What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is the free website analytics platform that provides a wide range of insights that improve your understanding of your website audience, their acquisition, behavior, and profitability.
Getting to know Google Analytics will pay for itself multiple times over as you make data-driven changes regarding your online store, the behavior of visitors on your website, and your traffic sources – information that can be leveraged to find new customers and prevent sales loss. Most importantly, with the recent shift to Google Analytics 4, the free analytics tool has become more user-friendly and accurate.
How to Set Up Google Analytics Tracking for E-commerce in 5 Steps
1. Sign up for Google Analytics
2. Set up your account and first property
3. Install the Google Analytics tag on your website
4. Set up conversion actions and audiences
5. Track your conversions through events
5 Key Reports in Google Analytics for E-commerce
1. Basic Google Analytics Reports
2. Google Analytics Segmentation Reports
3. Google Analytics Attribution Reports
4. Google Analytics Purchase Reports
5. Google Analytics Referral Reports
Why You Need Google Analytics for the Growth of Your E-commerce Store
If you run a retail store, you’ll be able to see how many customers are browsing your store and the products they are viewing, adding to their shopping cart, or putting back on the shelves. Setting up E-commerce Analytics and tracking relevant key performance indicators not only reveals that information and more but also helps you answer more detailed questions about visitor behavior, such as: What are the most viewed products and pages on your website? What is the average time people spend on a specific page? Which pages on your website generate the highest financial value for your business? How valuable is traffic from search engines versus social media ads? Which marketing campaigns or channels bring low-quality traffic that leaves without taking further action? What is the ratio of new visitors to returning visitors? What percentage of visitors add a product to their shopping cart and what percentage of those complete the checkout process? What are the most common devices on which your website is viewed?
How to Set Up Google Analytics for Your E-commerce Site
Setting up Google Analytics takes just a few clicks, but the exact steps depend on your website platform. If you are using Shopify, getting started is as easy as creating a new Google Analytics account and going to your Google & YouTube app to install the Google Analytics tag on your website.
How to Set Up Google Analytics to Boost E-commerce
Google Analytics also offers specific e-commerce tracking to gain additional insights relevant to your business. With basic e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics, you can get transaction and revenue data (for example, revenue generated from your online store), while enhanced e-commerce tracking provides additional information about visitor behaviors towards specific products at different stages of the purchasing process (for example, the ratio of product views to purchases). Since you run an e-commerce business, this additional detail is worth the effort.
5 Key Reports in Google Analytics for E-commerce
Google Analytics contains many reports that can be customized in hundreds of different ways. But if you’re just starting out, you can gain a lot of valuable insights from the built-in reports that come ready to use in Google Analytics.
Report
Real-Time
The Real-Time report is where you can monitor the traffic on your website in real-time. It shows you who is on your site at that moment, what channels they came from, the geographic areas of traffic visible on the world map, and the pages they are actively browsing.
Acquisition Reports
Acquisition reports provide insights into the source of traffic, conversions, and revenue for your e-commerce store over time, offering invaluable marketing analytics across all your channels and helping you discover how to bring more visitors (and customers) to your store over time.
Engagement Reports
Engagement reports are designed to help you optimize your website content and analyze how visitors interact with it. This includes information about how attractive your pages are to visitors, which is a signal appreciated by search engines and affects your search engine optimization.
E-commerce Purchase Report
The e-commerce purchase report may be the most useful report of all. Platforms like Shopify pass on information about your products, sales, and conversions to Google Analytics for deeper analysis.
Attribution Reports
Attribution reports may not be immediately valuable if you are just starting out, but they are important to understand the big picture of the customer journey to purchase.
Custom Google Analytics Reports
By default, Google Analytics will show you reports based on all traffic to your store, along with general insights that will be useful for most users. However, you can customize your reports to display information that is relevant to your context and analyze more specific categories within the overall traffic.
Steering Your Growth in the Right Direction with Google Analytics
Understanding the key metrics about your site and visitors is crucial for your business’s growth and expansion. You don’t need to be a data analytics expert to take advantage of Google Analytics and uncover the kinds of golden insights that could provide you with many missed future sales opportunities.
Frequently Asked Questions about Google Analytics
Is Google Analytics good for e-commerce?
What is the difference between Google Analytics for e-commerce and Google Analytics for websites?
How does Google Analytics track e-commerce conversion rates?
How does Shopify work with Google Analytics?
Source: https://www.shopify.com/blog/14681601-google-analytics-for-ecommerce-a-beginners-guide
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