Google Search Console & Google Analytics Setup For eCommerce

[VIDEO TRANSCRIPT]

In today’s video, I’m going to show you how to set up Google Search Console and Google Analytics for your eCommerce website.

Hi, I’m Oliver Bannister co-founder of Mechanised, we build and design bespoke websites, eCommerce stores and provide SEO, social media marketing and paid advertising services.

So why do you need to watch this video?

Setting up Google Search Console and Google Analytics will give you vital information about your customers and website. If you don’t have either of these setup, you’ll be missing out on information such as,

• how your customers are reaching your website
• what they’re typing into Google to find it
• which pages, products and categories are your most popular
• how long your customers are spending on your website
• how many pages to visit on average
• your key demographic and where you make more sales

This valuable data will give you insights into your key audience and help you refine your marketing strategy.

So before I get into it, if you like the video, like the video, and if you have any questions please leave them in the comments below and I’ll make sure that I answer them all.

So let’s get into it.

Google Search Console

So what is Google Search Console? Well, Google Search Console is a free tool from Google and it helps you, monitor, maintain and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google. It’ll help you understand and improve how Google sees your website which can lead to more traffic and sales.

So let’s get into the setup.

So what you need to do is go to search.google.com and you need to click start now and sign in with your Google account. Once you’re signed in you’ll see this page and then what you need to do is copy/paste your website address using the domain option and click continue.

You will then be instructed to sign in to your domain registrar and you need to create a new TXT record and copy this text into that please note that the DNS changes do take a while so it might be some time before you can actually verify your site.

So once your website is verified what you need to do next is to submit your sitemap.xml as it will help Google understand your site structure.

So what you need to do is, from your Google Search Console click on sitemaps to open up the sitemap page. If you’re using Shopify the sitemap.xml will be automatically generated and you’ll find it at yourdomain.co.uk/sitemap.xml.

If you’re using Woocommerce then you’ll have to download an SEO plugin like Yoast and it’ll generate one for you.

So when you know the location of your sitemap.xml you simply need to copy it and paste it into this field and submit it. Once you’ve submitted it, it’ll be listed here and the status will be processing check back in a couple of days and then it should change the success.

So once you’re all set up Google Search Console will start to track the data for your website. If you take a look under the performance tab you’ll be able to look at the data for the total clicks, total impressions, average click-through rate and the average position of your website within Google. You can then break this down into queries and pages.

So the data you find here is what you can use to optimise your website and improve the position in Google to make you acquire more traffic and sales.

Google Analytics

Okay, so let’s take a look at Google Analytics.

So what is Google Analytics? Well, it’s a free tool from Google and it helps you analyse your website traffic and visitor behaviour. Thankfully the setup is pretty straightforward, especially when you’re using Shopify.

So to get started you need to go to analytics.google.com and need to sign in using your Google account.

Once you’re signed in you need to go to the admin section and create a new account.

So let’s name it. We’re going to name this one Mechanised Test, but you should name that one your business name. Leave these ones ticked and click next. You want to select web because that’s what we want to measure. Next, let’s enter your website name which we’ll call that and your URL.

Everyone should be on https by now. Okay, then you need to select an industry. So let’s click internet for us and make sure you select the right country and time zone and let’s create that.

Let’s just agree to these terms and conditions, like that.

Okay, so once you’ve done that you’re then presented with your tracking code. Now what you need to do with this is you need to copy this and then you need to go to your Shopify account and under preferences, you’ll see Google Analytics here, you need to paste your code into here and save.

Once you’ve saved that you’ll see this use enhanced eCommerce tick box appear you need to tick that and save that.

And that’s it for the Shopify set up. What you need to do next is go back to your Analytics account and you need to go to data collection and you want to turn everything on here and save that.

Next, you want to go to your view column which is this one and you want to set view settings and you want to set your currency to your local currency. So ours is GBP and we want to save that.

Next, we want to go to the eCommerce settings which is here and turn that on and turn it on as well and we’ll save that. And that will give you full eCommerce tracking which is perfect for Shopify sites.

So after this, you want to come out of the settings and then you want to go to audience and demographics, overview. You want to enable this so you can see the age of your visitors and finally you want to go to interests, overview and enable this setting if it’s not already switched on and that should be everything you need to know for now.

Okay, so now that we’re all set up after a few days you should start to see some stats on your website traffic and I’ll quickly go through the key areas that you should be looking at.

So the first one is your audience overview so this gives you an overall look at your website traffic, number of pages per session, number of page views, average duration on your website and your bounce rate.

You’ve got your lifetime value. So this shows the lifetime value of your customers per channel and this will help you refine your marketing strategy when you realise where all your revenue comes from.

You’ve got your demographics, so this shows the age range and the gender of all your visitors. So if this looks like it should then you’re on the right track. If this is way off then you need to change your website fast.

You’ve got your acquisition overview, so this gives you the data you need to see which channels are working for you and which channels need your attention to acquire more sales.

You’ve got your behaviour overview, so this shows you the pages the visitors view the average time spent on them and the bounce rate. You can find some more details under the site content in our pages

So the data on this page will show more data, there we go so this shows more data per page and finally you’ve got your eCommerce data which is under conversions and eCommerce and overview.

So this gives you an overview of your overall revenue, number of transactions, average order value which is very helpful, it gives you the revenue for each product and also you’ve got the shopping behaviour.

So you can see how many people are coming through and how many people are checking out. So the more data you collect the better your insights will be and this will help you make key decisions on which direction to take your digital marketing and which marketing channels you should be investing in to get the most return.

So that’s how you set up Google Search Console and Google Analytics for your eCommerce website. What you need to do now is put everything into practice and perfect your marketing strategy.

Once again if you have any questions please leave them in the comments below and I’ll make sure that I answer each one.

Thank you for watching, see you next time.