3 Key Google Analytics Ecommerce Reports – Part I

Natacha Kenol - May 20, 2015

In Google Analytics, the Ecommerce conversion reports help you understand performance and activity for individual products and product categories, for example which products are selling on your site and whether your marketing efforts are driving conversions. In this blog series, we will review 3 key Ecommerce performance reports including Product Performance, Sales Performance, and Time to Purchase.

#1: Product Performance report

This report lets you see how your products performed in terms of revenue, price, and quantity.  It lets you learn more about which products visitors buy, in what quantity, and the revenue generated by those products. This report can be viewed in multiple ways such as Product name, Product SKU, and Product Category simply by selecting the desired Primary Dimension (Figure 1-3).

Figure 1

Primary Dimension: Product

Figure 2

Primary Dimension: Product SKU

Figure 3

Primary Dimension: Product Category

A secondary dimension can be layered in as well to get more powerful insights. For example, looking at which product category performs better on which landing page lets you see whether your site pages are optimal for users to purchase your products (Figure 4). In the example given below, we can see that the home page of the site is doing a good job at leading users to purchase in each product category. Moreover, this helps you see what kind of revenue each product or product category is generating and a holistic view of how well your site design is encouraging users to purchase.

Figure 4

Primary Dimension: Product Category

Secondary Dimension: Landing Page

Lastly, segmenting can be used to get more granular insights on how your marketing efforts are performing.  For example, by using the system generated Paid Traffic or Organic Traffic segments, you can take a look at performance by individual marketing channels and start asking questions like: Which marketing channel generates the most revenue? Which channel has the highest average quantity? Comparative date ranges   year over year can be used as well to see whether the marketing efforts are improving year over year based on optimizations and/or added investments, for example (Figure 5).

Figure 5

All in all, the Product Performance report is very helpful in understanding which products users are buying and which are performing better. Adding in secondary dimensions and segments can also provide more insight into how well your marketing channels are performing and where you may want to consider investing more dollars.

Stay tuned for Part 2 where we will review the Sales Performance report!