4 Reasons to use Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking on your Ecommerce Store?

4 Reasons to use Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking on your Ecommerce Store?

TRANSCRIPT

Hi Lucy Ross from e-commerce marketing here with a Google Analytics Update. If you have an eCommerce store then it is important to track everything that is happening on your website.

By default Google Analytics lets you track the traffic side of things, but there is also the added option of ecommerce tracking. This is really great for letting you know

  • What products are selling and get some insight into where those sales are coming from.
  • And it is also going to let you troubleshoot potential problems that are happening on your website.

Turning on eCommerce tracking

Now turning on eCommerce tracking on your website really depends on the platform you are using. I know on shopsite, big commerce and bigcommerce have really easy a couple of click installations, and platforms like prestacart have plugins that can be added. But it would pay to talk to your developer about turning that on.

If you decide you need some Google Analytics training we provide this service and can work through the steps to see if it is something that is easily turned on with your shopping cart, if it is an easy installation we will install it as part of the training – or if your CMS is not set up for e-commerce tracking it will be a case of talking to your developer as to wither or not they can implement this.

What kind of things should you be tracking with E-commerce Analytics?

  • How many sales you get each day, month, hour
  • Your conversion rate – what % of the website’s visitors is actually buying something.
  • This most popular selling product
  • Shopping cart abandonment – people who add something to their cart but do not buy. This helps troubleshoot things that could be going wrong in your shopping cart and if you find you have a sudden change in the numbers you can go and have a look and troubleshoot what is going wrong.
  • The average number of orders
  • The average value of an orders
  • Total sales during any given period
  • Compare your e-commerce statistics against other periods and see how they are tracking and if you are growing.

Basically, this gives you a really good insight into what is happening with your sales so that you can make decisions about improving your website and growing your profits.

The technical side of things

So how does the technical nerdy side of things work? Well basically the content management system of your website will either have this option or it will not.

If it does it pulls in your product’s prices, their names, their codes if someone gets to the point of making a purchase and reads it into Google Analytics.

If this is not something that is part of the backend of your website, then you will need to talk to a developer about structuring that information in a way that it gets pulled into Google Analytics so it can report that information for you.

E-commerce Dashboards in Google Analytics

It is also a great idea to build an e-commerce analytics dashboard into your analytics account.

This will let you see in just one click how your website’s e-commerce sales are performing today, and this month and comparing it to different periods.

You can pull in your most important e-commerce statistics and click on that dashboard to see how things are going.

It is also super helpful from a marketing and sales perspective for easily viewing the big picture of how sales are going. Or to report to your boss, or whoever is concerned with the bottom line.

I am not an analytics guru… How can I get help with this?

This is Lucy Ross from ecommercemarketing.co.nz.  If you need help with Google Analytics or perhaps you want some training about how to come up with a measurement plan and learn how to interpret the data that is coming through on Google Analytics so you can make marketing and business decisions then be sure to check out our google analytics training here’s the link…

Want to learn more?

If you would like to receive training, tips and updates in online marketing be sure to subscribe to the newsletter and we will be sure to keep you updated.

Build a measurement plan and use data to drive business growth

Hey Lucy here, I have just thrown together a video talk talk about a really common mistake I see with businesses who are starting out with online marketing.

Watch this video to make sure you avoid this crucial online marketing mistake.

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, Lucy Ross here with another online marketing update. Today I am going to talk you through the biggest mistake most businesses make when they are starting out with online marketing.

And it is actually crucial if you want to measure if you actually get a return on investment when you spending money on things like Google Adwords, S.E.O or perhaps paying for banner advertising, facebook advertising, and social media marketing.

So what we are actually talking about today is the fact that you need to build a measurement plan.

If you are spending money on online marketing you need to know how you are going to measure the results.

Ask yourself:

  • What would a favorable end result look like – What do we want them to do on our website?
  • How would I measure that?

 

HOMEWORK: What you need to do is sit down and think about what a positive result would look like and then the different ways you could measure that.

  • Do you want someone to make a purchase on an e-commerce website?
  • Are you wanting them to ring up and make a booking (restaurants, physios, doctors, Dentists)
  • What are the key performance indicators that tell you that the money that you are spending on marketing is actually resulting in sales

All this is going to tell if the money you have been investing in marketing campaigns has worked or not.

What kinds of things can you measure online?

Well, the cool thing about online marketing in relation to old school marketing is that you can track almost anything.

