How to Measure the Effectiveness of your e-Commerce Campaigns

Effective measurement of your marketing campaigns is essential if you want to optimise your marketing spend, improve advertising efficiency and understand the campaigns are profitable and unprofitable.

The beauty of an e-commerce store is that measuring the effectiveness of your different e-commerce marketing campaigns is relatively easy.

This is Part 3 in a Series of Articles on e-Commerce.

Before you start measuring the effectiveness of your ecommerce campaign, you first need to understand what it is you want to measure.  Apart from tracking sales, many retailers may also want to track newsletter sign-ups, coupon redemptions, time on site, and even phone calls.

Therefore it’s important to review your website and determine what actions you want to track.

Once your goals are determined, the rest is relatively straight forward.

1. Ensure Google analytics is installed on your website and that your Google Analytics profile is set to track e-commerce.

This will ensure your e-commerce transactions are captured in Google analytics. You can check this is set up in Google analytics by navigating to the admin section, and then the ecommerce settings in the view column.

2. Set up goals in Google Analytics so you can track actions that you deem valuable (e.g. newsletter sign-ups, phone calls, etc).

If you are not sure what to do, you may be able to ask your web development company to do this for you.

If you want to do it yourself, you should be aware that you need to have administrator access to set up goals in analytics. This can be problematic as some web development companies are reluctant to give you access to this – mainly because they have either set up your account incorrectly or are worried you might leave them.  Be aware that this is data you own and should have full access to.  Consider changing agencies if they are reluctant to give you full access or find an alternative solution.

If you want to set up the goals yourself, you need to navigate to admin, and then Goals in the view column.

Clicking on goals, will enable you to create goals into Google analytics.

Clicking on +New Goal, will take you to a screen where you can start creating goals. Google analytics also provide provide some helpful suggestions.

While you can certainly use Google goal templates, we prefer to create custom goals. In this example, we are creating a goal to measure conversions from a newsletter sign up page.

3. Use the Google URL Builder to tag your campaigns.

You can use this tool to track the effectiveness of your online and offline campaigns. It can be used for:

  • Non-Google Cost Per Click Campaigns such as ads on MyShopping.com.au, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bing, Yahoo or any other online comparison shopping site
  • Email marketing
  • Other online marketing such as banner ads
  • Offline marketing such are print, direct mail

Using the tool is relatively easy – you just need to add in tag elements to help analytics (and you) identify your campaigns.

Apart from your website address, there are 5 main sections to complete but only 3 are mandatory.

These include:

  • Campaign – this is where you put the name of your campaign (e.g. email newsletter march)
  • Source – this is where your link is displayed? (e.g. yahoo, newsletter, newsletter subscribers)
  • Medium – this is where you input how the message is communicated (banner, blog, cpc, email, print, referral, affiliate, social, offline)
  • Content (optional) – although optional, this is where you can define the call to action or ad headline (e.g. buy safety boots online)
  • Term (optional)- this is where you can tag with the keyphrase you are targeting (e.g. buy safety boots)

You can see an example of how we have used the URL builder to demonstrate a Facebook campaign using CPC for safety boots. The main thing is to define your main mediums and then consistently use the same tags for each medium. This means using consistent words and case type, otherwise, your campaign reports will be fragmented. We recommend using lower case only as this is consistent with Google Analytics the inbuilt tracking.

NOTE: You do not need to use the URL builders to measure conversions for Google Ads. Instead, you need to link your Google Analytics and Google Ads account and ensure auto-tagging is enabled in Google Analytics. This will ensure the campaigns are automatically tracked without using the URL builder.

Once  the data is available, you want to evaluate your campaigns in Google analytics at least weekly based on the following:

  • Volume
  • Quality of lead (hint – look at conversion data).
  • Cost Effectiveness

4. Access your campaigns report in Google Analytics

You can find your campaign tagging report in Google Analytics under Acquisition and All Campaigns.

Analysing the data is important as it will have provide guidance on which campaigns to best focus your time and resources.