Google Analytics can be a powerful tool that provides impactful data to e-commerce merchants if they use it correctly. However, installing it incorrectly can produce inaccurate reports, and this can lead to wrong actions. We’ll address common mistakes make e-commerce merchants make when installing Google Analytics and using the data.
- Missing Tags – Having duplicate tags, incorrect tags or incorrect placement can lead to flawed or misleading data. You want to make sure that you’re using relevant tags in all of your products to draw the most traffic.
- Self-Referrals – Reporting traffic from company insiders, employees or yourself can lead to incorrect data. You want to ensure that you exclude your home, company and office IP addresses from your report. An exception to this is if you should happen to make a phone sale.
- Using Incomplete or Short Time Frames – When you measure growth, compare month-to-date or prior month results and compare them to the exact same time a year ago. This will give you a clear picture of whether or not your business is growing. Many e-commerce merchants compare month to month, and this doesn’t show accurate growth.
- Ignoring Revenue and Conversion Rates – Merchants usually look at average page views, bounce rates and average time on site in favour of ignoring revenue and conversion rates. Optimise all of your channels for conversions because this is where your profits are and use Google Analytics to measure these each month.
- Referrals from Payment Platforms – If you focus on your referrals from payment platforms like PayPal, you’ll get skewed results. Customers leave your site, go to the payment platform and come back to your site once they process the payment. This massively increases your numbers, and you want to avoid it to keep them accurate.
- Analysing Your Customer’s Click Paths – In Google Analytics, click paths are very difficult and confusing to try and follow from start to end. They’re very time-consuming as well. Instead of focusing on them, you wan to focus on creating a path-to-purchase funnel to identify the steps that lead to customers abandoning their carts so you can fix them.
These few quick tips can help e-commerce merchants avoid the most common mistakes we see when they use Google Analytics. Instead, they can skip these mistakes and focus on the analytics that is going to bring revenue and growth to their business year after year.
