Your website is a silent salesman that pitches for your business all the time. Similarly, the data received from your website is the most important asset of your business, it will give you insights of the customer journey and behavior and will help you to create a customer-friendly content and interface.
With Analytics Audit tools and services you can dig into the website data of your company to better understand the areas of improvement. Analytics audit helps to improve the site performance, carry out analysis of lost sales/leads and increase traffic to attain the desired ROI. This is done by identifying core problems and eventually finding ways to resolve them.
Analytics audit should typically be conducted after an initial Google Analytics set up or after any major changes such as new features are added to your website. Analytics tracking is an essential tool for Ecommerce business to accurately assess and measure its revenue.
Google Analytics offers a built-in Ecommerce feature that includes Ecommerce tracking, conversion, goal-related tracking, demographics, visitor segmentation, and funnel visualization. All these features can help a business truly understand its market.
Here I’ll explain to you the areas you should analyze to get the most relevant and accurate insights into Ecommerce data in order to create a good strategy and understand the demographics of the potential audience.
1. Check if the GA code is present and set up Ecommerce tracking
For Ecommerce websites tagging every page on the site is very important. A GA Checker is a good tool that can be used to complete this task. Whether you set up the GA manually or with a tag management tool, ensure that the code is present on all the web pages of your Ecommerce website.
Ecommerce tracking provides an additional level of data above and beyond simple goal tracking. Ensure that e-commerce tracking is enabled for your website to collect the maximum amount of data for later analysis.
2. Analyze the version of the GA code
Check if the same version of GA code is present on all the pages throughout the website. It shouldn’t happen that one web page is implemented with one version of the GA code and the other with another version. This version difference can result in faulty analytics tracking, broken sessions and a large number of self-referrals showing up in the reports.
3. Avoid multiple tracking code on the same page
Google gives the liberty to install multiple instances of the Analytics tracking code on your web pages to send data to multiple properties in your account.
But if you add two Google Analytics scripts for any given web page then it counts every metric twice on your website and lowers the bounce rate significantly. If you suspect multiple-tracking, use a crawler to identify the issue and remove it.
4. Tag the ‘events’ that are related to your buying process
Tracking each interaction happening on your Ecommerce website is key to complete data. There are plenty of scripts that help automate the process of tagging. Tag all the interactions as ‘events’ that the customer might have with your business like viewing the products, adding it to the cart, abandoning the cart, adding the address, completing the purchase, not completing the purchase, etc. With this data, you can get reliable insights into how should you improve your interface, how and whom to target and how to make right business decisions.
5. Payment Gateway Referrals
Google Analytics starts a new session whenever a user comes to the site from a traffic source that is different from the previous one.
When a user browses your site and decides to purchase, you send him to the payment gateway. After the payment, the user is sent back to the vendor site. When this happens, Google Analytics starts a new session with the payment gateway site as the referral and overrides the previous traffic source that brought in the customer to your e-commerce site.
Hence, it is very important to check if payment gateways are being captured effectively by Google Analytics for implementation of traffic source for sales.
6. Exclude unwanted URLs
A very common scenario that Ecommerce websites do is use URL parameters for sorting content such as product pages. It is important to track the products users are sorting and you can do so by tagging that interaction as an ‘event.’ Hence, eliminate the most duplicate URLs by telling GA to ignore parameters and use the default URL properly.
7. Ensure PPC traffic is tagged appropriately
Ensure that auto-tagging is turned on and the Analytics account is linked to the AdWords account. Also, make sure PPC campaigns from other sources are tagged properly.
Wrapping it up
A detailed Google Analytics audit will give you the right and required insights. To utilize these insights to their best possible extent is up to you. Just by adding these few tweaks and following the steps will help your business gain monetary benefits.
To make the most of a GA audit, make a checklist of setups/reports that you need to validate to make the process simple and easy.
Tell me about your views on other metrics that can be tracked to attain maximum business benefits.
