Analytics Archives - SimpliStack.com

Enhanced E-commerce Set Up & SEO Audits

Kevin Webster — Mon, 09 May 2022 14:13:52 +0000

The path to purchase in your e-commerce store is critical for the success of your business. If you intend to use organic traffic to drive revenue, your Google Analytics Enhanced E-commerce setup should be examined during an SEO audit.

What is Enhanced E-commerce in Google Analytics

In short, Enhanced E-commerce (EE) is a series of reports that describe the effectiveness of your product pages, category/collection pages, on-site search results and other aspects of your website. When set up properly, it’s a great way to see if your visual merchandising is working to drive revenue and conversions.

It’s also a great place to look for how well specific coupon promotions and marketing campaigns are performing.

Often, however, we find that many companies don’t have this set up to work properly.

That’s why we include it in our SEO audits.

Enhanced E-Commerce Items we Check During an SEO Audit

Product List Set Up

Most Google Analytics installs for e-commerce sites do a good job of tracking product revenue. Most also track adds to cart and other product level performance metrics.

So many visits start from a Product List, or Category (a Collection if you’re using Shopify).

EE can also track these pages performance- if you have it set up properly. Most small to medium size stores don’t however.

So what are you missing?

These reports track what products showed in which positions when a category loads. Some stores default to showing the best sellers first, but other companies choose to do visual merchandising by hand, especially for holiday sale pages and such.

For your last big promo, do you know how many people clicked on the first product? The second? Did they add it to their cart or buy?

When your EE is working properly, you will.

Internal Promotion Performance

Running a site wide banner promoting a specific category or product? Do you have banners on your home page?

In EE, these are referred to as Internal Promotions.

We can show you how to properly code your banners to track impressions, clicks, and sales. It’s a great way to test effectiveness of both offers, and creative assets.

Coupon Performance

Most sites track this well in EE, but we’ll check to make sure yours does too. This report will show which coupons are being used the most, as well as which drive the highest average order value. If you do some math, it can also show you what percentage of your customers are using coupons in the first place.

Shopping Behavior

This is another report that most stores get right, but you can run into issues. This simply shows the path users take in your e-commerce store to purchase product.

It also will tell you how many visitors actually view your products at all, as opposed to just consuming your blog or other content.

Checkout Behavior

Unlike Shopping Behavior, many stores get this one wrong- and it’s really important. This report is key to your overall conversion rates, as it shows what step in the checkout process tend to make your users abandon the checkout process.

So this is a key part of our e-commerce SEO audit, since if its not configured correctly, you’ll have bad data, as in the image above.

Ready to get ranked? We’re ready to help.

The post Enhanced E-commerce Set Up & SEO Audits appeared first on SimpliStack.com.

Is My Google Analytics Setup Reviewed in an SEO Audit?

Kevin Webster — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 14:29:24 +0000

During an SEO audit, any tool you use to measure organic success should be included. So if you’re using Google Analytics, your implementation should be reviewed by the audit team.

Google Analytics is ubiquitous these days, running on almost every commercial website out there. In many instances, however, companies aren’t getting as much out of the data as they could be. This can in part be caused by an incorrect or “unfinished” implementation.

Accurate measurement of website traffic and consumer behavior is as important as simply tracking rankings when it comes to SEO. An agency shouldn’t just be looking to grow your traffic- they should be looking to grow your revenue.

So what should the SEO audit look for in your Google Analytics? Let’s take a look at most important components below.

Enhanced E-commerce

You want visitors to turn into customers. Enhanced E-commerce tracking helps explain why, or why not, people are buying from you.

While most of this is easy to set up, the steps to implementing enhanced E-commerce tracking differs based on the E-Commerce platform you’re using. Leading platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce & Magento expose the data layers necessary to track the data needed for enhanced E-commerce tracking in Google Analytics. In some cases, 3rd parties have developed a data layer plugin so you don’t have to do any manual javascript or .php coding.

If you have to implement the data layer manually, some metrics such as Product List Performance (which can help you with visual merchandising), often takes the most effort and scripting expertise.

A great audit will identify any issues with your implementation, and show you how to fix it.

Goal Tracking

Many times, new visitors to your site, whether it be from organic or paid media, aren’t ready to buy just yet. Non-transactional goals should be set up in GA to track such things as:

Newsletter Signups
Deep Visits/Dwell Time
Interaction with Product Reviews
Telephone Calls
Video views

On-site Search

We spend a lot of time researching what people search for on Google. Perhaps just as important is the search box in your E-commerce store. Properly implemented, the Site Search report in GA is a goldmine of data that can be used across your organization, and by your agency.

Some of the uses include:

Info for your buying & merchandising team on product you don’t have, but people want
Visual merchandising based on search numbers
Populating products in your social and emails
Potential pricing issues if there are many searches and few sales
Content for how to & other customer service/educational web pages

Multi-Channel Funnels

One of the big concerns we hear, aside from not getting enough “free” traffic, is that the organic channel doesn’t convert as well as paid search. There’s a few valid reasons for this, since a lot of organic search is investigational as opposed to transactional.

However, an audit should include a look at the lifetime value of organic customers. Since most of the reports people look at are “last non-direct click”, revenue from customers that first found you through organic won’t be included.

An audit can’t “fix” that problem, but it should describe what your actual organic ROI is in order to level set expectations going forward.

Why is this Important in an SEO Audit?

