How can you connect Google Analytics with your online shop?

You have an online shop and you want to get the best results, in terms of sales and profits. This is only possible by improving the performance your website has in terms of traffic and conversions.

As you know, you can’t improve what you can’t measure. That’s why you need analytics tools that show you the complete, up-to-date picture of the relevant metrics for your online business. Here’s how to do a Google Analytics installation and give your online store a value reset.

Connect your online store to Google Analytics

1. Create a Google Analytics account and set up the registration by logging in with your Google account.

To make the connection with your online store you can choose the method in which you use Google Tag Manager (GTM), whether you will have a Universal Analytics/GA3 digital property or a GA4 digital property.

2. Create a Google Analytics 4 (GA4) property

It is recommended that you create a GA4 property directly (if you don’t already have a Universal Analytics property), so that you will have access to historical data about your site’s activity, even after the scheduled AU termination in 2023.

You will fill in data about your account name, website name and URL, industry and industry category for your online store, reporting time zone.

This will give you a GA tracking ID.

When setting up the GA4 property, ask a Google Analytics specialist or work with the developer who built your online store to install the tracking code on the site. The GA tracking key will be applied just before the closing tag in the HTML code of the web page.

3. Make the main settings correctly in the View Settings and Property Settings section if you have Universal Analytics/GA3.

If you have GA4, then the settings are only in the “property”, or “data stream” area. We’ll do another article about the new settings you need to control when installing GA4.

4. Check the existence of the GA code on all pages of the site.

5. Controls how the number of sessions is recorded, proper attribution of traffic sources using UTMs for marketing campaigns, proper installation of ecommerce tracking options and matching of recorded data with actual data.

6. Checks integrations between GA and Search Console, Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.

7. Sets business goals in GA and monitors their proper functioning.

8.Exclude from display in Google Analytics the traffic of own website and card payment processors.

Last but not least, install the Google Analytics Debugger extension or Google Tag Assistant extension in Chrome to verify the correctness of your settings.

Make sure the programming team you’re working with has aligned to the same standards as you have, and consider an automated AI solution for tracking site traffic, including tracking options for online payments.

Set up specific KPIs for your online store

The future of e-commerce is all about hyper-personalization, and your marketing strategy will include a lot more user-generated content to increase conversions and engagement (measure interaction with the site).

Based on these trends, configure your KPIs in GA4 accordingly to deliver real-time insights about user interactions with the site.

Include the following criteria in the GA KPIs for your online store:

  • traffic to the site – number of sessions, number of users
  • conversion rate,
  • commitment rate,
  • average number of page views,
  • average time spent on the site,
  • return rate of unique users,
  • abandonment rate of shopping carts,
  • value of sales or number of ecommerce transactions,
  • average order value,
  • visits recorded on each product page displayed on the site.

These metrics should be segmented by traffic source, those “source/medium” or “channels” where you invest a promotion budget.

Add to this the Share of Search KPI, which reveals the visibility of your online store on Google, because it helps you to know in what proportion you get traffic from search engines compared to other sources.

Learn more about applying GA4 features on the Google Analytics Academy sites to access tutorials and learn interesting details about how other online stores have connected GA.

By connecting your online store with Google Analytics you get a wide range of new information about your business, the most important of which are demographic data about visitors, user behavior in interacting with the site, and statistics about transactions initiated and conducted on the online platform you manage.

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