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7 effective ways to optimize your online store’s conversion funnel

Posted on by Adenlab Adenlab

Building an effective conversion funnel for your website means optimizing it in a number of ways to improve your conversions and profits. This includes a set of best practices that focus on the design of your website, not just on one aspect or another, as you want to offer your users a complete package. The conversion funnel is made up of a succession of small steps. Each of these steps will improve your chances of increasing sales on your site.

In this article we’ll look at what a conversion funnel is, the parts that make it up and the 7 best ways to optimize the conversion funnel to increase sales.

What is the conversion funnel?

Easier said than done. It’s not enough to simply offer good services and products to get on the right track and make good sales. Often, it’s a little more complicated because customers can be unpredictable.
Developing and improving your conversion funnel is a good way to improve your sales. What exactly is it? It’s the path your customer or
user must follow before reaching the cart and finalizing their purchase.
In this process, there are 4 stages and, as you might expect, at each stage, there are losses. Optimizing your conversion funnel
therefore means minimizing the losses observed at each stage.

These 4 steps are:

  1. the Landing Page (Interest-Visit)
  2. the Product Page (Review-Discovery)
  3. the Purchase Page (Purchase Decision Summary)
  4. Purchase (Customer Loyalty-Settlement)

To get the most out of this funnel, each of these stages needs to be optimized in some way. In this article, we’ll examine conversion rate optimization best practices.

What do these stages mean? To begin with, all customers who visit your site, in one form or another, begin with the landing page. This is the most important stage of the funnel, and the one with the highest drop-off rate. This is where your customers will become aware of your products and services, and you need to hook them. You’ll need to provide engaging content, such as free blog posts, articles, guides, and even video guides and demos, to pique their interest.

The next stage of the funnel, which typically only 40-50% of landing page visitors reach, is the product pages. At this stage, users will be curious about your products because you’ve hooked them with an interesting landing page. This is a crucial stage, and this is where you need to provide healthy and interesting product pages. Talk about your products and provide some value, but don’t forget to include specific details that will interest certain customers.

Once customers decide your product page is compelling enough to buy, they enter the shopping cart phase of the funnel. This is a crucial step on the path to purchase, and poorly designed shopping carts are often the reason people abandon their purchases. They may add products to their cart, but never complete the purchase. There are a few best practices that can reduce the number of cart abandonments.

The last step is the purchase, when users decide to buy something it is important to have a good payment system.

Now let’s look at some of the best ways to improve your funnel overall.

Optimize your sales and your e-commerce funnel in 7 effective ways

Photo by Pickawood / Unsplash

Target ROAS uses artificial intelligence to automatically adjust bids, optimizing conversion values and ROI. Using advanced algorithms, Google Ads adjusts bids in real time to maximize performance based on your Target ROAS settings.

1 - Attracting customers via social networks (arousing interest)

The first stage of the funnel is marketing, which involves guiding visitors to your landing page. Social network marketing, in other words: being active on different social media platforms, has several advantages. Some 90% of marketing professionals believe that social networks offer broad exposure for their business activities.

By being active on several platforms, you can :

  • increase brand awareness
  • drive more traffic to your site
  • increase customer loyalty
  • improve your search engine rankings
  • boost your conversion rate

Facebook is a social network known to almost everyone, and has a large number of users. For this reason, it’s important to develop a high-performance tactic to attract Facebook users to your site. From 2018 to 2019, Facebook use by marketing professionals in the US rose from 86.3% to 86.8%, and could reach 87.1% in 2020.

Facebook ads are great, but they’re not enough. You need to design powerful ads to effectively promote your products and create a Landing Page that will make your visitors want to go deeper into the conversion funnel.

2 - Offer free, attractive content on your landing page (Interest phase)

The purpose of your Destination Page is to attract Internet users and make them want to buy your products, or at least to capture their interest. People choose pages and products that are of value to them, and at this stage, it’s just the right thing to do.

These could be short blog posts about your products and services, or a variety of promotional items.

3 - Use product proofs on your product page (Reflection phase)

When you present your products on your site, it’s important to display some kind of proof, a confirmation that your products are worth customers’ time, money and perhaps effort. The best way to do this is to display social proof (customer reviews, helpful messages or comments) on the product page. This will make your products seem more interesting.

According to a Minter report, 70% of Americans look for reviews on review sites before making a purchase. The good news is that BrightLocal found that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

4 - Optimizing your Product Pages (Examination/discovery phase)

The next step is crucial and indispensable (if you haven’t already done so): optimizing Product Pages.

This means giving customers all the information they need. Product descriptions don’t have to be boring, for example, describe how they would feel, but make sure they also include technical information.

Also include practical call-to-action buttons on your site, enabling customers to buy quickly and providing all the necessary information: shipping, costs and fees…

You can find great inspiration for your CTAs, but make sure they’re fun, unique and irresistible.

When it comes to optimizing a Product Page, web analysis is a must, especially qualitative analysis tools such as traffic maps and site path analysis. They’ll help you answer all those “Why?” questions during the optimization process.

5 - Using software to track discharge intentions (Basket stage)

Too many shopping baskets are abandoned along the way. Fortunately, there are many things you can do to reduce the number.
One of the best things you can do is create a pop-up message when the customer is about to give up.

You can do this with exit intent trackers, which can be very effective in this respect.
You can combine these trackers for an even more effective result. For example, Pixojet uses a pop-up linked to an intent tracker and a time spent tracker.

6 - Optimize your check-out (Shopping cart stage)

One of the most important parts of your conversion funnel is your Checkout System.

7 out of 10 visitors give up buying at this point. That’s a huge number. But there are a number of key ideas for reducing it:

  1. One study showed that around 30% of buyers gave up at this stage when asked to sign. Instead, offer order validation or automatically create a user account.
  2. Consider product prices that include shipping costs. For example, NuFace, an online beauty distributor, increased its orders by 90% by adding a simple “free shipping on orders over $75” banner.

Adapt your site to all types of media. In practice, this concerns buttons to tap (ergonomics), loading speed (reduce the number of images), ease of navigation (align / organize forms vertically).

7 - Offer and promote a loyalty program (Loyalty Stage)

The last stage is the one that never ends: building customer loyalty. This is an ongoing process aimed at creating long-term relationships. Here, you can offer a program with discounts and special offers to those who buy from you more than once. You need to promote this program so that customers are aware of what they gain by remaining loyal to you.

In one report, 84% of consumers say they prefer a brand that offers them a loyalty program, and 66% add that being able to earn rewards changes their purchasing behavior.

Conclusion

Improving your conversion funnel is the top priority in your business. If you make it so, and if you embrace this process of constant improvement, the results shouldn’t be long in coming.

How to set up conversion funnels in Google Analytics (step-by-step)

Posted on by Adenlab Adenlab

In this article you’ll find a number of tips and detailed steps for setting up your conversion funnels in Google Analytics.

Extremely useful for analyzing customer journeys, we strongly recommend that you set up your funnels to identify friction points in your customer journeys and improve your conversion rates.

We also recommend that you download our detailed study of Ecommerces’ sales by acquisition channel: Ecommerces’ Google Analytics Attribution

Several sections are covered:

Contents

1. What is the conversion funnel?

2. Why worry about conversion tunnels?

3. What is conversion funnel analysis?

4. How to view conversion funnels for your website

5. How to set up sales funnels in Google Analytics

6. How to use Google Analytics funnel data to optimize your conversion rates

7. Turn insights into action

Optimize your Analytics data and tagging plan with Tag Manager

Article source: How to Set Up Sales Funnels in Google Analytics (Step-by-Step)

written by Andy Calvo, web analyst at Hostgator

Let’s get to the heart of the matter, and to illustrate the point, let’s say you have a promotional video on your B2B site’s homepage, and it’s doing a great job of encouraging your potential customers to give you a call. The only problem is, no one is watching that video…
Or maybe you have an Ecommerce store, and you have no problem attracting people who come from social platforms like Facebook or Instagram. Many of them even add items to their Shopping Cart, but halfway through the checkout process your potential customers leave the site.

Surely these two scenarios ring a bell?

Although frustrating, these experiences are commonplace for any website owner. Fortunately, there’s a way to find out what’s stopping people from converting on your site.

