Why and for what purposes “Google Analytics” can be used in e-commerce?

google analytics“Google Analytics” – is at this moment most effective and cost free way to track and analyze achieved results. Already in the initial “Google Analytics” page you will find a lot of useful information about your e-shop, such as number of clicks, number of unique visitors on website, average session duration, visitor location on website, visitor hardware information (personal computers, mobile phones or tablets), the ratio between new and frequent visitors, website bounce ratio.
Number of sessions indicates how many times your e-shop was visited. Number of people on website is showed by unique visitors indicator. What is the difference between number of total visits and unique visitors? If the user visits your website three times – it means that it generates three visits but just one unique visitor. For that reason the number of total visits will be always significantly higher than number of unique visitors.

“Google Analytics”: most important information about users

Page views is another very important indicator. It shows how much interest users got towards your website. If the ratio between visits and clicks is four times, it means that that during one visit user checks approximately four website pages. As higher the ratio as better, because it means that the visitor got very interested in your products and has spent long time viewing them.
Average visit duration is a total time that all visitors have spent on the website divided by number of visits.
Bounce rate – indicates the number of visitors, who have left the website after visiting the landing page. As lower this indicator is as better, because it shows that visitors get interested in the content of your website (recommended not higher than 50%).
The percentage of new visitors – the high percentage of new visitors indicates that more and more internet users are getting aware of your website. On the other hand, high percentage of new users shows the negative tendency that the loyalty of visitors is low. If the bounce rate and percentage of new visitors are high, you should review such features as descriptions of products, the usability of website, loading times of different pages and other, which would motivate visitors to view more products. It is recommended to switch on Prestashop modules, which filter and offer customer to take a look at similar (Viewed products block), newest (New products block) and most popular products (Top seller block, Best products).

Website content review and indicators

One of the most important part of “Google Analytics” service package is website content review. It helps to find out which product/page of the e-shop is most popular (has most views). When you enter the window “Behavior > Overview”, you will find out the list of most viewed pages.
You can filter the list either by page title or address. When you choose the certain page, you can find out all the needed information, just like about whole e-shop: number of unique visitors, average time spent on website, bounce rate, etc.
Google as well as visitors appreciate high website speed. You can check if your website do not have difficulties loading different pages or server problems. It is possible to find out average loading speed as well as different loading times from different countries.

Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing strategy

When you enter the main traffic source page (Acquisition), you get the information about most common sources used by the visitors. The most common traffic sources of e-shops are direct, referral and organic search.
However, everything depends on your marketing strategy. Some companies invest in advertising through banner ads in other websites (in this case referral traffic source dominates), other use text ads in search engines (organic search traffic source dominates).
This section usually shows the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. It is visible from which sites comes bigger part of your visitors, even though you can be having same marketing expenses in different websites. For that reason, it is possible to find out which places are more effective to market your website. By utilizing these parameters you can find out what is your marketing cost per user and what do you gain from it. It is recommended to disable your marketing sources one by one in order to see which part of users is most beneficial, because the quantity of visitors is not always the most decisive factor. It is very important to attract the target consumers instead of seeking higher and higher number of visitors.
In the organic search window you can see what are the most commonly used keywords by users to get to your website. However, the more commonly used keyword is not always the better one. The statistics show how much time visitors, who used different keywords, spend on your website. It is possible that more commonly used keyword is misleading and visitors leave the website immediately without buying anything. However, the downside is that you have already paid for his visit.
All the available information in this section can be grouped and filtered according to different criteria. For instance, from the referral traffic it is possible to get the list of all websites, through which the users have found your page. Then you can review the behavioral patterns of the visitors (pages, sessions or bounce rate) and decide what are the most beneficial parts and what you possibly could change or remove.