Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool by Google that offers certain metrics about your website like: what is the web traffic, who visits your website, what location visitors arrive from, and what are your user attributes and behaviors. Google Analytics for e-commerce websites is a crucial tool for online sellers to better understand their customers and to know which products perform the best.
Why is it important?
Your website is at the center of your digital presence. Through web analytics, you can determine who your audience is and who you should target through your marketing whether it be Facebook, Linkedin, or other channels. Over 50 million people around the world have Google Analytics installed on their websites to help them make more strategic business decisions. Google Analytics for Shopify, for example, assists sellers to identify what products customers like and helps sellers to improve their experience (and the more enjoyable the experience, the more likely they are to complete a purchase).
How does it work?
Google Analytics is a code embedded in your website that collects data on all aspects of the web traffic from which pages people are visiting, who is visiting, what people are clicking, and so on. All of the data is sent to Google and they aggregate the data to provide you with information that is relevant to your business. They aggregate data on four levels:
- User level (related to actions by each user)
- Session level (each individual visit)
- Pageview level (each individual page visited)
- Event level (button clicks, video views, etc)
What kind of data is being collected?
- Metrics: Concrete data collected about your website (how many people visit, duration of visit, etc.).
- Dimensions: User demographics, male or female, geographic location of visitors. This helps you make business decisions of where to most effectively market your business.
2 Types of Data:
- Before Users Visit (Acquisition Data): You can see the demographics of your users and where the traffic is coming from (i.e organic search or paid ads) in order to determine what is the most optimal channel to advertise.
- During User Visit: Data about where customers drop off as some pages on websites have errors where users may drop off (ex. Issue with “Add to Cart”).