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3 Ecommerce Reports Online Retailers Should Run on Google Analytics Every Month

Date

December 7, 2016

Topics

How much monthly revenue are you missing out on? While it’s probably not healthy to think about this constantly. It’s good to stay on top of your ecommerce reports to understand what’s happening on your store.

Ecommerce Reports on Google Analytics

Google Analytics is incredibly powerful, and it supports a lot of the reports that we automatically generate in our Insights Suite. Unfortunately, using ecommerce Google Analytics is a marketable skill all on its own. You could spend hours mining through ecommerce data every day, but that’s probably not a good idea either. What Google Analytics reports should online retailers such as yourself be running on a regular basis?

Ecommerce Acquisition Reports

Many top online retailers spend thousands of dollars every single month advertising on Google and Bing. They also do this on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. But what kind of return on investment are you getting? Are people actually coming to your store from these ads? And if they are, how much revenue are they driving?

The Acquisition report makes it easy for you to see what kind of ROI you’re actually getting. This will help you understand whether you should pump more advertising dollars into your PPC campaigns, or whether they need some work. Of course, there are great insights and ecommerce metrics within each of these platforms. But consolidating as much work as possible is often important when you have limited time to analyze these details.

Shopper Behavior Reports

Once a visitor lands on your ecommerce store, what are they doing? The answers may actually surprise you. Looking at our own Behavior Reports and those of our clients is often fairly surprising. The ecommerce reports in this area of your dashboard will show you a few stats that are important to view on a regular basis.

For one, What is your bounce rate? Make a habit of finding tracking this as seeing abrupt increases or decreases to this number could be good indicators of whether your acquisition efforts are working or not. For example, if you pump a lot of money into PPC next month, how much does your bounce rate increase? You’re may be getting a high CTR on your ads. However, all of those visitors are bouncing. This means you may need to examine your ad copy, landing page copy, or both.

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The insights get even more intricate within the Behavior area of your ecommerce metrics dashboard. For instance, the behavior flow shows you the most popular paths that shoppers are taking through your site. This might change more often than you’d think, especially if you’re running special campaigns for certain brands or landing pages.

google analytics for ecommerce user flow

One of the most important ecommerce reports in this area of the dashboard is the “search terms” report located under “site search”. This report allows you to see what your most popular search terms are, and what shoppers are doing with these terms. We recommend that our customers check this data frequently, and especially when they introduce new products. This report can expose products that are not converting well, even when visitors are clicking on them from a direct search. This can be a sign of poor relevancy or search errors.

Filter by “% search exits” to find searches that are resulting in a number of visitors to exit. In the below example, visitors are obviously expecting to be able to search by an item number, which is not a function that is supported. In other cases, this will expose opportunities to stock products that you don’t currently carry. It can also help you learn of searches that are displaying “no results found” for searches that should be displaying important products.

google analytics for ecommerce search exits

Online Conversions Reports

The “Ecommerce Overview” report located under “Conversions” is probably the best way to get an overview of how well shoppers are engaging with your site and get some ideas on how to improve your conversion rate. Even if traffic figures are higher than ever, low numbers here are signs that your site is not functioning effectively when it comes to actually making sales.

Here you can learn your overall conversion rate, and your AOV. You can also find out which products your shoppers are buying, and the revenue generated by those products. This can expose marketing opportunities, possibly leading to AdWords and social campaigns, special promotions, and the creation of dedicated landing pages for those brands or products.

Want to learn more about optimizing your online shopping experience? Read our guides on site search best practices and merchandising your online store.