Want to improve your website’s effectiveness – like increasing sales and boosting conversions? To do so, you need to have a good understanding of how your customers are actually using your website.

How do people find your store in the first place? What keywords are they using? Which pages are they landing on – and how much time do they spend once they’re there? Which products interest people most? 

Google Analytics can help you answer all these questions and more. It provides the information you need to really understand your site and its visitors, helping you evaluate the performance of your content and marketing. Ultimately, you can use this data to optimise your site, boost conversions and increase sales.

What Is Google Analytics?

Mention Google Analytics and many people will give you a confused stare, but it’s actually pretty simple to understand once you’ve got your head around a few basic things.

In simple terms, it’s a powerful tool that allows you to track visitors (traffic) to your website and get detailed information about them and how they use it. Best of all, it’s completely free!

For an eCommerce business, Google Analytics will provide you with data such as:

• The number of visitors to your store
• Where they are coming from
• What device they are using
• How long they spend looking at a particular page or product
• Your most popular keywords

And so much more.

It gathers this information via a simple tracking code that is placed on your website. New GDPR regulations brought in during 2018 complicate things slightly, but thankfully Google includes a number of tools and settings that can be used to anonymise data and retain/delete information as required.

How Can Google Analytics Help My Business?

They say that knowledge is power, and that’s definitely true when it comes to eCommerce! The more you know about how people are finding you and browsing through your site, the easier it is to optimise it and tweak your strategy to meet your goals. 

Through the data you gather with Google Analytics, you can start to build up a complete picture of your visitors and their actions. You can easily track the results of your marketing campaigns and identify whether a product or particular piece of content is converting. What’s more, you can track the complete customer journey and use this information to then optimise your site for conversions and direct people to the places you most want them to visit. 

In short, you’ll be able to see exactly what’s working – and what isn’t. Once you know this information, you can do more of the things that are effective and focus on tweaking the stuff that isn’t.

Goal Tracking

One very powerful feature of GA is the ability to create and track goals. This allows you to track critical metrics such as leads, product sales, add to cart actions, account creations, newsletter sign ups, and so much more.

Essentially, you can track the customer’s journey and set goals to see how your business is doing. For example, you might set a goal for when a user reaches your cart/checkout page, or when someone completes a purchase. You might want to track newsletter sign ups or user engagement, like when someone views 3 or more pages in a single session. 

Goals can be based on a number of things such as visiting a destination URL, spending a specified duration on a page, clicking certain buttons, and so on.

Analytics Reports

To help you digest this information, Google Analytics also allows you to generate pre-configured and customisable reports that provide detailed insights into site performance and customer acquisition patterns.

Some examples of useful GA reports include:

• Mobile performance
• Traffic acquisition
• Keyword analysis
• Visitor behaviour
• Bounce rate and exit rate

As we mentioned, you can create custom reports that allow you to essentially dive as deep into the data as you want. It’s a very powerful tool.

Get the Most from Google Analytics

We’ve been using Google Analytics for years and know how it can help the success of your eCommerce business. As digital marketing experts, we’ll help you track your data and fully utilise it to your advantage, driving sales, increasing conversions and boosting your ranking in Google.

Want more information about what Google Analytics can do for your business?

Contact our friendly and knowledgeable team who will be more than happy to help you.