If you run a retail or ecommerce website things like product information reports, revenue reports, and sales reports are essential for benchmarking how your site is performing. All of this advanced data isn’t always easily tabulated or accessed.

That is, unless you are currently using the enhanced ecommerce features that are available for Google Analytics. You really should be because these advanced features can help your bottom line.

Here are some tips for getting more out of these enhanced ecommerce features.

Getting Consistent Field Values

When running the enhanced ecommerce with your ecommerce site, getting consistent field values is extremely important. It is important to make sure that you have the right values for analyzing those consumers who are just browsing and those who are making purchases.

You will need to enter an ID for each product and set fields for all of the user actions while on your site. Make sure that the ID matches in all of the fields or Google Analytics will not analyze the product for each step the consumer takes.

Data Import

Using the data import feature of Google Analytics, a product name and the product SKU can be matched automatically.

This is a great for implementations where the product name is not available for ecommerce steps or actions.

If you have product names that are not coming through your reports in the way that you want to see them you can use this data import feature to make sure that they come in properly. This will help you read your reports much more easily, which is necessary when you are trying to make improvements.

Category Hierarchy

Category hierarchy offers a way to broaden your data fields. When first implementing enhanced ecommerce for Google Analytics you will find there is a category field.

This field provides 5 dimensions in one. This means that you can add up to 5 levels that are separated using slashes. These will separate the string of information into dimensions that can be used by Google Analytics.

When running your ecommerce website having data that comes from consistent field values is extremely important.

Using data import and product hierarchy as well custom dimensions for the products on your site will help you achieve reporting that is more cohesive, which will allow you to catch more trends and insights of your consumers.

There is a reason that Google Analytics is a popular free tool to use in order to measure the success of your marketing efforts. It allows you to view the volume of traffic to your website, track where your users come from and where they go. It will also help you learn why your visitors are coming to your site at any specific period of time.

Using Google Analytics does not have to be difficult. However, there are many aspects of it that are often overlooked. Here are a few tricks to use in order to make sure you are getting the most out of Google Analytics.

Segmenting Your Audience

One tool that is often overlooked is segmenting your audience. Chances are that you have several targeted audiences visiting your website and distinguishing between them is important. In order to implement this tool; select segments from the admin page in order to create customized segments to help define your different audiences. These segments can be named whatever you want and allow you to distinguish between language, sex, age, location, etc.

Measuring Speed

One of the SEO ranking factors is your site’s download speed. This speed can deter new users if it is too slow. To check your speed using Google Analytics, go to behavior, then site speed, then overview. You can also see how individual pages of your site perform by visiting the page timings section. This will help you identify any issues with your download speeds.

Finding Browser Differences

Different browsers may have your site configured differently. Google analytics will allow you to check your speed across the different browsers. Go to audience, then technology, then browser, and operating system in order to see the load times and the bounce rates for each of the browsers visiting your site.

Real Time Snapshots

Go to real time then overview in order to see a snapshot of your site’s metrics when they are happening. You can learn how many users are on your site at the time, how they got to your site, as well as where they are coming from.

View Behavior Flows

Go to the behavior flow tab and then to behavior flow in order to see a complicated map of the behaviors of your users. You can narrow this chart down using the drop down menu that is available to look at different variables. These charts can provide a sense of how and why people visit and use your site.

If you have used Google Analytics in the past, you may be wondering what the newest features of the latest version are.

Here are some of newest features now available from Google Analytics.

Custom Dashboards

One of the best features of Google Analytics is the addition of being able to customize your dashboards. You can now create dashboards for your website to include any type of metrics that you want. You can also choose how the information is displayed such as in charts, tables, etc.

Basic Interface

The overall basic interface of Google Analytics is now different.

When you go to your site you will first go to a visitors overview screen. In the past you would go to a general overview screen that showed information about content and traffic sources. On the top of the report, you now see charts that show traffic patterns over the last month. You can also change the dates or compare 2 date ranges.

Interface

With the latest version of Google Analytics you can now create annotations for a specific day or days. For example, if you have a press release coming out on a specific day, you can add an annotation so that you know what caused the spike in traffic. You could also do the same if your website goes down, and there is a drop in your traffic.

Visitors

The visitor’s page will show you a report for any of your websites. The information will include the number of page views, unique visitors, and visitors overall. It will also show you the average amount of time visitors spend on your site. This page will provide you with a great overview of how the site is doing overall.

Another sub report option that is available allows you to learn more about their behavior. This includes whether the visitor is new or returning, how often they return to your site, and how engaged they are while on your site. Knowing how many people return to your site will give you an estimate of how many true fans that you really have. A user that has visited your site many times is most likely a fan of your company or site.

These are just a few of the changes that have been made to Google Analytics. It is important to keep up with the changes that occur to Google Analytics so that you are getting the most out of the site.

Google Analytics is the best free tool available for measuring the success of your marketing campaigns. It allows you to see the amount of website traffic coming in, as well as track where your users are coming from.

Using Google Analytics can be simple or complicated based on your needs. If you truly want to get the most from your marketing efforts you may need to dig deeper than you have before. Here are some tips you can use to improve your marketing efforts through the use of Google Analytics.

Create Goals

One of the easiest features to use with Google Analytics is goals. To set up your first goal, go to admin – goals-new goal. Conversion is typically the most important goal for most sites. There are many templates that you can choose from to effectively track your conversions. Once you have set up your goals you can quickly monitor your conversion progress.

Customize your Dashboards

To do this, go to your dashboard and then to new dashboard. You can have up to 20 dashboards at any point. Once your opening template has been selected you will be able to add widgets. This can be very useful for getting consistent reports and high level views of the overall progress of your campaign.

