The 12 Days of Data: Six Golden Goose Eggs

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On the Sixth Day of Data, my true love gave to me... Six Golden Goose Eggs 5 UTM parameters 4 Advanced Segments 3 French Fans (Viewed in GA Real Time) 2 Profile Settings And an Unsampled GA Data Set By Goose Eggs, I actually mean Zeros.. more precisely: powers of ten, in revenue. Today we're talking about E-Commerce and how you should be measuring revenue on your site, if at all possible. First though, let me segue briefly to Universal Analytics: if your revenue comes in  offline, you should still be tracking it back to web users if they identify themselves at all, because you can. Now, as to why... Ask yourself why you have a website: Does it serve a business function? Does your business invest in it? (Side-note: if a business doesn't invest in its website, it probably shouldn't have one.) There's this notion of Return on Investment that people bring up, occasionally, in business discussions. It's kind of important. There's a key component to that though - somehow you have to  quantify the return. Tracking E-Commerce in Google Analytics isn't necessarily about people buying stuff  on the website: it's about quantifying that revenue from users who've had exposure to your web presence (or any other interaction, if you're thinking Universally). Once you've quantified the return, and you're tracking E-Commerce data in GA, you can start to draw some really interesting insights. For example, you might notice that Cyber Monday could be a game changer for your business. You might consider some promotional marketing  leading up to Thanksgiving next year, and make more money. Maybe you'll find that most of your revenue is coming from returning visitors, but only at a few percent of total. Perhaps some remarketing efforts could identify those first-timers based on their interests, and allow you to target them with weekly promotions, bringing their second visit sooner and directly to the products they want,  yielding a more interesting and more profitable engagement (i.e. a higher conversion rate). If your sales occur in third-party retailers, and your retailers give you regular sales reports, you could load that into GA using the Universal Analytics Measurement Protocol, and start to see the trends between social, web marketing, and in-store purchases. You could engage your users on your sites with coupons or other promotions, in collaboration with your retailers, in the same spirit as those examples above. Without revenue data, your website's value may be nearly impossible to estimate. Reporting revenue lets you understand  where and  why your business is making money, and gives you that "Return" component on the "Investment" of your website. Smarter marketing, assisted by revenue and attribution data, turn that into higher revenue and profits. So let's make your business more profitable, and boost the ROI of your company's web presence, by tracking it fully. Merry Christmas :)