All you need to find out is a free Google Analytics account and a good Internet connection. (If you haven’t yet set up Google Analytics for your website, you can do so here).

Then it’s time to set up your sales funnels in Google Analytics. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to:

  • track visitor behavior on your website,
  • identify problem areas
  • optimize the user experience to get more visitors to do more of the things you want them to do: like make a purchase, fill in a recommendation form or subscribe to your newsletter.

If all this sounds confusing, don’t worry. Below, we’ll explain what conversion funnels (or sales funnels) are in Google Analytics, why they’re important and how to track them in Google Analytics. We’ll finish with a look at how to take action by leveraging your conversion funnel data.

What is a conversion funnel?

A conversion funnel (or Conversion/Order Tunnel) is a sequence of steps that a user follows to complete a conversion. A conversion funnel on an Ecommerce site might look like this:

  1. The customer arrives on the website.
  2. Once there, the customer browses a few pages of different products.
  3. The customer then adds an item or two to the shopping cart.
  4. Finally, the customer buys the item(s).

The sales funnel is different for different types of website and different types of customer. That’s why it’s important to know who your customers are, and to describe the series of actions they can take on your website.

All sales funnels (or conversion tunnels) end with a conversion. A conversion can have different definitions, depending on the business you’re in and the type of website you’re running.
Traditionally, when people think of a conversion, they think of completing an order on a website. But a conversion can be broader than that, such as signing up on a site or downloading a white paper.
Ultimately, a conversion is any type of behavior you want your customer to adopt that results in some value for your business.

Also read on our blog: The Facebook Guide to Creating Ecommerce Ad Campaigns

The Facebook Guide to Creating Ecommerce Ad Campaigns

Why should every site owner care about conversion tunnels?

Conversion tunnels or sales funnels are essential for understanding the steps your customers take before reaching their final conversion, and the obstacles that prevent them from doing so.

You can think of each stage of your sales funnel as a central touchpoint that you want people to reach on their way to conversion. Once you’ve defined each of these stages, you can identify the friction zones: the places where people get stuck, leave or don’t continue the conversion process. When you have this information, you can optimize your page design and site flow, adjusting the right elements to capture more conversions. And suddenly, you know what’s working on your website and what’s not – so you can start adjusting and improving.

Optimize your Analytics data and tagging plan with Tag Manager

Concrete example: Example of a Business Coach

Here’s an example to illustrate the value of sales funnels (or conversion tunnels). Let’s say you’re a business coach. As part of your assessment process, you offer a free 30-minute consultation, so that customers can get an idea of what you do and what you can bring to the table.
You advertise this consultation throughout your website with a prominent CTA (Call To Action) button.
To sign up, visitors click on a separate registration page and fill in a form.

When you analyze your sales funnel in Google Analytics, you’ll see that your CTA button has a high click-through rate. Whatever page they clicked from, the number of people who see the CTA button, compared to those who click on it to go to the sign-up page, hovers around 50%. This indicates that you’re doing an excellent job of generating interest in your free consultation.

However, once people reach the page with the registration form, less than 1% fill it in. Given the high interest rate, what explains this sudden loss of interest? Your consultation is free. What do people have to lose?

Well, maybe your registration form could have too many fields, discouraging prospects from filling out your form. Or, the sign-up form is too far down the page and people can’t find it. Maybe the page loads far too slowly and people give up and leave.

Each of the above could be an opportunity to improve your sales funnel. Right now, one or more of these elements turns people off and forces them to leave. Once they’re gone, they may be gone forever. It’s up to you to test different changes to see what motivates the 1% who convert.

Thanks to Google Analytics, you know exactly where the problem lies: the page with the form. People click through to the page with the form, but stop there. The sales funnel helps you pinpoint the problem so you can stay focused and make changes that lead to improvements – instead of wasting your time working on things that aren’t part of the problem, like changing your ad copy or increasing the consultation time from 30 to 60 minutes.

What is conversion funnel analysis?

Funnel analysis turns your conversion tunnel into something you can monitor and analyze. Let’s use an e-commerce site as a hypothetical example.
Below are the potential stages in your funnel:

  1. People arrive on your website.
  2. People navigate to a product page.
  3. People add a product to their shopping cart.
  4. People arrive at the payment page.
  5. People are finalizing their purchase.

Funnel analysis involves quantifying each of these steps, and seeing how many people made it to each one. Essentially, you want to know two things: the percentage exit rate from one step to the next, and the cumulative percentage of the total. This gives you a very good overview of the friction points in your sales tunnel.

Set up these steps in Google Analytics, and you can literally see the friction points. For our hypothetical Ecommerce site analysis, here’s what the data might look like in Google Analytics:

The blue blocks represent the total number of people reaching each stage, while the red arrows point to and indicate the number of people exiting at each stage. This data tells us several things:

  • Of all the people who access the website, 80% leave without browsing the product pages. This represents a great opportunity for you. We might ask, does the home page do a good job of directing people to the product pages? Are product categories listed in the main menu? Are “Best of” items highlighted on the home page? These are all things we could test to encourage more people to visit the product pages.
  • Of those who visit a product page, 75% end up taking the next step and adding the item to their shopping cart. Nice! It’s a good sign that among the people who are interested enough to visit the product page, we’re doing a great job of convincing them that they should buy it.
  • Unfortunately, only around 6% of these people complete their order. So there’s something wrong. Maybe there’s a technical problem with the payment page, or people don’t feel they can trust the site with their credit card information. Maybe there are too many fields to fill in, or it asks for information unrelated to their purchase. Whatever the reason, it’s an issue worth investigating. The fact that people have added the item to their shopping cart indicates a strong intention to buy, so if none of them are converting, there must be something preventing them from validating their order.

Just by looking at the raw data, we suddenly have a ton of information to work with to optimize our website. That’s what makes funnel analysis so reliable. Once you start thinking of your website as a journey/journey for your customers, you can get into their mindset and consider the incremental steps that move them forward.

Next, let’s talk about how to apply this strategy to your site.

Use for e-commerce sites

In the case of e-commerce sites, Target ROAS maximizes the return on advertising campaigns by targeting products or
categories with the best profit margins. This helps you achieve your business objectives while maintaining control over advertising expenditure.

Good to know: A well-defined Target ROAS can significantly increase profitability without requiring a proportional increase in the advertising budget.

How to visualize sales funnels for your website?

Before you even open Google Analytics, the first step is to fully understand your site and what you want your future customers to do. I recommend a brainstorming session where you map out your funnels. If you have an Ecommerce site, your funnels probably look like the ones we described above.

If you have a blog, the funnel concept still applies. There may be no product page or “add to cart” button, but you still have a home page, category pages, and blog posts. These blog posts should be considered as the “products” of your site.

You really want to think about your site, the journey you want users to take and their ultimate destination or goal. Is the goal to get people to read your blog? Figuring out how to direct them to your blog posts would be the top priority.

Remember that you could have multiple funnels within the same site. Maybe you’re a blogger who sells products on the side, so you’d have different sales funnels for your blog content versus your online store.

By the end of this brainstorming session, you should know what you want people to do, and break it down into steps (e.g. get to the site, visit a blog page, download a white paper).

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How to configure sales funnels in Google Analytics

Once you’ve got your sales funnels mapped out, it’s time to collect the data. There’s a lot to do, but segments and objectives are the easiest steps to set up, so that’s what I’m going to show you today.

Let’s start with the simplest option: create a segment.

Note: For convenience, we’ll use product pages as an example in the following steps. If you’re setting up funnels for your blog, adjust accordingly.

Creating a segment in Google Analytics

You will create four segments:

  • one for your home page,
  • one for your product,
  • one for your basket and
  • one for the thank-you page.

In Google Analytics, go to Acquisition > All traffic > Channels. This report visualization shows you all your website’s traffic, broken down by channel (social, organic, direct, etc.).

Create your home page segment.

Creating a segment in Google Analytics

Clicking on “Add segment” takes you to a new screen. Here you’ll see that Google Analytics already offers plenty of relevant options for sales funnels. If you like, you can also click on “Make a purchase” and that would be it for today 😉

But your site is not identical to any other. You’ve already described the specific pages of your site that you want users to be able to browse. The easiest way to create a segment for this specific sales funnel, and avoid Google scrambling the data, is to create a custom segment.

