Ecommerce is a fiercely competitive space. If you’re not growing, you’re dying. And to maintain consistent growth, you’ve got to be on top of your numbers. Google Analytics is a really good tool to use in order to do this.
We will be going through a lot of content in this article. Here’s the table of contents so you can go to the section of interest:
You will need to enable Ecommerce for each view you’d like to see data on. Then, include the tracking code on your ecommercet site to collect data and send it to your Analytics dashboard - you might need a developer to help you with this!
The steps in a nutshell are:
1. Sign into your Google Analytics account
2. Click on the “Admin” button and navigate to the view of choice
3. Click “Ecommerce Settings” under the “View” column
4. Turn on “Enable Ecommerce’
Now, you will have access to every metric and stat you could conceive of. But without context, numbers are just numbers. It’s useless having all this data if you don’t know what to do with it.
And even if you know which metrics to look at, what do you actually do with that information to bring in more revenue?
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Below is a list of the key revenue metrics you should be paying attention to. They are:
1. Conversion rate
2. Average order value
3. New vs. returning customers
4. Revenue by traffic source
5. Revenue per email
6. Revenue by demographic segment
7. Revenue by geographic segment
8. Cart abandonment rate
You’ll find out how to calculate each metric, how to track it in Google Analytics and how often to check it.
Most importantly, we’ve put together some actionable tips and examples showing exactly what to do to improve each metric. Put these into practice and you’ll be sure to see your store grow. Let’s get into it.
This is arguably the most important metric in ecommerce, showing how effectively you monetize your hard-earned traffic. Conversion is king. But globally, stores are only converting 2.86% of visitors.
Tracking your conversion rate properly and taking steps to improve it should be a top priority.
Whatever your conversion goal is, your conversion rate is a measure of how many times this goal was completed versus how many times it had the potential to be completed. So your conversion rate equals the goal completions divided by the interactions with your content.
An obvious conversion goal in ecommerce is for the user to make a purchase. In this case, the conversion rate would equal the number of transactions divided by the number of sessions on your store.
Assuming you’ve already set up ecommerce tracking on your store, head to Conversions > Ecommerce > Overview in your Google Analytics dashboard. The overview gives you a chart of your store’s performance over a given period of time and the conversion rate is given below the chart.
There’s a reason conversion rate is at the top of this list. It’s one of your most important metrics and one that you should be keeping a close eye on. Check it at least weekly for any major fluctuations.
However, you need a fair amount of data to get useful insights from your conversion rate for testing and optimization. I suggest tracking it in more depth quarterly or yearly.
If you’re doing A/B testing or other methods of conversion optimization, this leaves enough time to pull in the data, optimize your pages and take action based on the results.
Testing your pages is crucial for optimization. Here are the best ways to improve your conversion rate, along with some examples of best practice.
Compelling copy is hands-down the best way to increase conversions. Snappy, persuasive on-brand copy that speaks to the pain points of your customers builds trust and drives action. You might be surprised how changing one word produces a jump in your conversion rate.
Loaf: Loaf sell mattresses, furniture and other items for the home using a little cheeky British humor. The copy is consistently casual, fun and direct and always addresses the needs of the target customer.
They cleverly market this lower priced mattress as a spare room mattress. After all, you don’t want to spend too much on a mattress you’ll never sleep on.
AYR: AYR is an online fashion retailer renowned for their snappy copy, which is always conversational and humorous. The product details are left for the bullets below, the copy speaks directly to the customer.
When you walk into a brick-and-mortar store you can try on clothes, play with gadgets and taste foods. With ecommerce, you are asking the customer to buy something without ever having touched it or used it. This makes the photography extra important. It should be eye-catching and create a sense of need.
Bang & Olufsen: Making the best speakers with the sleekest designs, Bang & Olufsen need great photography to do their products justice online.
The photography should help the customer see themselves using the product by showing it in context. On the product page for this eye-catching speaker, the beauty of the speaker is displayed in a range of environments using a carousel of images.
