E-Commerce Tracking
Previously I have discussed the enormous benefits that come from using Google Analytics to monitor statistics on your website, and in particular why tracking your goal conversions is vital. In this article I am going to look a little more in depth at how you can track not only goal conversions but goal values allowing you to analyse in detail exactly how much revenue traffic sources, your online advertising campaigns and keyphrases are bringing to your business.
If you have been following this blog I’m sure you will already have set up Google Analytics and added goal conversion tracking. But if not that will be your first step to implementing a full e-commerce tracking solution. Once your analytics account is fully set up you will need to ensure that Google is aware that your website is an e-commerce retailer. To do this choose to “Edit Profile Information” in the analytics settings and ensure that the “Yes, an E-Commerce Site” radio button is highlighted.
You will also need to add a few simple lines of code to the receipt page on your website. Google provide this code in their online help centre (located here) and it can be copied from there directly into your receipt page.
This code will inject some additional information into the data that is transferred to Google Analytics. This includes information on both the transaction (for example the transaction ID, total sale value, shipping costs, and the city, state and country that the transaction was generated in). In addition to the transaction data the e-commerce tracking code also send data specific to each item that was purchased in the transaction. This includes the transaction ID (in order to track which transaction the item is related to), the product name, the category, the quantity ordered and the price of each unit.
As you can imagine this extra data provides huge scope for further reporting and analysis within Google Analytics. While knowing which keyphrases are driving the most traffic and which are converting the most often is undoubtedly vital information it is even more important to know how much revenue they generate; 20 conversions on a product with very low profit margins for example may prove less useful to your business than one transaction on a product that is hugely profitable.
For most business owners profit margins form the bottom line, and the only way to accurately know how much profit is being generated from online marketing is to employ an e-commerce tracking system.