Click on the red “New Segment ” button at top left.

Then click on “Conditions in the “Advanced” menu on the left.

click on “Conditions” in the “Advanced” menu on the left.

In this screen, you’ll define each stage of your sales funnel.
Use the drop-down menu to find and select “Page”.

Search and select “Page

Then select “matches exactly in the second drop-down menu. This prevents Google from including other pages with similar URLs.

select ” corresponds exactly to “

Finally, enter the URL of your home page in the text field, or use the / suggested by Google. (In Google Analytics, / is a shortcut for your home page.)
Name your segment in the “Segment name” field at top left, and click on the blue Save button.

Name your segment explicitly: here, “Home Page”.

Create your product page segment.

To see how many people go from your home page to the product page, you’ll need to create another segment. To do this, repeat the same steps above. Here they are for your convenience:

1 Click on Add a segment.
2 Click on the red New segment button.
3 Click on Conditions in the advanced menu on the left.
4 Find Page in the drop-down menu.

Then, if you have a single product, or want to create a funnel for a single product, you can continue the same process you used for your home page. Select “exact match” from the drop-down menu and enter the exact URL of the product page in the text field.

Segment creation for a product page

Alternatively, if you sell several products, you’ll want to see how many people visit any given product page on your site. In this case, you would select “contains instead of “exactly matches” in the drop-down menu, and use a common denominator in the text field (for example, if all your product pages include /shop/ in the URL, you’d enter /shop/ in the text field).

Identify the common denominator for grouping all the products on your site

Give your segment a name you can identify, such as the product name, or simply “Product Page”, and click Save.

Save the segment as “Product Page” and save.

Create your shopping cart segment

Follow the same steps again:

Shopping Cart” page segment

Finally, create your purchase confirmation or thank-you page segment

Follow the same steps again:

  1. Click on Add segment.
  2. Click on the red New Segment button.
  3. Click on Conditions in the advanced menu on the left.
  4. Search for the page in the drop-down menu.

Again, since the specific URL may vary from user to user, you’ll want to use the “contains” option and find a common denominator in the URL, such as /thank-you/. Give your “Thank you” segment a name and click Save.

Your Google Analytics should look like this:

Viewing segments in Google Analytics

Each segment is represented by a different colored line, and you can visually see the decline from one step to the next. There’s also a wealth of data for each segment described below. In this example, there appears to be a significant drop-off from the product page to the shopping cart, and again a number of people who don’t complete their order. Either of these would be a good place to start optimizing.

Setting goals in Google Analytics

Let’s move on to the more advanced option of creating and setting objectives.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll unlock other Google Analytics features, such as the Funnel Visualization report (available under Conversions > Goals > Funnel Visualization).

Visualizing Analytics Goals

To define goals, you need to access your Google Analytics administration settings. Click on the equipment icon in the bottom left-hand corner of your screen, then click on Goals.

Creating goals in Google Analytics settings

Then click on the red button “button..

New Analytics objective

Enter a name for your goal, such as “Place an order “, and check “Type: Destination”. Type : Destination. Then click on Continue.

In the last screen, we’ll use our thank-you page as the URL and select “Equals from the drop-down menu:

You now have the option of defining a value for each conversion. If you use your website primarily for lead generation, your revenue is probably not captured by Google Analytics. You can still estimate it by setting the Value field to ON, then specifying an amount. For example, if you’re using this goal to track white paper downloads, you can assume that, on average, each download is worth $100 to your business, so you should enter that. Again, this field is optional.

Objective enhancement

Next, turn the funnel ON. Here, you’ll present the different URLs for each stage of your funnel, just as we did when we created custom segments. Click Save when you’re done.

Finally, click on “Check this goal” to verify your work. Next, return to Conversions > Goals and you’ll see that you can now view the Funnel Visualization report where it shows you a visual representation of your funnel:

Google Analytics funnel visualization

This report tells us a number of things at a high level:

  • At the top, it shows you how many people have reached the target (120 sessions) and the overall conversion rate for this funnel (14.69%).
  • On the left, it shows us the previous page that brought visitors to the funnel in the first place. Often, this is the home page. It’s the most popular page for most websites, so it’s logical that it should appear here (indicated by “(entry)”).
  • On the right, it tells us how many people left the funnel at each stage, and which page they visited next, if they didn’t leave your site completely (indicated by “(exit)”).

Google Analytics will show you this same information at every stage. Where did your visitors come from before entering your funnel, did they leave at any stage and, if so, where did they go?

How can you use Google Analytics funnel data to optimize your site's conversion rates?

Funnel analysis helps you quantify the number of users reaching each stage, and determine the abandonment versus retention rate for each stage. Funnel analysis gives you the “What” (the cause). The “Why” (the reason) is a little harder to decipher.

Let’s take the example of our E-commerce funnel once again.

Our funnel analysis reveals that we have a high percentage of people going from our home page to our product page. That’s great! But if people don’t take that first step (go to a product page), it’s the #1 roadblock.

But many of those who reach the product page abandon their journey before adding anything to their shopping cart. This is where the focus should be. What can we do to improve our product pages?

  • Is it a design issue? Users don’t know how to add a product to the shopping cart? We may need to change the location, color or size of the Add to Cart button.
  • Is it a marketing issue? Maybe our positioning needs to be more effective, and we need to do a better job of emphasizing the benefits of this particular product.
  • Is it a question of price? Maybe the prices are really high compared to our competitors. When web users see it, they look at it and go.

There are all sorts of reasons why you might see friction on the funnel steps. That’s when that quantitative data really works well from a qualitative point of view, like adjusting the user experience, surveying your customers, and A/B testing your changes.

Customer surveys are a great place to start. There are many (and free) survey tools you can use for this purpose. Conduct a survey on the page where the problem arises, asking a simple question: “Were you able to accomplish what you were looking for on the site? If not, why not?”

From my experience with usage testing, you’ll find that a lot of people say they can’t find something or don’t know where to go. It’s a great opportunity to work on it.

If you’re on a tight budget, start with your friends and family. Ask them to follow the buying process on your website, but don’t give them any hints. Do they have any roadblocks along the way?

Turning insights into action with Conversion Funnels in Google Analytics

Conceptually, sales funnels aren’t a very difficult thing to grasp. We’re all consumers and we know how to do business online. We’ve all been in that position where we find ourselves lost on one website, get frustrated and leave for a competitor’s site.

This confusion represents a choke point in your sales funnel, and it can break your site. Funnel analysis helps you find these choke points. Then it’s up to you to experiment and improve the user experience.

Fortunately, setting up sales funnels in Google Analytics isn’t difficult. Follow the steps above, and you might be surprised by what you find.

For more information, don’t hesitate to contact our web analyst and tag management teams to work on optimizing your customer journey and acquiring qualified leads on your site.

Google Analytics : The ultimate guide to getting started with Google Analytics

Posted on by Adenlab Adenlab

Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking the activities of your site and your users. However, the sheer number of reports and information available can be time-consuming and leave you wondering where to start…

Indeed, this analysis tool can be confusing, even overwhelming, if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for.
Like any tool, Google Analytics needs to be adapted to your needs, not the other way around.
You’ll need to know where to go, and which pages and reports to use, to find out what’s important for your business and the development of your website. It’s vital to get the information that can help you increase your revenues.

In the guide below, we’ll cover what you need to know to get started with Gooogle Analytics, and we’ll also show you how to install Google Analytics on your site, monitor your traffic, create advanced reports and much more.

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Google Analytics Basics and Glossary

Before we delve into the benefits of Google Analytics, here’s a quick glossary of terms used in the interface and in this article.

Users – Users and active users indicate the number of website visitors or application users who have logged on to your website or application at least once during a given period.

Reports – Google Analytics offers over 50 free reports and the ability to create custom reports to help you analyze the demographic and behavioral data of users of your website and/or application.

Sessions – Sessions indicate the length of time a user is actively engaged with your website or application over a given period.

Traffic Sources – This report shows how users discover your website or application through organic search, paid search, referral websites and direct traffic channels. Also known as Acquisition Channels.

Direct traffic – Direct traffic is when a user starts a session on your website without coming from a traceable traffic source, for example someone typing your URL into their browser instead of clicking on your website link from Google search results.

