9xb - Creating Online Success

INTRODUCING GOOGLE ANALYTICS ECOMMERCE TRACKING: PART 1

You've probably seen your Google Analytics and, like most people, loved those funky graphs and bar charts. It’s quite compelling tuning in every few days and seeing what weird search queries people have entered to find your site, or even to look at the groovy map overlay and wonder about just what that guy in Kazakhstan made of your website.

Once you get away from such superficialities however, Analytics can be an incredibly powerful tool for many purposes. Today, we’re taking a look at the ecommerce tracking facility.

What you get

The most immediate, day to day reports are easy to get to and can give you a great insight into your site's performance at a high level.

All these things are useful little 'heads-up' indicators which you can use to make high-level judgements about how your site is peforming and where you might want to spend money.

What you need to set it up

There are a few things you need in order to enable Ecommerce Tracking.

1. An ecommerce site. This might sound like a no-brainer, but unless you're physically selling things through your website, you will get nothing out of this process!
2. A confirmation page on your website that is shown when a customer has completed a purchase. If your sales process ends up on a payment provider's site or another domain, then you won't be able to use the code.
3. Technical help from your web development team to install the code on this landing page. They'll need to pull out various aspects of information about the order to feed back to analytics. This stuff is typically held in a database so your web design/development company will have to do the necessary tinkering.

All of this will take a little time and knowledge and you'll probably have to stump up some money to buy the time necessary to carry out the work. However, it shouldn't be an enormous job, and if your web agency want to charge you thousands for the job then it's maybe time to ask if they're up to the job.

After the technical stuff has been handled, either you or your agency will just have to confirm to Google that the site is ecommerce enabled (done through the main 'Analytics Settings' option which you can access yourself).

And you're good to go!

In part 2, we'll have a look at how you can leverage some of the information you get to make better decisions and look for new opportunities to increase your web sales. We'll also look at the things Analytics doesn't do, and how you can overcome them if you want to use Analytics as a major tool to help you run your online business.

Notes and Queries...