Google Analytics is an extremely beneficial platform for gaining a better understanding of your website’s performance and the traffic flowing in. Metrics such as users, bounce rate, and traffic channels are important for tracking user behavior and how they interact with your website. However for e-commerce businesses, those metrics aren’t enough to gain a proper understanding of performance.
Luckily, for online businesses, Google offers E-commerce Tracking which tracks and monitors shopping activity on your website.able on the App Store; and now it’s here: App Store Search Tab ads. For the first time in App Store history, companies can now display their advertisements before a user searches, drastically changing the volume of users that can be reached through ads on their platform.
E-commerce tracking is a very simple way to gain extremely valuable sales metrics for your online business. Things like revenue, conversion rate, and average order value will now be tracked and displayed in your Google analytics dashboard.
Having E-commerce tracking enabled allows you to blend sales data and website user data to make better decisions in regards to your online business. You will gain a better understanding of website performance, conversions, and landing page success rates.
Google Analytics also offers an enhanced e-commerce tracking option that allows you to further expand on the metrics you track and the specific goals you can set.
E-commerce tracking is essential to find out specifically why you are getting conversions from your website.
With Standard E-commerce Tracking, Google separates the data into these 5 main reports:
Overview: The Overview report is a great place to start once you get e-commerce tracking set up. It will show you revenue, conversion rates, transactions, and your average order value.
Product Performance: The Product Performance report is a good way to visualize how products are performing in comparison to each other. Each product will be broken down into revenue, purchases, quantity, along with a few others.
Sales Performance: The Sales Performance tab shows you your revenue breakdown by date. It has a very clear graphical representation of the sales data which can be broken down by transaction.
Transactions: Within the transactions tab you can separate your product sales data by revenue, taxes, and shipping all by using the product’s transaction ID.
Time to Purchase: The Time to Purchase tab breaks down both the days to transaction and the sessions to transactions.
Enhanced E-commerce Tracking elaborates on those original reports and adds:
Shopping Behavior: Shopping behavior is a great way to visualize your sales funnel. It shows how many users are making purchases, and where exactly the rest of the users are leaving your website. You can use this information to better optimize your website page content to minimize drop-off of users.
Checkout Behavior: Much like Shopping behavior, the primary goal of Checkout Behavior is to display when users are dropping off. More specifically for this report, it is during the checkout process. Google Analytics allows you to add different steps to further refine the data.
Product List Performance: Product List reports represent a logical grouping of products on your site, based on your ec.js tagging. You can group related products, cataloged products, etc. and then analyze the data based on these unique groupings.
In addition to conversion data, once you enable e-commerce tracking, you will have more data in the acquisition report. If you click on channels, you can see a breakdown of how well each marketing channel is performing, and which ones are driving sales for your website.
Step 1: Log in or create your Google Analytics account
Step 2: From your dashboard in Google Analytics, find the admin button in the bottom left corner
Step 3: Navigate to the right hand side of your dashboard and click E-commerce Settings
Step 4: Turn on E-commerce tracking
Step 5 (optional): After e-commerce tracking is turned on, you can then decide if you want to turn on enhanced e-commerce tracking
Now that you have e-commerce tracking set up in Google Analytics, you can head back to the main dashboard. From there, under conversions on the left hand side, you’ll be able to see all of the metrics that e-commerce tracking has and you can get started analyzing data as it comes in.
For this whole process to work smoothly, you need to make sure to install your Analytics tracking code into your website. Insert the tracking code the <head> tags on your website, and make sure to put it on every page that you want to track.
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