Campaigns – Campaigns track specific ways in which users discover your website or application. Google Analytics tracks campaigns created by Google Ads and customized campaigns you create to track specific groups of traffic sources.

Pageviews – The total number of pages visited on your website or application during a given period.

Pages/Session – The average number of pages visited per session over a selected period, including repeated views of the same page.

Bounce rate – The percentage of sessions during a selected period where a user visited a page on your website or application and exited without interacting with any element of the page.

Audiences – Custom user groups you create to help identify specific types of users in Google Analytics reports, remarketing efforts, Google Ads ad campaigns and other Google webmaster tools.

Conversions and objectives – Objectives measure specific goals that you define as useful for your business, such as a purchase in your online store or the submission of a quote request form. Conversions represent the number of times users of your website or application complete each of the objectives you’ve defined.

Funnels – The path users take to reach a goal.

You don’t need to memorize them all. If you’re stuck in Google Analytics, you can hover over most terms to see a description window.

You can also click on the question mark at the top right of any Google Analytics screen to access the Google Analytics Help Center and search for specific terms and help information.

How to configure Google Analytics

To use Google Analytics, you need to log in with your existing Google Account or create a new one.

If you use Google Ads, Gmail, Google Docs, Youtube or any other Google product for your business, you must use the same account for Google Analytics. Once you’ve logged in to your Google account, you’ll sign up for Google Analytics.

To create your Google Analytics account, enter the details of your website or application.

Confirm the settings for data sharing between Google Analytics and other Google commercial products and click on Get tracking ID to complete the creation of your free Google Analytics account.

Your Google Analytics tracking ID is a number and code that uniquely identifies your website or application.

Popular app makers, website builders like Wix, content management systems like WordPress and e-commerce platforms like Shopify have specific instructions on how to add Google Analytics tracking code to your website or app.

Visit your website’s administrative dashboard to find out how to start tracking users of your website or app with Google Analytics.

Use Google Analytics insights

Using “Insights” at the top of the Google Analytics interface, you’ll be directed to the reports that are causing problems in your account.

How many users have I had this week/month/quarter/year?
What is the breakdown of users by device type/location/age?
What are my best pages in terms of page views?
Which of my destianation pages generate the most sessions?
How long do users stay on my site or use my application?
New visitors versus last month’s visitors?
What countries do my users come from?
What are my top U.S. cities in terms of users?
What is my target conversion rate?
What is the average loading time for my page?

Answering these questions can help you measure the results of your website’s marketing and advertising campaigns. Once you’ve identified the channels that attract the most customers to your site or app, you can focus your budget and time on the marketing and advertising tactics that generate the most conversions.

Optimize your analytics accounts and tagging plan

Custom settings to get the most out of Google Analytics

While you’re waiting for Google Analytics to start collecting data on your website or application, you can configure the following settings in your administration interface to make the most of your reports. Access the administration interface from the left-hand side menu.

Google Analytics objectives

Conversion reports in Google Analytics can reveal the most profitable users of your website or app. To use them, you’ll need to define one or more goals for your website or app users to achieve, such as making a purchase via the shopping cart on your website or making a purchase in the app.

Google Analytics offers templates you can choose from when creating a new goal. Choose the one that best matches the objective you want users to achieve on your site or app.

Once you’ve chosen a template, you’ll be directed to the appropriate goal type. If you have an e-commerce store and select “Buy goods”, it will choose the destination goal type.

From there, you’ll continue to detail goals and create a funnel to track the path your users take as they begin to make purchases. The funnel will track the percentage of users who start the process, but don’t finish using the steps and pages you’ve specified.

Continue to create goals as needed to track the additional tasks you want users to perform on your website or app. You can create up to 20 goals for your website or application.

Electronic commerce

E-commerce site owners can activate this option under “View Settings” to track transaction and product data from third-party shopping carts, mobile devices and other Internet-connected points of sale.

If you use a popular e-commerce platform like Shopify, you can refer to its documentation on how to send sales data and visitor behavior from its service to Google Analytics. This will allow you to view all your website data in a single application, instead of trying to match your Google Analytics data with that of your e-commerce platform.

Audience definitions

Audiences in Google Analytics represent the users most likely to achieve conversion goals on your website or application. You can track specific groups of users on your website or application by adding new audiences under “Audience definitions”.

These audiences can be leveraged with Google AdWords for remarketing and targeting. Let’s say you’re looking at facial care products online, and a few hours later, those same products appear on your favorite cooking site. This is remarketing with Google AdWords, as explained when you click on the AdChoices link.

Google AdWords displays your remarketing ad on websites in the Google Display Network. Google claims that the network reaches “90% of online users” through news, blogs and popular Google products like YouTube and Gmail. This ensures that your product or service reaches past website visitors in places they’ll notice.

Site search

If your website has a search field, you can track the queries made by your users by configuring your site search setting. To do this, search for something on your website and look for the letter preceding the query in the search results URL.

This is what you’ll need to enter in your site’s search settings. To find Site Search, click on View Settings in the Admin dashboard.

Scroll down the page until you see “Site search”. Activate this option and enter the letter of the search parameter.

Google Analytics may not show you the keywords users enter in organic Google search queries that lead to your website or app, but it can tell you what some users are looking for once they’ve arrived. You can use these keywords to create faster navigation to the pages users want most, improving the user experience.

Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool for website owners who want to monitor the health of their website in Google search results. If you’re already using it, you can connect it to your Google Analytics to get data on your main landing pages and the queries entered in Google organic search.

The option can be found in the Property Settings section of the administration dashboard, or in the Search Console section under Acquisition in the left-hand side menu.

By clicking on the button to configure data sharing with Search Console, you’ll be redirected to your website or application’s property settings in the admin dashboard. Scroll down until you see the Search Console section.

Click on the button to link your website or application in Google Search Console to your Google Analytics account. Give Google Analytics a few days to start receiving information from Search Console – specifically, more of the queries users enter into Google Search.

View Google Analytics reports

Depending on how many users engage with your website or app during a given period, you may have to wait a few hours or days to start receiving valuable information about your website traffic.

Here are some of the most important reports to consult, and how you can use them to help your business. You can access these and other reports in the Audience, Acquisition, Behavior and Conversion categories in the left-hand side menu.

Audience > Overview

Want to know how many users have used your site or application? Consult the “Audience overview” report, using the date selector at the top right of the report to view data for a specific period.

Use the Compare option to see if traffic to your website or app has increased or decreased between two periods, such as this week vs. last week, this month vs. last month, and other similar metrics.

Demographics > Overview

Identify the number of users in an age bracket or by gender (male/female) in the Demographics report > Overview.

If you’ve set up a Google Analytics goal as suggested above, take a look at the detailed age and gender reports under Demographics. Use the drop-down menu to switch between goals, and sort through the “Goal” achievements column to see which age groups and genders are best suited to conversion.

Use this information to help you create better sponsored ads on Google, Facebook and other ad networks by targeting ads to high-converting age groups and genders.

Audience > Language and region

Use these reports to display the number of users visiting your website, broken down by the language selected in the user’s browser settings, or by location. Sort by specific objectives to see where converting users come from and what language they speak most.

Select the drop-down menu to view more rows, or go to the next section of the data to see more locations and languages converting. Dive deeper by clicking on the countries at the top of the conversion page for details at state, county and city level.

Audience > Mobile > Devices

Not sure whether to optimize your website for mobile users or look into app development for your business? Check out the device report to see which devices users are accessing your website with, as well as the corresponding conversion data if you’ve set up goals.

If you notice a particular trend, for example that Android users have a higher bounce rate or a lower conversion rate than iOS users, you can test your website using an Android device to optimize it and ensure a seamless user experience.

Acquisition > All traffic > Channels

Get an overview of the best-performing channels – organic search, paid traffic, direct traffic, referral traffic, social traffic and email traffic.

For more details, including the specific sources that help users discover your website or application, click on additional reports in the Acquisition menu, such as the All Traffic > Source/Average and Social reports. These reports will reveal specific URLs and referral sources.

Behaviour > Site content > All pages

Find out which pages receive the most traffic using the All Pages report. Examine the bounce rate column of your most visited pages to determine if any need improvement so that more users spend more time and engage with them.