  • How many sales
  • How many contact forms were filled in
  • If someone downloaded a menu, coupon or p.d.f.
  • If they spend X minutes on a page (this tells you if they are actually sticking around to read your content).
  • And if they signed up to your newsletter.

You will need to think about what is important to your business

What kind of things would you like to track in google analytics? This could be things like

  • What people looked at on your website,
  • How long they stayed on that page
  • If they abandoned the shopping cart or perhaps abandoned one of your sales processes half way. e.g. Maybe they read they reach the sales page but they did not get to the thank you page that comes up after they put their email details in or their credit card details and made a purchase.

How do you create a measurement plan?

Basically, you need to sit down with a pen and paper and map out the points we just covered and map out what a positive result would look like and incorporate that into your analytics tracking.

  • You can also build dash boards into google analytics
  • Analytics goal tracking or e-commerce tracking
  • Adwords conversion tracking

Need some help?

If you need any help with this we offer an analytics training product and we can also tie that into google AdWords Training. This is Lucy Ross from EcommerceMarketing.co.nz with another online marketing update – catch you next time.

Google Webmaster Tools Alerts For Spam, Hacking and Abuse

Google Webmaster tools will notify you about  potential issues they have detected on your websites including:

  • Spammy, poor quality or abused user generated content.
  • Abused form pages such as comment spam (a rising problem)
  • Any Indication that web pagepage may have been hacked or defaced.
  • Your current rankings
  • The quality of your s.e.o efforts
  • Your mobile friendliness
  • Any errors it encounters while spidering your website

Where can I find these updates?

In the “Messages” Section of your Google Webmaster Tools account (This can be located on the left hand side when you log in).

I do not visit webmaster tools very often so how do I get these alerts?

You can get email you simply need to go the front page of Webmaster Tools Account and use the drop down menu to have messages forwarded to your email address.

Take Action: Go to your account right now and log in and be sure to turn email alerts on.

Why do I need to receive these alerts?

These alerts could save your website pages from being de-listed or possibly blacklisted in the search engines forever. Google will only give you a few days to fix the problem so it is best to stay on top of potential threats before they get out of hand.

Read more on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

Need help?

If you do not have time or resources to manage your online marketing in the house this is something we can do for you. As part of our online marketing partnership services, we can set up and review google webmaster tools regularly to troubleshoot issues and keep and eye on your traffic. If you are looking to scale your business you can learn more about how we work here…

Do you have questions?

We love to connect with our visitors so please ask them below and we will get back to you with the answers.

How to check your Websites Page Speed Video

How to check your Websites Page Speed Video

Ever wondered what Google thinks of your website? How fast it loads plays a part in how well you rank in the search engines, how much you pay for adwords clicks and how well you retain website traffic. Here is a video on how to look up your Google Page Speed using the Google Developers Page Speed Insights Tool

Watch this video

Transcription:

Hi, Lucy Ross here director at www.ecommercemarketing.co.nz and I am going to show you how to look up your website’s page speed and see how you are performing in terms of page load time when people come to your website.

The reasons you would want to look into this is that Google takes into account how long your websites page takes to load when it decides which websites to rank in its search results.

And that is because they want the people who are coming to Google typing in keywords to get a really great user experience. They do not want to send their users to a website and have to sit and wait 20 seconds for everything to load up, so you want to make sure that you are serving up the content on your website within a couple of seconds, otherwise, your traffic is going to bounce. And most likely They will leave and probably go to the competition and you are going to be losing money if you are paying to get any sort of traffic to your website.

So what we are going to do is visit the Google Developers Page Speed tool. Now on my website, I have included a link to this on the page speed optimisation page. So you can click on that and open it up. So what we are going to do is click on the link and open up the page.

Google Developers Page Speed Insights Tool – Mobile Results

And we are going to do is plug your website into this box here. So lets take a website and press analyse.

You can put your website or any website in here and it will crunch its page speed for you.

What we will see when we come to this blog nice and simple is that when you are on a mobile phone it is not doing to well, it is in the red, we want that to be orange at least, or preferably green.

And it is giving you suggestions of all the different things you could do in order to improve the page speed. Now it is saying from a user experience perspective it is doing well.

How do I fix my websites mobile page speed?

So what you want to do is come in and here and fix the red and orange problems, you can use the drop down to find out all the files that are slowing your page down.

If you are not technically minded and this stuff doesn’t make sense to you, that’s where we come in. We provide a page speed optimisation service and basically what our developer does is he logins to your website and he makes changes to all of your files to help bring it out of the RED ZONE and into the GREEN ZONE and improve your Google page speed.

