Your Introductory Guide to Google Analytics for Ecommerce Websites
What you'll learn: Empower your ecommerce business with Google Analytics: Start measuring, analyzing, and optimizing your website's performance with this comprehensive guide. Discover key metrics, identify areas for improvement, and drive growth with actionable data.
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Outline
Introduction to Google Analytics
Whether you’re a small or big business owner, you must understand how your website or app is doing so you know the profit or maybe loss your business is experiencing. At other times, you'll have to focus on boosting site conversions or traffic. You'll need a tool to track those figures to accomplish this, and Google Analytics fills that need. In this article, we’ll look at what Google Analytics is, how it works, its benefits and every other thing you need to know to get started.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a web analytics service that offers basic analytical tools and information for marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) needs. It can be used to monitor the effectiveness of websites and gather visitor data. Organizations can use it to track goal completions (like purchases and product additions), identify patterns and trends in user engagement, ascertain the most popular sources of user traffic, evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing initiatives, and gather additional visitor data like demographics. Google Analytics is a popular tool used by small and medium-sized retail websites to collect and examine different customer behaviour metrics. These insights may be utilized to enhance marketing efforts, increase website traffic, and enhance visitor retention.
How Does Google Analytics Work?
To begin with, Google Analytics uses page tags to collect user data from every visitor to their website. Next, each page's code has a JavaScript page tag added to it. Every visitor's web browser is activated by this tag, which gathers data and transmits it to one of Google's data collection servers. Then, Google Analytics may produce reports that are easily customized to monitor and display information about the number of users, bounce rates, average session lengths, channel-specific sessions, page visits, goal completions, and more. However, because the system depends on cookies, individuals who have disabled them will not be able to have their data collected.Quiz
Benefits of Google Analytics for E-commerce Businesses
Updated user interface for easier use: The redesigned user interface of Google Analytics makes it simpler to use and navigate. The interface also has capabilities like machine learning-powered reports for Google Ads and a Maps visualization for geographic data. You can get data from a variety of platforms, such as the web, mobile applications, and IoT devices.
Google Ads and Google Analytics can be integrated: This implies that you may monitor the performance of your Google Ad advertisements and adjust as necessary. Additionally, you may target these users with relevant ads on Google Ads by creating remarketing lists in Google Analytics. You may also design unique dashboards and reports for your online store using Google Analytics. If you want to follow particular KPIs or compare data over time, this is quite beneficial.
Customer Acquisition Data: Information about the origins of your website visitors, including search engine organic results, sponsored search results, social media networks, direct visitors or referrals from other websites, and visitor behaviours (conversions) is another helpful feature of Google Analytics.
Google Tag Manager: You can manage your Google Analytics tags with the free tool known as Google Tag Manager. You can easily add, change, and remove Google Analytics 4 tags from your website or app with Google Tag Manager. You can also examine and troubleshoot your tags using Google Tag Manager before publishing your website. This is especially helpful during the developing stage of your website or app.
Tracking and Evaluating your campaigns: The Google Analytics campaigns report allows you to assess the performance of both your current and past campaigns using measures related to traffic (such as visits and bounce rate) and conversions (such as total revenue from each source and number of transactions). This is to calculate the return on investment for each campaign, paid and organic, for your company.
Setting up a Google Analytics Account For Your E-commerce Store
To create a Google Analytics 4 Account, follow the steps below:
Sign in to your Google Account. If you don’t have one, you can create it at myaccount.google.com/
Visit the Google Analytics website: analytics.google.com/analytics/web/provision/#/provision
Click on the “Start measuring” button and Enter a “Property name”, which could be your business or website name.
Click on the “Next” button and fill out the “About your business” section. Set the site name, the reporting timezone and the main currency of your site.
Finally, click on the “Create” button to create your new GA4 property.
Understanding Different Reports in Google Analytics
Landing pages report: This tells you the pages visitors visit first when they are on your site and what they do afterwards. You may also decide to delve further into the particular pages on your website that attract visitors and result in conversions. Additionally, you'll discover the average bounce rate and the amount of time visitors spend on your website.
Channels Report: This kind of marketing report aids in the analysis of the source and general category of your traffic. It enables you to track traffic and conversions by channel and evaluate the success of new activities and strategies.
Mobile Overview Report: When it comes to traffic, mobile has surpassed desktop, which makes tracking mobile metrics and performance crucial. With the use of this kind of analysis, you can gauge user numbers, demographics, and origins, as well as the actions and in-app purchases that users are making within your app. It's possible to slice and dice your data to comprehend the behaviour of various user groups if you have a solid understanding of the relevant metrics.
New vs Returning Users Report: This simply means visitors who have never been on your website and visitors who have. There should be a good mix of both first-time and recurring visitors, but there is no set standard. Numerous elements, such as the kind of website you have, its age, the source of visitors, and your main goals and objectives as a business, should all be taken into account and how they relate to your operation.
Funnel Analysis Report: With GA funnels, you can monitor the actions people take on your website or application to fulfil a goal that converts them into consumers. Giving you a better understanding of the visitor's behaviour at every stage of the conversion process is the primary objective of Funnel Analysis Reports. This informs you of the adjustments needed to optimize your website.
