Google Analytics is an important tool that plays a very crucial role in optimizing the performance of a website, most especially with regards to the conversion of visitors. If you run an e-commerce website built with WooCommerce or any other online store builder, then one of your top priorities as a business entity is attracting enough visitors that will eventually lead to an impressive conversion rate.
It is plain and simple; you cannot optimize your site to increase the visitor to conversion ratio if you’re unable to effectively track the activities of your site’s visitors. Monitoring customer activities in your online store doesn’t only help you keep tabs on your site’s growth, it also avails you to a lot of key information you ordinarily wouldn’t have access to.
It is erroneous to blindly set up a marketing strategy without first analyzing the behavior of your website’s visitors. Doing this will only amount to a waste of funds and resources since the end result of applying such an ill-conceived strategy is laden with futility and failure.
By regularly tracking customer activities, however, you are made aware of the flaws hindering commercial transactions on your platform and can easily rectify it with a digital marketing plan or a website upgrade.
Why your WooCommerce site’s conversions have to be tracked
It isn’t just enough for you to set up your online store and waits for sales to be consistently executed, you must also carry out frequent analysis of your e-commerce platform in order to study the peculiar shopping behaviors exhibited by customers.
Though it sounds strange to continuously monitor the activities of the shoppers visiting your website, it is a fundamental website management function that helps gauge the effectiveness of your online store’s features and their influence on your sales numbers.
The information retrieved from the tracking of conversions isn’t only factual but also contains reliable metrics that can be used to boost the performance of a website… conversion wise.
Shopping Behavior
The shopping behavior of customers on an e-commerce site is deduced from multiple data that are made available by the Google Analytics tool. This data culminates from the measure of multiple parameters, some of which include the most purchased product, the most visited page and of course, the number of customers that make it past the checkout page.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
These are metrics that disclose essential information about a site’s performance, specifically focusing on areas where success can found and sections that need to alter to improve the site’s growth and increase sales figures. KPIs are key indicators that determine if your e-commerce business is meeting or close to achieving its goals. A few of these KPIs are average order value, conversion rate, cost per acquisition, and shopping cart abandonment.
Product Performance
Google Analytics is able to retrieve information about the performance of each product in your online store. This function and the data it delivers make it possible for you to identify the products doing poorly on your site and direct marketing effort to boost its sales.
Checkout Behavior
Knowing how your customers engage the checkout process ensures that you’re able to make the necessary adjustments in order to make checking out items even less strenuous.
Sales Performance
The information contained within this important data includes sales details along with revenue, shipping, tax, and refunds.
Marketing Report
Though the marketing strategy utilized on your e-commerce platform can’t be quantified, it can still assess with measurable findings presented back to you. Marketing inputs that collated in with Google Analytics include affiliate tracking, discount vouchers, and coupon codes.
Conversion tracking on WooCommerce
Numerous plugins are able to perform the primary function of tracking a site’s conversion rate as well as other essential metrics site owners pay attention to; most of these plugins are, however, riddled with varying levels of inefficiencies at a functional level. Another issue that is common with a lot of these less-renowned analytic tools is the installation process, which can be frustratingly tedious.
Enhancing e-commerce tracking on WooCommerce with Google AnalyticsAlthough WooCommerce can already be infused with Google Analytics, the “Enhance E-commerce Tracking” function in the analytics tools can be enabled to allow you monitor the important metrics that gauge your site’s performance. To be able to use this function, however, you must have WooCommerce ready to be installed and your WordPress site must have Google Analytics incorporated into it. With both these two conditions met, you can begin the process of optimizing your WooCommerce store for more effective site analysis.
1st Step: Open Google Analytics and enable Enhanced E-commerce Tracking
To begin the process of enabling the “Enhance E-commerce Tracking” function, you must enter Google Analytics admin area and make your way to the “E-commerce Settings” section.
Next, you will have to turn on the “Enable Ecommerce” option if it hasn’t already been done. Doing this turns the tab bright blue with the word “ON” clearly visible.
Proceed to click the “Next Step” button below and ensure that the “Enable Ecommerce” tab remains on in the follow-up screen. After confirming the status of the tab, you can proceed to click the submit button in order to bring the first step to a satisfactory conclusion.
After completing this step, you can take a break from the admin area in Google Analytics and return to WordPress.
2nd Step: Install the Enhanced Ecommerce Google Analytics plugin and configure it to fit Analytics settings
This step begins with you installing the Enhanced E-commerce plugin for Google Analytics on your customized e-commerce site and also activating it to make it functional. It is noteworthy that the plugin only becomes functional if WooCommerce has already been installed.
After the activation process, you then proceed to the WooCommerce settings area and navigate to the “Integration” section on the dashboard. With a long list of options displayed on the screen, go ahead and scroll down the list until you come across the option, “Add Enhanced E-commerce Tracking Code”.
Activating this function, which is done by turning it on, ensures that you successfully finish the second step of the process and complete the aspect of enabling enhanced e-commerce tracking.
With this part wrapped up, you can begin to access important metrics that form the center of this enabled feature.
3rd Step: Use Google Analytics to review your new metrics
To achieve this, you will have to return to Google Analytics and open the “Conversions” tab. Lodged inside the tab are the new metrics you will be working with including Checkout Behavior, Shopping Behavior, Sales Performance, and of course, Product Performance.
Each of these metrics measures specific elements of your e-commerce platform that can be used to assess your site’s performance based on the set parameter. For example, when you click on Shopping Behavior, you are given access to the number and variety of the products that have been added to the shopping cart as well as the number of people that abandoned the checkout process.
Having a detailed knowledge of this data makes it possible for you to rework the checkout page for more optimized performance in case a high number of visitors leave the page without completing their orders.
If you, however, want to know which part of the checkout process is responsible for the inefficiency that is costing your e-commerce site the conversions it needs, then clicking on Checkout Behavior should afford you a clearer picture.
You can also gauge the performance of your e-commerce platform by measuring the amount of revenue each product in your virtual catalog earns. This ensures you get a vivid picture of the items that are under-performing so that they can either be aggressively marketed or completely dropped from the store.
The last of the metrics, Sales Performance, simply make available every data that has to do with the sales volume generated on your website. The metric also takes account of taxation and shipping costs, ensuring that they aren’t muddled with the rest of your online store’s revenue.
Conclusion — Ethical stance on the usage of Google Analytics for customer tracking
There is sizeable opposition to the use of customer tracking tools, most of whom criticize it for its invasiveness. This notion, however, is quite flawed since it suggests that the purpose of monitoring the visitors to a website is strictly for surveillance. That can’t be further from the truth since the websites and e-commerce stores that use these tools couldn’t care less about the identity of their visitors.
The only thing that matters to e-commerce sites, when it comes to maximizing Google Analytics to track WooCommerce conversions, is using the retrieved data from the completed analysis to improve the performance of their sites and increase their conversion rates. Knowledge of the customer’s identity has next to no impact in influencing the key metrics; hence, it isn’t useful to the sites.
So if you want your WooCommerce store to undergo a remarkable change in the area of conversions and maximize its commercial features then upgrading to Google Analytics with Enhanced E-commerce Tracking is indeed your best bet.
Other part of the equation
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