Important Google Analytics report you need to know for your Ecommerce business

Data is key to making informed decisions, especially when running an Ecommerce business. Thank goodness for Google Analytics. The insights it provides contains a huge amount of information about your online store, your visitors and where they came from. All of these information can be used to find new customers and increase conversions.

But for many online sellers just starting out, Google Analytics can be very confusing with all the technical reports and information that's difficult to understand and navigate. In this post we will look at how you can easily set up Google Analytics for your store and which reports are important for your online business.  

Why is Google Analytics important for your business

It is different if you have a physical store. You can see the people walking in and see their behavior first hand. You can also talk to them to get more information. When you run an online store, you are pretty much blind if you don't have analytics. 

Using Google Analytics can better help you understand the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, better understand your visitors and their behaviors and optimize your store.

Setting up Google Analytics for your store

Google Analytics is fairly easy to set up. If you’re on the EasyStore platform, all you have to do is create a new account in Google Analytics, copy the tracking code, and paste it in the Google Analytics app setting in your control panel.

In order to use the Analytics tool, you will first need to have a Google account. If you already have one, you can straight away create a Google Analytics account.

Report categories

Google has a lot of reports and those reports can be broken down into a hundred different ways. You can find the different report categories on the left side menu.

• Real-Time - Shows you what’s happening on your site in real time.
• Audience - Tells you more about who is on your site.
• Acquisition - Tells you how your visitors and customers are coming to your site.
• Behavior - Tells you important information about your site and what your visitors are doing.
• Conversions - Tells you more about your sales and conversions.

*Please note that there will not be any data until your site starts getting traffic.

Content Reports

When you are running an Ecommece site, you probably want to know which pages are most often visited. You can get these information by running content reports.

Behavior > Site Content > All Pages

This report shows you all pages of your site and the data that goes along with them. How you can use this report to your benefit is by identifying which product pages have the highest number of visits. With this, you can know which products in your online store are most popular.

Now that you know which products are most popular, you can have those products featured on your home page or use it as recommendations for new shoppers.

Social Media Reports

You are probably using social media channels to promote your online store. This report will show the effectiveness of your marketing on social media platforms.

Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals

These reports tell you the social platforms that send traffic to your site. For obvious reasons, this is an important metric to look at so you know where you should be spending most of your time and energy for social media.

Traffic Source

There is no doubt that getting traffic to your online store is probably the most important thing to you as an ecommerce entrepreneur. But it is not enough to just get traffic. Do you know where are your traffic coming from?

Acquisition >  All Traffic > Channels

Similar to the Social Media Report, this also lets you see where the traffic to your store is coming from. This is important especially if you use multiple channels such as Facebook ads, Google ads, social media, blogger reviews, and so on to promote your online business. 

You can dive into which traffic source brings the most traffic and you can use that information to properly allocate your marketing resources. 

Bonus: Break down into Source/Medium to get a more specific source of traffic. For example “google/organic”, is where you see your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) effort come into play. Are you getting organic traffic? Read the SEO guide for newly created online store

Conclusion

There are lots more data and reports you can dig up using Google Analytics. But if you are just starting to use analytics for your ecommerce business, you probably just want to focus on these few things. 

The information you gather from Google Analytics will help you make better business decisions, so start implementing analytics in your business today.