Part II – Advanced Analytics: Goal Tracking

This is part II of a three part series on Google Analytics. You can read part I here:
Part I – Installing Google Analytics in Miva Merchant

Now that you have Google Analytics installed, you will be able to track important data about your visitors. Analytics will tell you where your visitors came from, what keyword they searched for to find you (if they came from a search engine), and how long they stayed. This is very useful information, but if you own an e-commerce store you also need to be tracking sales statistics such as customer conversion ratio, and checkout abandonment rate.

Google Analytics has two advanced features which allow you to track both of these statistics and also many more. The features are call Goal Tracking and Analytics for E-Commerce.

How to setup and install Google Analytics Goal Tracking for Miva Merchant

Goal tracking is useful for a few different things. It allows you to set up “Goals” which are events that you want your visitors to complete. Some example goals are signing up for a newsletter, requesting a catalog, or the main goal – completing a purchase on your site.

One of the best features of Goal tracking is it funnel visualization. You can set up a series of steps that your visitor must go through to complete a goal. The checkout process is a perfect example of this. You can see where your visitors are abandoning their cart during the checkout process. Here is an example:

As you can see 15 people started the checkout process and 3 actually made a purchase. This is very valuable data which will allow you to see if you have any problems with your checkout. If a large percentage of visitors were leaving at the shipping page, this would probably indicate that your shipping prices are too high.