Tracking e-commerce transactions
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Written by Atila on September 2, 2008 – 3:39 am
In order to properly gauge what traffic sources are the most successful for an e-commerce Web site, you must track all your Web site transactions. Tracking e-commerce transactions allows you to attach a solid dollar value to each keyword that brings visitors to your site, as well as an average value per visit from each of your traffic sources.
Once you have e-commerce tracking properly installed, you can order your traffic sources and referring keywords by their dollar value. This process allows you to prioritize the most valuable keywords and other traffic sources for your Web site.
Before you can track any of your Web site transactions or view reports that attach dollar values to your traffic sources, you must first correctly set Google Analytics to catch the order data from your shopping cart. The first step in this process is letting Google Analytics know that you are running an e-commerce Web site.
Having access to Google Analytics e-commerce data such as keyword profitability enables you to aggressively target the keywords that have the highest conversion ratio for your site. If there are a lot of sales coming in from a certain linking partner, you can consider a media buy to get more exposure to that audience.
This form of selective targeting ensures that you reap the largest return possible from your SEO and marketing efforts, by making sure your promotions go towards keywords that your reporting data predicts will consistently convert into sales. This is a perfect example of a way you can work smarter instead of harder.
A lot of the time there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Instead, just improve on what you know already works for your particular Web site.
After e-commerce tracking is successfully installed, allow time to pass so that there is enough meaningful data collected to allow you to make accurate decisions. Depending on your sales volume, a month or less should be a sufficient time frame to collect meaningful data. View the E-commerce report for your Web site profile. In the bottom-right corner, your sales sources are listed. Click any of these links that are search engines. For example, use Google Organic. Clicking Google Organic opens the list of your top keywords for the month. Click the Revenue column to sort your keywords by the amount of revenue each accounted for. You now have a list of your most valuable keywords.
Next, visit www.google.com and start searching for your top keywords from that list you just viewed. Where is your site ranking for those keywords? If the answer is not position 1, you have found some potential targets for search-engine optimization, and possibly even for pay-per-click. Targeting your top keywords and making sure you are ranked as highly as possible for them ensures that you make the most revenue from your searchengine efforts.