Behaviour > Site speed > Page load time

The page load time report helps webmasters identify the slowest loading pages that users access the most. Since page load speed can have an effect on conversions, it’s in your company’s best interest to find out what’s slowing down your top pages.

Conversions > Goals > Conversion funnel schema

Most of the reports in the “Conversions” section are a gold mine for companies looking to link revenues to specific marketing campaigns in order to determine ROI. The “Funnel Visualization” report, for example, will help you identify areas of your sales funnel that need to be optimized for conversions.

If you define a goal with a funnel, your funnel visualization report will look like this.

If you run an e-commerce business, you can use this report to diagnose a conversion problem on your contact page, for example. Correcting this problem could lead to increased sales in your online store.

Conversions > Multichannel funnel > Most common conversion paths

Not to be confused with the custom funnels you’ve set up with your goals, the “Multi-Funnel Channel Top Conversion Paths” report displays a user’s path from specific traffic channels like organic search results and social media before completing a goal.

Here, you can see that the most important traffic path that led to conversions was a user’s visit from an organic search and then directly before fulfilling a goal.

Go beyond the essentials

As you get used to the standard Google Analytics reporting functions, you can start to delve into other advanced features, including the following.

Create segments to display all the data in your Google Analytics reports for a specific subset of users, such as users from a specific country or paid traffic source.
Create customized reports that present the data you really want in a single report. It’s all about making a standard Google Analytics report more relevant to your business.
Create better visualizations of your Google Analytics data using Data Studio (as shown above).
These and other advanced Google Analytics features can help you get the business intelligence you need to grow.

Conclusion

When it comes to Google Analytics features, this article presents just the tip of the iceberg. Once you’ve mastered the basics, be sure to dive deeper into analyzing your site or app, using the data to improve your site’s traffic and conversions.

We welcome your questions and comments. If you need more information and advice on your Google Analytics and Tag Manager account, we can help you with your Data, Analytics & Tag Management.

Source: Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics

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Google Tag Manager: the ultimate guide to getting started

Posted on by Adenlab Adenlab

Since its inception in 2012, Google Tag Manager has come a long way. In particular, it’s become much easier to use. But do you really know how to exploit its full potential? This short guide will help you get started and track your users’ behavior effectively. We’ll take you through the main features of Google Tag Manager, making them ever more practical and easy to use.

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What is Google Tag Manager?

The Tag Management System (TMS) can easily be compared to the Content Management System (CMS). Both can make changes to an entire website, via a single interface, and without the need to go through a developer to change each tag one by one. You may wish to call in a developer for the initial installation of the Google Tag Manager code snippet.

Being able to manage your site’s tags means being able to analyze user interactions via a user-friendly interface. There are, of course, other solutions, such as Adobe Analytics’ Launch. But overall, they all work on the same model and can be easily integrated, without any programming notions.

Operation and set-up

Google Tag Manager inserts JavaScript and HTML tags, created from within its interface, into the hard-coded container on each page of your website. This Google Tag Manager container is a piece of code that allows you to have an impact on the tags.

Creating your Google Tag Manager account is quick and easy. All you have to do is fill in the information requested on the website. Once you’ve created your account, you’ll be taken to the main interface. At the top of your workspace, you’ll also find your unique identification number.

If you click on it, two pieces of code will appear:

  • The first code snippet uses JavaScript to activate tags, and Google Tag Manager asks you to paste it into every page of your website.

  • The second code snippet is an HTML iframe that is used when JavaScript is not available and must be placed after the opening tag.

To find out more, you can also visit Google’s Configure and install Tag Manager page.

Tags, triggers, variables

Here are the definitions of three important elements that appear in the Google Tag Manager interface:

– Tags: tags are tracking codes and code fragments that tell Google Tag Manager what action to take on this page. An example might be sending a page view call to Google Analytics.

– Triggers: triggers specify the conditions under which a tag should be triggered. For example, a trigger can be associated with a condition to trigger a tag only when a user displays URLs containing the path / blog /.

– Variables: variables are values used in triggers and tags to filter when a specific tag should be triggered. Google Tag Manager provides built-in variables and lets you create custom variables. A “click” class variable has a value name (such as a string of words) assigned to website buttons.

How do you create a tag in your Tag Manager?

The first thing you need to know is that you shouldn’t create a “Page view” tag if you already have a Google Analytics container on your site. Creating a “Page view” tag in Google Tag Manager in addition to the Google Analytics container will result in duplicate page view visits each time a user visits a page, skewing your data.

Once you’ve created a new tag (Tags – New), you can name it and select a Google Analytics tag type to send the data to. It is also possible to send data to other platforms. Don’t forget to add your unique identification number.

Variables: everything you need to know

Variables play a very important role in the creation of banners. There are two types of variables in Google Tag Manager: built-in variables and custom variables.

  • Built-in variables are a special category of variables that are “pre-created” and non-customizable. New containers have no user-defined variables at the outset, and some built-in variables are pre-activated.

  • Custom or user-defined variables: these are used to meet specific needs not covered by the built-in variables. In particular, Google Tag Manager is compatible with these types of user-defined variables: http source URL, proprietary cookie, data layer…

Google Tag Manager: use the preview function

Feel free to use the preview function by clicking on the button in the top right-hand corner of your workspace. Open your website in a new window. An insert should appear at the bottom. By default, the Tags window will display all tags on the page, whether activated or not.

When you add a tag to Google Tag Manager, it is not yet visible on the site. That’s why it’s important to test the tag, to ensure that it’s triggered and that the data is sent to Google Analytics.

You can then publish (click on “Submit”) your new tag from the Google Tag Manager interface.

Also worth knowing

Google Tag Manager can be used to create a tag from the simplest to the most complex. However, we advise you to try and keep things as clear and scalable as possible. Whether using an agency or in-house, we recommend that you keep an inventory of tags. Use meaningful names for each tag, trigger and variable. This will help everyone involved to understand which tags are active in the container. The “Versions” page shows you which version of the container is online on the site and lets you click on the different versions to see which tags it contains.

Go further with Tag Manager and your Google Analytics account

Google Analytics and Tag Manager are the main tools we use at Adenlab to visualize and track your Data-Driven strategy.

We will analyze your technical environment
We will prepare Workshops with your team to identify and validate the indicators and objectives you need to track and analyze.
The tagging plan for Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics or CRM will be documented.
And we will

We’ll take care of setting up the Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics environment.
We’ll also work with your technical teams to integrate elements into your site and source code.

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Digital acquisition strategy: Analyze user behavior to develop sales and build customer loyalty.

Posted on by Adenlab Adenlab

For online stores, there’s no question: digital marketing and acquisition strategy are the keys to growth. In order to progress in the right direction, acquire new customers and grow serenely, there’s nothing like a good knowledge of your users to improve your acquisition strategy and build customer loyalty. Where do your customers come from? How did your customers discover your brand? What are they looking for on your e-commerce site? What are their profiles? What are their paths on your site before converting and making a purchase? In this article, we explain why and how to measure your users’ behavior.

Why measure user behavior with Google Analytics?

If you’re in the middle of a digital acquisition campaign, you’re probably looking to optimize the performance of your campaigns. And among the avenues for improvement is the measurement of user behavior, often overlooked by companies.

And yet, like a giant like Amazon, it’s essential to be aware of your visitors’ expectations and to respond to them. This excellent knowledge of your customers and prospects will enable you to develop further. Whether you’ve set up Google Ads campaigns, social media, marketing or sales initiatives, your potential customers will arrive at different “gateways” to your site, and will certainly be interested in different product and service offers. The behaviors and performance indicators of your acquisition levers will be different. And yet your actions all have the same objective: to develop your sales. The more you increase the number of acquisition channels, the more they will have an impact on the final conversion. Your future customers will be likely to interact with your different acquisition levers (Google Ads campaigns, your search engine optimization, your social media, your emailings…) Identifying buyer behavior will therefore be very important to invest more in one channel rather than another.

Google Analytics: how to analyze your customers' visits and conversions on your ecommerce site?

In addition to analyzing your social network campaigns or a targeted Facebook advertising campaign, make Google Analytics your precious ally. Google Analytics is indispensable to any successful digital acquisition campaign, and will enable you to study the performance of your acquisition campaigns in detail.

