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At its core, e-commerce is about maximizing profit. Knowing which products are most profitable and/or most popular can help you to make more informed decisions about both your website and product lines. The new version of Google Analytics makes it simple to find the information you need.

So you want to start tracking your marketing efforts. Setting up tools like Google Analytics is a great way to stay on top of your data and ultimately on top of your marketing efforts. Unique visits, conversions, and bounce rates are great places to start…but what if you don’t know what those things mean? Never fear, Whereoware is here to help!

A few weeks ago, we wrote about hidden gems in the new version of Google Analytics. One of the most valuable of these is the new “Real Time Reporting” option, which is still in beta, but is so feature-rich that it deserves its own separate blog post. So, without further ado, let’s explore.

The new interface of Google Analytics has been live for a few months now and we have discovered some great features that weren’t heavily promoted in the initial excitement.

These “hidden gems” have been right under your nose, providing brand new information on your data or perhaps just a new way of looking at the same old numbers. Here are some of our favorite innovations.

By now, you know that Google Analytics can be used for many types of analyses, from pinpointing referral sources to uncovering which keywords your customers are looking for. But if you’re an ecommerce site, you may be missing out on one of the most important features – Google Analytics’ ability to take stock of revenue stats using ecommerce tracking.

Sounds great, but how?

We’ve talked about the benefits of working social media into both your website and email campaigns. With any luck, the two efforts will play off of each other, encouraging site visitors to sign up for emails and driving email recipients to your site. But how do you know if your social media efforts are having any effect?

Some important social metrics can’t be measured by Google Analytics, such as the number of comments on your blog posts, number of followers who are sharing your content or the number of followers who like your content. The Google Analytics platform, however, is a great place to look for information on the effects of social on your website.

If you’ve gone to an ecommerce website in the last decade, there’s a good chance you’ve used a site’s internal search. Web designers have gotten wise to the fact that many customers know exactly that they’re searching for and don’t want to browse through products to find it. That’s why most sites, nowadays, have an internal search bar.

Your customers are using internal search. Why aren’t you?

 You may have noticed that Google has rolled out changes across many of their platforms recently. One area that this affects is Google Analytics. While it’s very different from the old version, these changes are largely for the better.

To access the new interface, log in to your account and click “New Version” at the top right of your screen next to your email address.

Digital marketing has long been cursed with attributing conversion to the last action a user took. For example, if a customer arrives at your site via organic search and then makes a purchase, most platforms (including Google Analytics) attributed this credit solely to SEO success. While this does tell you that the person ended up converting because of your SEO strategy, it doesn’t show you the complete picture.

Often times, it’s difficult to get a sense of a site’s performance when you’re flipping back and forth between stats on said performance and an image of the layout itself. Google Analytics’ “In-Page Analytics” feature, a floating overlay that shows layers helpful statistics on top of a real-time image of a page, is a handy way to view both at once.

If you are like most companies, most of your organic search comes from branded terms, aka people who have already heard of your company. You can get a lot more insight if you filter out the branded terms and see how true prospects are finding you.

The how to:

Not every person has a good memory. Sometimes it’s hard to remember names or faces, or even where you put your keys in the morning. So it’s no surprise that while juggling the many pieces that go into making a successful ecommerce business, people often tend to forget what their previous moves were.

Google Analytics provides the perfect examples of this, both of the problem and a resolution. We all like seeing positive changes in our data, whether it’s an increase in visits, conversions, time on site, etc. But unless you can figure what happened at that moment in time that may have caused the change, you’ll never be able to replicate it to achieve the same results.

Google Analytics allows you to track where your customers are coming from. In your account, click on the ‘Traffic Sources’ bar on the left hand side (1.), and it will show you an ‘Overview’ of traffic coming to your site. Information on the different sources is displayed prominently on the screen (2.).

Google shows that there are three different ways customers ended up on your site, but what exactly do these mean? We’ll use a coffee shop example to explain.

Picture this: it's a Monday morning, and you're going about your usual business of monitoring activity on the company website. You comb through the information on Google Analytics. The landing and exit pages are trending in a predictable pattern, your AdWords campaigns are doing well, and most factors appear to be normal. However, the Google Analytics pageview graph shows an inexplicable bump in last week’s data…an increase in homepage visits.

A co-worker suggests that this may be a fluke occurrence, with consumers making purchases in anticipation of the weekend's activities. However, neither of you can recall this type of increase in weeks past – was it there, but less pronounced? The only way to tell if this is anything out of the ordinary is to compare this week's numbers to those from previous weeks. Google Analytics has a handy built-in feature which will allow you to compare data between any time periods.

Comparing dates, step by step...

Every time we turn around someone is asking us about mobile. It is obviously in the forefront of many people’s mind and rightly so. Mobile traffic is growing at light speed. According to study by Cisco, it is estimated that global mobile web traffic grew 159% in 2010. That is 4.2 times faster than standard broadband traffic. The study predicts by 2015, smartphones and tablets will make up just over 30% of the mobile market.

So we know that optimizing your site for mobile is important, but how important is it to you right now? Google Analytics makes it super easy for you to find that out. You can see the number of people using mobile devices to access your website, where they are coming from and what they are doing on your site, allowing you to make decisions based on actual usage, instead of guessing.