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Tracking Key Metrics for E-commerce Businesses With Google Analytics
Tracking website traffic with Google Analytics: This metric helps you know how people find your website. You can find out the traffic that comes from social media, Google Ads, and the Google Search Console. You may decide where to concentrate your marketing efforts by understanding where your visitors are coming from and what they do once they reach your website. You can find this information under the “Acquisition” tab.
Tracking user behaviour on your website: By tracking user behaviour, Google Analytics can help you understand the performance of various pieces of content. Are they, for instance, going to some pages more frequently than others? Do certain categories of information have longer on-page times? This can assist you in identifying what works and what doesn't, which you can utilize to guide your future marketing and content development decisions. You can check out your website’s user behaviour in the “Behavior” section.
Tracking conversions: Tracking conversions means you want to find out if people are buying (or doing whatever you want them to do) when they are on your website. That’s what conversion metrics on Google Analytics is for. These are not the same automatically generated metrics as the ones before them. Instead, conversion analytics calls for setting targets, usually about the pages that visitors are sent to after converting. More detailed information on how people are getting there, how many are converting, and other details can be obtained by instructing Google Analytics to follow users to these last pages.
Tracking e-commerce sales and revenue: Ecommerce tracking is a feature that monitors user behaviour on your website when they shop. Google Analytics does not automatically collect e-commerce-specific data such as revenue, cart abandonment rates, or conversion rates, even if it tracks website metrics like pageviews, traffic sources, and bounce rates. That’s why you have to enable the tracking by enabling ecommerce events. To enable it, go to the Google Analytics dashboard and click on Admin. Go ahead to click on ecommerce settings and then toggle Enable Ecommerce on.
Creating custom reports and dashboards: As you get a grip on your website’s metrics, you'll discover that you need custom Google Analytics reports. These custom reports can help you check particular metrics well, using apples-to-apples comparisons between periods and campaigns. These custom reports come in handy when you present information to investors thanks to the strong numbers you can compare and the graphic reports you can run.
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Improving Your E-commerce Business With Google Analytics
Identify Your Target Audience With Google Analytics
Audience Tab: With the ‘Audience’ tab, you get a look at all your users to see their country/region/geography, age and gender
The Interest Tab: This is under the Audience Tab and it displays your users’ common interests across various categories like TV, Sports, and Beauty and Wellness.
Analyzing New vs Return Visitors: Analyzing new versus returning visitors might help you learn more about your "core audience" and emerging user group. You get to find out about the new, frequent, most engaged, and highest-converting visitors.
By Using Segments: With Google Analytics Segments, you can monitor, quantify, and examine particular user groups. You can categorize users based on factors like age, gender, location, and user type (such as new or returning visitors)
Improve Your Website Design and Content With Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one tool that can aid with design, find major problems, and eventually affect online performance. If you are a newbie or a professional web designer, below are some of the ways you can use Google Analytics to improve your website design and content.
Verify that Google Analytics is successfully connected to your website.
Determine the goals you have for your website. This could include conversions, sales, traffic, and so on.
Consider the actions that users should take on your website to achieve those objectives.
To find any behavioural gaps, check Google Analytics' customer journey.
Utilize those gaps to pinpoint problems, and then use excellent design to address those problems.
Optimising Your Marketing Campaigns With Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the best tool available for tracking and improving the performance of web-based businesses. It allows you to track performance both on-site (conversions, site usage, content) and off-site (promotional activities, SEO). Below are some ways you can optimize your marketing campaigns.
Find pages with low conversion rates and high bounce rates.
Locate and enhance underperforming organic search pages.
Employ UTM parameters.
Find sources of high-converting traffic.
Investigate new markets.
Apply content grouping.
Utilize internal site search to identify possible demand and bottlenecks.
Recognize pages that load slowly.
Open Google Data Studio and create a dashboard.
Using Google Analytics to Improve Your Customer Experience
Customers come to your website with one thing in mind. It’s either to find a particular product, schedule an appointment, etc. If your website allows your customers to meet this goal with ease, then we can say that there is a good customer experience will be good. If they encounter obstacles, then it’s a bad customer experience. Some of the ways you can measure whether or not your customer experience is good or bad include:
Search Queries.
Segment your data.
Goals /Conversion Rate.
Loading Speed.
Bounce Rate.
Make Better Business Decisions With Google Analytics
Understanding Client & User Behavior: Google Analytics provides information about your client’s interaction with your channels. You get to track their behaviour individually, from the acquisition stage to retention, with unique user IDs.With this, you get to make real-time decisions based on real data. You can track which channels are effective in customer acquisitions, and keep tabs on data regarding engagement with your products. This, in turn, can help your company develop strategies for increased client retention.
Understand User Needs: Google Analytics is incredibly helpful for companies, as it provides valuable insights into where audiences are based. With this, you can figure out the people who engage with your content and post new stuff according to their time zone. You get to engage them well and increase conversions
Targeted Marketing: A wide range of capabilities provided by Google Analytics can assist you in scaling the management of your digital marketing initiatives. There are various methods for managing the data that this program collects. One application of these data sets is for marketing-related ad personalization. Google allows you to place customized adverts based on the geographical data provided by your customers.
