Three of The Last Hurdle™ team successfully completed the Google Analytics Academy Course; Digital Analytics Fundamentals. This course was available online until 30th October 2013 and everyone registered for an analytics account got the invite to complete this free course. There were a number of new revelations, in this week’s article we look at the benefits of the event and eCommerce tracking.
One of the most useful and exciting additions to the Google Analytics update is the Events tracking and eCommerce tracking features. Whether your business uses your own unique online shop, or a popular eCommerce system like Shopify, you’re now able to quickly and easily implement code to record when specific actions are performed on your website. Instead of just basic page views, you can measure specific interactions within individual pages, to gain a more comprehensive measurement of the online behaviour of your potential customers.
Google Analytics Update – Event Tracking
For each individual event, such as completing a contact form, a newsletter sign up or clicking through to another blog article, there are several different components which you can record, each of which will help to provide you with a clear image of your customers’ online experience. Firstly, you can split your events into different categories. Categories could include adverts, videos or downloads, depending on exactly what you want to measure.
Within each category you can then specify the type of action which you’re measuring, whether it is a simple click, the playing of a video, or the downloading of a file. Bear in mind that you can name these actions, and that your analytics report will group all actions which are defined by a singular name together, potentially leading to less useful reports. An example could be the grouping of all click actions together in one report, as opposed to specific reports for your file downloads, clickthrough’s and form completions.
Google Analytics Update – eCommerce Tracking
This Google Analytics update introduces the eCommerce tracking feature, which tracks live purchase information and can be used to identify specific referral behaviours. The system will store information like transaction and product ID’s, and will allow you to measure information like your sales conversion rate, total and average sales values, number of unique purchases and total number of items sold. It will also highlight where a ‘dropout’ point happens in the buying process, giving you early warning if there is a part of the buying process that is not user friendly. Armed with this clear and convenient data centre, you can keep on top of your online sales performance and make changes accordingly. You may notice greater economic activity in certain sections of your website, or identify those areas which could require advertising or improvements to the product and customer experience.
Whether you implement eCommerce tracking or Events tracking (Google Analytics Fundamentals advises do NOT implement both), you’ll be provided with a greater insight into the online behaviours of your customers. With this Google Analytics update, inexpensive yet useful analytical information has never been easier to collect. This is an invaluable tool for smaller business owners, who will be looking to optimise their online presence for greater sales conversions and customer experience.
Google Ananlytics Update – Bisola Orimalade, Jules White & Trevor Ray from The Last Hurdle have all successfully completed the Google Analytics Academy course that was released in October 2013 and are happy to discuss your sites analytics. Get in touch by calling 01604 654545 or emailing sales@thelasthurdle.co.uk
