Google Analytics offers a powerful way to help manufacturers increase their ecommerce sales. And as with all good marketing, it revolves around thoroughly understanding who it is that’s searching for your products, how they go about learning more, and how they make purchases.

If you are using one of today’s robust and user-friendly ecommerce platforms like Shopify or Woocommerce to run your ecommerce store, then Google Analytics should be automatically set up for you to use. You can check how to set up your Shopify store settings for Google Analytics here.

To get you started using Google Analytics (GA) to learn about your customers and increase sales, we’ve listed a few places not to miss when analyzing data. In this first post, we’ll review setting up a dashboard, creating goals, analyzing traffic sources, and analyzing multi-channel funnels. 

Customize Your Daily Overview

The first thing you see when entering GA is your dashboard. Depending on your role in the company, you might want to look at different data. To customize your dashboard for data that is most pertinent to a marketer open Reports, click CUSTOMIZATION then Dashboards, and then click +New Dashboard. You can choose to start with default widgets or a blank canvas. You may want to add widgets to show overall revenue, website traffic volume, and top performing geographic areas. For marketing experts, we recommend segmenting traffic data by:

• Traffic channel 
• Landing page 
• Product category

Create Goals

Goals represent actions you want your visitors to take on your website. To create a goal, click the gear icon in the lower left hand corner of your screen and navigate to the All Website Data view. In the View column, click Goals. Click + NEW GOAL to create a new goal. Follow the prompts to create up to 20 goals for your store. 

Some helpful goals for your store might be:

• Checkout completed
• Contact us form completed
• Create an account completed
• Print coupon completed

Analyze Traffic Sources

To open the All Traffic report, click Acquisition on the left hand navigation column and then select All Traffic and Channels. Click Ecommerce in the Explorer tab. Keep in mind that the data here is attributed to the last referral source the user visited before converting.

Compare Transactions, Revenue, and Ecommerce Conversion Rate to the Traffic Source to see what site referrals are generating the highest number of transactions, most revenue, and conversion rate. Using these numbers, you can decide where to spend more or less of your marketing budget. 

Analyze Multiple Channel Funnels That Lead to Conversions

Since many conversions take place over several visits from different referral sources, analyzing all of the places users visited that brought them to the store is helpful in seeing the whole picture. 

To open the Multiple Channel report click Conversions in the left hand navigation column, then click Multi-Channel Funnels, then Overview.

The Multi-Channel report is most useful to analyze a single goal at a time. To choose a goal, click All under Conversion, then uncheck the goals you do not want to view for now.

The Venn Diagram in the Visualizer area will show the conversion percentages of each of the channels as they worked alone versus where they worked with another channel. The data corresponds to the chart on the left. You can draw conclusions like, if the percentage of conversions that used Organic and Direct is high, visitors likely were introduced to the site via organic and later typed the web address in to revisit and purchase. There are many more ways to analyze multi-channel goals, which we’ll leave it to you to explore.

A Good Start!

If you start getting familiar with GA and how it can help you understand what drives sales and which marketing campaigns are working best, you will be well on your way to a sustainable income through your online store. For more don’t miss GA places, stay tuned for our next post.