Speaker 1: Have you recently installed Google Analytics because someone's told you that you need that to help grow your Shopify store, but you log in and you have absolutely zero idea of what's going on and what all the numbers mean? Or even worse, you've upgraded to Google Analytics 4, you sort of knew a little bit about universal analytics, but GA4 is just a whole new world. Well, luckily for you, over the last six months, I've been using GA4 every single day on my Shopify stores. So I've got a really awesome understanding on how you're gonna use it to grow your store. And I wanna take you through how I'm using it every day so that you can hopefully get some tips and tricks and use it to help grow your e-commerce business. So we're gonna look over my shoulder, we're gonna jump into my Google Analytics account, and I'm gonna take you through where to click, what to look for, and the numbers that matter so that you can actually extract value out of Google Analytics. Now, if Google Analytics is just new to you, it's a free tool that's provided by Google. And what it is, is it's a little piece of code that sits in the back of your store, and it tracks all the movements that your visitors do on your store. So it tracks what they click, where they go, whether they buy something, but it also tracks where they come from. So we can actually find out where someone has found your link, they might've clicked it on a Facebook ad, they might've clicked it on a blog, they might've clicked it in Google, we can find that out and it lands on your store. And then we can work out whether or not where they came from was a great way to drive sales. We can then also look at what's working on your site and what's not. Where are people leaving? Where are they engaging? All the things that help you optimize your store and optimize your traffic so that you can really grow your business. So let's jump straight in to my Google Analytics and take a look around. So when you first get into Google Analytics, you're gonna come to this page here. Now, this page is okay, but it doesn't really give us much information. So we need to dig a little bit deeper. So over on the left, we've got reports, we've got explore, we've got advertising. Now the area you're gonna wanna play with today from a basic level is reports. So let's click into that. Now reports is broken down into a couple of different sections. You'll see one here, which is called life cycle. You may see one that's called business objectives, or you may see something else. Now we can actually customize this to the view that we want because Google Analytics can actually be used by a whole heap of different businesses. It doesn't just need to be Shopify stores or e-commerce businesses. If you're running a blog or if you're running a service business, you'll also use Google Analytics. So what Google has done for us is it's broken these up into these little collections so that we just look at the data that we need to look at. And these are the reports that we need to find for the type of business that we have. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you the one that I use for e-commerce so that you can set it up on your store and remove all the other ones. So in order to update this, we're gonna click over into library and we're going to see this section here, which is called collections. Now you'll probably have all these predefined collections in here. Now, if you've got more than one or you've got the business objectives one or something else, what we can do is click over here and we can click unpublished to the ones that we don't want. And the ones that we do want, we just wanna make sure that they are published. And what that's going to do is bring it over to the left here. Now we only really use the lifecycle one at this stage. So once you've done that, we're gonna go back and we're gonna have a look at some of these predefined reports. So we'll click acquisition and we're gonna click acquisition overview. So acquisition is basically where we're getting our visitors from. So think of it as traffic sources or where people click out on the web before they hit your store. So we're acquiring people into our store. Now this overview acquisition is relatively helpful, but I like to dig a little bit deeper. So we're gonna go straight into something called traffic acquisition. Now traffic is what we refer to as where people come from. It's the traffic that drives them into the store. And we often break traffic into something we call channels. And these channels are things like paid channels, if we pay for people to come to our store, organic, if they're free, or they could be something like a referral if they're a link from somewhere else. And this is how Google Analytics breaks them up. So we've got paid, we've got organic, we've got referral and we've got direct. Now, when you log into yours, you're just gonna look a little bit like this. Mine has been slightly customized and I'll show you how I've customized it. But the way this screen works is we can adjust it based on the data that we want to see. So right now it's got a default channel group. And if we think about what I mentioned before around organic or paid or direct, it clumps all the different types of traffic into this one category. Now we like to find out a little bit more information because if we're paying for traffic, we wanna make sure that we understand, are we paying in Google, we're paying in TikTok, we're paying in Facebook. So we can actually expand this out to get a little bit more information. So in Google Analytics 4, we can click in here and we can go source and medium. And for those of you that have used Universal Analytics in the past, you'll understand this source slash medium concept. So the source is Google and the medium is the way they got there. So if it was Google paid, it means it came from an ad on a Google search engine. If it's Google organic, it means that it came from a search listing. Hopefully that makes sense so that you can understand how everything works. So now if we look at the breakdown here, we can see Google CPC, which is paid cost per click. And we've got Google organic. We can