Hi Andrew,

I have a question for you related to one of your previous newsletters – you say it’s important to track sales, where they’re coming from so that we can concentrate on traffic streams bringing in most sales. All good so far, that makes perfect sense.

I have installed Google Analytics on my online shop but I just don’t understand where can I see traffic related to actual sales – all I get is number of visitors, countries they visit from etc. etc. but no data of actual purchases.

Is it just me or that’s what you meant by “tracking sales”?

Best regards,
Steven

Hi Steven,

Thanks for your question.

You have done nothing wrong so far – installing Google Analytics is the very first step to set-up proper tracking system. And you’re totally right there – Google Analytics shows you bounce rates, most visited pages on your site, traffic sources and other data about your visitors and their actions on the site.

But to track actual sales and link your shop’s orders with Analytics data you need to set-up E-Commerce Tracking:

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55528

This is the missing part in your set-up.

By enabling E-commerce tracking in your Analytics’s settings, you activate new feature set in your account. But to make it work, you’ll have to add some custom code on final checkout page, on your website (page where visitor lands after a successful payment). Please see your shopping cart’s documentation on how to do this.

Once you’re all set, you’ll start seeing sales related info in your Google Analytics account, including:

* Sales (number of orders, value)

* Conversion rates

* Average Order value

* And so much more!

The best part is that every single metric can be filtered down to KEYWORD level! So you’ll know exactly which keywords bring you most sales, highest conversions or number of orders. Once you know this data, you can work even harder to get more traffic via that source or set-up AdWords campaign for example (as you’ll know that particular keyword is a money keyword – it brings in sales).

Hope this helps!

Thanks,
Andrew

• Tweet