Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:26:55 +0000

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Within the AdWords Campaigns report, you can click the tabs along the top of the report data to see various interesting metrics. Of particular interest is the Clicks tab, which shows you the performance of each AdWords campaign (or ad group) across various metrics. Important metrics that you should look at include:

Visits How many visits the campaign sent to your store. Cost The total cost of the campaign. CPC Cost per click: How much each ad click cost you, on average. RPC Revenue per click: How much each ad click earned you, on average. This is calculated by looking at which clicks resulted in eCommerce transactions and/or goals that have a value assigned to them in Google Analytics. ROI Return on investment: This is calculated as (total revenue from campaign - total cost of campaign) ÷ total cost of campaign. If this figure is positive then you're making a profit from your AdWords campaign; otherwise you're making a loss. Margin Your profit margin on the AdWords campaign: This is calculated as (total revenue from campaign - total cost of campaign) ÷ total revenue from campaign. Again, you want this figure to be positive, since this shows that your AdWords campaign is profitable.

If you discover from this report that your AdWords campaign has a negative ROI — that is, you're spending more money on ads than you're making from them — then you'll need to look at optimising your ads, keywords, and landing pages.

Other metrics

As well as the key metrics outlined above, Google Analytics gives you many other ways to measure your store's performance. You might find some of the following reports useful in certain situations:

Ecommerce > Average Order Value The average amount of money that customers spend per order. This can be useful when you're cross-promoting products or running time-based promotions — if the average order value increases then your promotion is probably a success. Ecommerce > Visits to Purchase How many times a customer visits your store, on average, before they buy something. This can help you design your store's structure and content. For example, if customers tend to buy your products on the first visit then your products may be suited to impulse buying — therefore you can design your content to encourage more impulse purchases. Ecommerce > Days to Purchase How many days, on average, between a customer first visiting your store and buying something. As with the Visits to Purchase report, this information can be useful when it comes to designing and tweaking your store content. Content > Site Overlay This brings up your site in a new window. For each page of your site, it shows you the percentage of visitors that clicked on each link in the page. It also shows you transactions, revenue and other useful stats for each link. This can be useful for tracking visitor behaviour on your key landing pages, and finding out exactly what actions visitors are taking (or not taking).

The main drawback with Site Overlay is that it groups links in the page by URL. For example, if a page contains 3 links pointing to the same URL then Site Overlay can't tell you which of the 3 links performed the best. (Here's a good article discussing Site Overlay's benefits and drawbacks.)

Summary

In this article you've looked at how to use Google Analytics to track your online store's performance. You've seen:

• How metrics can help you improve your store
• How to install and use Google Analytics on your store
• Some important metrics for determining your store's effectiveness, including conversion rate, bounce rate, pages per visit, time on site, goal funnels, AdWords Campaigns, and more.

You're now ready to start measuring your metrics and make your store a success. Good luck!