see the same for Facebook. Now, this is a little bit messy. This has got to do with UTM tagging and moving from meta to Facebook. Now, UTM tags are a whole nother subject. So if you want me to do a video on UTM tagging, drop a comment down below. It's a really useful thing if you really wanna get down and dirty with your data. And we can see we've got email campaigns. We've got Facebook again. Ruling pop is the referral. So we think about links back. Now, where the data is really cool here guys is basically we can see at a channel level, the types of sessions we're getting, whether they're converting, whether they're not converting. So we can see from Google CPC, this site is heavily relying on ads. So we can see 4,000 users and 5,900 sessions. Now, the difference between users and sessions is, users is one person, sessions is the amount of times someone visits the site. So imagine I visited this site and I'm one user, but I visited the site five times. That means it's gonna be one user and five sessions, okay? So that's how you can understand how many people are using the store. And we've got engaged sessions and now we've got conversion rate, total revenue and bounce rate. Now, you're probably gonna see different columns to this. I've customized this report to the things that I wanna see. These are important metrics to me. I wanna see how engaged people are. I wanna see, are they bouncing? Are they converting? And how much money are those pages generating for me? Now, in order to customize these pages, we pop up over here on the right-hand side and we click customize. And we can basically go through here and add all the different metrics we want to this report. So I've gone through and I've clicked metrics and you can see that you've got them all in here. I've added in bounce rate, I've added in conversion rate, I've added in conversions and revenue. But you can just click down here and add anything in that you would like. So as an example, maybe we wanna put in quantity. How many units have people purchased? Let's click apply and see what happens there. And we can see this is the quantity that has been purchased. So all this data comes in directly from Shopify or your e-commerce store that you have plugged into this. So you can basically go through and adjust this report to anything that you want it to be. Stats I like to see are revenue, bounce rate and conversion rate, because then from there, we can understand which channel is performing and which channel isn't performing. And then we can go into those channels and we can have a look to see what we need to do with it. Do we need to increase ad spend if it's performing really well? Do we need to optimize the ad campaign? Do we need to send more emails? Do we need to do better SEO? So you can see the power of this by understanding which channels are performing. If we compare this to the analytics you get in your e-commerce platform like Shopify, we only see an overview of what's happening on your store. We see total sessions and average conversion rate. But in here, we can see that at a channel level. It's super, super powerful. And it's the way that we can really scale our e-commerce businesses. So after we've made changes to the report, we're just gonna do save changes to current report. We click save. And this is gonna save it permanently in your account. So we'll click back. And we can see that now this traffic acquisition is there and you'll see this little message next to it, sessions. Okay, so now we know what's happening here. Now I'll give you a couple of different things that we can do here. I love to look at trend lines. So I'm gonna open this range up to be, let's go last month, okay? Click in there. And I love to see trend lines to see how things are going. So what I wanna do is this is telling us how many sessions we got by source medium over time. But I actually wanna see how much revenue did I get from each channel over time. So if we click total revenue, what's gonna happen is this is going to change. And we now see this as total revenue by session source. So we can see we've got Google CPC and it highlights the trend lines. We can see Google Organic and it highlights the trend lines, Direct, Meta, Facebook, et cetera. So we can see whether or not the changes that we make in ad campaigns or emails and things that we send, whether or not they have an impact over time. Really powerful metric to understand. Now that we know where our traffic's coming from, let's now have a look to see how people are behaving on our site and what they're doing. So then what I look at is I click over here to engagement and we're gonna click pages and screens. Now pages and screens is basically the pages that people land on on your store. And we can look at it at a page level to see how well those pages are performing. So if we have a look here, we can see this is a boxing glove store. We can see what people are clicking on. So we can see how many views this page have, how many users hit that page, how many views per user, how long they've stayed on the store. Now, this one isn't actually tracking revenue because of the type of tracking we have. We're using something called server-side tracking. It's a little bit more advanced. It gives us better data elsewhere, but we actually lose this data. If you're using the standard Shopify integration, you will actually see revenue in here. For us, it's okay at this stage because we just look at things like engagement time and engagement rate, okay? So engagement rate as an example is how long do they spend on the page. The higher the engagement rate, the better they are on the page. The lower the engagement rate, we might need to look at why they might be leaving. So they're the stats that you should be looking at. Engagement rate, total revenue, time on page, and how many pages people are visiting. And then the next thing that we need to look at when it comes to engagement is landing pages. Landing pages is the page that someone first lands on when they get to your store. Now, we would do the same thing as we did with pages and screens, and we have a look to see how many people are engaging with this page. Are they