Driving Business Optimization using GA

Every business having presence online will need the help of analytics to measure its effectiveness for efficiently interacting with desired target audience (customers) for achieving its objectives.

Google Analytics provides some really powerful features / tools for all kinds of businesses. There are some basic features and advance features, explained in detail later in the article.

The basic features are mostly to track visits (sessions), visitors, page-views of your website across various dimensions like geo-locations, browser info, network info, time scale, source of traffic like (Search Engine, Direct, Referral) and more. Further articles will talk about advance details about these basic analytics metrics.

The second part of the analytics is very interesting, mostly used by minority of the websites. These features concern ability to store business related information like product information (for ecommerce sites), user’s info like (Age, Income, Sex, Education etc.) for websites that capture these information and finally event tracking and tracking special user actions.

These are some tools which are very available and every business should use them to fullest, because it’s free. Some of the tools like “_setvar()” functions are designed for the website owners to transfer users information from the forms designed onsite directly to Google servers. This information is user defined and stored as defined by user. Users’ can choose the variables to be stored GA system, name them with descriptive names. The huge advantage is these variables will appear alongside other pre-existing variables like visits, visitors, page-views, traffic & geo info.

Now the GA system can help you view a cross tab or a slice dice cut of data with your custom User data along with standard data such as Visitors, Type, Geo, Traffic and more. Using this imagine a Ecommerce site will now be able to view if there are more Returning visitors from people with Age group > 40 years or Bounce rate of home page is more for Age group < 22 years, how useful will this be?

Similarly a whole host of powerful insights can be obtained by combining the revenue information, user profile information and web analytics data. Few sample questions which you always wanted to know can be answered in a click of a mouse.

A)      The city that attracts the youngest population and are high paying online, do not view the movie section of your site because it’s simply not visible. They are probably landing on the wrong page.

B)      Exit Rates of pages in payment processing flow from users with low income. This will help us figure out many things like the price sensitivity of the users, navigational issues and so on..

C)      Age group, Income status, Geo location of Returning users who pay up online.

D)      Average number of visits a user makes before making a purchase online. Split this data across Age groups, Income levels etc.

E)     User segments buying maximum number of products in one transaction. You can create separate pages for selecting multiple items.

These insights along with many others help in segmentation of the user base based on revenue, activity & user information. Market Segmentation can help you create specific targeted campaigns.

There are various ways of setting up Ecommerce system in GA

A) This requires identifying the elements to be tracked and stored in GA
B) Enable Ecommerce tracking in GA console.
C) Configure the GA.js code for ecommerce tracking
D) Install the Ga.js code in “thank you” page
E) Configure the code to transfer the data captured in the form onto GA.js file. This process is done via calling _utm.gif image file, if there are 3 products purchased in a transaction then there are 4 request for the file.

You need to create a server side code to output the data in the format GA is looking for. Overall tracking business data can be very fruitful and useful for measuring success of your efforts online.

External References:
http://cutroni.com/blog/2008/01/13/google-analytics-e-commerce-tracking-pt-1-how-it-works/