Web analytics are the basis for keeping track of the performance of one’s online activity. If you are wondering what tracking is, well, this is the collection and processing of data about users and their path within a site to provide information about the domain or, for example, the reach of an advertising campaign.
In this day and age, one cannot think of disregarding tracking user activity on one’s site, because to do so would mean going in blind and probably making a big deal out of getting few results, and moreover, few tangible ones. But how do you go about capturing user activity? Implementation can be done through the insertion of scripts within the site’s code, or more simply through a tool, which is the salvation of those involved in tracking: Google Tag Manager.
This tool makes it possible to “send” the information collected on the site to the various data-reading tools, such as Google Analytics, Facebook, Google Ads, Hotjar, and many others. The information that is sent is called events and it is the actions that the user takes that I decide to track. And why should I be interested in receiving this data? For example, if there is an “Add to Cart” button, I maybe want to know how many times that button is clicked but then no actual sale results from that step. In addition to the click on a button, different types of elements can be tracked, such as a form submission, time spent on a page, or a simple pageview.
On Google Tag Manager, you can use preset events, or you can create custom events, through the use of datalayers, javascript code snippets that I’m going to insert directly into the tool.
Google Analytics makes it possible to analyze user interactions with my site by having so much information and a very high level of detail. For example, if I had an e-commerce of women’s sneakers, I would want to be able to identify the target audience to campaign on. To do this, I might analyze the profile of my visitors (this is always meant as an average of aggregate numbers), looking at what are the most visited pages on my site, or what channels my traffic comes from, or what age and location my audience is made up of.
Data analysis becomes crucial for improving one’s business, whether it is a blog, an informational site, or even more so an e-commerce. In order to be able to make decisions and implement new targeted strategies aimed at increasing one’s goals (which can be either simple views, interactions such as clicks, or purchases), it is necessary to study well the behavior of users, to go and visualize their points of interest or downfall.
Monitoring an e-commerce business on Analytics
In an ever-changing landscape of the e-commerce world, it is becoming more and more crucial to understand how your company is generating revenue, but also expenditures, such as with campaign spending.
If you integrate third-party tools, such as Facebook and Google Ads, with your online store, you must have data on these sources as well. Without having complete information about customer behavior on different channels, you cannot chart a course toward increasing ROI on ad campaigns. This is because from Analytics, I can analyze data and “adjust the tune” on my campaign budget, depending on different elements. An example might be an observation about declining traffic for a seasonal brand, which suggests a reduction in ad spend.
To make the right business decisions, there are some key pieces of information to have, such as: the number of transactions, sales and revenue per product, the number of average orders, purchase trends across different channels, average order value, e-commerce conversion rate, average time taken to purchase, coupons used, checkout process channels, and so on.
With the right metrics, one can understand when customers make purchases and what elements cause a user to buy. This helps make crucial decisions on how to go about changing the interface and usability of e-commerce to increase sales and turn mere visitors into customers.
Setting KPIs for an e-commerce site
Once you have gathered information about your customers, it is important to set goals (or objectives), which are specific actions that allow you to assess the extent to which the site achieves the goals I have set. They are then based on one’s key performance indicators (kpi) and represent the realization of an action, called a conversion, that contributes to the success of one’s business.
Google Analytics setup for e-commerce
First, in order to view an e-commerce data in Google Analytics with a greater level of detail, you need to enable the Enhanced E-commerce feature from the administration section of the tool. The next step in setting up e-commerce tracking is to add the code to your site or app so you can start collecting data. To perform this task, you will need to have manual dexterity in editing HTML code and coding in JavaScript. Otherwise, the best solution is to enlist the help of an experienced web developer.
And here Google Tag Manager comes back to help us, which as mentioned before is our ally, making us independent (though never completely) from developers. With Tag Manager, the job becomes easier, and even easier if you make use of an e-commerce building tool, such as Shopify. With these, you can pass already created events directly from the e-commerce platform to Tag Manager and consequently to the interest tracker.
The main advantage of advanced ecommerce (EE) over standard ecommerce implementation is the huge number of valuable reports that merchants have access to with EE. Advanced ecommerce is necessary to obtain comprehensive checkout channeling reports and similar reports in Google Analytics.
How to leverage data analytics to increase sales
From the moment visitors arrive on your site to the final checkout process and payment, the entire journey says a lot about their behavior.
By studying your users’ behavior, you can draw several inferences about which buttons and elements attract their interest or where they stall, so you can keep tabs on your e-commerce and improve the user experience.
You can, for example, see which products appeal most to your audience, and accordingly, highlight them. You can study the revenue per transaction and the number of products per transaction. If the number of products per transaction does not satisfy us, you can take advantage of it by offering discounts for buying larger quantities of products or free shipping if customers reach a minimum amount.
If my sales cycle is stable or fluctuates predictably by product or season, I can use this information to make reliable revenue forecasts. If customers regularly make numerous visits before buying, one can think about a site design that leads more easily to purchase pages or options that allow users to compare products and prices with those of competitors.
By capturing this data, it is then possible to implement Data driven Marketing, that is, data-driven, fact-driven Marketing, and perform CRO analyses to increase the performance of my e-commerce. These analyses can be done on a page graphic, or on a single element, such as a button or pop-up. Also called A/B testing, they are done by dividing the audience 50/50 and having the first half receive option A, the second half option B, to evaluate after a given time range the results and choose to adopt the most successful option.
When analyzing an e-commerce, it is important to analyze the behavior of the payment page. For example, being able to understand where your users are exiting from during the checkout process is essential to reparameterize the issues that are preventing conversion. Whether it is the shipping option that turns them away or the lack of payment options, or even people may even have trouble applying promotional offers on the checkout page, and these are all barriers to purchasing our products.
To make the most of the data, it is important to tailor the strategy to the case. For example, if I sell sweaters, I may include a variable on temperature and weather from where users are buying. Or, I may decide to associate information with the CRM tool in order to use it to send ad hoc communications or to apply special discounts.
Sometimes the problem may lie in the usability of the site, which may perhaps give problems from mobile, or we understand that the solution is to direct the user and take them to the point we are interested in.
In short, there are many combinations of information that can be used to understand what is going and what is not going on our e-commerce and it is up to us to figure it out, trying to be as specific as possible, going into detail. To do this requires just a little bit of imagination and lateral thinking. The important thing is to always customize the study as much as possible, depending on who our customers are and what our products are.
