Managed WordPress Ecommerce Help

Monitor conversions with Google Analytics Pro

Growing an online shop requires juggling a lot of different skills and parameters. Optimizing the performance of your site, ensuring that your shop is easy to find online and promoting it to many different sources are some of the most common things you'll need to do in order to continue improving your sales. One that may get forgotten, though, is the importance of keeping track of the growth and activity in your shop.

Tracking some key metrics like the conversion rate of your customers, the average value of your orders, and your product impressions can help you easily notice any patterns that are starting to emerge. This can help you move fast to either utilize them or prevent them, depending on what you'd like to achieve. This may seem daunting if you have no experience working with analytics tools. In this article, we'll discuss how to use the built-in Google Analytics Pro feature, as well as how to find and read some of its important metrics related to eCommerce.

Configure Google Analytics Pro

Let's start by ensuring that Google Analytics Pro is connected and correctly set up with your shop to start tracking its activity:

  1. Sign in to WordPress
  2. Navigate to WooCommerce > Settings > Integration > Google Analytics Pro.
  3. On this page, you can enable and disable tracking, authenticate your Google account, and customize how you'd like tracking to work for your shop. You can also enable and disable debug mode if you're facing any issues, and rename any tracked events names. For this step, we'll continue with clicking on the Authenticate with your Google account button. Pro Tip: You can also add your tracking ID manually, but we recommend authenticating your Google account instead to ensure that any future changes implemented will be changed automatically.
  4. After granting any permissions needed for your Google account, you'll then return to the Google Analytics Pro page in your shop. Now, you can add the property you'd like to use for your Google Analytics account to track your shop. If this is your first time using Google Analytics as well, make sure you follow this guide on how to create a Universal Analytics property.
  5. Now that you've added the property as well, Google Analytics will start tracking traffic on your site. Please note that you'll start seeing data in your account after at least 24 hours. Until then, you can go to the real-time reports, and double-check if Google Analytics is working properly or not.

Well done! Now that the configuration has been completed, let's see how you can find and read some of the most important metrics for your online shop.

Key metrics measured by Google Analytics Pro

Google Analytics has a wealth of information you can check to find out more about your shop and your customers' behavior. We'll discuss the 3 that are key to growing your online shop. These are:

  1. eCommerce Conversion Rate
  2. Average Order Value
  3. Product Impressions

a. eCommerce Conversion Rate

Learning how to find and use this metric will allow you to better understand how many users visiting your shop actually "convert" to paid customers. For example, if 10 users visit your shop and 5 of them buy a product, then your converstion rate of that sample is 50%. And a higher rate means higher income and better sales.

This is a very important rate as it can help you quickly discern if your marketing and design efforts are working. A fairly low conversion rate or one that is falling may point to an underlying issue with your shop that you may need to resolve in order to increase your sales. Are your customers getting confused with the user experience in your shop? Is your checkout page working as expected? Is your latest marketing initiative not as effective as you'd expect? These may have an impact in your conversion rate.

If you'd like to find the conversion rate, navigate to your Google Analytics account and then Conversions > Ecommerce > Overview. You can find your revenue and the Ecommerce Conversion Rate under the graph. By default, you'll see the conversion rate of the last 7 days, but you can change that by changing the date range on the upper right corner.

Note: Make sure you research what's a "typical" conversion rate in your industry and size of shop. Conversion rates can vary wildly, so make sure you find some data as to what to expect from this metric and how to use it.

(Back to top.)

b. Average Order Value

This metric is key to understanding how much your customers are spending in your shop. Usually calculated by dividing the revenue of a specific date range by the number of orders for that period. Having a low average order value could mean that your customers purchase a small number of products per order.

Some examples of cases that affect this value may be: the pricing of the products; the layout of the product lists; the discoverability of similar products (e.g. upsales, bundles); the user experience in your shop from start to finish. However, as the previous metric, this is mainly an indicator of something going wrong. Finding what works for your shop can only be done by experimenting with different parameters and then viewing the results by inspecting these metrics.

If you'd like to find the average order value for your shop, navigate to your Google Analytics account and then Conversions > Ecommerce > Overivew. It's right next to the Ecommerce Conversion Rate. It's also affected by the date range you've set on the upper right corner, so make sure to change it based on your needs.

(Back to top.)

c. Product Impressions

Our plugin also implements the Enhanced eCommerce Tracking offered by Google Analytics. This allows you to also track the "product impressions" in your shop. In short, you can check the product views based on the number of sessions in your shop. This is a great way to understand which products in your shop are more popular as well as keep an eye out in any changes you're doing to your products and how it impacts them.

For example, changing prices, pictures, or even trying some marketing strategies like offering a discount, using pre-orders, and bundles, all can affect the product impressions in your shop. Tracking them can help you understand which changes are more effective and allow you to define the best strategies for your target group.

If you'd like to find the product views and keep an eye out on your customers' activity, you can navigate to your Google Analaytics account and then Conversions > Ecommerce > Shopping Behavior and you can find more information about the customer experience of users in your shop. You can find more information about product views, which ones are new or return visitors, and which sessions also include product views or where customers have added products directly to the cart and proceeded to checkout.

As before, you can change the date on the upper right corner and you can also create a new segment on the upper left corner if you'd like to target more specific sessions for your metrics. For example, you can create a segment that only includes the number of converters, or one that includes only the bounced sessions, among others.

(Back to top.)

Great news! You're now ready get started with Google Analytics and dive deep into all the different metrics offered! And don't hesitate to continue checking for new metrics to incorporate in your data while growing your shop!

More info