Acquisition channels report in Google Analytics

Google Analytics’ Enhanced Ecommerce reports will also enable you to analyze the performance of your catalog, as well as sales by brand, category and product. Google Analytics can also tell you about interactions on a video player, downloads or form submissions: anything that can be micro-converted.

Enhanced Ecommerce Report

Of course, it’s a prerequisite that all your tracking and targets have been properly set up and are returning quality data. To optimize your Google Analytics account, we strongly recommend that you use Tag Manager to set up your tracking and pixels. A good tagging plan is essential for driving your data-driven acquisition strategies. We can also help youoptimize your tagging plan with Tag Manager.

Keep your goals in mind and track the right performance indicators.

Before studying your ecommerce site’s metrics, take the time to ask yourself the right questions and what information you want to gather to understand your users:

  • Where do your biggest customers come from?
  • Do your customers use your search engine to find a product?
  • Is your new “XXX” brand selling well thanks to your Google Ads campaigns?

Where to start? What should you analyze in Google Analytics?

Every company has its own objectives, which means studying the data that matters to you and that will help you develop your business. So, each of your objectives must be associated with a value in order to understand what it brings you:

  • Does the number of new creations count?
  • The number of subscriptions to your newsletters?
  • Clicks on your social networking links?
  • Number of pages per session?
  • Time spent on your company website?
  • Sales generated by your paid search campaigns?
  • Sales generated by your email campaigns?

Enhance your online offer and products

Being able to track every indicator through Google Analytics will enable you to adapt your offer and your site to your customers’ needs. It’s not an easy task, but improving the user journey to increase your conversion rate is a formidable lever for boosting your sales and profitability. You’ll need to improve or rectify the shopping experience if you notice that your key performance indicators are falling or dropping abnormally: e.g. the number of cart abandonments is increasing => you need to review your conversion funnel and identify problem pages, or review whether your payment module is no longer functional. Tracking events and actions on your site plays a major role in your digital acquisition strategy. Clicks on an ad, playback of a new video, sharing of your content, number of uses of your search function… Everything can be analyzed and used to optimize your site and conversion rate.

Google Analytics lets you analyze user groups and segments

When launching a new product, it’s always interesting to know the behavior of a whole group of people. Cohort analysis enables you to isolate and study the behavior of a given group of users who share a common characteristic, such as their country. This handy feature is offered by Google Analytics on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. If you follow these users long enough, you’ll be able to find out when they lose interest in your products or, on the contrary, how you manage to retain their loyalty over the long term. And to take things a step further, why not link the “Behavior Flow” report to these groups, so you can learn more about their habits and see what interests people in these segments and what doesn’t?

Anticipation remains the key to your success

Studying your users’ behavior means above all being able to anticipate future purchasing trends and know what works and what doesn’t. Each person’s content preferences represent their intentions for you, just like keyword searches on your site’s search engine. If you have the opportunity, don’t hesitate to combine the power and precision of Google Analytics with direct surveys of your users. A few quick satisfaction questions can go a long way towards helping you improve in the future.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4): what you need to know and what new features does GA4 offer?

Posted on by Adenlab Adenlab

Since 2005, Google Analytics has been the benchmark for website and marketing performance tracking. Over time, Google has made additions and improvements to the platform, announcing last week that it would be discontinuing :

Optimize your analytics accounts and branding plan: ask for a diagnosis

One of the most common instances of Google Analytics (Universal Analytics) will disappear on July 1, 2023

What's new in Google Analytics?

The simple version: Universal Analytics will be replaced by Google Analytics 4 from July 1, 2023.

The official announcement: Google has announced that “on July 1, 2023, standard Universal Analytics properties will no longer process data. You will be able to see your Universal Analytics reports for some time after July 1, 2023.

However, the new data will only be transmitted to your GA4 properties.

What is a Google Analytics property?

This is the website or application you are tracking with Google Analytics.

If you currently use Universal Analytics to track your website, this will be called your “Universal Analytics property”.

Once you’ve set up GA4, you’ll have a Google Analytics 4 property for that same website. Since Universal Analytics (UA) and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) are different, several reports are available for each property.

What is Google Analytics 4?

To understand exactly what GA4 is, a quick lesson in the history of Google Analytics is in order.

Google Analytics: The very first instance of Google Analytics was released in 2005.

Universal Analytics (UA): The new, improved version of Google Analytics was released in 2012 and has become the default property type.

Google Analytics 360: this is a software suite that, in addition to Universal Analytics, provides Tag Manager, Optimize, Data Studio, Surveys, Attribution and Audience Center. Released in 2016.

Google Analytics 4: This is the latest version of Google Analytics, released on October 14, 2020.

What's the difference between Universal Analytics (UA) and Google Analytics 4 (GA4)?

In addition to offering more features than Universal Analytics, Google Analytics 4 is built differently to align with current and future reporting and privacy needs.

Here are just a few of the benefits of Google Analytics:

Event-based

Universal Analytics is session-based, while GA4 is event-based. In other words, the ability to track events such as button clicks, video plays, etc. is built into GA4, whereas it requires advanced configurations in UA. This means that page views are not the only important metric.

Multi-device tracking

Universal Analytics was designed around desktop web traffic, while GA4 gives companies visibility into customer journeys across their entire website and applications.

Automatic learning

GA4 uses machine learning technology to share information and make predictions.

Respectful of privacy

Universal Analytics (UA) data is highly dependent on cookies, which is not the case with Google Analytics 4.

How do I know if I'm using Google Analytics?

Google Analytics 4 was released on October 14, 2020 and has become the default version, so if you created your property after this date, you’ll probably be using GA4.

If you’re using analytics before this date, you’ll probably be using Unnversal Analytics (UA).

If you’re not sure, you can check your property type by clicking on the down arrow at the top left of your account, next to your property name :

Next, look at your property ID:

🤓
UA property IDs start with UA and end with a number.
🤓
GA4 properties have numbers only.

What do I have to do?

If you are currently using Universal Analytics, there are three actions to prioritize:

Switch to GA4 as soon as possible

Although you have more than a year before this change takes place, it’s best to make the change now so that your GA4 account can collect the data needed for automated information.

If you’re currently using UA, and want to set up a GA4 property alongside your existing UA property, use Google’s GA4 configuration wizard, which gives you the option of configuring it with your markup.

If you use Google Ads, organize personalized events or use other advanced features.

See Google’s page on how to upgrade to Google Analytics 4, which breaks the process down into 12 steps with effort levels indicated for each step.

Adjust your Google Ads conversion tracking

Once your GA4 property is set up, you’ll be able to view Analytics data in your Google Ads account If you’ve set up conversion tracking, you can import Analytics conversions into Google Ads and delete any targets you’ve imported from Universal Analytics (UA) to avoid duplicates. To import your Analytics conversions, in your Google Ads account, go to :

Tools & Settings > Conversions > Add a new conversion action
then select Import:

Here you can select each conversion event you wish to import into your Google Ads account.

Exporting historical reports

Google will allow access to your Universal Analytics data for at least six months after July 1, 2023, during which time you will need to export the data that is important to you. There are three ways to export:

  • Exporting individual reports
  • Using the Google Analytics Reporting API
  • Export to BigQuery

Conclusion

Don’t wait any longer to upgrade to Google Analytics 4! The sooner you start, the more historical data you’ll have in your account.

What’s more, Google’s machine learning will be able to start earlier and predict interesting information in your GA4 account.

Don’t hesitate to contact us to set up your GA4 accounts and parameters. Our Analytics experts will be with you every step of the way.

Optimize your analytics accounts and tagging plan: Ask for a diagnosis

Conversion tracking with Google Ads

Posted on by Adenlab Adenlab
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Why integrate conversion tracking with shopping cart data when running an ecommerce business?

Google Ads conversion tracking is essential for measuring the performance of your campaigns.

There are several categories of conversion on Google Ads, but the one we’re most interested in for Ecommerce is the value and therefore the purchases made following an interaction with your Shopping or Search campaigns.

Today, Google Ads offers tracking elements in addition to the conversion value, and these include Shopping Cart information!

And yes, Google has set up an improved tracking system that allows you to track not only the conversion value, but also information on the products that have been sold: this is conversion tracking with shopping cart data.