The easiest way to produce persuasive copy on your product page is to get your customers to write it for you. Adding customer reviews provides social proof and is a very powerful way to influence the buying decision. Typically, this is the final push they need before purchase.
Free People: Right beneath this product description is a five-star review which couldn’t have been more perfect it was written by the brand themselves
Live chat is making waves in the ecommerce world, producing results that no one thought possible. 79% of businesses say offering live chat has had a positive effect on sales, revenue, and customer loyalty.
A chat box popping up at just the right moment can, in real-time, deal with anything stopping the customer from purchasing. Chatbots can even guide them right through the purchase automatically.
Jerome’s Furniture: California-based furniture retailer, Jerome’s, takes a soft-sell approach by letting the customer initiate the chat. Even so, they’ve seen phenomenal results using live chat, achieving a 1000% increase in their conversion rate.
This is a simple yet crucial metric for any ecommerce store. It tells you the average dollar amount spent by your customers.
AOV, along with conversion rate and unique sessions, completes the revenue equation. It helps you get to know your customers’ spending habits and identify opportunities to upsell, cross-sell, and make tailored offers.
Simply divide the total dollar value of sales over a given period by the number of orders over that period.
You’ll find average order value next but one to your conversion rate in Google Analytics: Conversions > Ecommerce > Overview.
Most brands track average order value as a moving monthly average. This approach gives you enough time to collect the data but is regular enough that you can take action if things start to go the wrong way.
The easiest way to improve average order value is to upsell and cross-sell to existing customers as they are checking out by recommending other items. This is how Amazon became the dominant force in ecommerce.
iHerb: iHerb recommends products in a number of ways. On this product page, it recommends products frequently purchased together as well as related products. This makes sense for a store that sells thousands of low-priced items that are very closely related.
The upsell is a surefire way to increase average order value. If the customer is ready to purchase one item, they’re already well on the way to moving up to a higher-priced item. Sometimes they just need to see it there in front of them.
Upsell Recommendations by Innonic: This free Shopify app allows you to easily add product recommendations at checkout to entice customers to add more items to their cart. The recommendations are automatically generated based on previous purchases. It’s easy to install and integrates flawlessly with your existing store.
Offering customers items similar to what they intend to buy is another way to increase average order value.
Relatify: Relatify lets you tag products by type and arrange them into collections. Then it displays related products to entice customers to add more to their orders. This app stands out for its easy integration with Shopify stores and great support.
By offering free shipping when customers spend a given amount, you all but guarantee that most of your orders will hit this benchmark. Set the level just above your current average order value to push orders up over that value.
This works particularly well for stores whose products have a long shelf life where customers have recurring orders. It makes sense to bump up the order because they would be making the purchase down the line anyway. But the trick is, they’ll likely do this each and every time.
Vision Express: Vision Express changed the game for those of us with less than 20/20 vision by offering prescription glasses frames and contact lenses online, without the hiked-up optician prices.
Here, I’m 5p from hitting the minimum order and they let me know, offering free delivery if I spend over £49. One more pack of contact lens solution pushes the order over the minimum threshold and saves me £2.98 in shipping. It’s a no-brainer, even though it’s adds £9.99 to my order.
Returning customers are far more valuable and cheaper to procure than new customers.
A recent survey found that compared to first-time customers, returning customers:
In a nutshell, it’s more cost effective to look after your loyal customers than to chase after new ones. Tracking the rate of new vs. returning customers tells you how well you are doing this.
For the percentage of returning customers, divide the number of returning customers by the total number of customers and multiply by 100.
There are two simple ways to track this in Google Analytics.
To compare the total users to new users, head to Audience > Overview and find the figures underneath the chart.
Or, to get the percentage of returning customers, navigate to Conversions > Ecommerce > Overview and click on + Add Segment. Check the boxes for New Users and Returning Users and click Apply, as below.
Keeping your loyal customers coming back is a long-term strategy so it should be tracked monthly. Although larger stores with bigger teams may be able to track it more regularly.
As mentioned, returning customers are more likely to buy again. As much as brand awareness is important, brand loyalty is what converts. Here are some tactics to keep your customers coming back for more.
