Tracking and Analysing with Analytics
If you’re running a WordPress website, it is very common to use Google Analytics to track and analyse the visitors to your website.
But did you know that Google Analytics also has some advanced eCommerce tracking features:
The Ecommerce reports allow you to analyse purchase activity on your site or app. You can see product and transaction information, average order value, ecommerce conversion rate, time to purchase, and other data.
Benefits of Using Google Analytics for WooCommerce
Setting up eCommerce tracking in Analytics will let you see vital information such as total/average revenue, conversion rates, product revenues, cart/checkout conversion rates and abandonment rates, and more.
Being able to measure this information is an absolute necessity in order to improve and optimise your store’s conversion rates. It will also help you understand whether most of your sales are coming in via organic search, paid search, referrals, email or social media, which will help you make informed decisions on where best to spend your marketing/advertising resources.
Setting up WooCommerce Analytics Tracking
While it used to be quite difficult to set up eCommerce tracking to work with WooCommerce, these days it is quite straightforward.
Here is a simple set of steps to follow:
- If you aren’t already using Google Analytics on your website, sign up for an account. Create the Property and View for your website.
- To configure for WooCommerce, in Google Analytics, click on the website View, then click on Admin, View, Ecommerce Settings then configure the following:
- Set “Enable Ecommerce” to On.
- Set “Enable Enhanced Ecommerce Reporting” to On.
- Save, then click on “View Settings”
- Set the “Currency displayed as” setting to match your WooCommerce currency.
- Save your Analytics View settings.
- Return to your WordPress dashboard, and install and activate the WooCommerce Google Analytics plugin. This free plugin is written by WooCommerce core developers, and allows WooCommerce to send your transaction/sales data across to Analytics.
- Our recommended settings for the WooCommerce Google Analytics plugin are as follows, you can easily customise them to suit your needs:
- Enter your Google Analytics Tracking ID – get this from the Properties tab of your Google Analytics account
- Leave the domain name blank when using Universal Analytics
- Tracking Options: tick the boxes to enable the Global Site Tag, Universal Analytics and Enable Standard Tracking. This will add the Google UA id tag to all pages/products on your site.
- Use the Display Advertising and Enhanced Link Attribution options if relevant to you, otherwise leave blank
- Turn on the Anyonymise IP Addresses, or if you leave off ensure you check your privacy obligations and ensure you display the correct information to your site visitors.
- Turn on the tracking for Purchase Transactions and for the advanced eCommerce events you want to track (why not track all of them).
- Save the plugin’s settings
If using the PayPal payment gateway in WooCommerce, follow these instructions to configure the PayPal account’s auto return settings.
We recommend logging out of your website and placing a test order (including payment). After doing so, you’ll need to wait 12-24 hours for Google Analytics to record and analyse the data.
Next Steps
Once a few sales have rolled in, log in to Google Analytics, click on your website, then click on Conversions, eCommerce, Overview and take a look around.
The Acquisition, Overview report can also be very useful, as it will show you the conversion rates and revenue statistics for each traffic source.
You may wish to read Google’s support article which explains what information is available once eCommerce tracking has been enabled.