To be sure, analytics and SEO are two different things. It may even be unusual for an SEO agency you engage with to do this portion of the audit.

We think it’s important.

The third step in our E-commerce SEO Audit Roadmap is “Set Goals”. To do that, the measurement environment must be in place and working like it should.

Goals for an organic search campaign will vary from company to company, but they should definitely include more than just revenue.

Ready to get ranked? We’re ready to help.

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Why Don’t Conversions in Google Ads and Google Analytics Match?

Kevin Webster — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 18:00:42 +0000

If there’s one question that every search marketer has had to answer for a client, it’s this one: Why don’t my conversions in Google Ads and Google Analytics match? The answer is simple, yet hard to understand. It’s all about your attribution modeling.

What is Attribution Modeling?

For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll start here. Attribution modelling is simply a way of looking at who gets credit for a sale or lead. Depending on the model, someone might get credit for the whole transaction, or just part of it. There is no “correct” model, and selecting the most appropriate model will depend upon your business.

As a rule, if you advertise a lot of different places (Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, blogs… all the different digital channels), you’ll want to use a model that attributes a portion of the transaction to each ad that got clicked. This way, you’ll be able to better understand the return on your ad spend.

In the old days (so like 10 years ago), all we really had was either first or last click attribution. So the sale would either be assigned to the first or last channel that had a click in the customer path to purchase. This was ok, since we could at least understand the impact of part of our advertising budget.

What if there were clicks in between though? Well, they simply didn’t count. Which really isn’t fair, since they did help us stay top of mind with the consumer, even if they didn’t transact right that moment.

What Attribution Model do my Tools Use?

This is going to depend in some cases, but we’ll start with one absolute: Almost every report in your Google Analytics account attributes conversions to the last non-direct click. So in other words, if you’re looking at your standard Source/Medium report in the Acquisition portion of your account, anything in the Google CPC row is a visit where a Google ad was the last click on a measurable source. A user could come back directly to your website (typing in your full website address for the most part) and NOT overwrite Google CPC.

However, if a user finds you through organic search, then hits a remarketing ad or comes in through a coupon website, then that sale will get re-attributed to a new source/medium.

This is where the disconnect between Google Ads and Analytics comes in.

If you’ve set the attribution model to anything other than last click in your Google Ads account, these numbers will no longer match up. (Keep in mind, they will almost never match perfectly for a number of reasons).

In particular, if your agency or Google Ads representative talked you into the Data Driven attribution model, you’re going to be way off when you try to reconcile Ads and Analytics. The Data Driven model is a predictive model, and tries to show value across multiple ads or keywords based on consumer behavior. It doesn’t report a “real number” in the sense that we’re used to talking about them.

Reconciling Google Ads and Google Analytics

Let’s say for a given time period, Google Ads is reporting $1.7m in revenue, and Google Analytics is telling you your Ads only garnered $1.3 million. That’s a big discrepancy, so if people in your organization are looking at these things actively, it’s bound to become a topic of discussion.

Analytics:

Google Ads:

So which do we believe? The answer is neither, without digging a little further.

Since we know that the Analytics report is last non-direct click, and in this case the Google Ads report is data-driven, we have to look at a different report in Google Analytics to find that additional $400,000 in revenue. This report is in the Conversions section of Analytics, as opposed to acquisition:

We need to do a few things to this report to find the hidden money (which we will soon see isn’t really hidden at all, but rather being credited to another one of your marketing channels). Here’s how you’ll want to set up the Top Conversion Paths report:

Your conversion type selected should only be the one that has actual revenue associated with it. Not Smart Goals, etc. You’ll note I have Type selected as All as opposed to Google Ads. That’s just so that I could get screen shots I can share publicly. You can save a step by selecting Google Ads. It’s also important that you select Path Length as All, to capture all the revenue.

Once set, something magical happens:

We’re now only seeing a discrepancy of $12,000, as opposed to $400,000. That’s a lot easier to swallow. So now that we know our tracking is in fact working properly, and we aren’t ACTUALLY missing transactions and revenue, it begs the question:

Why is traditional Google Analytics reporting off by $400,000?

From the report we just created, let’s walk through some examples of how this happens.

Attribution and Transactions: Who Gets the Credit?

Here’s 9 paths consumers took to order from an e-commerce website. You’ll note of course that they all include at least one click from a Google Ad:

In ALL of the above examples, a data driven attribution model in Google Ads is going to take credit for the sale, in one or more Ad Groups. Line 2 would split credit between a few different clicks in your Google Ads reporting, as would lines 4 and 9. And those three transactions would all be credited to Google CPC in your traditional Analytics reports.

Line 5 however, would show credit to 1 ad in your Google Ads account, but would actually put the transaction and the revenue in your Google Organic channel in Analytics, since organic is the last non-direct click.

Line 3 would still be Google Ads in ALL reports, since the last click is direct, so Analytics ignores it for attribution.

If you have a really strong affiliate program with lots of coupon and loyalty sites involved, you might see a bunch of transactions like number 6 above.

In Conclusion

So in the end, the reason your Google Ads and Analytics accounts don’t show the same numbers is likely attribution. Start by checking with the steps outlined above before looking at your tracking code and other somewhat less likely scenarios.

There’s much more to know about attribution modeling, but that will require its own blog post, which we’ll do down the road.

If you have any questions, drop them in comments below!

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