Configuring Google Analytics for your Online Store

Friday, June 22nd, 2012
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Savvy merchants want to understand the origin of traffic to their online store.  Understanding which keywords are converting to sales can help you market intelligently. Fortunately, Google offers a robust reporting engine for free called Google Analytics.  If a shopper stays on one domain for the shopping process, setting up the Google Analytics tracking snippets is straight forward.  However, if a customer goes across multiple domains or sub-domains, setting the Google Analytics snippets requires using some additional parameters.

Fortunately, solving this issue is not rocket science.  Assuming that your website and your online store are on the same top level domain, you can set the domain within the Google Analytics code that appears on your site and in your store.  When setting the domain, the natural question is which option to pick:

yourdomain.com                                    

or

.yourdomain.com

Most SEO expects suggest going with .yourdomain.com. If your store and your website are not on the same top level domain (this does not impact most merchants) this gets a bit more complicated since you need to use Google’s pageTracker function on the links that point from your website into your store and vice versa.  More details on this topic can be found here.

Since Google Analytics is already integrated in Nexternal’s eCommerce Platform, accurately tracking referrals into your store is simple.  In the Google Analytics Domain field within the Nexternal Order Management System (Settings/Edit Policies Addenda and Disclaimers), specify the domain of your website and presto, you’ll be accurately tracking customer behavior.

Craig is the VP of Sales at Nexternal and is known in the industry as an expert in eCommerce, systems integrations, and online marketing. Craig has been with Nexternal since 2000 and his passion and experience are apparent to all who work with him.