E-commerce businesses and sites seem to pop up all the time. These brands often rely heavily on digital marketing methods to bring in new customers and reach new audiences. Digital marketing is a must for e-commerce sites because of the immense competition in nearly every online industry. E-commerce sales often come down to which brand is more effortless for customers to find, as many sites sell identical or similar products. The reliance on ads and other digital marketing methods makes tracking analytics vital for these companies. Discover how setting up e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics can be beneficial for your company.
Most Major Platforms Already Have It
Most significant platforms already provide some sort of preexisting analytics tracking for e-commerce sites. Major e-commerce platforms understand the importance of tracking for e-commerce businesses, so they set out to give this initially. Many platform options—including Shopify, Squarespace, and Wix—offer built-in baseline Google Analytics, and some even offer enhanced analytics tracking. Check with the platform you currently use to see if this is the case for your site. If not, most platforms can add them for you. Consider bringing this up to your digital marketing team to check on and install. Proper installation is crucial to the functionality of the tracking.
Hiring a professional digital marketing team to handle Google Analytics tracking is a good option for e-commerce companies. The information the team gathers is vital to continued success and to improving conversion rates and .
Choosing Between Standard and Enhanced Tracking
There are multiple different types of tracking for Google Analytics, including Standard and Enhanced.
Standard
Standard Google Analytics tracking provides less detailed reports. Below are the included features and a brief breakdown of what each means:
- An overview: This includes a revenue summary, conversion rate analysis, transactions, average order values, and more.
- Product performance: This includes all revenue, purchases, quantities, average prices, and much more broken down into different categories.
- Transactions: This includes the revenue report, tax, shipping, and quantities.
- Sales performance: This is an examination of revenue based on date.
- Time to purchase: This is a look at the buy cycle and a “days to transaction” and “sessions to transaction” report.
Enhanced
Enhanced Google Analytics tracking provides everything Standard Tracking offers along with a few additions. Discover what a company can gain from investing in Enhanced Google Analytics Tracking for its e-commerce site:
- Shopping behavior report: This shows companies the number of sessions at each stage of a purchase funnel and an analysis of where people abandon the funnel.
- Product performance report: This shows companies how products performed from both a summary view and a shopping behavior view.
- Checkout behavior report: This report includes how users navigate the checkout process
- Order coupon report: This lets companies see how order-level coupons performed in revenue, transactions, average value, and code.
- Product coupon report: This shows companies how their product-level coupons performed in revenue, unique purchases, code, and revenue per purchase.
- Affiliate code: This is a report to track how affiliates contribute to the e-commerce performance overall in revenue, transactions, average order value, and affiliation.
How To Use the Information Gained from Tracking
Tracking allows companies to see reports detailing various levels of data and information. What the company does with this information is up to it. The mere existence of data is not beneficial to a business; the way the company uses the data to inform how it proceeds is what matters. Companies can use the information gathered by Google Analytics tracking in a variety of ways. They often use the data to identify critical insights into their customers’ movements and buy cycles. For example, suppose a company is doing just fine and suddenly experiences a drastic conversion drop. Google Analytics tracking allows that company to look at the information and identify the root of the problem. After identifying the problem’s source, a company can rapidly address it so that conversions can recover quickly.
Tracking provides insights into how people get to a website and informs future ad spend areas of improvement. For example, suppose a website sees most of its traffic come in from paid search. In that case, investing in search engine optimization may be beneficial to reduce reliance on paid traffic in the long term.
Common Pitfalls When Setting Up Tracking
Companies often don’t set up their tracking correctly. Some platforms come with it built in. Others hire professional digital marketing agencies to set up and monitor the tracking. Below are some common pitfalls when setting up or using Google Analytics tracking:
Ignoring the Metrics
One of the most common mistakes businesses make when using Google Analytics tracking is ignoring the reports. The reports provided are filled to the brim with useful information and insights to inform the company’s future. Companies can capitalize on the data from these reports.
Forgetting About Attribution
Attribution is different for each platform, and companies should keep that in mind. Attribution means what channel gets credit for the purchase. Google Analytics offers different types of attribution models that track and measure in different ways. Most companies favor first/last click attribution, but delayed attribution is another popular one.
Installing It Incorrectly
Installing Google Analytics tracking incorrectly can lead to many problems. When installing it, make sure you have coverage on every part of your publicly accessible website to ensure it’s tracking correctly. If you miss a page, it could break tracking or lead to inconsistencies in reporting.
Incorrectly implementing tracking is like flying blindly. Properly installing the system is essential. If a company is worried about it, it should outsource the project to a professional digital marketing agency.
At Logical Position, we employ a team of professionals dedicated to helping your business reach its full potential. As a Google Partner, we are experts in setting up e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics for all of our e-commerce clients. Contact us today for a free consultation and for more information on Google ads for local business, PPC, SEO, and all our other services designed to help your business reach its full potential.