And what it means is if this makes no sense to you, as it probably does if you are not a developer you can hire us and we will fix that for you.

Google Developers Page Speed Insights Tool – Desktop

And you can also jump across and see how you are performing on a desktop computer. We can see this website is not doing to well on a desktop either.  The reason this website is not doing that well is because she needs to crunch up her images and make them a little bit smaller, and she needs to do some more technical stuff to the site in order to improve that.

Basically this analysis tool breaks your websites issues down into different categories. It is saying that the things you should fix immediately are in red, the things you should consider fixing are in orange, and the things doing really well are in green. And this will help you prioritise what you need to do.

If you decide your website needs page speed optimisation because you are in the RED and want to be in the green you can head to our website to the page speed optimisation section and you can learn more about this service.

 

How many customers does a slow website cost you?

Page speed optimization is important for optimizing your website for not only traffic, but also for conversions.

  • A fast loading site will let your potential customer find the information they are looking for faster – and be more likely to convert. Because its fast, the search engines will be more likely to rank it in their search results. This means more traffic, conversions and profits/
  • A slow loading website will probably drive your potential customer off the site and onto the competitions site because your page to took long to load, or did not work on a smart phone . Because of poor user experience its likely that your rankings could drop, which means spending money on traffic that leaves, less conversions and wasted marketing budget.

Need help with this?

We provide done for you e-commerce services – Page speed is just one of the elements we look at during our conversion and traffic optimization. If you want to find out if this service might be right for your business schedule a 10 minute chat today click here…

 

Adwords Conversion Tracking – Measuring the results of your Campaigns.

If you have not installed adwords conversion tracking on your website you are shooting yourself in the foot. Learn more about how conversion tracking helps you make marketing decisions that grow your business.

TRANSCRIPTION

Hi, Lucy Ross here from ecommercemarketing.co.nz with another online marketing update for you. Today we’re going to talk about the importance of tracking and actually finding out where your marketing budget is going and if it’s bringing you, customers.

Are you tracking conversions?

If you set up any sort of Google AdWords and you’re not using Google AdWords conversion tracking, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. That’s because conversion tracking allows you to see exactly what keywords make sales or bring leads into your business.

Making the right decisions

Now, if you’re not using conversion tracking what you’re going to find is with Google AdWords, you’ll be spending money on a whole lot of different keywords, but you won’t know specifically which ones bring you business, so you can’t adjust your bids to perhaps make sure you appear in front of more people and you scale up those sales.

It also means because you don’t know which keywords aren’t making you any money, you can’t reduce the cost on them and turn them down. This could lead to basically empty pockets, and exhausting your AdWords budget, and no way to really refine and tweak things.

Do you have a measurement plan?

It’s important to set up a measurement plan in Google AdWords which is going to let you track things like phone calls or people that use the contact us page, or an e-commerce you want to be tracking if they make a sale. You want to basically track people’s engagement from AdWords and that they took the specific action that you wanted them to take.

Goal Tracking, Cart Abandonment and Profits

This is also important to carry through to your Google Analytics account. You have the ability in there to track goals, and there’s even an eCommerce tracking option in there if you want to track what products you’re selling, your conversion rate, and your shopping cart abandonments. You want to set up a measurement plan to basically find out all the things that are going well and resulting in sales or leads or money in profit. This involves sitting down and saying okay, what would a positive result look like, and how could we measure that, and how can we implement that into our website.

Track peoples actions on your website

With Google AdWords conversion tracking code, you basically take a little bit of code and you paste it onto the page that people reach after they take that action. If they filled in a contact form, it would be on the thank you page that came up once they’d pressed send on that contact form. If they went and put their details into your shopping cart, it would be on the successful order or order thank you page that came up.

Build a funnel (by fixing the holes in your website)

Basically, Google knows that when someone’s visited that page that a sale has happened, or with the case of Google Analytics goal tracking, it would say people reached the cart page, they reached the checkout page, and then they reached the sale page, so that’s a sale.

But, it could also track things like people reaching the cart page, the checkout page, and then not going through, so you could see how many people were putting things in their cart and then abandoning and not making a sale.

This is really helpful for you if you’re perhaps thinking about making changes to your website. Or, if suddenly things change, it would let you know that something was wrong and needed attention on your shopping cart.

Get tracking

This is Lucy Ross from Ecommerce Marketing. If you need help with Google Analytics or Google AdWords, we offer training. It can help you set up a measurement plan to make sure you’re getting results out of your online marketing. If you want to find out about more tips and techniques like this, be sure to sign up to our newsletter. I’ll see you next time.

