Why You Need to Utilize Google Analytics for eCommerce
For many eCommerce entrepreneurs, Google Analytics can become overwhelming with its number of technical reports and amount of information. Even though using Google Analytics can help you evaluate marketing efforts and optimize your online store for conversions and sales, most entrepreneurs aren’t trained business analysts that sift through data all day to find these valuable insights.
Why Bother with Google Analytics for eCommerce?
You’re busy enough without stuffing your brain with numbers you don’t understand and trends you never knew existed. So why bother with analytics? Google Analytics helps eCommerce entrepreneurs understand what works and what doesn’t work, gain an advantage over competitors who don’t use analytics, and increase sales and conversions.
Target Audience Identification
Most think of Google Analytics as a tool that tracks the number of visitors that come to your site or individual pages on your site. Google Analytics data, however, provides much more than a number. Google Analytics tells you exactly who’s visiting. Visitor data includes age, gender, geographical region, interests, and more.
Mis-identifying your visitors leads to lost sales. If, for example, you believe your audience consists primarily of middle-aged men, you would naturally include language and other features targeted toward middle-aged men. If Google Analytics, however, shows that you’re getting an equal number of visitors in their 20s and early 30s, you’ll want to adjust the marketing message or the marketing medium.
Because you receive user data based on in-market segmentation, you’ll know how many of your website visitors take a specific interest your store’s specialty. If you market educational software, for example, your demographics report displays the number of visitors who see your site that list education and learning as an interest. Not only does it identify visitors that would naturally be in your target audience, it tells you specifically what part of that target audience they fit in to.
Website Usability
Google Analytics tells you what visitors do once they get to your site. Something as simple as knowing where visitors enter your site and where they drop off helps identify issues that need fixed and what parts of your site are attracting visitors.
The Behavior and Conversions reports within Google Analytics help you understand if your website’s usability satisfies your customers. The behavior reports show which pages receive the most user engagement and those pages that get little interest once visitors arrive. Conversion reports will show you where users drop out, helping you to eliminate weak links in the conversion process. One very useful data point you can find using Google Analytics is cart abandonment and how to measure it.
Audience reports help you optimize user experience by identifying which devices visitors are using to view your page, which browsers they are using, and which search engines they are searching from.
Budget Allocation
Successful businesses don’t just guess how to allocate money in their budget. From the analysis Google Analytics provides, you can determine the best way to invest further budget. There are even reports within Google Analytics that suggest a percentage of budget increase or decrease based on the specific attribution model you choose.
Google Analytics helps identify gaps in your budget. Using the acquisition report, for example, you might identify that a large percentage of visitors that come from Pinterest buy certain products. It would, therefore, behoove you to allocate resources to attracting more Pinterest visitors. Furthermore, using Google Analytics for budgeting means you can measure the ROI of changes in marketing campaigns.
Now What?
As an eCommerce entrepreneur, you might be wondering how you can take all this information and put it to work for your store. That’s what we’re for! We help merchants achieve their eCommerce goals with our in-house team of Magento-certified developers and Magento Marketing experts ready to build a site that will withstand the rigors of eCommerce and heavy traffic.