Google Analytics E-commerce Reports

Overview of Analytics E-commerce Reports

Objective: In this module you'll learn about e-commerce reports and how to interpret them. Some examples of the kind of information you can get from the e-commerce reports include:

• the products that were purchased from your online store
• your sales revenue
• your e-commerce conversion rate
• the number of times people visited your site before purchasing

Interpreting Analytics E-commerce Reports

Overview: The report provides an overview of e-commerce activity on your site. Revenue is the value of purchases.
Conversion Rate is the percentage of visits that results in a purchase. Transactions is the number of purchase orders and Average Order Value is the average revenue from each of those purchases. Purchased Products shows how many different products (SKUs) were sold.

Total Revenue: Revenue is determined by the number of purchases and the average purchase value. Some important steps you can take to maximize revenue are:

1. Purchase targeted advertising and write effective ads (see the Traffic Sources reports)
2. Make sure your landing pages show the information, services, or products that you promise in your ads (review the Content reports to help minimize bounce rates)
3. Simplify your conversion funnels so that fewer would-be customers abandon the checkout process (review the Goals reports)

Conversion Rate: This report shows the rate at which visits to your site result in purchases. Tracking conversion rates over time is an effective way of determining whether your marketing and website are becoming more or less efficient at turning visitors into customers. Note that conversion rates are most useful as company-specific benchmarks against which to assess marketing and site effectiveness because conversion rates vary considerably across businesses (even within the same industry).

Average Order Value: Tracking changes to the average order value over time is important to catalog sites that may change and shift which products and services they are actively marketing. Many e-commerce sites monitor this metric to see if cross promotions are working. This is an important metric that works its way into many higher level executive and shareholder reports.

Product Overview (Product Performance): How much of each product do you sell? This report shows the number of items sold, the total revenue, the average price, and the average order quantity for each product you sell online. Click any SKU to drill down and view detail.

Product SKUs (Product Performance): This report shows the number of items for each SKU sold, the total revenue, the average price, and the average order quantity for each product you sell online.

Categories (Product Performance): How much of each product category, product, and SKU do you sell? For e-commerce sites, understanding which products are selling online is crucial for generating relevant content, promotions and advertisements. This report shows the number of items sold, the total revenue, the average price, and the average order quantity for each product you sell online.

Transactions: This report is a list of all transactions on your site, useful for auditing your transactions.

Visits to Purchase: How many visits does it take for visitors to purchase? Understanding your sales cycle is important to the overall success of your site. This report helps you understand how many visits it takes to convert your visitors into customers and, by extension, the kind of content you need to create in order to reach your prospects.

Days to Purchase: How long does it take before visitors make a purchase? Understanding your sales cycle is important to the overall success of your site. This report helps you understand how long it takes to convert your visitors into customers and, by extension, the kind of content you need to create in order to reach your prospects.