3 Key Google Analytics Ecommerce Reports – Part II

Natacha Kenol - June 16, 2015

In Part 2 of this blog series, we will review the Sales Performance report. As we mentioned last month, the Analytics 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. After all, you want to be able to see that your marketing investments are driving sales to your website and increasing your company’s bottom-line.

#2: Sales Performance report

As you may have guessed, the sales performance report provides you key insight into your sales metrics! More specifically, total revenue, conversion rate, and average order value. In these reports, Date is used as the primary dimension.

The Total Revenue tab shows the total revenue amounts by date for the date range selected. For example, looking at Figure 1 below, we can see that March 1st 2015 (20150301) generated about 6% of total revenue for the March 1 -31st time frame selected.  Layering in a secondary dimension, such as medium CPC, can provide more insight into whether your paid efforts are generating more revenue year-over-over or using a custom comparative date range depending on your sales cycle.

Figure 1

The Conversion Rate tab is more telling of the efficacy of your marketing and site design. Are your marketing efforts resulting in conversions and attracting users that are primed to buy? Is your site designed in a way that makes it easy for the user to purchase your products?

If you start with an initial benchmark (industry conversion rates, internal conversations and historical data), you can see how you are trending over time and whether you have improved month over month, year over year, etc (Figure 2).

Figure 2

The last tab, Average Order Value, lets you see the average value of e-commerce transactions and thus, how well you’re closing each deal on your site (Figure 3). The goal would be to see average order value increase as you are successfully cross-selling products, for example.

Figure 3

In closing, the sales performance report helps you understand which products are converting, and by inference, which products are best suited for your customer base and which ones are supported by your marketing efforts.

Stay tuned for Part 3 where we will review the Time to Purchase report!