How to combine analytics and online store?

The most common problem we can point to is the lack of drawing conclusions and analyzing what is happening with the site. Site owners look primarily at the level of traffic, but anyone who has been in business longer knows that this does not always translate into increased sales.

Analytics means what?

There are many tools that help us track user behavior and analyze various things. These are tools like Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager or even Google Adwords.

So let's check out what can be tracked and the common shortcomings and mistakes.

Goals. Set up goals

Google Analytics allows you to set up goals for many different events. This is important, you need to do it as soon as possible to collect as much data as possible.

For online stores, the ecommerce module from Google Analytics is very helpful in allowing us to track sales. Not only can we see order fulfillment when we go to the ecommerce section. You can also see this data by phrases and other traffic sources. This allows you to see where the most sales are generated.

Adwords campaign as an aid in searching for the best phrases

A common problem is focusing on selected products or phrases. Due to the fact that in Google Analytics they are hidden as not provided, we do not know which phrase brought the user to us and which phrase converted the best in terms of number of purchases.

Google Adwords comes to our aid. It is important to link the Adwords campaign with Analytics so that we can see which phrases from the Adwords campaign brought us traffic.

After running the Adwords campaign(more), in Google Analytics in the paid traffic section we will see exactly which phrases generated sales. This is very valuable information. On the basis of this information you can decide which phrases to focus on in your SEO activities, which subpages of your products should be better optimized, expanded, or maybe better promoted within the website.

Tag Manager for advanced goal measurement

In case you want to measure more advanced goals Google Tag Manager will be helpful. It embeds Google Analytics code and therefore we have constant access to old data from our account.

Tag manager allows you to set goals on the basis of the page code. It's a big facilitation. In the past in order to catch an untypical goal we had to paste a JavaScript code and send it further to GA. Meanwhile, here you do not have to paste anything - we catch the event on the basis of the class or id of the element in the code.

Periodic reviews

A good practice is to review our data periodically. That is, every given time - month, quarter or longer period, we check what is happening with our goals. Google Analytics provides many opportunities to compare data with other periods. On the basis of this you can draw a lot of conclusions and check if everything is going in the direction we have chosen.

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