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Brian: Good afternoon everybody, welcome to Shopify guru webinar #4. My name’s Brian
Alkerton, I’m one of the gurus at Shopify.
Analytics: is something that a lot of people are talking about, it’s not very well understood.
What we’re hoping to do is give you gives a broad overview of what analytics is, why
it’s important, what are some basic entry-level steps you can take to get your shop working,
and using analytics to see how your shop is working effectively, and what you can do.
As much as we do talk about online shopping and e-commerce, when it comes to explaining
analytics, a really great example to use would be a real world shop. If you picture your
average brick and mortar shop, let’s say you’ve got a store and 100 people walk in
your day everyday, and of those 100, five people buy something. Is that a good thing,
is that a bad thing, it’s kind of hard to tell. In the real world, you can get information
just be talking to your customers. There’s all these different sources that are going
to drive traffic to your real-world store, and depending on those sources, then you can
make decisions about how to treat different customers. You might have a tv promotion that’s
saying 10% off anything in the store. If someone comes in and says they heard about you on
tv, it might be beneficial to say, did you hear about our promotion?
Analytics is taking that basic process, and moving it into the online world. It’s taking
a look at where your customers are coming from, how they’re behaving, and using that
ad information to improve sales, improve conversions…
It does sounds a little cynical at first. In a perfect world, you might be able to dedicate
all the time and energy to every single customer, but from a working perspective, it makes sense
to do it. It makes sense to ensure your customers are being provided with exactly the experience
they’re looking for. What you can do is provide that experience, because you know
what they’re expecting.
On that note: analytics, very broad definition: using the data that your visitors provide
you, in order to provide them with a more satisfying experience, in the hope that it
turns into sales, and even if it doesn’t turn into sales, then you know that it didn’t,
and you can try to do something else.
How do we do this, and what are some cool applications for it? Shopify does have some
great analytics features that are built in. But generally we recommend Google Analytics,
if you’re going to be doing anything in depth with analytics, they provide a great
product that works really well. I’m going to switch over to a desktop view, I’m going
to walk you guys through setting up Google Analytics.
This is the page at google.com/analytics, you’re going to click into access analytics,
it’s going to ask you to sign into an account. If you don’t already have an account, we
recommend making one. We’re going to look at my test shop, as well as another website I currently have.
This is the basic interface you see whenever you open Google Analytics. I have my store
here, and that’s my personal website… In order to set up Google Analytics on your
Shopify store, you don’t need to paste any snippets of HTML code, or upload any files.
It’s a really straightforward process. Each of these sites has a code, that starts with
UA, and then a whole bunch of numbers. We’re going to use this code to tell Shopify what
Google Analytics account you’re linked with.
What you’re going to do is go into, up here, where it says “my analytics account,”
and you’re going to go to create new account. Once you sign up for Google Analytics, it’s going to ask for your URL.
Your URL to provide is your Shopify URL. After you’ve done that, and you’re signed up,
you’ll come back to the main page… You’ll be provided with the name of your website,
and your UA code, which is what we’re going to take over to the Shopify admin.
Now we’re going to switch over to our Shopify admin. Once you’re into the store admin,
you’ll see a little bit of information here… Under preferences, in the store admin, you’re
going to go to the preferences page. Shopify has made it very straightforward to get your
analytics page set up. Once you’re on the general preferences page, scroll down to where
it says your Google Analytics account, paste in the UA number that you’re provided by
Google, click apply settings.
So now when we switch back over to the analytics page on Google, we can look at the report
for our Shopify site. When you first set up your Google Analytics account, this is what
you’re going to see. You’re not going to see any visits, this is because it’s
only going to track data going forward.
We’re going to take a quick look at some of the analytics for my personal site, and
that’s when you’ll see how this data works… I do just want to take a quick moment, we
do have three other gurus here in the room, they are a huge help on this webinar… Back
to Google Analytics… This is what your Google Analytics graph is going to look like once
you’re up and running. You’ve got all your statistics here, that are going to give
you the information that you need.
Here we’ve got visits, that’s the number of unique people that are coming to your website,
regardless of how many pages they visit, that’s the number of actual people that have opened
up your website. You’ve got page views, that’s the number of pages on your site.
Each visit has a certain number of page views. Your bounce rate, and your average time on
site are two things that are really interesting to look at. The bounce rate is the percentage
of people who visit your website, and leave without going to any other pages. In the case
of this site, we’ve got a 66% bounce rate, which means 2/3 of people visiting the site,
open it up and then they leave, they don’t go any deeper into the website. This is a
good metric for looking at how effective your homepage is. If you can do things to reduce
that bounce, you’ll notice an uptick in sales. Same thing with the average time on
site. If the average person is only spending 30 seconds on your site, chances are that’s
not enough time to make a purchase. You might want to start looking at things to keep people
on your site. There’s a term called stickiness, that a lot of people use to refer to this
metric.
The last stat that we’ve got here is new visits. This is the percentage of people that
are coming to your site, that have never been there before. If you’ve got a high percentage
of new visits, that means that you’ve got a lot of great opportunities to make a good
first impression on people, and generating some sales. If that’s a much lower number,
then what you’re seeing is a lot of return traffic, so you might want to start looking
at loyalty programs, to convince those people that every time they’re coming back, they
should always be making a purchase.
