A selection of chapters from the book

Your filtered view in Google Analytics should be your main view that you use for day-to-day analysis and reporting. And one of the first filters that you will want to configure in this key view is the "Include My Domain" filter. The reason for this filter is that you...

In an earlier chapter we went through the Shopping Behavior Report, which delivers an overview of your sales pipeline by seeing what percentage of visitors to your website get through each stage of the funnel, and where they abandon ship. In this article we'll have a...

The tracking codes used by Google Analytics can get a bit complicated, especially if you're not a developer. I'll do by best to explain in this article how it all works. There are two eCommerce frameworks that you can use in Google Analytics - Standard Ecommerce and...

Congratulations! You have decided to set up your Google Analytics according to best practice for eCommerce businesses. You are soon going to be able to achieve rich insights from your Google Analytics data. But before you can get the insights that can help you to earn...

Lets get started on looking at your configuration. General Admin Settings The setup  for your ecommerce store will be done in the Admin area of Google Analytics. To get to Admin, click on the button on the left menu that looks like a gear. In Admin, you should already...

Having and using your eCommerce data in Google Analytics is super useful! However, before your Google Analytics account can read eCommerce data you need to turn on eCommerce tracking. You need to turn on Ecommerce Settings for each view that you want to include...

IP addresses identify groups of users, and this is something that can actually impact significantly on your eCommerce operation. The case for using IP address filters is that you want to filter out your own business' IP addresses, and the IP addresses of your...

To a human being (at least one who isn't a computer programmer), the difference between a lowercase and uppercase letter is minimal. One may be more grammatically correct than the other, but one letter out of place doesn't change the meaning of a word or sentence....

In this article, we're going to be looking at the Ecommerce Overview report. The overview report shows you important metrics for your eCommerce Activity. In the image below, you can see how to access the Overview report. By default the graph shows you your Revenue and...

The purpose for this view is to have a backup of all the data, completely unfiltered, so that if you ever lose any data due to it being filtered out of another view you can still find the data you need. Definition - Filters: In Google Analytics, filters are used to...

Comparing different demographics with each other provides us with far more insight than just looking at Google Analytics users as a single pool. Google Analytics makes this process really easy with the use of segments, ensuring that you can identify and target the...

The tracking codes used by Google Analytics can get a bit complicated, especially if you're not a developer. I'll do by best to explain in this article how it all works. There are two eCommerce frameworks that you can use in Google Analytics - Standard Ecommerce and...

The Model Comparison tool is an aspect of Google Analytics that helps you to attribute completed transactions to specific marketing campaigns. This is really useful, because you need to know whether any specific marketing campaign was good Return on Investment or poor...

Google Analytics makes it possible to gain access to a huge amount of valuable data, and this can be the difference between a successful and unsuccessful eCommerce operation. To access that data, Google Analytics makes available a wide variety of reports, and so you...

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, segmentation is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal in Google Analytics. So it is vital to make the most of the Segment Builder included in the software. This article will tell you exactly how to achieve that. Now...

Google Analytics can provide eCommerce businesses with a wealth of opportunity, but some of its best features remain unknown to the majority of users. One such feature that helps you better understand what is going on in your store involves storing parameters as...

Most eCommerce sites rely on one of the major eCommerce platforms, and fortunately most of them have some kind of automatic implementation of Enhanced Ecommerce tracking that is built in, or access to a plugin that can make your job so much easier. The most popular...

I'm a big fan of using Google Analytics data in novel ways to help you to understand what is happening on your website. One of these ways is to look at convertibility of each page. Its the equivalent of comparing the percentage of users who converted with the...

In the previous article in this series, we talked about finding out what parameters are in your URLs, and I explained that there is a way to store these parameters outside of the URL so that they can be used in Google Analytics without causing the problems of...

Product and transaction data is an important aspect of all the Google Analytics Ecommerce reports. Being able to use all the reports at your disposal is really valuable, but to do that you need to get the right data into Google Analytics. This is the trickiest part of...

