In the coming months, we will look at how your Magento webshop can be further improved. Each sub-blog will cover a part where we see in practice that there are still a lot of gains to be made. In this first blog, we will look at how you can use Google Analytics in 4 steps to gain insight into your Magento webshop and achieve continuous improvement. The 4 steps are:

• Step 1: Defining your goals for your webshop
• Step 2: Setting up your Google Analytics account
• Step 3: Analysing your data and defining your KPIs
• Step 4: Plotting actions and adjusting your KPIs

Why use Google Analytics?

But before we start, a little more about Google Analytics. Google Analytics is free software for measuring what happens on your webshop. It gives you insight into all kinds of important indicators such as:

• Where your visitors are coming from;
• From which marketing channels you get a lot of traffic and where there are still opportunities;
• What are the conversion rates of your webshop;
• What percentage of your users view your Magento webshop using a smartphone or tablet.

Step 1: defining your goals for your magento webshop

Before starting your webshop, it is important to determine the goals of your webshop. Often, the focus is only on sales, while there are often other goals that determine the success of the webshop. Also, the goals of a B2B webshop are often different from those of a B2C webshop. Some examples of goals:

• Acquiring new customers
• Helping customers find the right products
• Newsletter subscriptions
• Obtaining reviews on product purchases
• User interaction with your webshop

Step 2: setting up your Google Analytics account

In practice, we usually see that Google Analytics is on, but nothing else is set up. A pity, because a good set-up ensures that you can retrieve the right information. Therefore, make sure you have at least the following things set up:

Linking your Magento webshop with Google Analytics

The first step is to link your Magento webshop to Google Analytics. Magento has made this extra easy for us with its built-in default link. If you are logged into Magento admin and go to System/Google API, you can enter your Google Analytics account number here.

Creating two data views in Google Analytics

The moment your Magento webshop is linked to Google Analytics, you get to see the first data in Google Analytics. To make sure you get a good picture, it is important to create at least two views in Google Analytics, namely:

• All data: this view does not contain filters but here all data is displayed.
• Filters: you use this view to do your analysis. In this view, you exclude your own IP address, and also, for example, the IP address of your Magento partner.

Exclusion of IP addresses

In Google Analytics, you can choose filters in your data view:

Make sure to exclude IP addresses from your office here, but also from your Magento partner or marketing agency. You can also exclude certain websites here that cause a lot of unwanted traffic.

Enabling e-commerce functionality

By default, Google Analytics does not have e-commerce functionality enabled. But by going to Management/E-commerce settings go, this setting can easily be turned on. This gives you instant access to more data, such as product performance.

Setting your goals for your Magento webshop

In step 1, you determined your goals for your webshop. When setting up Google Analytics, it is important that these goals are set correctly. You set up your goals at "Manage/Targets".

You can assign a value to each goal and also the intermediate steps that need to be carried out. This gives you a good overview of the conversions on your goal and which intermediate steps need to be improved to achieve more conversions in your Magento webshop.

Step 3: Analysing your data and defining your KPIs

The moment you have determined the goals for your webshop and set up Google Analytics properly, you can start analysing your data. There are a number of standard reports in Google Analytics that can help you do this. Some examples of good reports to start with:

• exit pages: what are the pages from where your customer leaves the webshop?
• Conversion rate for your webshop's goals;
• page load times: which pages perform above average?

The moment you have a good idea of where improvements can be made, you can get to work drafting your KPIs. Your KPIs are your action metrics. For example: if your analysis shows that 80% of users drop out of the checkout, you can set up a KPI for this, such as: within 12 months, the percentage of users dropping out of the checkout should be reduced to 50%.

Step 4: plotting actions and adjusting your KPIs

The moment you have determined your KPIs, you can get to work plotting your actions. For example, if you see that certain pages have a very long loading time, you can look into the cause of this. The moment you have made a change for an action, you can make a so-called 'annotation' in Google Analytics.

This makes it very easy to track the result of your actions.

For tracking your KPIs, Google Analytics has a handy tool, namely the ability to create your own Dashboard.

On your Dashboard, you put your KPIs, making it very easy to take a look at your KPIs every week and set out actions to improve them further.

Want to know more about the possibilities?

Want to know more about the possibilities of using Google Analytics for continuous improvement of your Magento webshop or do you want to start applying these steps but still need some help? Please contact us. Are you on Pro Support with us? Then we will contact you to see together how we can apply these steps and ensure that your goals are met.