- So what should you be tracking for your ecommerce store?
In this video I'm gonna show you
what you should be setting up in your Google Analytics
to track your ecommerce store correctly.
All and more coming up right after this.
(digital music)
Hi there and welcome to another video of MeasureSchool.com
where we teach you the data-driven way of digital marketing.
My name is Julian and on this channel we do
marketing tech reviews, tutorials, and give you tips
on better tracking just like this one.
So if you haven't yet consider subscribing.
Now a while ago I did a video
on what you should be tracking for your website
and that more data doesn't always equal more insights.
So, if you have an ecommerce store,
you might be asking yourself how can I apply this
to my ecommerce store and build up the tracking.
Now I have worked in ecommerce companies before,
when I started out my digital marketing career,
so I have a little bit of insights
because we did a lot of things wrong
and tracked a lot of data that we never used.
So in this video I'm gonna give you some tips
on what you should be tracking for your ecommerce store.
Alright, before we get started,
you need to have your Google Analytics installed
and there we can start with the basic setup.
Now, what is important for an ecommerce store?
For an ecommerce store really it's important
to get your outcome tracked, which is the sale,
this is something you want to increase,
this is the number you want to increase
at the end of the day.
Now, gathering context about this data point,
about the actual sale is very important.
Google Analytics, for example, has a very nice feature
which is called the ecommerce tracking,
which lets you do exactly that, gather data about your sale,
but also about the context of the sale,
so how much was sold, what price was in there,
what products were bought, shipping costs, and so on.
So you have a lot of data surrounding this
and can analyze it later on in your tracking correctly.
So this is the most important part to install
on your ecommerce store, and if your ecommerce store
doesn't have that installed get it installed right now.
Now, the second part is all about
getting your sources tracked,
and this is about the question
where did my users or the sales come from in the end.
And this is all about getting your landing page URLs
tagged correctly with UTM parameters.
If you don't know what they are,
I have another video on that as well.
But this will tell you where your users are from
and give you that crucial part of
you have people coming to your website
and converting somehow,
and where did these people come from
and did they buy or didn't they buy.
So we have these two pieces that are crucial
for our basic setup of Google Analytics
on an ecommerce store.
And really for me, this is really a lot of insight already,
so if you are working on optimizing your ad spend,
you can be tracking a lot through these two pieces already,
and these need to be in place
in order to have a base tracking
that actually works for your ecommerce store.
Now let's get into the advanced section.
Now, in the advanced section you would like
to get more insights from your data,
and probably you have a little bit of resources
available to actually look at that data
and also gain insights from it.
What I would recommend is to gather data
about the crucial touchpoints of your website.
So when people come from that source that you have defined
and that you can now use to actually segment your traffic,
then you want to be making sure
that they go through the checkout completely,
or what they actually do on the category pages,
how do they use the category pages,
how do they use the product pages, and so on,
and there's a great feature set within the Google Analytics
called Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking.
Now, when you want to install this, it's probably
a little bit harder to set up.
That's why I would recommend
to get proper help to install this.
But the data that you will get is very beneficial
to actually look at that and gain great insights
about how your users are using your ecommerce website.
And this is really already a little bit more sophisticated,
you need to have somebody to actually look at the data
and, again, gain insights from it
and take action on that and optimize your website.
Other than that I think that's already a very big step up
in the right direction to getting a bit more advanced
in your analytics efforts on your ecommerce website.
Alright, then you go into the expert level,
and the expert level is all about getting more insight
and more contextual data about the data points
that you have already been tracking.
So being able to segment your data
in a more meaningful way is very important,
so you need to send more dimensions
and more contextual data into Google Analytics
in order to be able to do that actually.
What I would recommend is to set up a plan,
think about which questions you really want to answer,
and then send the right custom dimensions into the system.
So, for example for users,
is this already an existing customer?
What is his lifetime value, for example?
How can we be tracking that within the Google Analytics,
also outside of the system, so on a more BI basis,
going more into the different systems
that you might have set up and your CRM system,
and so on, to gain insights.
Again, this is something that you would probably do
once you have a person inside of the company
who is already responsible for data, a BI person,
or somebody who is an analyst within the company,
who can actually take that data
and do the hard number crunching.
This is not something that you will probably do
as an online marketer who just looks into
how can I optimize my PPC campaign.
So it needs a bit more effort to send the data in,
it needs a bit more effort to get insights out,
and it needs resources to maintain the data as well,
and so be very intentional, again, about
what you should be tracking for your ecommerce store.
Alright, I hope these tips help you
to get a better sense and feeling about
what you should be tracking for your ecommerce store.
If you have any questions about this
or you have any suggestions,
please leave them in the comments below.
I would be really interested, if you are an ecommerce owner,
what you think is the most important part
of your analytics today and the data that you are gathering.
And if you like this video, please give it a thumbs-up
and subscribe to this channel,
because we'll bring you new videos every Wednesday.
My name is Julian.
Till next time!