Electronic commerce has opened a new way to market products by means of electronic system such as the internet and other computer system. E-commerce website play a vital role in selling products online. To be successful in e-commerce industry it is important to track the activity of customers and visitors of your e commerce website. So far tracking the activity of each and every user from a centralized facility is a difficult task.
With the introduction of Google analytics, a free service offered by google, tracking and analyzing the user behavior online is easier than before. Google analytics or a cross platform web based application that generates detailed stats about visitors of a website. The Ability of GA to track visitors from all the sources like search engines, advertisements, email marketing and other digital sources like pdf document, makes it a sophisticated application over the web.

GA DashBoard

Features that make GA an essential part of an e commerce website

1. Funnel visualization
A funnel path is a series of pages through which a visitor is expected pas before reaching the final goal. Where as a goal is a page where visitors reach once they have completed an action. (Example: A receipt page after making a donation).

Funnel visualization help you understand the following things.

  •  From which point in the funnel path people tends to leave
  •  What does turn them away? Is there any design element that don’t work here?
  •  Which funnels path convert the best.

By setting up a proper goal for your website you can make smarter decisions from the information provided with the goal such as

  •  Which marketing campaign or referral brought most visitors
  •  The geographic location of converting visitors
  •   The keyword that leads to goal conversation

2. Traffic channel tracking

This feature allows you to track traffic from both Google AdWords and non Google AdWords advertisement campaign. By linking GA to your AdWord account you can measure campaign ROI and on site performance. Since GA can track all search queries and referring source that send traffic to your website, by adding tag information in the other advertisement campaign you can estimate the ROI of same. Apart from adding campaign tracking the traffic channel will help you to obtain information such as which keyword is delivering organic traffic to your website.

3. ECommerce tracking

This feature allows you to track sales activity and performance. The information provided are

  •   Transaction detail
  •   Revenue
  •   E commerce conversion rate
  •   Number of times people visited your website before purchasing
  •   List of products that where purchased from your website

4. On-site search tracking

Another most important feature of GA is the ability to produce internal search report. On site search tracking feature generate reports on how people search once they entered your website. By analyzing the search report following things can be found out
Which product or item is the users are searching for
Where visitors started their search
Where they ended after the search
Whether the search result is worthy for user

5. Regular expressions

Apart from predefined goal set and filters GA provides you regular expressions to create flexible goal and powerful filters
List of regular expressions characters used in GA are given below.

.Matches any single character 
*Matches zero or more of the previous item
?Matches zero or one of the previous item
|Lets you do an “or” match
^Requires that your data be at the beginning of its field
$Requires that your data be at the end of its field
()Use parenthesis to create an item, instead of accepting the default
[]Use brackets to create a list of items to match to
–Use dashes with brackets to extend your list
\Turns a regular expression character into an everyday character

6. Social media integration

Social activities are key in e commerce website. With the help of social media integration you can track social activities in your website and happening outside of your website. It shows traffics from various social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter etc.
Google +is automatically integrated into GA . In order to integrate other social media applications you have to use the track social function which provides uses the following information
The social network being tracked such as facebook twitter
The social action to be tracked such as like and share
The target URL which receives the action
The page from which action occurred

References

1: http://www.google.com/analytics/
2: http://www.google.com/analytics/learn/
3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm78xlsADgc
4: https://developers.google.com/analytics/solutions/articles/hello-analytics-api
5: Google Analytics Guide [email protected]
6: Google Analytics Guide DBD Media