Posted:
(cross-posted on the Google Analytics Blog)

 "Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Analytics made it extremely easy to analyze the metrics that are important to an ecommerce site and garner the insights to make smart changes to our website, driving significant improvements in performance!"
-- Danny Gavin, VP and Director of Marketing at Brian Gavin Diamonds

Our Enhanced Ecommerce features in Google Analytics are officially out of beta today, complete with brand new tools like Product Attribution. Combined with our new Shopping Campaigns report, Google Analytics provides our retail clients with an integrated view of their customers. As part of today’s announcements, we’re also excited to highlight partnerships with Shopify, PrestaShop, Blue Acorn for Magento, and mShopper. Using Enhanced Ecommerce in conjunction with our partners’ products simplifies the implementation process and gives you a full set of tools to create and optimize your ecommerce site. Please see the end of this post for more information about our partners’ solutions.

Understand customer behavior
Enhanced Ecommerce provides insight into the customer’s path to purchase, like when customers added items to cart, started the checkout process, and completed a purchase. Importantly, Enhanced Ecommerce gives you the ability to identify segments of customers who are falling out of the shopping funnel. You can then focus on these high intent-to-purchase customers with remarketing or by optimizing your checkout flow. Brian Gavin Diamonds, a Texas-based jewelry design house that is renowned for its signature hearts and arrows diamonds and custom jewelry design, used Enhanced Ecommerce to discover that in a single month they had missed out on more than half a million dollars in sales due to cart abandonment at the customer login page.  The company worked quickly to optimize their checkout flow with guest checkout functionality and immediately realized a 60% increase in customers completing the checkout process to payment.  You can read more about Brian Gavin Diamonds’ success with Enhanced Ecommerce in our case study.


Optimize online merchandising to increase sales 
Once you’ve gotten users to your site, Enhanced Ecommerce allows you to optimize the onsite experience to drive sales. By using Product Lists, you can identify how customers are discovering and interacting with products before purchasing them. Armed with this information, you can analyze your onsite promotions in order to build a more effective merchandising strategy, or use the product attribution functionality to understand which product lists drive conversions.

In an increasingly mobile world, this information is critically important since screen real estate is limited and must be used wisely. For retailers with mobile apps, the Google Analytics SDK fully supports Enhanced Ecommerce, so you can do rich analysis of product performance and customer behavior across all sales channels.  Across both desktop and mobile, Enhanced Ecommerce delivers the information you need to increase sales on your site.

Drive revenue with Shopping Campaign reports
Today, we’re also introducing a new Shopping Campaigns report as part of the AdWords reporting section in Google Analytics.  This feature will be rolled out over the next few weeks and will allow you to analyze the performance of your shopping campaigns.  With this functionality, you’ll have the ability to understand the product categories/types that are driving site engagement and revenue and use this information to optimize your bids.  So, how can you get started?  If you have already linked your Adwords and your Google Analytics accounts, this report will automatically appear in the Adwords reporting section of your Analytics account.  Not linked yet?  Simply follow these instructions to link the two accounts.


Get Enhanced Ecommerce with our partner integrations
Shopify, PrestaShop, Blue Acorn for Magento, and mShopper have partnered with us to integrate Enhanced Ecommerce as part of their ecommerce solutions. If you’re using one of these platforms, you can take advantage of Enhanced Ecommerce by enabling one of these pre-built integrations.  Shopify’s solution is available today while solutions for Prestashop, Blue Acorn, and mShopper will be available in the coming week. To learn more about our featured partners, please visit our partner page. 

Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce is built to help you understand your customers and optimize your sales conversions. Combined with Shopping Campaign reports, Google Analytics is a complete solution for ecommerce businesses.  For more information about how to implement this feature in your Google Analytics account, please see the documentation available in our help center.

More about our partners

Shopify
Shopify is a commerce platform that allows anyone to easily sell online, at their retail location, and everywhere in between. Shopify offers a professional online storefront, a payment solution to accept credit cards, a point of sale system to power retail sales and a card reader to process credit card transactions through a mobile phone. Shopify currently powers over 120,000 retailers in 150 different countries, including: Tesla Motors, Gatorade, Google, Wikipedia, LA Lakers, CrossFit, and many more. 