How filter out your website visits from Google Analytics

How filter out your website visits from Google Analytics

If you are running an e-commerce business then chances are you and your staff jump on the website on the regular basis, to add content, check prices, analyse s.e.o or perform basic day to day tasks.

The trouble is that these innocent visits to your website could be skewing your Analytics data.

These are some of the important metrics that are being diluted by your personal visits to the website

  • Conversion Rate
  • Visits
  • Return Visitors Data
  • Average time on site.

We want to be tracking the behaviour of your customers and potential customers… not your staff.

So how can we fix this?

By filtering our any traffic to the site from your business ip address we can remove your staff data from our tracking, so we only what happens when customers visit the website.

The great thing is this is easy to do and I am going to walk you through the steps on this blog.

Finding your IP Address.

I need you to do the following for me.

  1. Open a web browser and type in “what is my ip”
  2. Note down the number it says (should be something like 122.12.123.12)
  3. Go to your router and turn it off at the wall for 10 seconds then turn it on again.
  4. Once connected to the internet  Open a web browser and type in “what is my ip”
  5. Note down the number.

If the numbers are the same you have a fixed IP address and you can use this to filter out any visits to the site from this computer.

You can perform this task on any computers used to access the website, this may also be helpful for your S.E.O or Web Development company, marketing staff and IT staff.

How to add the filter.

    1. Login to Google Analytics.
    2. Go to the website you want to add a filter to.
    3. Look for the  “admin option”.
    4. You should see 3 rows of data Account, Property, View <— you are looking for view.
    5. Click the filters option – Usually a good idea to set up an unfiltered view of all data and a master view that you use.
    6. Click on the new filter button to add your filter
    7. Filter Name – Give your filter a name like “Customer Service Computer”
    8. Filter Type – Under filter type select “traffic from the IP address” *this is not the default so you will have to select it.
    9. From ISP Domain – Pop your domain name in here
    10. Save.

You are done – you can repeat this process for any other computers you need to add.

How to find your Page Load Speed in Google Analytics

How to find your Page Load Speed in Google Analytics

This is the second instalment in our page speed tutorial series how to look up your average page load speed in Google Analytics. I have put together a video to walk you through this step by step.

TRANSCRIPTION

Hi Lucy Ross here director at www.ecommercemarketing.co.nz. I just wanted to show you how to jump into your Google Analytics Account (if you have it set up for your website) and figure out how long on average it is taking for your website to load when people visit it. This is called the page load speed.

sitespeedFirst we need to login to google analytics

  1. Go to the Google Analytics website
  2. login
  3. Head to the reporting tab (along the top)
  4. Look for the section called Behaviour > Site Speed > Overveiw

In the Example

Now this example (29.49 seconds) is really high and people are going to get frustrated especially if they are on a mobile phone and they will just leave the website and go somewhere else. On a desktop you might wait a few more seconds but anything over 10, 20 closer to 30 is not great and you NEED to look at bringing this down.

Sub categories

You can also look through the other subcategories in the page speed section of analytics to find out which specific pages are loading faster and which ones are really slow, and in here you can also get speed suggestions and user timing information.

What to do next

This is all going to give you an idea of which pages are not loading fast and need some attention for you. Now the video you are watching is a great supplementary video to a video I filmed earlier where we looked at Google Developers Page Speed Insights Tool and what you can actually do is take your url results from google analytics with regards to page speed. (you can see in the example the homepage is taking 22 seconds to load) and take the urls over to the Google Page Speed analyser and actually find out why certain pages are loading slowly and go and make those changes.

Things like image optimisation are easy to change yourself,  some of this stuff is on the more technical side of things and this is a service we can provide for you.

Page Speed Optimisation Services

If you are interested in page speed optimisation and you find this all a little to technically heavy then come to our page speed optimisation page. You can find it in the product section of our website and you can learn more about the services we provide to help speed your website up so you can retain more of the traffic that is coming to your website and turn them into customers.

Make sure your website is working

If you are investing any sort of money into getting traffic to your website be it content marketing, SEO, or traffic and then your website is taking for ever to load, you are basically wasting that money, they are most likely going to leave and go to the competition. So it is really important to make sure your website is actually working as a marketing tool, to capture those leads and to give you time to turn them into customers.

So this is my second video in the page speed optimisation series, learning how to use google analytics to find out your sites average page speed, if you need any help with this head to our Page Speed Optimisation Page. This is Lucy from www.ecommercemarketing.co.nz thank you for your time.