How to Set Up eCommerce Conversions Tracking in Google Analytics?

Learn to see how to track eCommerce conversions in Google Analytics. Although the idea of automatically tracking our online store’s eCommerce conversions didn’t sound very appealing, Read To Learn How To improve eCommerce conversion after and get more focused on eCommerce conversion rate optimization.

1. Product Impressions

If you’re running an online shoe shop, you always want to see which of your products are viewed most often (and possibly clicked on). This can be achieved by creating a secondary dimension that shows the number of impressions per dimension. You can do this by adding a ‘User Defined’ custom report and setting the secondary dimension to the number of product impressions (Number of Impressions).

2. Product Clicks

When you’re running an online shoe store, it doesn’t necessarily mean that every time someone sees a pair of shoes they instantly buy them. While it would be nice to think your shoes are just that good, the truth is very different. Most people will browse through your shoes and keep looking until they find what they’re after. This means if you want to sell more shoes, you need to give people a reason to click on your products.

By using the same secondary dimension as above (Number of Impressions), you can see how many times a specific product was clicked on. This way, if customers are clicking on your shoes but not buying them. You’ll know which pair they’re looking at and can adjust your products accordingly.

3. Product Abandonment

For every click made on an online eCommerce store, there is also an ‘opportunity’ cost. This means that when someone clicks on a product they might not be the only one doing the same thing. This means if they don’t buy your products (or abandon their shopping cart) soon after, they might end up buying similar shoes somewhere else.

Since this is an opportunity cost, it can be translated to revenue. If someone checks out your shoes but doesn’t buy them, they might end up buying the same pair in your competitor’s store. This is why it’s important to track product abandonment (and see which products are most often abandoned) in Google Analytics.

There are two ways of going about tracking your product abandonment. Firstly you can use the classic eCommerce tracking code and set up event tracking for ‘Checkout Completion’ with a unique transaction ID. While this method works, it does take time to implement and only allows you to track one type of event (i.e checkout completion).

It’s also important to note that the ‘Checkout Completion’ event is triggered when a user abandons their shopping cart, but not necessarily when they leave your store. In this case, you’ll want to set up event tracking to track when a user leaves your site without viewing any other products.

Using page-level events, you can track what products were looked at and then abandoned, as well as what page was viewed before abandoning their shopping cart. This way you’ll know which pages are the most popular and whether customers prefer to look at shoes first or accessories first.

4. Ecommerce Conversions (in a different account)

The previous methods show how people interact with your store, while eCommerce conversions show how many transactions your store is generating. Although it would be great to track both of these methods in the same account, you can’t due to Google Analytics’ own rules. Since this could cause confusion when linking accounts together. Here’s a short guide on how to link different eCommerce conversions within different Google Analytics accounts.

This Google Analytics rule specifies that eCommerce transactions can only be tracked in the same account (so you can’t track sales across different websites). To get around this, you’ll need to set up a second property within your existing account and link it with your main profile.

There are two ways of doing this. the first method involves creating a separate account and linking it as an ‘Exhibit’. Using this type of linking allows you to create a complex dashboard that uses different accounts as its foundation. In order to use the Exhibit method. You’ll have to have multiple websites with separate eCommerce properties associated with each website.

The second way of creating your secondary Google Analytics account actually allows for better customization. Instead of setting up your secondary property as an Exhibit. You’ll want to create a new property with the exact same settings as your original eCommerce site. This way all of your pages will be linked together and show accurate data. If every page is linking back to itself (and is set up properly), then you won’t risk having any data discrepancies.

5. Adwords Conversions (in the same account)

Another way that you can track online sales is through Google Analytics’ AdWords conversions functionality. This method allows you to see how much revenue your AdWords campaigns are generating from ‘conversions’. Although this method of tracking is also within the same account. There are some differences to eCommerce conversions.

The biggest difference is the fact that you’ll need to link your AdWords account with Google Analytics in order for this method to work. Once you’ve linked the two accounts together you can start adding Adwords conversions to any of your pages. You can use either an auto-tag or a custom JavaScript code in order to do this.

To set up a conversion, you’ll need to head over to your AdWords account and create a new ‘Conversion’ under the ‘Tools’ section of your account. Once this is done, simply select which campaign you’d like to track conversions for and enter in a name for the conversion. In order to tell Google Analytics that this is a conversion, you’ll need to add in your tracking ID. Once this is done, each time a user clicks on an ad and then lands on a page with your tracking code. It will be counted as a conversion.

6. Offline Conversions (in different accounts)

For businesses selling tangible goods, it may be even more important to track offline conversions. These are sales that involve either an in-person store purchase or a phone order. Since Google Analytics doesn’t have the ability to track offline conversions, you’ll need to set up a new property for this method of tracking.

A way of doing this is by setting up your main eCommerce property as an offline conversion property. To do this, simply add a new ‘property’ in your account and add the same tracking code to all of your pages. In addition, you’ll need to add a second tracking ID for ‘offline conversions’. Once this is done you can start monitoring any phone or in-person sales by looking at your secondary property.

8. Multi-Channel Funnels (in different accounts)

There is one final type of conversion tracking that you can do within Google Analytics and that’s using the ‘Multi-Channel Funnels’ feature. This method allows you to see how users interact with your website on their way towards making a purchase. This is actually a fairly complex method of tracking and requires setting up different types of goals.

The first type of goal is called ‘Direct Visits’. This refers to people who arrive at your website directly, meaning they didn’t come through any other channels. The second type is called ‘Referrals’ which are users who arrived on your site via another website. This includes search engines, social media websites. And other types of marketing campaigns. The last type of goal is called ‘Medium’ and it refers to how the user initially came to your site (through which marketing campaign or through what website).

Once you’ve created these different goals. You can use them in order to see how each channel impacts the user and their eventual purchase (or other conversions).

9. Using Adwords Cost Data in Google Analytics

There is one very popular method of tracking an online sale that we didn’t discuss which is by using cost data from your Google AdWords account. This method can also help you get a better idea of how much money you’ll need to spend in order to get a conversion. The concept here is simple. You’re trying to find out how much it costs to make one sale.

So, for example, if you have 100 clicks that end up converting into 50 sales, then your cost per acquisition (CPA) is $20. By using this data in combination with your other analytics data. You can easily estimate how much it will cost you to reach 1,000 users and how many sales that might lead to.

There are a number of ways in which this data can be used and depending upon the size and type of your business, they include:

– Getting a better idea of what keywords to use in order to get sales

– Improving the efficiency of your marketing campaign

10. Tracking Offline Sales

Tracking offline sales might seem like it’s impossible with Google Analytics. But there is one way you can do this by using cost data from your Adwords account. You’ll need to use what’s called a ‘cross-domain tracking’ method. This basically means you have to change the value of the ‘utm_medium’ dimension in your tracking code.

You can give each of your marketing campaigns a different medium, for example, ‘CPC’, ‘organic’, or another type. Each time you run a new campaign, just use a different value for the medium field in your tracking code. By doing so, you can use this information to determine what is performing better and which medium will give you the highest return.

11. Tracking Offline Conversions

As was mentioned earlier with cost data. Another way that offline conversions can be tracked is by using a UTM code. The same principle applies with offline sales as does online sales. It all boils down to track where the user came from.

When it comes to tracking offline conversions, you need a way to uniquely identify your offline marketing campaigns. In order to do this, you’ll need what’s called a ‘cross-domain tracker’. Simply put – you need another website that contains your UTM code and tracks people who come from there. This other site is usually called a thank-you page and it can be any website you want. Just make sure that your Adwords account has the proper link tracking.