What’s one of the most powerful tools for your online ecommerce store that is also free to use and simple to set up?
Google Analytics. Read on to learn more about how it can help you.
What Is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is one of the many digital tools that Google provides to website owners. When combined with other Google tools, Google Analytics can give you a full picture of your online store’s performance.
There is both a free and paid version of Google Analytics. The free version will likely give small and medium-sized businesses all the features they need. Enterprise businesses may want to consider upgrading to the paid version, called Analytics 360, which contains additional features plus a dedicated account manager.
The vast amount of data provided by even the free version of Google Analytics has made it a necessary resource for any website manager or online marketer. Google Analytics consists of three basic elements:
Data Collection
Google Analytics can gather a broad range of data about your site that helps you as a site owner, track, analyze, and understand the behavior of your site’s visitors and site performance. Google Analytics tracks three types of site hits: Pageview Hits, Event Hits, and Transaction/Ecommerce Hits.
Data Processing
Google Analytics processes the data it collects on your site’s visitors and generates reports. It starts by separating the data into User data, which is collected on distinct site visitors, and Session data, which is collected for a period of time that a specific user is on your site. Each type of data can give you different valuable insights.
Report Generation
Google Analytics takes the visitor data it has collected and processed and presents it to you in report form. These reports are in visual format so they can
be used to more quickly and easily identify actionable insights like trends and patterns.
How Google Analytics Can Help You
You can use Google Analytics for several purposes. Three of the most common of these are briefly described below:
Marketing Analytics
Insights from Google Analytics reports can be a vital tool to enhance your marketing. It can help answer many questions such as which of your marketing channels is directing visitor traffic to your site and what is your conversion rate from those channels.
Site Performance Analytics
Google Analytics reports can help you better understand your site and its visitors, and answer questions such as which of your pages gets the most traffic, how quickly do your pages load, and the performance of your site on a PC versus a mobile device.
SEO Aid Analytics
Google Analytics provides insights into your ecommerce store’s SEO, such as which searches do visitors use to find your site and which of your landing pages gets the most traffic.
How To Set Up Google Analytics
To create a Google Analytics account, you must first create Google Account if you don’t already have one. You’ll need a Google email address and password to get started. Once you have this set up, here are the general steps required to set up Google Analytics for your online business site:
- Create a Google Analytics account or sign into your current account.
- Set up your site’s property. Choose the account to which you want to add the property, then create and name the property, enter your store site’s URL, industry, and reporting time zone.
- Add a view to your property. Go to your account and the property to which you want to add a view. Use the menu to Create a View, name it, select the view type (web or app), and answer a few other questions.
- Add your tracking code. On the site you want to track, add your tracking code directly after the tag of your site.
- Confirm your code is working. Visit your Google Analytics portal and look at the Real-Time reports. The report should show at least one site visitor, which is you. You’ll then know your Google Analytics code is up and running.
The Bottom Line
Google Analytics can be very valuable for your ecommerce business. This free tool is part of a digital suite that Google provides to online store owners to help understand your site’s performance.
Google Analytics collects a vast amount of detailed site data, processes it, and generates visually formatted reports to give you insights into your online store. These reports can help answer questions to help enhance your marketing, site performance, and site SEO.
You can set up Google Analytics for your ecommerce store’s site in just a few steps so you can quickly begin accessing reports that will give help you enhance the performance of your online business.