An email newsletter to existing customers with news, product updates, offers etc. is a great way to keep them engaged and entice repeat purchases. This is a must for ecommerce stores and should be seen as the minimum requirement in your efforts to improve this metric.
It helps to keep the timing of the newsletter consistent and regular. If you do it weekly, do it every week at the same time. If it’s only bi-weekly, that’s ok, but do it every time at the same time.
If the content is genuinely compelling your best customers will look out for it and be disappointed if it doesn’t arrive on time.
A good way to collect email addresses and build your list of loyal customers is to use pop-ups. With tools like Privy, you can target campaigns only to people who have showed genuine interest in making a purchase.
Offering a lead magnet, like access to a video or entry to a competition, is a great way to capture their email so you can nurture them further and turn them into long-term return customers.
Offering a coupon code for a special discount gets customers in the door and hopefully gives you their email address and opt-in for marketing.
Be careful not to give too much of a discount as this will attract the wrong type of customer. Remember we are looking for people who will become long-term, high-spending customers.
This example from Prospector Knives offers a 20% discount on the next purchase in exchange for the user’s email address.
Creating and managing a customer loyalty program is much easier than it used to be and has huge potential benefits. Loyalty program members spend between 12-18% more per year than non-loyalty program members.
Smile.io: Smile is an easy way to add a custom loyalty program to your Shopify store without any coding. It has thousands of five-star reviews which show how much ecommerce stores value the ability to keep customers coming back.
You can connect Smile with your email marketing software and other tools, and access analytics to optimize your loyalty program for maximum retention and sales.
Breaking down where your revenue is coming from is vital in refining your strategy. It not only helps you recognize consumer trends, but also see where your marketing dollars should be spent.
Assessing which channels are bringing in the most and comparing that figure to the cost of each channel helps you understand your ROI for social, organic search, paid search, referrals etc. and figure out the value of a customer from each traffic source.
Google Analytics tells you conversion rates and total revenue from each channel.
Navigate to Acquisition > Overview and look at the Conversions > Revenue column.
This is something you need to keep an eye on for any big changes. Check it weekly and make sure there are no significant fluctuations. If you’re running a new campaign on a new channel, of course you will want to check it more carefully and regularly to gauge performance.
Knowing your revenue by traffic source means that you'll be able to maximize your return on investment by investing in channels that perform. Here are some ways to help your ecommerce business sell more.
Once you know your best performing traffic sources, you can increase spend on that channel, hopefully increasing traffic and improving your overall conversion rates even further.
A word of caution though, don’t put all your eggs in one basket – or all your marketing budget in one channel. You want to have multiple campaigns running on multiple channels so you can continue to track their performance and change your strategy accordingly.
An assisted conversion is any interaction, apart from the final click, that led to a lead converting. They tell you which sources are helping other sources to convert, even if they are not directly converting visitors themselves.
For any sources that aren’t converting directly, only put money into them if they are assisting other sources.
Attribution models determine the way Google assigns credit for conversions to different channels. It’s not always a straight path from source to conversion, so it’s not as simple as assigning credit for an assisted conversion to the channel with the last indirect interaction. It’s a good idea to make a comparison between the seven different models:
Navigate to Conversions > Attribution > Model Comparison Tool to make this comparison. It will give you a much deeper insight into your customers’ paths to purchase.
For a more detailed exploration of ecommerce attribution models, check out this comprehensive guide.
To see how each channel is performing in terms of assisted conversions vs. direct conversions, head to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions.
In this example, you can see that although referrals had marginally fewer direct conversions than organic search (43,429 vs. 46,167), the channel’s assisted conversion value is almost 4x higher. This is a great example of the nuances present when you dig this deep.
This kind of analysis tells the real story of how your channels are performing.
This is a vastly undervalued metric. It doesn’t dig down to your bottom line in terms of the costs of email marketing, but it does tell you how much your email marketing is bringing in, which is an extremely valuable measure.
Revenue generated / (Email quantity sent – number of bounces)
Click through to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels.
