Google Analytics™ Third Edition

Chapter 20. E-Commerce Tracking

Transactions, revenue, product performance—all these are elements or factors in an e-commerce business. They're also measurements of how successful your e-commerce business is at driving sales.

These measurements are important in helping you track and monitor what works and what doesn't in your e-commerce infrastructure. How many days does it take before a user makes a purchase? How much time do visitors spend on your site? And most important, how does this information fit with all the other data that you've examined in Google Analytics?

Your e-commerce measurements can tell you. Commerce is defined as the buying and selling of goods. On a macroeconomic level, commerce could represent all of the sales within a city, state, or region, but we're not concerned with macroeconomics. Rather, we're concerned with microeconomics—the buying and selling of goods on a specific web site: your web site.

Even more specifically, you're probably concerned with how much you're selling from your web site. It's not enough just to know what you're selling, though. You also need to know how those sales happen because when you know, you can duplicate the process.

Google Analytics provides reports that help you understand the circumstances under which your products are sold. For example, do you sell more products on Monday than on any other day of the week? You can know for sure using the reports in this section.

Note

There's more to enabling e-commerce tracking than just turning ...