Google Analytics
Search engine marketing is all about performance and that performance is measured by analysing every part of a website. The surge in search engine marketing over the last five years is based on the return on investment provided by the measurable nature of search engine marketing; this measurability is provided by analytics.
Search engine optimisation uses e-commerce and Google analytics to determine how best to optimise a website to ensure your website performs. Tracking your e-commerce is a capability, as it tracks performance so you know which areas of your website are performing. It gives you excellent indicators as to what you can do to rectify any non performing areas. For example if you have one million new visitors per month but a very high bounce rate, then changes need to be made to specific areas.
Analytics will determine everything from the number of purchases made to the total revenue created from those purchases and the conversion rate of site visits to purchases made. The report can decipher how each individual product is performing or, if you prefer, how each category of products is performing.
E-Commerce Tracking
The analytics will allow you to keep a track of all transactions carried out on your website (useful for audits) and it will show you how many visits to your site occur before a purchase is made. All these aspects of e-commerce tracking give you a valuable insight into how your website is working and how people interact with it.
To track the e-commerce transactions on your site, follow these steps:
• First, you need to enable reports in the settings of your website profile. Go to the ‘analytics settings’ page in your account and click on ‘edit’. You should now see a ‘profile settings’ page and again, click on ‘edit’ in the top right hand corner of the ‘main website profile information’ section. You can now edit the profile information and change the radio button from no to yes under ‘e-commerce website’.
• Ensure the Google analytics tracking code is included within the receipt page of your website. You will need a little knowledge of coding for this.
• On the receipt page, below the normal tracking code, you will need to add the ‘_addTrans’ command with: Order ID, Affiliation, Total, Tax, Shipping, City, State, Country.
• Below this you need to add the call ‘_addItem’ including: Order ID, SKU/Code, Product Name, Category, Price, Quantity.
• Conclude the process by taking all the information collected by the transaction object and submitting it through the ‘_trackTrans’ to Google Analytics.
These steps should take you to all the information you need to optimise your site’s sales performance.
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Interesting and helpful post, especially in the week when Omniture was bought by Adobe. This post shows that the usability of Google Analytics is much simpler than Omniture. Also Google Analytics is faster and free! Adobe have got their work cut out for them.
@Tabowm:
Google Analytics is just as powerful and capable as Omniture. It’s been my experience that the number of issues that I have seen come up from the few Omniture implementations I’ve been involved in has surpassed every one of the hundreds of Google Analytics implementations.
Omniture will never be as good or usable as google analytics, even under the Adobe brand. The Omniture Suite 14 is cluttered and confusing and the fact that Omniture make so few implementations shows a lack of vision, even there Excel client is hit and miss. I agree with you that Google is as powerful and capable as Omniture and vice-versa but Google are a much bigger and more powerful company than Adobe and have major brand awareness and the internet is there business as they have created a lot of today’s standards.