Guide to setup a ecommerce tracking using Google Analytics

The Google Analytics platform as you know already gives better clarity about the performance of your website. It is one of the most robust tools even at its most basic level and can give a SWOT analysis to help you understand the pain points and the areas you have to improve on your current website. For eCommerce website, Google Analytics can do more. Apart from the user insights, the average time spent on a page, page views, etc., as an ecommerce business owner, you have to know more about the user actions. Each click they make on your site may affect your sales and you have to know why.

To get the necessary data for this, you have to implement the advanced Google Analytics for eCommerce. This is used exclusively to track your eCommerce operations and sales data effectively. Along with the basic parameters, you can also track the bounce rate, sessions, traffic source – the source link that directed your user, how close a user came to the cart checkout (purchase), conversion rate, etc. With these insights, Google Analytics tells you what works and what isn’t. For example, with your new layout, your new copy, you can see how they perform and modify them based on the results. To put it more openly, Google Analytics for eCommerce can decide the next logical step of your business activity to achieve higher conversion rates.

Initiating Google Analytics for Ecommerce

Post setting up your basic Google Analytics account, we can set up the eCommerce feature as an add-on to that. Enter the admin panel which is present in the lower-left corner and select the eCommerce settings. Usually, the panel here is divided into accounts, properties, and views. If you have more than one site registered into this Analytics account, ensure you are selecting the desired eCommerce business site. In the eCommerce settings, Enable the eCommerce option. Below that there will be another button that says, ‘Enable Enhanced eCommerce Reporting’. Even though it is optional, as your eCommerce SEO agency we recommend you to turn it on to get more detailed reports on your user behavior.

Checkout Behavior Analytics

In this Enhanced eCommerce Reporting, you will be seeing a Behaviour Analysis option, through which you will be introduced to analyzing the user behavior through a funnel model. Using this, you can get the details about exactly at what point people usually drop off from your website. You can also group your users based on their actions and can compare some stats. Through the funnel, the number of visits, product views, add to cart action everything can be monitored and analyzed. Along with, which product page/landing page impresses most of the visitors and which product page directly drives the ‘Add to cart’ option, etc. A user who viewed your product may or may not turn into a buyer/customer. You can easily get this conversion ratio and modify the product pages accordingly to drive positive sales actions.

Tracking Codes

Reference :- https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/enhanced-ecommerce

To enable the Google Analytics tracking for your website, you have to inject the provided code onto the site. For an ordinary website, this seems to be less complicated. However, for advanced eCommerce analytics, you may need the help of an eCommerce SEO agency to do the honors.

For eCommerce tracking and enhanced eCommerce, Google Analytics itself provides a guidebook. If you are well-versed with HTML or Javascript even at a basic level, you can play around with it. To access the data from the shopping cart platform, you have to initiate cross-domain tracking. It is a necessary activity you have to deploy to get your hand on wholesome analytics data. Moreover, without this, you won’t be able to access the cookies from different domains. If you are using Shopify, it is easier to integrate eCommerce Analytics.

Know what your users like!

There is one more optional setting present in Google Analytics for eCommerce. In the View Settings tab, there is an option called ‘Site Search Tracking’. This will bring more insights into what your customers are searching for on your website. It is a transparent window for your ‘Site Search’ and will track all the user activities related to it. Based on the popularity rank of an item, you can prioritize their presence on your website, which in turn may increase the sales conversion rate.

Mismatch of data? No, there isn’t!

After setting up the eCommerce analytics for your shopping site, test the implementation. Usually, people do dummy or several test transactions to test the flow of numbers. There may be a slight mismatch between the analytics and the shopping cart data, but it is very much usual during the initial stages. Understand that, Google Analytics tracker activates only when the user goes up to the ‘Thank you for shopping page’. It wouldn’t differentiate canceled orders, unfulfilled or partial orders, even discount codes for that matter. But the analytics from your shopping cart can provide clarity on this. To understand more about this, contact your eCommerce SEO company.

Setting up Goals

For any shopping site, the purchase will be the ultimate goal. Adding to the cart may be a positive sign, but until the checkout happens, the success ratio can’t be calculated. There can be secondary goals or targets like sign-ups, adding to the cart, or visiting a particular landing page, but purchases should be given prominence. It is the main business objective and the hidden agenda behind all your secondary goals.

The goal here can be of any type. It can be a custom one or a predefined template suggested by Google. The templates here vary from Revenue, Acquisition to Inquiry, etc. You can select the best one that works for you. You can change it whenever you want as per the agenda. Apart from this, you can set up a custom purchase goal. Give a name for the ‘Goal’, and give a proper description only for you to understand later. In the destination paste the ‘Thank you for shopping’ page URL and verify the same. By this whenever a purchase happens, it will be tracked under the goals.

This is how you can set up basic Google eCommerce analytics for your shopping site. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Under the right guidance of your eCommerce SEO company, you can go for a deeper dive into this world of numbers and play with them to improve the sales of your eCommerce website.