3 Google Analytics Reports You Haven’t Used for Your Magento Store

Guest Post by Tom Bukevicius, Principal at SCUBE Marketing: 

As the first in a series of guest posts, we’re proud to present this article by Tom Bukevicius, a Chicago-area PPC expert and taco aficionado. At SCUBE, he helps clients make the most of their traffic and PPC investment, and in this post, he shares 3 awesome ways you can make the most of your traffic by looking deeper with Google Analytics.

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As a Principal at a digital marketing agency, I am exposed to analytics often. There are a lot of metrics to review, but the most important ones are what I call “money metrics.” These metrics cover store revenues, advertising costs, transaction volume, etc.

Google Analytics is an excellent tool to understand how much money your Magento store is generating. Every time I log into Google Analytics I say:

Google Analytics is capable of showing the “money metrics”, but you need to know where to go. Today, I will share three reports that I bet you haven’t used. They will show you:

1. Where the money is coming from.
2. What path your buyers take to purchase.
3. Where buyers get stuck during the checkout process.

Where The Money Is Coming From

Channels Report is a very popular report. It will show you the traffic, user behavior and E-Commerce revenue by traffic source. See the screenshot below.

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Note that this report doesn’t come like this out of the box. You’ll want to make sure that you have Enhanced Ecommerce integrated with your Magento store. Without it, you will only see traffic and user behavior metrics – forcing you to make wild guesses and making it hard to improve performance.

Why I Love This Report?

I can see the performance of each channel. This allows me to evaluate and direct marketing investment into the channels that perform best. This becomes particularly useful when you start paying for traffic and need to measure the ROI.

How to Find Channels Report

Here is where you can find this report. Channels Reports sits in the Reporting section of Google Analytics. On the left menu, find the Acquisition tab, then navigate to All Traffic, then Channels. See the screenshot below.

Take Channels Report To The Next Level

If you’ve used the basic features of this report, good. However, there is one caveat, it uses Google’s Default Channel Groupings. If you have many traffic sources, you will lose the accuracy of each channel group.

You can take it to the next level by applying Custom Channel Definitions, which allow you to define your own channels. Here is what it looks like.

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You will notice that the channel names are slightly different, and associated metrics are different as well. Every channel is customized and defined based on your needs. Imagine Custom Channel Definitions as a filter with the right information for your Channels Report.

You can create multiple filters if you have different definitions of traffic. To access your definitions use the dropdown menu under Default Channel Grouping and select your custom view.

The example below has two custom channel definitions for two different audiences:

1. Executive view (higher level)
2. Analyst view (more detailed level)

Note that Custom Channel Definitions don’t come out of the box with your Google Analytics installation. To set these up, use this step by step guide.

Now that you know where the money comes from, it’s time to dig deeper.

What Path Your Buyers Take To Purchase

Your buyers are already distracted with an overwhelming amount of information on the internet. On top of that their attention is already divided among multiple devices and channels.

That’s one of the reasons why 95% of first-time visitors don’t convert. 46% of them need 3 or more visits to purchase.

For this reason, you need to accept the reality, track your buyer path to purchase and take steps steer them in the right direction.

Enter the Path Length Report

Path Length report shows you how many interactions your buyers need before they purchase. An example below show that 68% of buyers purchase within one interaction. However, 27% need between 2 and 4 interactions.

This example shows us that we may need to launch retargeting and email follow up sequences to get buyers back to the website.

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How to Find Path Length Report

On the left menu, find Conversions tab, open Multi-Channel Funnels section, then navigate to Path Length. See the screenshot below.

Take Path Length Report To The Next Level

Once you know how to navigate the Path Length Report, you can go deeper to understand your buyers. You can apply conversion segments based on traffic source of the first or last touch point, time lag and path length.

In addition, you can customize a lookback window. Lookback window is important because it reflects your user buying cycle and sets the time period for attributing revenue to traffic sources. See the screenshot below for customizing your Path Length report.

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Now you know how to track your buyer path to purchase, it’s time to take a look at where they get stuck during purchase.

Where Buyers Get Stuck During the Checkout Process

Your checkout process may have barriers to purchase. Buyers can get stuck like this puppy, and you may not even know about it.

Enter Checkout Behavior Analysis Report

This report gives you a snapshot of the steps in your checkout process. The neat thing about it is you see a clear progression with specific areas where buyers drop off. See example below.

 

This report helps you to problem solve the barriers your checkout process creates for the users.

In the example above, you can see that 47% of the buyers drop off after we ask them for their contact info. This begs a question if we ask for too much information, if the form has errors, if the call to action button isn’t clear, etc.

Another step from the example is the Payment step with a 52% drop off rate. Based on this data, we can start the analysis and forming hypotheses on potential problem areas of this step.

How to Find Checkout Behavior Analysis Report

On the left menu, find Conversions tab, open E-Commerce section, then Shopping Analysis, and finally Checkout Behavior.

Take Checkout Behavior Analysis Report To The Next Level

Once you see the snapshot of your checkout funnel, it’s time to go granular to other dimensions, because some of the answers can exist there. By default, Checkout Behavior Analysis report breaks the traffic down into new and returning visitors. Which is great. However, you can drill down into other insightful dimensions such as:

• Geography
• Keyword
• Source or Medium
• Device

All of these dimensions and their subcategories enable you to identify opportunities for improvement. In addition, you can switch between completed and abandoned visits within each dimension.

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Next steps

Hopefully, by this time, the “Show Me The Money” reports and their customizations will make your Google Analytics experience more insightful. Now you can log into Google Analytics and say show me:

• “Which traffic sources generate the most money for my Magento store?”
• “How long is the path my buyers take to generate the revenue for my Magento store?”
• “Where do my Magento store buyers get stuck preventing to complete the purchase?”

The insights you will generate will be useful.  But don’t stop there. Dig deeper into reports, take action based on the insights, and reap the rewards.