Here we’ll give you a quick reminder of Google Ads conversion tracking, and then give you the information on this Google Ads tracking with the basket data as well!

What is Google Ads conversion tracking?

Google Ads conversion tracking refers to all the procedures and devices used to record conversions or transactions carried out on your website, and to bring back information that is important for your profitability measurements.

With Google Ads conversions, you can track the transactions generated by your Search or Google Shopping campaigns, as well as Display and Youtube.

It’s thanks to this code snippet that you’ll be able to track transaction values in Google Ads and measure the return on investment (ROAS) of your campaigns.

Google Ads conversion tracking is therefore essential and must be functional before embarking on any major expenditure on Google Ads.

There are several types of conversion you can measure, such as :

  1. Sending a form
  2. One call
  3. Request a quote
  4. …

The above actions measure lead acquisition strategies

For Ecommerce, it is common to measure business objectives such as :

  1. Purchasing
  2. Add to basket
  3. Initiated payments

In fact, the device most frequently used by Ecommerces is the one tracking transaction information generated by Google Ads campaigns.

This is the “Purchase” tag, which allows you to track the value of the transaction attributed to your campaign.

This is of course very interesting and extremely useful, but it lacks information on the products that were actually sold in this transaction.

Usually, it’s in Google Analytics and in the E-Commerce part of the reports that you’ll find data on the products that have been purchased by your customers.

Google Ads tracking with Shopping Cart data lets you know directly in Google Ads which products have been purchased, without having to go into Google Analytics.

When it comes to analyzing the performance of campaigns and your catalog, this functionality is more refined, enabling you to better distribute your products and prioritize the distribution of your catalog in relation to sales.

What’s more, the integration of tracking with shopping cart data will enable you to go even further in your analyses, and automatically calculate the margins generated by your campaigns.

To create a conversion action, you will find all the information on the Google Ads page: Create a conversion action
and in your Google Ads tab: Tools and settings > Measurement > Conversion

Why install conversion tracking with shopping cart data?

As mentioned above, Google Ads conversion tracking, and more specifically the “Purchase” tag, will enable you to track conversions and conversion values: the value of the transaction attributed to your campaign.

This information is essential for estimating the profitability of your campaigns and the return on investment.

However, if you set your Google Ads tracking parameters to bring up Shopping Cart data, your analyses, and ultimately your optimizations, will be more relevant and effective.

Not only will you be able to analyze the value of conversions, you’ll also know which products were sold during these same transactions.

Conversion tracking with Shopping Cart data will also enable you to measure the revenues and profits generated by your Shopping and Search Network ads.

And yes, you'll be able to measure the profits (margins) made on your campaigns.

To track margins, you’ll need to add costing information. This will enable Google Ads to **automatically calculate product margins. **

Advantages of this tracking mode :

  • precise measurement of revenues and profits generated by Google Ads (Shopping and Search ads)
  • Detailed reports on basket size and average value
  • Detailed reports on items sold

How do I set up conversion tracking with shopping cart data?

To get Shopping Cart data into Google Ads conversion reports, you’ll need to set up conversion tracking using Google’s global site tag or Google Tag Manager (GTM).

However, we recommend that you go through your Tag Manager and add the data parameters using your Data layers;

Here is the example provided by Google Ads Help:

To transfer basket data to the conversion tools, proceed as follows:

  1. Select the conversion tag to which you wish to send the shopping cart data.
  2. Check the “Provide sales data at product level” box.
  3. Select data layer or JavaScript variables as data source.
  4. You must add the parameters below to the payment page to reference them.

Find out more in the article: “Configuring and testing conversion reporting with shopping cart data“.

Do you have more questions about Google Ads conversion tracking? Do you need to set up an appropriate tagging plan for your Google Analytics and GA4 analyses?

Contact our Analytics and Tag Management team. We will certainly be able to help you.

Consult our Data & RGPD experts

Google Analytics: end of GA3, how to prepare for GA4?

Posted on by Adenlab Adenlab

The old version of Google Analytics, GA3, will disappear for good in 2023, to be replaced by Google Analytics 4. Why this sudden switch to GA4? And what changes can you expect?

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The end of Google Analytics (Universal Analytics - GA3) in 2023

On March 16, Google caused a stir by announcing the phasing-out of its web traffic analysis tool, Google Analytics 3. The standard version will disappear completely on July 1, 2023, and the 360 version in October 2023. GA4 will take over.

A sudden decision that hasn’t made many analytics and SEO professionals very happy.

The tight schedule is a cause for some concern, as is the complete change compared to previous versions (new technology, interface, jargon…).

Finally, there are still questions to be answered about data transition, given that Google has yet to propose a dedicated tool.

Google Analytics in the crosshairs of the CNIL

So why the rush? The CNIL, the French Data Protection Authority, may have precipitated this decision. Last February, the CNIL issued formal notices to various website operators for their use of Google Analytics, deeming the transfer of data to be non-compliant. These formal notices followed a series of similar complaints (101 to be exact), lodged by the None of Your Business association.

(NOYB) in various countries affected by the RGPD.

We can assume that Google preferred to keep up with the CNIL’s recommendations by offering a new version of GA, and avoid a flight of its customers to more RGPD-friendly solutions.

What are the RGPD-related developments with GA4?

In order to comply with the French and European authorities, Google had to rethink its data management model. Previous versions of Google Analytics, including GA3, were unable to anonymize users’ IP addresses without first hosting them outside the EU. This is exactly what the CNIL pointed out last February.

With GA4, available since October 2020, Google is making a profound change to the data collection model and proudly announces it on its blog:

“Google Analytics 4 will no longer store IP addresses. These solutions and controls are particularly necessary in today’s international data privacy landscape, where users increasingly expect more privacy and control over their data.”

New features in Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

In addition to greater respect for data confidentiality, GA4 also offers its users new functionalities

Smarter insights

using machine learning to better understand the customer journey across all platforms and devices.

Seamless integration of Google's advertising platforms

a feature that will optimize the performance of your campaigns and boost your marketing ROI.

Improved measurement

GA4 implements automatic and native tracking that you can activate on your site’s functionalities such as external links, search, scroll, data download, video interactions.
We strongly recommend that you activate scroll natively, as you’ll see in the last point.

Engagement rate replaces bounce rate

With GA4, we’ve gone from a disappointing metric to a positive one, with an engagement rate inversely proportional to the bounce rate.
Remember, the main problem with the bounce rate was that it didn’t take into account the time spent when there was no interaction on the page. Now, GA4 is able to detect scroll activation on a page and count the time spent by the surfer on your site’s pages.

Conclusion

The future will be Google Analytics 4, or it won’t be!

Unless you’ve given up on Google Analytics, you should make the switch as soon as possible, if you haven’t already done so.

Points to remember about the switch to GA4

GA3 will disappear completely on July 1, 2023 for the standard version and in October 2023 for the 360 version.

Historical data will remain available until December 31, 2023, after which they will be permanently deleted.

To date, no dedicated data transition tool has been proposed by Google Analytics for making the switch. To be continued…

Don’t wait any longer, start complying with Google Analytics 4 right now.
If you need experts to help you through this transition, contact us!

As specialists in e-commerce site support, we know just how effective analysis can be in optimizing the performance of an e-commerce site. We’d be delighted to support you in this upgrade.

Contact our Analytics experts

Google Ads’ tracking Consent Mode: will it recover your lost data?

Posted on by Adenlab Adenlab

What is Google Ads "Consent Mode" tracking?

Consent Mode is designed to ensure that important data is collected to measure the effectiveness of your Google Ads advertising campaigns, even if your users have not given their consent to cookies.

Products compatible with Consent Mode :

  • Suivi des conversions Google Ads
  • Tag de remarketing Google Ads
  • Floodlight
  • Google Analytics

Best Practices for Optimizing Target ROAS

Photo by Markus Spiske / Unsplash

In order to function, Google’s Consent Mode uses two tags to adjust the behavior of cookies and

Google tags :

  •   ad_storagean

  •   alytics_storage

The consent mode uses these beacons to receive information on the consent status of users directly from the cookie consent window provided by your CMP (consent management platform).

Cookie Management

Sending data to Google

Consent Mode recovers an average of 30% of data, excluding cookie validation.

