E-Commerce and Google Analytics
Google Analytics
Search engine marketing is all about performance. You want the ROI for your efforts. The performance is measured by analyzing every part of a website. The ROI is measured by analytics.
Google Analytics allows an e-commerce site to determine how to best optimize the website to ensure that it performs at a high-level. By tracking each page, you will know what areas are working, and what areas are not working, enabling you to fix those problem areas. You are able to view the bounce rate of each page, the number of visitors to each page, and the keywords people used to find the site and/or page.
Google Analytics will determine everything from the number of purchases made to the total revenue created from those purchases and the conversion rate of site visits to purchases made. The report can decipher how each individual product is performing or, if you prefer, how each category of products is performing.
E-Commerce Tracking
The analytics will allow you to keep a track of all transactions carried out on your website (useful for audits) and it will show you how many visits to your site occur before a purchase is made. All these aspects of e-commerce tracking give you a valuable insight into how your website is working and how people interact with it.
To track the e-commerce transactions on your site, follow these steps:
- First, you need to enable reports in the settings of your website profile. Go to the ‘analytics settings’ page in your account and click on ‘edit’. You should now see a ‘profile settings’ page and again, click on ‘edit’ in the top right hand corner of the ‘main website profile information’ section. You can now edit the profile information and change the radio button from no to yes under ‘e-commerce website’.
- Ensure the Google analytics tracking code is included within the receipt page of your website. You will need a little knowledge of coding for this.
- On the receipt page, below the normal tracking code, you will need to add the ‘_addTrans’ command with: Order ID, Affiliation, Total, Tax, Shipping, City, State, Country.
- Below this you need to add the call ‘_addItem’ including: Order ID, SKU/Code, Product Name, Category, Price, Quantity.
- Conclude the process by taking all the information collected by the transaction object and submitting it through the ‘_trackTrans’ to Google Analytics.
These steps should take you to all the information you need to optimise your site’s sales performance.
