google analytics

What is Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free analytics tool that helps you measure your website traffic and gain insight into how people interact with it. It has dozens of different reports to help you drill down into user behavior of all kinds, whether visits, queries, referrals, or something else.

Google Analytics is enabled by installing a unique Google tracking code into your site. Once installed, Google will track your visitors' behavior and send that data to Google Analytics' servers. That data is then aggregated and presented to you through their intuitive and comprehensive reports.

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Getting Started

To start using Google Analytics, you'll need to create a?Google Analytics account. If your business is using other Google products like Gmail or Google Drive, you should use that same account to set up Google Analytics. It's important to set up the Google Analytics account using your primary account so you have full control over the data you'll be collecting. However, you can always?give access to your Google Analytics data?after you've created the account.

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Be careful!?Never let someone else create the account under their own account so they can manage it for you. If for some reason you part ways with that person, all your data goes with them.

Once you've finished creating your account, you'll need to install the tracking code. See?Setting up Google Analytics?to learn how to install the code in your BigCommerce store. After you've installed the tracking code, you'll want to set up some?goals?and?filters.

Goals?measure how often visitors complete specific actions on your site. For example, making a purchase or signing up for your newsletter. Setting up goals can help you track where customers drop out of your purchase funnel.
Filters?enable you to limit or tweak the data that you view in Google Analytics. For example, you can exclude data from specific IP addresses or subdomains. Setting up filters can help you focus on the data that you find most important or exclude data you don't need.
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Did you know??A Google Analytics account can have up to 50 properties (websites) and each property can have up to 25?views.

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Setting up Goals

There are many different types of?goals?that you can set up in Google Analytics. One of the most important ones for any online business is a?destination?goal. Setting up a destination goal to track purchases will help you evaluate the effectiveness of your store by providing you critical data, such as the number of conversions and your conversion rate.

When?creating a destination goal, you'll specify the path (URL) and funnel you expect your traffic to take. Set your destination URL to?/finishorder.php, and use the?Begins with?match type.

When you specify the steps in your funnel, Google Analytics will record where visitors enter and exit the path on the way towards your goal. Typically, this will be your cart (/cart.php) and checkout (/checkout.php) pages.

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Setting up Filters

One of the first filters we recommend creating is an exclusion filter for your own traffic to avoid skewing your data. Internal traffic is typically different from external traffic and shouldn't be included. For example, internal traffic could be employees working on your product catalog or web developers stress testing your storefront.

You'll want to gather all the?IP addresses?for the locations that you typically use like offices, homes, and warehouses. Once you've collected them,?create a filter?in Google Analytics.

When creating your filter, enter your IP address(s) using?Regular Expressions. For example, a single IP address like 123.45.678.901 would be entered as?123\.45\.678\.901. If you're entering multiple addresses, separate them with a?|.

Other tools at your disposal like the?Referral Exclusion List?can be used to prevent hosted gateways such as PayPal appearing as referrals in your data. See?Excluding Referrals From Hosted Payment Gateways?to learn more.

Once you've created your account, installed the tracking code, and set up your goals/filters, it's time to get down to business. Google Analytics offers a wide range of reports to help you get an understanding of how your site is doing in search results. In the next chapter, we'll go over all the main reports and how to create a custom dashboard, so your most important data is always at your fingertips.?