Google Analytics is powerful analytics software. A common way to use it is to just slap the JavaScript snippet on every page template you have and let it collect basic data about unique visitors and pageviews and such. That’s useful, but it’s also the bare minimum. Say there is an important button on your site. Leveling up, you could send custom events to track users clicking on that button. Those are the analytics that matter the most.
Further down that road is tracking eCommerce analytics. This is extra-tricky, as it requires you sending events to Google Analytics for sales, instances of adding/removing things from cart, views on products… all sorts of stuff. If you don’t do all that (and do it right), you don’t get good analytics information.
Yet another reason I like WooCommerce! Instead of this analytics integration being a monumental effort and a substantial bit of technical debt to maintain, you just install the WooCommerce Google Analytics plugin and… that’s it. Also: it’s free.
I’ve had this integrated for months right here on CSS-Tricks, and I can confirm:
- It was close to zero effort.
- It just works.
Now, to be clear, WooCommerce has its own analytics built right in. If what you are interested in is sales reports and top sellers and stuff like that, those are the dashboards I’d be looking at. But there are some things that the built-in WooCommerce analytics just don’t do. For example, I can check out the sales funnel on Google Analytics now:
CSS-Tricks isn’t exactly an eCommerce-focused website, so the funnel there starts super wide and gets super (super) tiny — but hey, at least I can confirm that and see it with my own eyes. Plus, I can glean some insights here, like the fact that 66/70 people completed checkout once they got there (pretty good), but only 70/525 even proceeded to checkout after adding to cart, so I’m losing a lot of people at that stage.
Here is some more interesting data that only Google Analytics knows:
Of 66 sales, 56 of them came from returning visitors, not new visitors. So people tend to not buy on first look, but do come back later. I’m not sure if that means I should be making things more enticing for those new visitors or if I should lean into reminding people about it after they’ve looked at it. Either way, now I know because I have the data.
There is data in the WooCommerce analytics that I’d normally have to go to Google Analytics to see. I can see individual orders. I can see what the top sellers are and compare product sales over different time periods. All useful stuff, and you might appreciate having all this in one place.
Again, my favorite part about this is having all this data. It feels like it should have been hard-won to get, but all it took was clicking a few buttons. That’s why I never regret just doing things the standard WordPress and WooCommerce way! Things tend to just work!
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