Choose Email as the Source.
You’ll see a breakdown of your revenue per email in the final column on the right.
You will probably be tempted to track this more often after blasting a new email campaign. It can be tracked monthly, giving you a true insight into the money each of your emails is bringing in.
Improve open rates by A/B testing your subject lines. You can also test headlines, images and copy within the email to improve click-through rates. These two factors combined will increase the revenue derived from each email.
The best copywriters in the world swear by their swipe files. These are collections of high-performing copy to use as inspiration for new sales letters and emails.
To improve the performance of your emails, hold onto any sales letters or landing pages that you see performing well or that you find inspiring. When you need to write or improve a sales email, your swipe file is your reference.
It’s much easier to start with inspiration when you’re staring at a blank page.
Power words hook the reader by making them feel an emotion. Words like joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger and anticipation among many others.
Add these words to tried headline formulas. Try using numbers, offering value, asking a question, creating intrigue or making a comparison.
This headline analyzer is a useful tool for a quick check on the power of your headlines.
It assigns your headline a score out of 100 and offers tips to improve the score to make your headline more compelling.
By segmenting your audience, you can isolate key elements of your data. Looking at revenue by different demographics allows you to drill-down and really get to know your audience. Looking not just at how much revenue each demographic is bringing in, but how well they convert informs your strategy going forward.
The advanced segmentation feature in Google Analytics allows you to read off your revenue by age range and gender.
Start by going to Audience > Demographics then choose Age or Gender.
The screenshot below shows more traffic in the 25-34 demographic but the 35-44 year olds have a higher AOV and convert better.
To segment further, add a secondary dimension from the drop-down. Here I select Gender.
This shows that the highest revenue segments are not the best converting segments (highlighted in green).
You can see that 35-44 year-old males offer the best combination of high revenue and high conversions. Armed with this information, you can go ahead and create a new segment for future analysis.
This is a deep-dive metric that takes some time to analyze. For smaller stores this could be a quarterly check, larger stores with more resources might check this monthly.
Understanding your customer demographic is key for increasing sales and building relevant marketing campaigns. Here are 2 points to think bout when improving this metric.
This key insight tells you which specific demographics to target harder with your ad spend. Read off your best converting demographics on the high revenue list and target these.
Given finite ad budget and resources, it’s best to leave the poor-converting demographics and focus your attention on those bringing in more revenue from a lower ad spend.
It’s useful to track geographic segments in a similar way to demographics. Google Analytics has all the information needed to look at revenue and conversions by language and location, and cross-examine this against age and gender for a complete analysis.
Again, Google Analytics gives you the data for this, including total revenue, average order value and conversion rate for each language or location, from specific cities, to wider geographical regions to whole countries.
Navigate to Audience > Geo. From here you can choose to segment by Language or Location.
We can see that US-English-speaking visitors bring in the most revenue by far and are the best converting group. So we can add this parameter to the buyer persona.
Choose Edit from the Actions menu on the segment you added in the previous step.
Add en-us in the Language field.
Similarly when you look at the data by location, the US is by far the best performing.
PRO TIP: Change the primary dimension to City for a deeper-dive into your data. The highlighted cities here have the highest conversion rates. Exclude the worst converting locations in your PPC ads to save money on low-converting traffic.
You can also easily check this data in Conversific.
The beauty of this interface is its simplicity. Once you’ve decided on the metrics to track, use Conversific to keep on top of them without wading through the reams of data offered by Google Analytics.
Check this metric along with the demographic data monthly or quarterly depending on your resources.
The same advice applies as demographic segmentation above:
Cart abandonment is a huge problem in ecommerce. On average 69% of shopping carts are abandoned. That means stores are only taking $3 out of every 10.
You can see this as an opportunity. That remaining $7 represents potential revenue on each order. That’s why keeping track of your store’s abandonment figures is so important.
Cart abandonment is a measure of how many shoppers put something in their cart but didn’t check out. Take your total orders for a given time period and divide it by the total number of visitors who added an item to their cart.