It retrieves information using anonymized pings.

Pings are used for the following events:

  • Consent status pings are sent from all pages visited by the user for each cookie category (even if the consent status changes),
  • Conversion pings are sent as soon as a conversion has taken place,
  • Google Analytics pings are sent to all pages of a website on which the Google Analytics tag has been implemented.

In what way?

  • Time and date (of your website visit).
  • User agent (if users visit your website)
  • Referrer (how users accessed your website)
  • Redirection information in URL (e.g. GCLID / DCLID)
  • Boolean information on consent status
  • Random number generated on each loaded page

RGBD compliance

What does the law say?

The RGPD directive establishes rules on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data.

“personal data” means any information relating to an
identified or identifiable natural person (hereinafter referred to as the “person
concerned”); an “identifiable natural person” is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier, such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier, or to one or more factors specific to his or her physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity;

“processing” means any operation or set of operations which is performed upon personal data or sets of personal data, whether or not by automatic means, such as collection, recording, organization, structuring, storage, adaptation or alteration, retrieval, consultation, use, disclosure by transmission, dissemination or otherwise making available, alignment or combination, restriction, erasure or
destruction;

Source: DIRECTIVE (EU) 2016/680 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL APR 27, 2016

RGPD IN BRIEF

No personal data or data enabling personal profiling either by ID or by nominative personal data may be processed without the consent and justified legitimate interest of the person concerned by the processing.

No personal data may be further processed in order to be anonymized to comply with the RGPD.

RGPD AND CONSENT MODE

Photo by Daniel Romero / Unsplash

What does Google have to say?

Anonymization of data processing and data collection first Parties only.

Technically and theoretically, Consent Mode makes it possible to obtain completely anonymous data:

a page = a unique id which is renewed on each page = an action = a ping sent to google solutions (analytics, Ads, etc.).

The user path cannot be followed.

Conversely, actions triggering conversions can be tracked, and degraded Analytics data can be tracked (session times, page views) thanks to the consent mode.

The Consent Mode not only uses no cookies, but also recovers First Party-oriented data.

💡
If you need more information or need to review your RGPD and consent policy, our Data Tag Management and Analytics teams are here to help.
Consult our Data & RGPD experts

What the CNIL says

For the first 4 techniques, the collection of individual data for
advertising purposes comes under the RGPD, and must logically be subject to
“free and informed” consent on the part of the Internet user. For the 5th
technique, that of the cohort that seeks to anonymize
personal data, it also imposes consent in the name of another
text, the ePrivacy directive.

CONSENT MODE IS BETA

Consent mode is sold as a tool to comply with RGPD regulations without ever mentioning it in the Google documentation. The consent mode plays on the fact that it does not collect any personal
data, as it only collects anonymous browsing data on the website (first parties). This data can therefore be processed.

On the other hand, the CNIL seems to be impartial on its side, and the boundary between personal data and website events (conversion tracking) seems relatively close. Consent mode has so far not obtained any conformity from the CNIL. For the moment, it’s an existing technology on a slippery slope, liable to be declared non-compliant by the CNIL.

All in all, it’s fair to say that Google GAFA has gone to great lengths to produce a tool that complies with regulations. However, this is to the detriment of the free interpretation of laws and the words used in legal texts.

Aggregators have their own user-privacy-oriented interpretations, while advertising agencies have their own business-oriented interpretations. Only official validation of the Api by the CNIL will determine the compliance of the consent mode.

Consult our Data & RGPD experts

Increase your sales without spending a thing! By improving your search engine optimisation on Google Shopping!

Posted on by Adenlab Adenlab

Merchants combining Google Shopping’s free listings with their Google Ads campaigns recorded 2 times more views and increased visits to their site by an average of 50%.

For many advertisers, products listed on Google Shopping and not benefiting from an advertising campaign are relegated to oblivion: that’s a mistake!

Indeed, we tend to believe that, like the second Google page, these product pages are never visited.

However, back in 2020, Google observed that merchants who combined free listings with their paid campaigns recorded twice as many views and increased visits to their websites by an average of +50%.

These significant figures can be explained by three letters: SEO.

Taking care of your search engine optimization on Google Shopping will encourage you to adopt best practices in the management of your Merchant Center feed, which in turn will improve your natural search engine optimization and therefore your visibility.

We also show you how to FINALLY analyze sales and conversions linked to your search engine optimization on Google Shopping (Warning: GA4 prerequisite).

How to improve the visibility of your products on Google Shopping Free

Good practice means taking particular care with

Although ROAS and ROI (Return on Investment) are often used interchangeably, they differ.
ROI takes into account overall costs, while ROAS focuses solely on advertising investments. ROAS is therefore better suited to evaluating the effectiveness of Google Ads campaigns.

Practical examples to better understand its application

How your feed works

It’s essential to ensure that your Merchant Center indexes your catalog correctly to maximize the visibility of your products.

In fact, even if it’s accepted that a certain percentage of your products will not be visible, a high percentage of rejected products is still an indication of a malfunction in your flow settings.

Choosing your keywords

Depending on your references and products, you can choose different positioning strategies.

Focus on generic, highly competitive keywords, or work on the long tail with more specific keywords.

The choice of one or other method will also be determined by the time and budget you can devote to this activity.

The care you take with your titles and descriptions

Indeed, even if it’s advisable to include your keywords in titles and descriptions, it’s better to write for web users before writing for the robot.

In fact, use descriptions to provide more information about your product. Descriptions will be used by Google Shopping to position you on “long tail” search terms.

Adding reinsurance elements

This will help you stand out from the competition.

Don’t forget that your free listings won’t necessarily appear among the first. You’ll be able to catch the eye of web surfers with your free listings on sites such as Avis Vérifiés or Trustpilot.

All these tips should help you improve your visibility on Google Shopping, the spearhead of free product listing.

Google Shopping : Improve the performance of product listings on Google Shopping

What would be the point of tracking the conversions of your naturally listed products on Google Shopping?

Analysing the performance and sales of your search engine optimisation products on Google Shopping has four advantages for you

Improve your customer knowledge

Having the most comprehensive and up-to-date understanding of your market will enable you to spot future trends and plan your strategies accordingly.

Enrich your database

Indeed, what could be more important than the intention of a customer who lands on your site by dint of research and without having been influenced by a paid shopping ad?

Discover high-potential products

These analyses will enable you to include the same products in your paid campaigns.

Give your products free visibility

Whether you’re just starting out in e-commerce or you’re a seasoned pro, search engine optimisation on Google Shopping lets you test your hypotheses in real life without fear of incurring a loss, whatever the performance of your paid shopping ads.

And if you feel like retorting that the customer journey is long and impenetrable, we’ll tell you that it’s all the more reason to track down those conversions that often fly under the radar, and which could enrich your knowledge of the paths your customers take to get to you.

As you can see, not worrying about these conversions would be like being satisfied with the tip of the iceberg, thinking you’ve seen the whole thing.

How to activate free Google Shopping conversion tracking in 5 clicks

Now it’s time to set up your tracking system to follow the evolution of your search engine optimisation on Google Shopping Gratuit and track the evolution of your sales.

It’s important to note that using Google Analytics 4 is a prerequisite for this tracking. If this is your case, this tutorial is for you!

A new Merchant Center feature will enable you to unlock the full potential of your catalog. To set it up, follow these steps.

Rendezvous :

  1. In the tools and settings section, then in conversion settings
  2. You can now activate automatic tagging.
    The final url will then be assigned a tag as in the following example:
    www.example.com/?srsltid=123xyz

Merchant Center – Conversion settings

Secondly, you’ll need to view your conversions in Google Analytics 4.

After logging in, go to :

  1. in the Administration section.
  2. In the list of products to associate, select Merchant Center.
  3. All you have to do is link the two accounts.

For even more effective tracking and performance monitoring, build your own customized tool with Adenlab. With our Catalogue straker solution, create a more relevant reporting hub that meets your objectives. Thanks to our data-driven vision, quickly identify products in immediate need of attention, and anticipate increases in competition.

Read also:

  1. Conversion tracking with Google Ads
  2. How to optimize product listing performance on Google Shopping and improve free search engine optimization?
  3. Google Analytics 4 (GA4): what you need to know and what new features GA4 offers