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If you don’t know where you are, you can’t know where you’re heading. I find that this saying rings true when it comes to managing and scaling your startup from lessons I learned from CXL institute

So knowing the ins and outs of your analytics is crucial because without a robust approach to your analytics dashboards you won’t know

Once you master Marketing analytics, you’ll know what encourages customers to interact with your product, and what pushes them to close the tab altogether. So, I’ve put this article to help you become a data-crunching machine

The 5 types of metrics you must know about

When it comes to knowing which product metrics to analyze, here are the fundamentals

1. Audience

Analytics information about your target audience provides you with insights into your customers’ geographic location, age, gender, and perhaps their interests or product preferences.

2. Acquisition

This data informs you how exactly your customers found your store, and how they arrived at your site. This information indicates which marketing channels your brand should focus on

3. Behavior

This data shows you how your customers respond to information on your web site. Customer behavior relates to the content customers click, the products that interest them, and what they buy. The data could include how long customers spend before making a purchase or leaving the site.

4. Conversions

Conversion data refers to the point when an online user turns into an actual customer. You should track conversion data over time and identify when conversion rates increase, decrease, and the potential causes.

How to configure Google Analytics for your product

While Google Analytics is an excellent tool, there are several configurations you need to make so you can get the best out of it. Let’s take a look at the most important actions you should take to get the most out of the tool.

1. Set up your Google Analytics in Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free tool for deploying tracking and remarketing code in a simple interface. The tool removes the need for developers to add or remove pixels. Marketers have control to add or remove pixels without having to know any JavaScript, PHP, or HTML.

1. Sign up for GTM and specify where the container will be used
2. Create a new tag
3. Enter your GA tracking code and tracking type
4. Set the trigger for “All Pages”, so the tag fires on every page visit

2. Register and verify your site with Google Search Console

From an SEO perspective, having a Google Search Console (GSC) account is essential because it can help monitor your website’s status, “crawlability”, and keyword ranking on Google.

1. Register your product site’s domain
2. Verify the domain through either GTM or GSC
3. Upload an XML sitemap so Google can index your site faster.

3. Verify checkout tracking

One common reason that cart abandonment happens has to do with the checkout process. According to the Baymard Institute, 28% of users abandon cart due to a long or complicated checkout process.

Checkout tracking is essential for understanding when users drop out of the process. Track each stage of the checkout section by ensuring each page of the process has a distinct URL. For example:

4. Enable site search

Knowing what your customers search for on your eCommerce site is golden because it helps you to find specific keywords that keep popping up and allows you to unearth new search terms.

Google Analytics provides you with a report of the keywords your visitors. Whenever users search your site, the search queries are in the URL.

For example, if your users wanted to search for “Metal Reusable Water Bottles,” the URL will show the following:

1. Go to your Analytics account
2. Set Site Search Tracking on under Admin > View Settings > Site Search Settings

5. Customize tracking campaigns

By default, Google Analytics segments your incoming traffic from multiple sources and channels. Here’s Google Analytics’ default channel grouping:

• Direct: Customers access your site by typing in your web address into their browser.
• Organic Search: Traffic via organic search engine results.
• Paid Search: Traffic via a paid search engine ad, like Google Ads.
• Display: Traffic via a display, banner or content ads.
• Social: Customers came to your site via social media, or from a campaign that has been tagged as social media.
• Email: Visitors that came to the site via a link embedded in an email campaign.
• Affiliate: Customers came across your site or brand via an affiliate campaign.
• Referral: Customers access your site via a review article or coverage by a news outlet.

Occasionally, Google Analytics will incorrectly classify your traffic within the groups shown above, or the traffic doesn’t fall into any of the categories.

But, you can set Google Analytics to classify your traffic by using URL Query String Tags. This helps you capture additional traffic from PDFs, dark social sharing, HTTP to HTTPS redirections, and more.

Filter bots and spiders

Non-human traffic like bots can inflate your metrics and lead to data inaccuracies. To resolve this issue, you need to filter out traffic from bots.

1. Navigate to Bot Filtering in View Settings,
2. Tick the checkbox that reads “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders”

The essential Google Analytics metrics and reports you should know

Once you have configured Google Analytics, you can access several Product metrics. There are two types of google analytics reports:

• Standard: See basic data like conversions, average order value, products, and transactions.
• Enhanced: See standard report data, which items are added to carts, and shopping behavior.

Now, let’s take a look at what product metrics Google Analytics provides.

1. The standard metrics

These are the metrics that you can get from Google Analytics Standard Report:

1. Conversion Rate: Total Transactions/Total Sessions x 100
2. Transaction: Total number of purchases ordered on the site.
3. Revenue: Top line revenue during a specified time period. This figure may include tax and shipping, but this depends on how it has been set.
4. Average Order Value: Total Revenue/Total Transactions

. The enhanced eCommerce metrics

Enhanced Ecommerce gives a better picture of the customer journey. You can view the “Enhanced” reports via the left-hand menu of the Google Analytics’ dashboard.