Troubleshooting Your Ecommerce Store with Google Analytics: A Step-by-Step Guide

In the ecom industry, we rely on our businesses to attract, engage, and convert visitors into customers. However, issues with your online store can prevent it from functioning properly and achieving its full potential. Today, we’re going to go over how to use Google Analytics (GA) to find and fix problems with your site to ensure it’s working like it should … and making you money!

Step 1: Monitor your store’s performance

Keeping a close eye on how your store is performing will help pinpoint any issues that might be affecting its ability to bring in revenue. Here are some key metrics to pay attention to:

• Traffic: Monitor your traffic to see how many visitors are coming to your site and from where. This can help you identify any issues with your marketing campaigns or store content that might be causing a drop in traffic.
• Conversion rate: Look at your conversion rate to see how well your store is converting visitors into customers. A low conversion rate could be a sign of issues with your store’s design, user experience, or checkout process.
• Bounce rate: Your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your ecommerce store after only viewing one page. This can be a strong indicator of the effectiveness of your content, design, and user experience, as it reflects how well your store is engaging and retaining visitors. A high bounce rate could indicate that visitors are not finding what they’re looking for, are experiencing issues with your store’s navigation or layout, or are otherwise not finding value in their visit.
• Average session duration: The average amount of time visitors spend on your site can give you an idea of how engaging your content is. A low average session duration could be a sign of issues with your content or user experience.

Step 2: Identify specific issues

Once you’ve determined possible issues with your ecom website’s performance, the next step is to use Google Analytics to dig deeper and find specific problem areas.

Audience section

Use the “Audience” section to segment visitors based on different criteria. The “Audience” section of Google Analytics is a powerful tool for understanding your store’s visitors and identifying issues that could be affecting specific groups of visitors. 

Once you’ve created a segment, you can use it to filter the data in GA to see how specific groups of visitors are interacting with your store. For example, if you create a segment for mobile users, you can see how mobile users are behaving on your store compared to desktop users. This can help find problems that might be affecting a specific group of visitors, such as a high bounce rate for mobile users or a low conversion rate for visitors from a particular referral source.

Acquisition section

Use the “Acquisition” section to see where your visitors are coming from and how they’re interacting with your store. Analyzing the data in this section can shed light on trouble with your marketing campaigns or referral sources that could be impacting your store’s performance.

Key questions to ask in the “Acquisition” section:

• How much traffic are you getting from each referral source or marketing campaign?
• How well is each referral source or marketing campaign converting visitors into customers?
• What is the bounce rate for each referral source or marketing campaign? 

Behavior section

Use the “Behavior” section to see how visitors are interacting with your store and to locate any site performance problems.

Key metrics to look at in the “Behavior” section:

• Pageviews: How many times has each page on your store been viewed?
• Unique pageviews: How many unique visitors have viewed each store page?
• Average time on page: How much time are visitors spending on each page?
• Bounce rate: What is the bounce rate for each page on your store? A high bounce rate could be a sign of issues with your store’s content or user experience.

Knowing this information will help you improve and optimize your website’s content, user experience, and performance.

Wrap-Up

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for identifying and troubleshooting issues with your ecommerce store. Using it to monitor your website’s performance and analyze your data can provide you with a deeper understanding of your store’s visitors and identify specific issues that might be affecting your store’s ability to attract, engage, and convert visitors into customers. The better your store functions, the more sales you will make!