Why integrating your store with Google Analytics?

Shop-Script PREMIUM stores are integrated with Google Analytics, a free Google tool designed to analyze website traffic, performance, usability by providing reports on site activity:

Whether you are just starting your e-commerce business, or your online store is already showing good results, the benefits of Google Analytics can be significant. It helps you target problem areas, get an insight on the preferences and choices of your customers’ community, improve page design and content, marketing campaign, and bring success to your business. Here are some of the benefits of Google Analytics and how they can work for your online store:

• You can review reports on site traffic for various periods of time. Depending on the nature of your business, you can analyze how your store reacts to seasonal changes, sale and discount time offers, or other introduced changes or even business non-related factors that could have influence your business in the past or the present.
• Google Analytics can pinpoint most common landing pages; i.e. pages in your store that customers are most interested in. That is especially useful for a new store: this lets you see customer’s perspective on resources, services, and products that are offered on your site.
• A feature quite useful for e-commerce that covers many locations is geographical reports. It is often very helpful to see which products are more popular in various areas in South America compared to Europe, US, or Canada. You can review your business in different parts of the world and adjust your offers and sales accordingly.
• You can track “paths” that your customers and store visitors took to get to your store’s home and product pages. Did they come to your site from by clicking an advertisement link placed on another page? Did they find it in search results? How do visitors navigate your site? Do they use products and categories browsing or prefer to search for products? Answers to these and many other questions can help you analyze your marketing and advertisement campaign and get an insight on your site content, design and navigation logic.
• The feature referred by Google Analytics as funnel visualization. It can help you analyze, for example, checkout process in your store. You can see what percentage of customers have completed checkout process, and at what steps others dropped out. Many online merchants try to make checkout process simple and appealing to customers. Funnel visualization can point out problem areas that should be redesigned.

You can get the full list of features and benefits on Google Analytics web site.

How to integrate your Shop-Script store with Google Analytics
First thing you need is Google Analytics account (go to www.google.com/analytics to get one). When registering for an account, indicate that you are opening an account for an e-commerce site – this way Google Analytics will provide you with reports on customers orders. Once you’ve registered and received your account id, switch your Shop-Script store to administrative mode and enable Google Analytics integration: click Configuration -> Configuration -> Google Analytics, enable the feature, enter your account ID, and currency type. This will enable your order summaries, store visitors and other information to be sent to Google Analytics.

Now you can log in to Google Analytics and access reports on your online store. (Please note that Google Analytics updates and processes reports once every 24 hours.)