Navigate to Conversions > Ecommerce > Shopping Behavior. Your total abandoned carts and abandonment rate are shown below the main bar chart.
The final column in the chart below that gives you a comparison of the completion rate for sessions with transactions between new and returning users.
To make this comparison by other factors, select one from the User Type drop-down menu.
These stats offer a deeper dive into your abandonment stats, but numbers are just numbers in isolation.
Conversific puts these numbers into real-world context by offering benchmarks from your industry. The conversion report shows you the stats you need at each stage of the funnel.
Tracking your cart abandonment by month will provide you with the necessary insights to make targeted efforts to improve the drop-off.
The opportunity to recapture the revenue from abandonment carts is so huge, a bunch of solutions have been developed. Using the techniques below, stores have recovered up to a third of the lost revenue.
Exit-intent pop-ups use data about a user’s behavior to predict when they are just about to leave a site without completing their purchase. The technology is getting more and more sophisticated all the time.
Pop-ups can be used for lead capture or to directly offer a discount on items added to the cart. Either way, the goal is to make sure the user doesn’t leave without completing the purchase.
Lush: Handmade cosmetics retailer Lush uses humour to get the attention of visitors who are showing signs of leaving without a purchase. The CTA here is to sign up for their newsletter which they use to nurture leads and remarket to make sales further down the funnel.
Swisswatchexpo.com: This example from Swisswatchexpo.com includes a countdown timer for a sense of urgency and an offer of $100 off and free shipping.
The goal of payment page design is to make it as easy as possible for the customer to enter their payment details and complete the transaction.
To make the path to purchase as frictionless as possible, you need to consider the following:
Apple: Design is central to all things Apple and their checkout page is no different, clearly displaying the key information with no distractions. Product recommendations appear below the fold, out of sight of the key information.
The Buy Now button is consistent with the CTAs used throughout the journey and stands out with a bright blue colour against the white background.
A host of tools like Recart and CartStack have made retargeting customers who abandoned carts easier than ever. These tools automate the sending of personalized emails reminding them of their lonely cart or even offering discounts in an attempt to get these customers to complete their purchases.
With Google Remarketing, you can target ads to individuals who visited your site and added items to their cart but didn’t complete the purchase.
By adding a tag – a few lines of code – to your site, Google has the necessary information to retarget these cart abandoners across their Display Network with an ad reminding them to return and complete their purchase.
Targeting to customers who already have enough brand affinity to visit and add an item to the cart produces 2-3x higher click-through rates than standard display ads.
Concentrating on these key metrics should help you streamline your marketing efforts and improve your online store’s performance.
Take the information for how often to check each metric and add that to your weekly and monthly ecommerce reporting routines. Then, adapt your reports to make it easy to track the metrics mentioned.
Here’s a reminder of the key takeaways:
Get started implementing these tips today and taking inspiration from the examples offered, and you’ll be on the way to skyrocketing your sales and smashing your store’s goals.
Setting up Google Analytics is as simple as:
1. Creating an account on https://analytics.google.com/
2. Setting up a property on your account to reflect your ecommerce website
3. Setting up a reporting view
4. Add tracking codes to your ecommerce website to start collecting data
First, navigate to the Acquisition » All Traffic » Source / Medium on your Google Analytics account. Then, click on “E-commerce” under “Explorer’. You will find the “revenue and transactions” column in the table.
At its most basic, ecommerce analytics is gathering relevant data to track the performance of your online store. You can use this information to understand different aspects of your business such as consumer behavior, revenue growth, and conversion rates by channel. Then, make an educated decision on how to grow your online business.
Analyzing ecommerce data follows the same principles of basic data analysis:
1. Understand what kind of data you are tracking and where it is coming from
2. Collecting the data from the appropriate sources
3. Processing the data based on relevant parameters
4. Making sure your data is clean
5. Drawing conclusions from your data
This post is by Steve Smith, CEO of Conversific. They found that there’s a direct correlation between trying to understand data and being sad. That’s why the team behind Conversific wants to change the world of eCommerce analytics upside down and make it mainstream to every Shopify store.