Is Google Analytics Worth It for E-Commerce Merchants?


Published May 24, 2022.

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. It is one of the best e-commerce analytics tools on the internet. This article will discuss the many merits of using Google Analytics and show you how this tool can improve your e-commerce business.
Is Google Analytics Good for E-Commerce?
Google Analytics is an excellent tool for real-time analytics on website traffic, user behavior, buyer personas, which pages are top performers, and conversion rates.
In particular, Google Analytics can track user analytics metrics such as:
- The number of people who visit your website
- Where visitors are coming from (e.g., organic search, paid search, social media, etc.)
- What pages people are visiting on your website
- How much time people are spending on your website
- What devices people are using to access your website
The Role of Google Analytics in E-Commerce
Knowing the customer's journey—the path of interactions each customer takes before making a purchase—can help e-commerce sellers construct their websites and marketing tactics to drive consumers to convert.
Google Analytics offers an excellent set of analytics crucial for analyzing the market and gaining insight into your customers' shopping habits.
How Can Google Analytics Improve E-Commerce?
Using e-commerce analytics to boost sales is a precise and measurable business tool for success. Here are some ways that online entrepreneurs will benefit from Google Analytics.
Reducing Customer Churn Rates
Google Analytics allows e-commerce merchants to gather data that will equip them to target specific audiences that more precisely match their customer profile. This can reduce customer churn rates.
Creating a Sales Funnel
Google Analytics can help you evaluate whether your website is achieving your goals when you create a sales funnel, also known as a conversion goal. By analyzing the metrics derived from tracking the customer journey from lead generation to signup, to purchase, to repurchase, you can better tweak your marketing activities to boost your e-commerce conversion rate.
Analyzing Consumer Behavior
Familiarizing yourself with your site's consumer behavior data is crucial to securing conversions. Google Analytics for e-commerce gives you access to a checkout behavior analysis report that shows you how successfully your users moved through your checkout process and, more crucially, the percentage of users who abandon your site at each stage of checkout. This data can help you understand why a customer abandoned a shopping cart and ways you can eliminate the barriers preventing them from finalizing a sale.
Product Analysis
Product analytics metrics derived from Google Analytics can help businesses understand which of their product features are being used by their customers. The purpose of product analysis is to identify how a product or service is performing in the market by measuring, analyzing, and interpreting data on a product and its users. By understanding how customers interact with a product, companies can make changes to the product to make it more user-friendly and efficient.
Shopify
Many online shops run their businesses on Shopify, and while the platform does come with the Shopify Analytics tool, it has its limitations. You can't drill down into site metrics. For a deeper analysis of your consumers and your site's user experience, you should add Google Analytics to your Shopify platform.
By understanding how people are interacting with their website, businesses can make changes that will improve the user experience and increase conversions.