This post is dedicated to all those who have yet to see the light of website visitor analytics, with an introduction to the why and how of using Google’s free Analytics product on your eCommerce website.
Why You Should Use Website Analytics
All companies keep a close eye on general performance metrics such as numbers of sales, revenue and profit, but with the rise and rise of online commerce a large proportion (or in some cases all) of sales and leads for any given company will come from their websites. So if you are not analysing the performance of your site, how can you possibly make informed decisions on how to improve the sales or leads of the company? The simple answer is that you can’t, or at least not in any deterministic fashion. With an analytics solution setup on your site you can track current statistics for visitors and their behaviour as well as seeing the effect making changes has to these behaviours. Additionally you will gain the ability to segmentation your visitors by source, which will also allow you to make more informed marketing decisions. This is of course just the tip of the iceberg, with the scale of modern website analytics applications and the rise in different online marketing disciplines (SEO, PPC, Email, Social Media…), the number of use cases has become truly endless. I would argue that any business working online which continues to shy away from utililising such solutions to analyse and improve their site in a pragmatic way, will not only under perform but could get left in the dust by competitors who do.
Google Analytics Advantages And Disadvantages
First and foremost, Google Analytics is completely without cost (other than time, of which there is never enough). There are plenty of other analytics solutions out there including those bundled with standard hosting packages, but in the class of free solutions Google Analytics reigns supreme. This is mainly due to the amount of resources being put behind this product by Google who see Analytics as a tool enabling people to work better on the web which in turn will enable them to better use other Google products (such as AdWords) and hence boost Google’s revenue. Additionally there is another major driving factor, Google loves data. This should not be a surprise considering they are after all a company built on algorithms and the application of these algorithms to large data sets (starting with the original PageRank algorithm). With their analytics product, Google gains access to an incredible amount of data, which allows them to better understand user behavior. This in turn shows where improvements can be made to their paid products, in order to provide a better service to those users.
With regular updates to the application Google Analytics has grown to include just about any report you would care to conceive. From standard simple user navigation tracking to more recent additions for tracking the effects of social media efforts or visualising multiple-channel funnels. This continuous improvement along with custom reporting facilities means that Google Analytics can compete with the best of the competition in pretty much every area.
Google Analytics uses JavaScript to track page loads, where many other website analytics packages will directly use server logs generated by web server daemons (services) such as Apache to generate their reports. Due to Google’s reliance on JavaScript, visitors who do not use it cannot be tracked. Typically this will be a small proportion of users, perhaps around 1-2% with the majority of these being made up of users of text / voice browsers. For tracking Google uses only 1st party cookies, this means they are run directly from the pages users are viewing rather than being loaded up from another site when the page loads. With all the recent changes around cookie laws in the UK and EU it is important to notify users of this use of cookies on your website, although consent may be assumed in many cases due to their 1st party nature and being limited to tracking the user on the site in question. With large data sets, Google Analytics reports may only sample the full data set in order to give approximate results. So when using the application, trends should always be favoured over absolute figures. There are analytics packages which will perform more accurate and/or faster reporting with large data sets, but these will come with a cost and would not be appropriate for most website owners (we can’t all be Amazon).
Getting Started – Signup & Setup
Before getting started you will need to have access to the content of the files on your web server, either directly through FTP or via your Content Management System (CMS) of choice (many CMSs will have pre-build addon or plugins to help do this for you). To create a Google Analytics account, go to Google Analytics and click ‘Create an account’ in the top right corner, you can use an existing Google account or with setup a new one to use with Analytics (other users can be added to individual Analytics profiles later). The setup process will ask for various parameters and then provide the JavaScript snippet to insert into your web pages. Just remember that this needs to be included on every page of your site in order to enable full visitor tracking.
There are many additional settings which will help improve sections of Analytics and enable certain reports which will not be available otherwise, depending on your site content and purpose you may wish to setup:
- Goals – These are your objectives, and within Google Analytics you can define what they are. Without setting up your goals you will not get the full benefit of the application as these allow you to view reports in terms of conversion and revenue, see goals setup instructions.
- AdWords – If you are using Google Adwords to display paid advertising you can get all of your lovely data in analytics allowing you to match up advertising costs to revenue generation. You can then make better choices regarding keyword selection, bidding, landing pages and more, see AdWords / Analytics setup instructions
- AdSense – This feature is more commonly for content based websites than eCommerce, but your AdSense revenue data for adverts you run on the site can also be brought into the fold, see AdSense / Analytics setup instructions.
- Site Search – A very common feature in eCommerce is allowing your users to search your catalogue. With site search you can specify the variable used in the address of your search page, see site search setup instructions.
Next Steps
With the ubiquity of Google Analytics the number of resources available online to help you leverage value from the application is quite staggering. A great place to start is the Google Analytics Learning Page where you can find links to lots of online resources including a range of videos to help you get started. However, a quick search of any related topic or report will yield plenty of related articles and other content.
Hopefully I have begun to make my case as to the value of using Google Analytics in eCommerce. However the proof of this will come when real insight is gained through the use of the application with real site data. In my next article I will begin covering some of the basic reports and metrics available and use cases for them.
Resources / Further Reading
- Google Analytics
- Google Analytics Learning Resources
- Ultimate Web Analytics Comparison Resources