Setting Custom Alerts

Most of us do not have the time to check our Google Analytics page each day for any type of unusual activity. This is why setting custom alerts is useful. To do this, simply go to your admin page then to custom alerts and then create new alert.

You can apply these alerts to all of your traffic or just different segments. You can then set the alert to go off when a certain metric either goes up or falls (within a set amount of time). When the conditions are met you will receive either a text or an email.

Stop Visiting Your Site

Chances are that you visit your website often to make sure that everything is working. While this is good, your visits can actually skew the information provided by Google Analytics. You can set up a filter in the admin panel so that traffic from your IP address is excluded.

Use Google Webmaster Tools

Setting up google webmaster tools for your site is highly recommended as this will provide you with further insights that are not offered through Google Analytics. These insights include impression data, spam actions, and organic keyword search.

When it comes to Google Analytics there are many mistakes in tracking code that can easily be avoided or fixed. Here are some of the most common mistakes that people make when broken implementations appear in your Google Analytics.

Missing Code
It is easy to simply overlook pages when you are first implementing tracking code. Additionally, code may end up missing because new templates did not receive code, code was deleted during edits to a page, or a special landing page did not receive code.

Make sure everyone on the team knows the tracking code and where it should be placed on each new page.

Duplicate Code
Someone may simply paste the new code twice on the same page …which could cause problems.

Another way that code can be duplicated is adding the code for a new account, to a page that has code from an old account. This is more common than you might think. If you are having tracking issues on a new install of Analytics, check to see if any old code was there first.

Sometimes one snippet of code is on the top of the page and the other is located near the bottom. When this happens a tag management system will send hits to Google Analytics while the code on the page is sending hits to the same Google Analytics account.

Another duplication that may happen is when you have the universal Analytics code and classic Google Analytics code installed on the same page. This scenario also sends twice the hits to your Analytics.

To avoid this problem make sure to regularly monitor and test any changes made to the code.

Missing Subdomain Tracking
Are your users traveling between subdomains? If so, and you do not have subdomain tracking enabled then Google Analytics identifies the first user as another user on the second page. If you need to track users across your subdomains you will want to make sure that you are not relying on the default settings and ensure you have subdomain tracking enabled.

Missing Cross Domain Tracking
Subdomain tracking will not help with users that travel across your different domains. Cross domain tracking needs to be enabled in order to make sure that you are tracking the same user across your different websites.

These are just a few of the common mistakes that people run into when using Google Analytics code. Most of these mistakes can easily be fixed to ensure that you are able to use Google Analytics accurately and effectively.

Creating your Google Analytics account is a fairly simple process.

The first step is to visit the sign up page. If you currently have an email account through Gmail you can use it to sign into your analytics account. For those without a Gmail account you will need to create the entire account first.

Google currently offers a universal access account along with the classic account. The universal access account is currently in beta and has several extra features. If you choose the classic account you will then be upgraded to the newer features when they are out of beta.

All of the information on the sign up page is quite self-explanatory, simply enter the URL of your website, create an account name, enter your time zone, country, etc. Once the information has been entered you will then get a tracking ID after agreeing to the terms and conditions.

Installing Google Analytics on WordPress

After you have created your Google Analytics account, it is important to copy your tracking code to use on your website. Since WordPress is one of the most popular website platforms out there, we will look at it.

There are several ways for installing Google Analytics through WordPress. They are:

Using a direct copy/paste to your themes footer/header file
Updating the functions.php page
Or with plugins.

The recommended method is to use a plugin as this will make the entire process much simpler.

There are a ton of different plugins that are available that will help you add Google Analytics to your website. Using one of the simple, lightweight plug ins is recommended when you are first starting out.

The direct paste method is fairly simple as well. You will simply copy your Google Analytics code to the header.php (or footer.php) file of your theme. It should be pasted right after yourtag (or right before thetag in footer).

You should really only use the Functions.php method if you absolutely know what to do. You will want to use the appropriate code in the functions.php file for your theme on WordPress. You will also need to paste in the Google Analytics code you received when you signed up.

Using Google Analytics

Google Analytics is really a must have for every website. This service is free to use and will provide you with valuable insight into your websites traffic. The only way to truly improve your website is to use the data provided by Google Analytics to fully understand your audience and what they are doing while on your site.

It is important to measure how successful your inbound marketing efforts are.

One of the best tools for this is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is free to use and it allows you to learn more about your website traffic, track where your visitors come from and why they are visiting your site.

Here are a 5 ways to use Google Analytics effectively to make sure you are getting the most out of this extremely useful tool.

1. Tracking Email Campaigns

Google Analytics allows you to track your email campaigns. To do this you will need to go to the admin page and then to custom definitions and to custom metrics. Here you will create a metric called email opens. Make sure that this is active and then create the email in your email software program. Use the given code to track your email campaign.

2. Creating Custom Campaign URLs

There is a free tool that you can use in order to customize URLs for any of your marketing campaigns. This tool will allow you to identify 5 parameters, your medium, source, content, term, and the name of your campaign. Once you have set up the custom link you can use the full link or a shortened form created by a tool such as bitly.

3. Analyze Site Searches

You may use behavior/site search if you have the search function enabled on your website. This will allow you to analyze the data of what users typically search for. A user that performs a search on the site is more likely to convert to a sale than the ones who do not. If you see what your users are looking for you will know what they want, which allows you to publish content that is related to those searches.

4. Weekly Reports Email

There is an option to have reports emailed weekly or monthly to provide you with a snapshot of the most important metrics of your site. This is perfect for those who do not want to use Google Analytics manually.

5. Watch for Updates

It is important to make sure that you watch for any updates to Google Analytics. Consider following the Google Analytics twitter page so that you are up to date on these new functions and features as they come about.

Take the time to implement these tips and you will be able to fully track your website traffic to learn more about what works and what does not.