leaving when they hit the page? And if they are, why are they leaving? So let's have a look at this. We can see that the homepage, which is this one here, gets the majority of our visitors, which makes sense. But what we can see is we have a really high engagement rate, so 80%. So that means that 80% of the people that land on that page stay on there or move to another page. 21% or basically 20% leave at this point in time. So we look at that to go, well, actually, is that within our, okay with that? Yes, we are. Obviously, we want it to be 100% of people, but it's pretty rare to get that on your homepage. And then we look through here and we can now see other pages. These go down over time. So let's have a look at this one. We're seeing that this page drops a little bit lower. Now, I know why that is. We're running out of stock of that product, but we can see at a landing page level that if someone lands on this page, how much revenue is it actually generating for us? Okay, so we can see a nice bit of revenue coming through on those pages. All right, cool. Now that we know how people engage on pages, the next thing to do is understand how the e-commerce funnel works. So let's pop over here to monetization and we're gonna go into purchase journey. So when we look at the e-commerce purchase journey, it's a really important way to help us increase our e-commerce conversion rates. A conversion rate is obviously when someone visits the store and makes a purchase, that is a conversion. Now, if we have 100 people visit the store and only one makes a conversion, then we've got a 1% conversion rate. Now, there's a couple of steps that goes into getting someone to a sale and that's called the purchase journey. So if we think about when someone hits the store, when we looked at my stats a second ago, we saw most people hit the homepage. Then from the homepage, they'll probably hit a collection page. Then from a collection page, they go to a product page. Then from a product page, they can click add to cart. Then from there, they're gonna go to checkout and then they're gonna buy the product. That is a perfect e-commerce journey. But what happens is people fall off that funnel all the way through. So they might not even hit a product page, they might not click add to cart and they might not reach the checkout. By looking at these stats in detail, we can understand where the break in the funnel is. So we wanna see how many people are hitting a product page because if they don't get to a product page, they're not gonna buy. How many people are clicking add to cart and if they're not clicking add to cart, why is it? How many people got the checkout and if they don't get to the checkout, why? And then how many people went from checkout to buying and if they didn't, why? All right, so I'll give you a quick understanding of how this works on this store. So this store basically shows that of 100% of people that started a session with us, okay? Only 52% viewed a product. Now that could be that they browse the product on the collection page and then they went through to the product detail page. From there, of the 52%, 16.7% added to cart, okay? From there, we've got that 48% of the 16.7% started to checkout and then only 46.7% of people actually made a purchase. Now by looking at this, we can understand where is the funnel that we need to improve. So could you imagine we got more people to view our product? Just by doing that would increase our add to cart rate, begin checkout and purchase rate and we'll bring everything up. So that would be our first objective on this store. The second thing would be, how do we improve add to cart rates? How do we make sure that more people are adding things to cart and what are the things that we could do there? Then we could go, how quick can we get to the checkout and how easy are we gonna make it for them to purchase? You can also see this at a mobile desktop tablet level, which is really powerful because a lot of people do these tests on a desktop, but never look at how the mobile experience works. Tell you a little story. I had one brand I was working with and they were just getting terrible mobile conversions and they said, we need to get our mobile site up and running. We need to optimize it. We need to change it because it's just not working. But they'd actually never tested themselves on a mobile site. So I went there and I opened it up on my phone on mobile. I clicked add to cart. And what actually happened was when I went to the cart, they had a little live chat button that popped up on the checkout button, which meant I actually couldn't click the checkout button. So you know what we did? We just moved the live chat button, checkout button was visible and their conversion rate on their mobile sites went up like that. But they would never have known that if they weren't looking at it in detail. So this is where the numbers are super, super important team. So guys, that is how I'm using Google Analytics every day. I spend about 10 minutes every morning going in and just checking out the numbers and seeing whether they make sense. And then if there's anything that stands out that I need to make decisions on, I'll go in and talk to my team and say, okay, we need to improve the ads here. We need to look at where those links are coming from. We need to change some of the pages here. We're getting a lot of traffic here, but it's not converting. We're not getting enough product page views. The add to cart's not working. And I'm using this data to help me make decisions on how I'm gonna steer my business. So Google Analytics is a super powerful tool. If you can get to know the numbers, get to understand your store and really work your way through Google Analytics. And if you liked this video, make sure to subscribe to my channel. I drop videos like this all the time. Now, if you wanna work with me, I do work with aspiring e-commerce entrepreneurs to help them grow their stores. I run a program called the e-commerce bootcamp. I've left a link in the description below. If you're interested, hit me up on the bootcamp. I'd love to have you in there so I can help you grow your e-commerce business.