Moving down the dashboard, we’ve got the visitors overview. This is a daily graph of
how many people are visiting your page. If you find that certain days are getting much
higher visitors than others, those are the days you might want to do a special promotion.
You’ve got a map overlay, that shows you where your traffic is coming from. Again,
if you want to do any geographical promotions…
Continuing down, we’ve got the traffic sources overview. We’re going to dig into this one
in a moment. We’ve also got our content overview. The traffic sources overview tells
you where your traffic is coming from. It’s broken down into referring sites, if you posted
a link on another website, that would be your referred hit. Direct traffic is people that
are just typing in www dot your shop dot com, into their browser. This is important to look
at, people that are coming to you as direct traffic, these are people that are specifically
seeking you out. Last you’ve got search engines, those are people that are typing
in, and your search pops up in the search results. These are people that are looking
for something specific. It lets you know what people are looking for when they come to your
site.
The content overview is going to show you where on your site most of your traffic is
coming from. In this site, you’ve got the home page, and most people are only viewing the home page… Each of
the pages that you see in your content overview, you can drill down to specific stats. For
example, on this page, if you see this page when you come to my website, there’s only
a 12.5% bounce rate, which means the people that are coming here are more likely to stay.
The best way to get great results is to experiment with it. Going back to our dashboard, we’re
going to look into customer porting, as well advanced segmentation. Customer porting…
let’s say you want to find out the relationship between these statistics. If you open customer
porting, you’re brought to this page which lets you build any type of report you want
to measure any kind of statistic.
We’re going to click on create customer report. Let’s say I want to measure bounce
rate, by traffic source. I want to see, how likely people are to leave my site, sorted
by where they’re coming from. I can grab the bounce rate metric, and then I scroll
down to the traffic source dimension, and drop that there. It’s going to give us the
percentage bounce rate, based on where they’re coming from. I’ll create that report by
clicking here. We’re going to see bounce rate by source. We’ve got a few different
sites that people are using to refer to me, and the different bounce rates by site. Ottawa
fringe dot event bright dot com, only 20% of those people bounced. Those are people
that came and read a considerable amount… all the way, to people that are coming from
Facebook and Google. What this ultimately can do for you is it gives you the ability
to see what traffic is sticking around and what traffic isn’t. People that are coming
in and just browsing, versus people that coming in, buying…
The next thing I’m going to show you is advanced segmentation. We’ve got a whole
bunch of different sites that are not necessarily connected to each other, but some are. We’ve
got Facebook and Twitter, social media… You can use advanced segmentation to tie those
together. I can just see social media and have that all as one source.
In order to create that, you’re going to go over here and click advanced segments,
click to create one. It’s going to ask for the dimensions and metrics. In this case,
I’m going to drag the source in here, start typing Twitter dot com, it finds it automatically.
And then drop another source, and use Facebook. This is going to give me the ability to measure
all my social media hits as one collated source. Click test segment, and I’ll see the social
media segment.
One last thing I’m going to cover is how to do conversion tracking. It’s one thing
to look at the traffic, how long it sticks around, but the real value is whether or not
anybody’s going to buy something. We are working on a Wiki article, which will explain
this process. On the dashboard, you’re going to open up your goals, and you’re going
to set up a goal. On any different profile, you can set up to 20 conversion goals, but
we’re just going to focus on one which is just straight sales. We’re going to name
our goal sales. You can follow the steps, they’re not specific to my store… We’re
going to make sure it’s an active goal, and make sure the goal type is an active URL
destination. For the match type, you’re going to make sure you do a regular expression
match. This is going to, anytime someone comes to your website, it’s going to put a note
on that person, follow them throughout the process of using your site, and when it gets
to the checkout, it’s going to ping that you had a conversion.
From here, you’ll be able to see how many of your hits from Twitter are converting…
We’re going to file this as a regular expression match, you’re going to set the goal URL
as slash checkout slash orders slash show. And just leave that as is, and goal value,
don’t need to worry about that. What you also what to do is create a funnel for this
goal. By creating a funnel, it ensures that people are coming to the checkout, it takes
them through each step of the checkout, and it doesn’t report false positives. We’re
going to add each of the steps in the checkout process.
Start with step one, which is slash checkout slash orders slash show, and this is going
to be just first page checkout. You’re going to make sure that each of these are required
steps. The next step is one that’s going to change, depending on whether you’re using
an onsite/offsite, or Paypal, or express checkout website. You’re going to want to use website
slash checkout slash orders slash forward. That’s going to be the offsite checkout.
If you’re using an onsite, or a hosted gateway, you’re going to use a different URL, which
is checkout slash orders slash done. Once you’re done that, you’re going to add
one more step, which is checkout slash orders slash show, and that’s the final page, where
someone sees their order confirmation. Because we’ve set up this order tracking in such
a way, that makes sure that we’re not reporting any false positives.
Once all that is done, click save goal. You’ll see your sales goal right here, you can edit
that later on, but for basic conversion tracking, that’s all you need.
That’s analytics 101, there’s a lot of stuff you can do to go much deeper. I urge
you to search the net, there’s a lot of great resources. Google Analytics also has
a ton of facts and great resources.
That wraps it up for us today. Thank you all for coming out. As always, if you ever have
any questions, us gurus are here to help.