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Building a successful e-commerce store requires product performance analytics. Regardless of your e-commerce store’s niche, it probably sells multiple products. Whether it sells two or 2,000 products, though, you’ll need to analyze each product’s performance.
Some products will perform better than others. With product analytics, you can identify weak points within your e-commerce store’s product lineup so that you improve them.
Add to Carts
Tracking add-to carts will provide insight into the performance of your e-commerce store’s products.
An add to cart occurs when a shopper selects a product for their digital cart.
It’s the precursor to a revenue-driving transaction. For example, shoppers must add it to their cart to buy a product, followed by completing the checkout process.
By tracking add-to-carts, you’ll know which products have the strongest purchase intent and which products have the weakest purchase intent.
You can run reports to see how many add-to carts each product generated during a given period.
For example, if a product generated substantially fewer add-to carts than others sold on your e-commerce store, you should optimize it to make the product more appealing.
Unique Purchases
You should also track unique purchases. Unique purchases are the number of times a product was purchased during a given period.
In Google Analytics, each instance in which a product was part of a transaction contributes to the product’s unique purchases.
For example, if you sold 500 units of a product last month, its unique purchases for that month would be 500.
Add to carts don’t always translate into purchases. Research by Baymard Institute shows that nearly three-quarters of shoppers abandon their carts.
You should still track add-to carts, but unique purchases offer a more precise representation of product performance.
Detail Views
‘Detail views’ is an essential product performance metric. It’s the number of times a product’s description or details section was viewed.
If a product page has an extended description, you can track detail views to determine how many shoppers viewed it.
Some shoppers may visit a product page without reading its description. With ‘detail views,’ you’ll know exactly how many shoppers viewed a product’s description.
A high number of detail views is a sign that shoppers want to learn more about a product, whereas a low number of detail views is a sign of disinterest.
Like most product performance metrics, detail views is a metric included in Google Analytics. Therefore, you can use Google Analytics to track your e-commerce store’s ‘detail views’.
List Views
Depending on how your e-commerce store is structured, you may want to track list views. ‘List views’ is the number of times a product appeared in a list during a given period.
Products, of course, may appear in other places besides standard product pages.
If your e-commerce store has a search function, shoppers may find products in the search results.
On the other hand, if your e-commerce store has categories, shoppers may find products after selecting a relevant category.
Tracking list views will reveal how many times a product was viewed as part of a list. A high number of list views indicates that shoppers are actively searching for the product.
They may not know the product’s name, but shoppers are still finding the product through search or category lists.
Revenue
You can’t measure the performance of your e-commerce store’s products without tracking revenue. Revenue is the total amount of sales revenue driven by a product during a given period.
It reveals how much money customers have paid your e-commerce store for a particular product.
Revenue isn’t the same as unique purchases. Some products may have a high number of unique purchases and a low revenue or vice versa.
Low-priced products, for instance, often generate less total sales revenue than their high-priced counterparts. Therefore, they may have low revenue and a high number of unique purchases.
How to Use Google Analytics for Product Performance Analytics
You won’t find these or other product performance metrics available using Google Analytics’ default settings.
Instead, you’ll have to set up enhanced e-commerce. Enhanced e-commerce is an optional tracking and reporting feature specifically for e-commerce stores.
It will introduce several new performance metrics to your Google Analytics dashboard, including add to carts, unique purchases, detail views, list views, revenue, and more.
To set up enhanced e-commerce, you’ll need to enable this feature in your Google Analytics dashboard. From the dashboard’s home page, select the “Admin” link at the bottom of the sidebar, followed by “E-commerce Settings.”
You’ll see a button to toggle on and off enhanced e-commerce for your online store on the next page.
Once you’ve enabled enhanced e-commerce, you must add the Google Analytics tracking code to your e-commerce store.
Many e-commerce platforms have a plugin for Google-enhanced e-commerce.
For example, if your e-commerce store runs WooCommerce, you can download the plugin at wordpress.org/plugins/enhanced-e-commerce-for-woocommerce-store to automatically add the Google Analytics tracking code to your online store.
If there’s no plugin available for your e-commerce store’s platform, you can still use enhanced e-commerce; you have to add the Google Analytics tracking code manually.
You’ll be able to add different tracking code snippets to various pages and parts of your e-commerce store.
Google Analytics will then return performance metrics related to your e-commerce store’s products. For more information on enhanced e-commerce, visit developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/enhanced-ecommerce.
There are other tools and analytics solutions that can track the performance of your e-commerce store’s products.
Most e-commerce platforms even include some performance metrics. Nonetheless, Google Analytics is both free and effective when used for this purpose.
After enhancing enhanced e-commerce and adding the tracking code, you can use Google Analytics to track product performance metrics.
Product performance analytics will allow you to build a more profitable e-commerce store. It involves analyzing the performance of your e-commerce store’s products by tracking various metrics.
Rather than only looking at store-wide metrics, don’t ignore product-specific metrics. Analyzing product-specific performance metrics will help you optimize your e-commerce store more effectively.