Know Customer Demographics: Google Analytics is a crucial Webmaster tool for determining if your online company goals and objectives are being met. We use it to build several dashboards that monitor a range of metrics, including click-through rate, bounce rate, traffic by source, number of sessions, length of sessions, etc. It is also a fantastic tool for determining and monitoring the demographics of our clientele. This makes it easier for us to decide where and how to allocate our resources for sales and marketing tactics.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): You are likely aware of what SEO is at this time. It is among the most successful digital marketing campaigns available today. This is made even more effective and efficient in assisting your business's growth by Google Analytics. The tool provides information on your best-performing pages and the pages on your website that are attracting the most visitors from search engines and search queries. This can assist you in planning the type of material you should invest in and how best to divide your time and resources.
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Advanced Google Analytics Tracking
Using Google Analytics to track cross-device behavior
With Google Analytics 4 (GA4), there's an enhanced method for monitoring the customer journey across several devices. Cross-device monitoring enables the merging of disparate sessions from one user into a single journey. This new feature allows you to monitor how and when a visitor enters your site using a mobile device and then switches to a laptop to finish the purchase, eliminating the need to wonder if this is the case.
To see the data:
Sign in to your Google Analytics account.
Navigate to your view.
Open Reports.
Select Audience > Cross-Device.
Using Google Analytics to Track Offline Conversions
Offline conversion tracking enables marketers to track and understand your customer’s entire journey, from the first online interaction to the final offline conversion. It is important because every offline conversion that turns into a business opportunity is important. However, these offline conversions might slip through your analytics net without the proper tracking mechanism.
To set up offline conversion tracking in Google Analytics:
Set Up a Conversion Data Set in Google Analytics: This acts as a container for your offline conversion data. Go to “Admin”. Under “Property,” click “Data Import.” Then, Click on “+ Create data set.” Choose the “Conversion” type, and select “Continue.” Name your data set and be sure to enable the “Allow manual uploads and allow Google Analytics to use data to improve services” option. Then select “Next.”
Take User ID at the Point of Offline Conversion: Now that you can store your offline conversions, you need to start taking them as they happen, and this involves capturing unique identifiers like the User ID. You can use a CRM or Point of Sale system to help capture this data. At the point of sale or customer interaction, capture the User ID. Also, your website should have previously assigned these IDs and stored them in your CRM. Don’t forget to note the interaction’s timestamp and any other data, such as sales amounts, product details, etc.
Upload Your Collected Data to Google Analytics: After gathering your offline conversion data, upload it to GA4. From your GA4 property, just go to “Admin > Data Import.” Find the data set you created in Step 1, and select “Manage Uploads.” Choose “+ Upload file” and select the file containing your offline conversion data.
Using Google Analytics to Track Customer Lifetime Value
Based on lifetime performance, the Lifetime Value report enables you to determine the relative value of various users to your company. You may view the lifetime worth of users that you have gained through paid search or email, for instance. With that data in hand, you can figure out how profitable it is to devote marketing funds to acquiring those users.
To check out the Lifetime Value report:
Sign in to Google Analytics.
Go to Your View.
Open Reports.
Select Audience > Lifetime Value.
Using Google Analytics to Segment Your Audience
In Google Analytics, segmentation allows you to break a large data set into smaller segments for easier analysis. Segments are subsets of data that are created by applying filters and conditions to the larger pool of information. Teams often use segmentation to target offers or build more compelling experiences for different personas.
How to Create Segments in Google Analytics
Login into your Google Analytics account.
Go to the “reports” section on your dashboard.
Click on “audience” which will prompt a dropdown menu. From the dropdown menu, click on “overview.”
Navigate to “Add segment” on the Audience Overview dashboard.
Navigate to “system” under the “view segments” section and select which segment(s) you would like to apply.
Once you’ve selected the segments you’d like to apply, click the “apply” button.
You’ll be redirected to a new page that will show you the audience data that meets your segment criteria.
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Using Google Analytics to Create Custom Funnels
A funnel is a representation of the steps users take to accomplish a specific task, such as purchasing on a website. You get to identify the weak points in the user’s journey and allow you to focus on optimizing those areas for better results. To better understand user behaviour and optimize your website or app, you can create custom funnels in Google Analytics. You may find flaws and make data-driven decisions to enhance conversions and user experience by visualizing and evaluating the user path.
Usually, custom funnels appear as a tab in a custom report.
To see your Custom Reports:
Sign in to Google Analytics.
Go to your view.
Open Reports.
Choose Customization.
Then select +New Custom Report.
Select the Funnel tab.
Conclusion
You’ll agree with me that Google Analytics is a highly valuable tool for any business as it gives you tangible data that you can apply to grow your business. Your data tracking becomes more sophisticated and you get a much more accurate and useful picture of who is visiting your website and what they do once they get there. In all, the insights you get into your audience's behaviour from the tool are invaluable resources that will help you make data-driven decisions for your business.
