Ecommerce: Overview: Google Analytics Power User Part 5

Next up in the series of most useful Google Analytics reports is the Ecommerce: Overview Report.

If you have an Ecommerce website, then the Ecommerce: Overview Report will likely be one of the reports that you regularly review to assess where your revenue is coming from and how your campaigns are performing.

Note: Even if you don’t have an Ecommerce enabled website you can still monetize your success events by adding goal values. If you are a lead generation site and you have more than four lead generation forms as success events and you want to monetize them all you could set up your forms submissions as Ecommerce events. This would then keep all of the success event data in one profile/report. In this case the forms would be products and the data will be reported in the Ecommerce section not the goals section. By doing this though you loose some of the reporting that is available in the goals section, such as the funnel visualization. So as with everything in life there are pros and cons (you could also set your forms using the four goals and ecommerce).

When looking at the Ecommerce Overview report you will see the Ecommerce conversion rate charted, a summary of the number of different products that generated $X in revenue, the average Ecommerce conversion rate for the period, total number of transactions for the period, average order value, and total products purchased. At the bottom of the report you will find two tables which report on the Top Revenue Sources, by Products and by Source/Medium.

Once you’ve done your quick review and compared these top line metrics with the previous month, and the same month a year ago… it is time to dive in and learn more about where your traffic is coming from and how your campaigns are performing.

To do this you will click on one of your top performing products and then select a dimension (this is a drop down menu in the heading of the first column). There are a number of dimension to choose from; Product SKU, None, Source (this is the referring site), Medium (is the type of referral i.e. cpc, organic, email, referral…), campaign, keyword, ad content, visitor type ( new or returning), landing page, language, continent, sub continent, country/territory, region, city…). This is where it starts to get fun. You are now looking at one of your top performing products and comparing what keywords contribute to your revenue. Take this even one step further by using Google Analytics Advanced segmentation feature to see how paid vs. non-paid visitors contribute to a products revenue. This is crucial information for your marketing team who are responsible for product search marketing both paid and organic.

From the Ecommerce Overview report the other Top Revenue Sources report is based on Sources/Medium instead of products. This data tells us what referring sites contribute the most revenue. As with top revenue sources by products, top revenue sources by sources/medium can and should be segmented by a dimension. The default dimension for this report is keyword. You will notice that this report provides us with an ecommerce conversion rate (the top products report didn’t provide this). This report will also be a very valuable report for those people managing both organic and paid search campaigns as you can determine which keywords are converting well on a per source basis and even segment further by first vs. returning visitor…