Google Analytics provides a valuable tool for setting goals and funnels for your eShop. A goal corresponds to any action a visitor might complete during a browsing session. When one of the set goals is completed, it is recorded as a conversion in your Google Analytics account.
A funnel, on the other hand, is a path of urls that your visitors are likely to follow while completing one of the set goals. Google Analytics keeps track of the pages included in a funnel, enabling you to check how effectively your shop is helping to achieve your business goals. A funnel can help you understand, for instance, how often visitors abandon the path to a goal, when they take it, or when they ignore the steps.
In an eShop the main funnel to consider is the checkout funnel. Google Analytics offers a special feature, "Enhanced eCommerce", to manage monitoring, goals and reporting, without having to set them manually. Advanced eCommerce tracking enables you to track:
- product views in a listing: every time a product appears on screen in a list (such as a product category page, or a carousel slideshow). It is also possible to give the name of the list in order to see, in the analysis phase, which lists perform better in terms of CTR
- view a product datasheet: the number of times a visitor accesses the details page of a product
- add to cart: every time a user adds a product to the cart. You can indicate when this addition is made, whether viewing a list or a product detail page
- visits to the cart page: Google Analytics can be informed of the page where the button to start the checkout process is present
- visits to the various pages (or steps) making up the checkout funnel: in this case too, during the implementation phase, which and how many steps are involved in this process
- transactions: this whole process ends by tracking how many orders are actually finalized through your eShop.
Google Analytics Advanced eCommerce tracking can be used to access related reports. Today we're going to talk about two of the main reports, although custom analyses can be undertaken (which we will see on another occasion).
The first report is "consumer behavior": to understand this, we need to think of a funnel whose main actions are:
- visiting or accessing the site ➞ awareness
- visiting a product page➞ interest
- adding to cart➞ consideration
- visiting cart page➞ consideration
- purchasing ➞ conversion.
Consumer behavior is useful for looking at macro-steps and understanding how visitors interact with your eShop: are there few visits to product pages? There may be a problem with listing pages or search filters. Are there many visits to product pages but few additions to the shopping cart? The product datasheets are probably unclear. Are there many visits to the cart page, but few transactions? The checkout process may have some complications discouraging users from finalizing the purchase.
According to a 2022 Baymard ApS study, the average cart abandonment rate in eCommerce is 69.82%. This is definitely a frustrating situation for eShop managers (source: shopify.com).
Since this final step is fundamental for monitoring the state of health of an eShop, Google Analytics offers us an ad hoc report, "checkout behavior", that tells us how users "move" between the different steps of the checkout process.
Checkout behavior
A study conducted by the b2x study center, based on the shops it manages, shows that out of 100 users who add a product to their cart 67.7% abandon the checkout process. Of this 67.7%, 64% abandon it before entering the shipping address. The two steps regarding data entry for shipping and payment have abandonment rates of 21% and 15% respectively for remaining users.
Therefore, 32.3% of carts are actually converted into an order.
How to analyze data
The analysis of data provided by Analytics highlights the steps when users abandon the shop.
We should stress that there are no "ideal" abandonment rates. The figure depends on the type of goods sold as well as the goal of the shop (pure sale or info-shopping).
It is however fundamental to periodically monitor funnel trends in order to detect any changes (up or down) in this percentage. Positive differences might be due to improvements in the shop's UX and UI or to the development of new traffic sources. If the site contains bugs, there will be a drop.
Additionally, in the event of ADV campaigns, Analytics might detect an increase in the number of sessions but not a corresponding increase in product views.
The basic question to ask is: is the traffic you want to bring to the shop aimed at conversion or at strengthening brand awareness?
Campaigns
The analysis provided by the checkout funnel should be particularly timely when launching specific marketing campaigns. Strategies such as exit pop-ups with discount coupons or emails to retrieve abandoned shopping carts should increase the conversion rate in the short to medium term.
In some shops, strategies such as coupons or promotional emails can affect overall sales positively by 2-5% in terms of revenue.
b2x, your partner for selling online effectively
We at b2x track and monitor all stages of the checkout funnel in order to suggest improvements to partners to maximize the cart conversion rate. This entails adopting a large-scale strategy that includes shop analysis and improving UX and UI and CRM systems.
Thanks to our proprietary bi.te solution, our team is also able to identify critical factors for monitoring eCommerce channels, performance indicators and areas of improvement for the eShop.
Our experts can implement best practices that include the development of promotional campaigns and the expansion of services regarding payments and shipping methods (cash on delivery, payment by installments).
April 18. 2022 
