These days, simply tracking inventory and sales is not enough. You need a high-powered analytics program to dig up back-end consumer antics in order to gain a deeper understanding of their motives, tendencies, and preferences when it comes to shopping on your site.
Google Analytics is one of the highest-rated analytics programs in the world – and it happens to be completely free. This makes it extremely accessible to a wide range of e-commerce stores. Especially now that Google Analytics 4 (GA4) collects data from both websites and mobile apps.
But when it comes to Google Analytics ecommerce tracking, there are some tips and best practices to be aware of. Today, we’ll guide you through the use of this comprehensive analytics tool.
Google Analytics is a free website analytics software platform created by Google. It offers users valuable, data-based insights into consumer behavior, customer acquisition, profitability, and audience patterns.
If you own or work for an online store, using an analytics program to uncover hidden trends, details, and patterns of behavior can be instrumental in driving conversions and rising above competing businesses. Without a robust analytics tool, it is much harder to establish your brand as a high-performing e-commerce site and make the sales you need to reach financial and visibility targets.
Some of the data that GA4 ecommerce analytics will be able to provide you with includes:
These are all invaluable bits of information you can use to strengthen and optimize your e-commerce marketing strategy. Plus, using Google Analytics is completely free and very easy to set up.
All you need to do is sign up for an Analytics account and obtain your unique Analytics ID. Then you need to know how to set up ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics 4, wish is made simple by following Google’s prompts.
After that, all that’s left to do is access your account and see your back-end data for powerful insights into online store performance that push your site toward greater success.
Once you have set up your Google Analytics account and started using it to access deeper data insights, you can start adopting some best practices to elevate your data analysis game even further.
Here are five ways to get the most from GA4 ecommerce analytics.
This is one of the first and most important steps you can take towards getting the most out of your Google Analytics account. Views are sets of specifications used for measuring traffic on a single domain, and there are three main ones that every brand should use for their site:
Master – this should be your primary view setting. It is used for basic tracking and reporting for your site. You can also tweak it to filter out certain bits of data.
Test – as the name implies, a test view is a preliminary view setting you can test out before making it a master view. See how well it works for you before adding it to your list.
Raw/unfiltered – if you want a completely comprehensive, unfiltered view of your site’s antics, use the raw view setting. This view is essential for tracking major or long-term trends.
With the proper use of views, you can compartmentalize the way you view site traffic and data in order to gain a more detailed understanding of its patterns.
Google Analytics is primed to track and record broad-scope information about your audience. But you can narrow it down into segments based on their location, gender, age range, spending habits, and even general interests. You can also track how they behave when visiting your site for the first time.
Knowing all this information can essentially help you see your site’s performance under a digital microscope, helping you improve your marketing efforts to meet customer expectations better.
If you have a Google Ads account, you can link it up with your Google Analytics account for seamless synchronization between the two. You can also link it to pretty much any business or personal management system from Google; they are like a family of tools that work better together.
This connection process can be done by accessing your Google account and going to “settings.” Once they’re synced, you’ll be able to access far more insightful and accurate GA4 ecommerce analytics data reports.
In sales, a funnel is a path or number of steps a customer takes from entering your site to exiting. You can set up multiple funnels on your site via Google Analytics to encourage a certain pattern of movement (ideally resulting in a sale) and also understand more about what motivates them to reach conversion.
Utilizing Google Search Console’s features is also a good idea here as you can monitor your site’s performance both generally and in search engine results. This ensures that you can see your click-through rate from Google and improve it if it’s affecting your sales funnels.
If you want to opt for the paid version of Google Analytics, you can also create your own custom funnels for even more specialized conversion strategies. Once you know how to track conversion in Google Analytics, you can continually refine your funnels until they perform exactly as desired.
Just like with any strategy, setting goals is one of the best ways to ensure you actually reach them, especially when trends in ecommerce change regularly. You can create and set your own Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or goals as a method to track conversions more accurately. Some of the best KPIs to set for e-commerce sites include:
Google Analytics ecommerce tracking can help you focus on these goals as you continue working hard to get their numbers up. Use the tools available on the platform to visualize and actualize your site's performance goals.
If you owned a retail store, you’d get an up-front view of how customers behave and what kind of patterns of behavior they adopt while shopping. But when it comes to e-commerce, you need a tool that can handle the back-end side of customer data for you.
With Google Analytics ecommerce tracking, you can create a marketing strategy that is more finely attuned to your customer’s needs and expectations, using their natural instincts and behavior to shape a better strategy for success. When you know how to track conversion in Google Analytics, you’ll know how to sell, sell, sell!
There are a lot of other tips and tricks in the book that you can follow to make your descriptions hit home. However, the ones we’ve described above are some of the main and important ones.