Learn How to Enable Ecommerce Tracking in Google Analytics To Help Your Business Grow
When you’re creating and running an online business, you’re going to have to do more than just manufacture your product. You’ll need to make sure that you’re marketing your product to those people who are likely to buy it and that you’re marketing efforts are effective. One of the best ways to do this is through enabling e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics.
Why Enable Tracking?
Tracking will show you what your customers are doing. It will show you what kinds of products are more popular on your site, how many of each product your customers are buying, and how long it takes them to purchase after they first visit your site. This will allow you to learn what products are your big sellers so that you can make sure they’re well promoted when you’re working on bringing more customers to your business. It will allow you to streamline your ordering process for products you need to make your own products and will enable you to be sure you’re not going to run out of a best seller at the hight of your sales. By keeping your products in stock, you keep your customers happy.
How Do You Enable Tracking?
Before you begin tracking how your customers find your site, you’re going to need to enable tracking on your website. This isn’t very difficult, but it can lead to many more sales. The steps for How to Enable Ecommerce Tracking in Google Analytics are:
- On the Google Analytic page, go to “Admin” on the menu bar.
- Next, use the menus to select Account, then Property, and then finally View.
- Click to view the Ecommerce Settings, and then make sure the toggle is set to the “On” position.
- Before exiting the page, make sure to save this setting.
- WordPress: Google Analyitics for WordPress by Yoast (this plugin makes it easy)
- BigCommerce: Watch the video tutorial below to set up your Google analytics.
Once your e-commerce tracking is turned on you will need to add a little bit of code to your website. Google has this code available on your Google Analytics page and it’s created specifically for your site. You will have a choice of using code for a website, Android apps or IOS apps.
What’s Next?
After you have tracking turned on, you can wait a little while for some of the information to become available. With a lot of customers visiting your site, the tracking should have many statistics in a short amount of time. If you don’t have many customers yet, you may have to wait a little bit to get definitive information. You’ll be able to view all of the statistics for your site so that you can be sure that your marketing efforts are paying off and your customers like your products.
Cutroni.com has a pretty good collection of in-depth articles to help Ecommerce store owners get their analytics dialed in the right way along with generating reports and sifting through the data.
An Example
If you run a business where you make your own candle at home to sell online, there are a variety of different candles you may sell. From bee’s wax to candles with various scents, you’re going to want to know what products are selling so that you can make more of them. While you can judge this based on sales alone, you may want to be able to predict trends so that you can prepare extra candles ahead of time without worrying that you’re making too many.
For instance, with Google Analytics, you may be able to figure out that in the summer you sell a wine bottle candle in a margarita scent the most. You can prepare for the summer by purchasing extra wine bottles and creating more candles ahead of the summer rush. If summer is the only time you use wine bottles and you prefer mason jars in the winter, you can get an idea of how many wine bottles you may need before summer hits so you won’t have to order too many or make another order if you run out. You can avoid having to make rush orders which may have higher shipping charges as well.
Grow Your Business
When you’re running a business, you need to be aware of all aspects of your business to keep your customer base growing. By analyzing the information Google makes available to you, you can make sure that you have enough product on hand at all times and see what products of yours the customers prefer. Whether you’re making your own candles, sewing your own items, or you have any other small business, these results can help keep your business running smoothly throughout the year.