When comparing segments in Google Analytics of the most useful comparisons is between conversion status. For example Transacted vs Did Not Transact, or alternatively users who reached different stages in the sales funnel. I like to compare three segments - users who...

In the previous article, Fixing the Problem of Parameters in your Ecommerce URLS in Google Analytics, you learned about what a big problem parameters can be in your URLs, but how they're also very useful because they provide insight into how your visitors are using...

If you've read other articles in this series, you are probably familiar by now with the concept of filtering data to make it more valuable for your eCommerce store. This is undoubtedly a critical aspect of your overall Google Analytics configuration. We've covered...

Segmentation analysis is when you group your website users into different buckets (segments), and look for situations in which one group has a different behaviour from another. Understanding your customers is central to being able to sell to them effectively, so this...

As we continue our detailed look at segmentation in Google Analytics, this latest article will help you to build specific segment recipes that you can create and reuse. These examples can help you to compare key audiences to each other in order to find differences...

As I was describing in my last article, Setting Ecommerce Goals in Google Analytics and Why This is So Important, one of the key aspects of Google Analytics is defining your Goals. This is how you tell Google Analytics precisely what you're looking to achieve. This is...

The practice of Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO means increasing the transactions in your eCommerce store without needing to find more traffic), or in fact any kind of business optimisation, is driven by measuring and increasing specific business outcomes. In Google...

The Product List Performance Report is the last of the built-in Ecommerce Conversions reports and is available to businesses with Enhanced Ecommerce. It is located in the Conversions menu, as shown in this image: WRONG IMAGE, WE NEED PRODUCT LIST PERFORMANCE The...

The Time to Purchase Report is another of the many eCommerce-specific reports that appears in Google Analytics. It's worth considering how long it takes your customers to purchase after first discovering your website as this helps you with your remarketing strategy....

As you are probably learning by now, there are a lot of eCommerce reports included in Google Analytics once you switch on eCommerce reporting. And it certainly makes sense to take full advantage of these if you have an eCommerce store, as they provide valuable...

Feedback from customers has always been necessary for businesses, but in the era of online commerce it can be really hard to know what people are interested in. Essentially shopping via the internet is anonymous until the final transaction. Modern online retailers...

The Product Performance Report provides a ton of useful information for your eCommerce store, and you're definitely going to want to take advantage of it. In this blog post, I will be describing some of the key data that is included in this report, and how you can use...

As we have established by now, there are a wide variety of different eCommerce-specific reports included in Google Analytics. It is valuable to be able to understand the data contained in these reports, which is why I've taken the time to walk you through them...

This article and the several following in the series will cover the topic of segmentation, as this is undoubtedly one of the key aspects of Google Analytics. Segmentation provides a powerful way to analyze your data in order to discover insights, and you're not...

The Shopping Behavior Report is another important aspect of Google Analytics, enabling you to better understand your customers. You can see the access point for the Shopping Behaviour report in the image below: If you have Enhanced Ecommerce set up in full then you...

In this article, we're going to take a look at parameters, and examine how collecting them in your Google Analytics can help your eCommerce business. My capturing parameters on the URL you can collect useful information about what your visitors are doing. But...

As I've mentioned in previous posts, the segment builder providers you with a huge amount of potential because it can help you to compare different audiences to find insights that can drive your eCommerce strategy. But in order to use the segment builder effectively,...

These settings are often overlooked when setting up Google Analytics but they can make or break your configuration. Lets look at Referral Exclusion, Cross-domain Tracking and Custom Alerts in more detail so that you don't forget to set them up. 1. Referral Exclusion...

In this blog post, I'm going to run you through why your eCommerce Business should also make use of Google Tag Manager alongside Google Analytics. However, I’m not going to go into Google Tag Manager in detail here because it is a extensive topic worthy of its own...