At the heart of every ecommerce site should be a great analytical reporting solution like Google Analytics. At FastPivot, we love Google Analytics and we love helping businesses make data-driven decisions.
Google Analytics can give you a lot of data. For large retailers with a full-time analytics department, mountains of data are good. For smaller ecommerce sites, this much data is overkill; you’ll never have the time to sift through everything. Given the likely time constraints of you and your staff, what metrics are the most important when measuring success? Here are the top five metrics every ecommerce site should track in Google Analytics:
1. Visitor Acquisition by Traffic Source
2. Task Completion Rate
3. Revenue by Channel
4. Return on Ad Spend
5. Multi-Channel Funneling
Let’s take a look at each one:
1. Visitor Acquisition by Traffic Source
Visitor acquisition by traffic source is a great measure of how your public relations, link building and social media efforts are working by source. You can look at the site usage or ecommerce values for each of the sources and mediums to find growth over time. The question you want to answer is: Are my efforts paying off?
2. Revenue by Channel
Revenue by channel is similar to number one, but this provides a sexy way of seeing which channels are bringing you the money! Do research and find if there are channels that you are investing in that may be under-performing or over-performing. Are there areas where you can adjust?
3. Task Completion Rate
Task completion rate is a great way of looking at the smaller micro conversions that add up to larger macro conversions on your site. Task on your site must be individualized to you. Take a long hard look at your site to see what people should be doing and if they’re able to do it.
How does this translate into data in your Google Analytics account? If you sell jewelry, it might be how visitors research various products. You would want to look at average visit duration, time-on-site and pages-per-visit into account. If you’re a lead generation company, it might be something like walking through a funnel process to get a prospective customer to request product information or register for a webinar.
4. Return on Ad Spend
Return on ad spend is a straight-up metric that you’ll learn to love once you’ve integrated Google Adwords and Google Analytics. You have integrated both of these platforms haven’t you? ROAS tells you at a glance what’s working and what’s not working for your PPC advertising through Google Adwords.
5. Multi-Channel Funneling
Multichannel funneling is kind of like the Holy Grail for some businesses. They want to know if their efforts are reaching everyone effectively. There’s also plenty of attribution modeling that can be done once everything has been set up properly. I highly suggest you take a look and see how things look.
I use Google Analytics daily. In my experience working with online retailers who aren’t full-time analytics experts, these are the top five metrics every ecommerce site should track in Google Analytics. Learn them, learn to love them, and they’ll return the favor by illustrating problems and opportunities that will boost your bottom line.