PrestaShop
PrestaShop is a world industry leader in Open Source solutions for ecommerce, whose mission is to challenge ecommerce limits by developing a powerful solution that is accessible to anyone, anywhere. Through the Open Source software, PrestaShop allows everyone to create online stores quickly, easily and for free. The company currently counts more than 200,000 online stores worldwide, 700,000 community members and over 4 million software downloads.

Blue Acorn
Blue Acorn is a premium eCommerce agency dedicated to helping retailers and brands achieve revenue growth through a comprehensive, data-driven approach. In order to best support this approach, they became the first Magento Solution Partner in the world to also hold certified partnerships with Google and Optimizely. By integrating data and testing throughout their services, they are able to help their clients make the best decisions possible and further support their best-in-class design, development, and optimization capabilities.

mShopper
mShopper is a leading mobile commerce platform that allows retailers to create custom, mobile-optimized e-commerce sites designed specifically to increase sales on mobile devices. The integration with Enhanced Ecommerce will provide a dramatic impact on mobile commerce conversions for retailers by delivering superior insight on product sales and overall campaign performance. mShopper recently launched mStore® v4.1 with marketing tools and a performance dashboard to drive conversions and improve sales for customers using mobile devices as well.

Posted by Marcia Jung, Product Manager, on behalf of the Google Analytics team
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Posted:
(Cross-posted from the Google Analytics Blog)

 Plan ahead.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen the holiday rush begin earlier and earlier. And we’ve also noticed that the shopping frenzy is extending beyond the traditional season, with transaction rates in 2013 boasting lifts even after Christmas. These trends make for a lot of opportunity for online retailers, but you need to play your cards right. The most important thing you can do to ensure seasonal success is to plan your digital strategy now.  We’ve analyzed transaction behavior from a portion of our Google Analytics accounts over the 2013 holiday season to develop a guide for seasonal success. 

Which days drive the most transactions?
In order to develop a successful holiday retail strategy, it’s important to first understand the days that drive the most sales for your business. Once you understand this, you can craft a strategy that optimizes your media and promotion not only for these days, but for the entire holiday season.

As digital retailers are well aware, Cyber Monday is THE digital shopping day of the year.  It generates the most transactions of any single day and, in 2013, saw a transaction rate lift of 170% over average.  In second place is Black Friday, a day that has increased in digital importance over the last three years. By 2013, the transaction rate on Black Friday was 114% higher than average.  Beyond these two stars, the table below shows you the top days in 2013 by transaction volume and the lift in transactions rates on each day.


In general, beyond Cyber Monday and Black Friday, the Mondays and Tuesdays before Christmas in December tend to generate the highest volume of transactions.  Interestingly, the highest transaction days are not correlated to the days with the most sessions (traffic to your site), so avoid using the top session days as a proxy for the top transaction days.


 How can I drive sales on the top transaction days?
The holiday season generates some of the highest transaction rate spikes and the lowest dips for the entire year. In order to drive digital sales successfully, it’s important that you adjust your bids for auction-based media, such as search ads, appropriately to account for higher transaction rates on key dates and throughout the season.  As you navigate the holiday season, use the lift in transaction rates over the average transaction rate as your bid multiplier for auction-based media (learn more about bid adjustments). This adjustment schedule reflects the increased value of clicks that are more likely to convert, and helps ensure that you stay ahead of competitors and  get in front of the right consumers. The transaction rate lift for the top days are shown in the table above, while the chart below gives you an idea of the lift for the weeks surrounding the holiday season.


As you can see, the top days generate some of the biggest transaction rate lifts, but there’s also plenty of upside in the weeks preceding Thanksgiving as well as right before Christmas.  A smart retailer will generate a bid schedule for the entire season, starting 4-5 weeks before the Thanksgiving holiday.

Marketing to consumers is notoriously tricky and often trend-driven, making the holiday season a difficult and uncertain time for retailers. However, with proper pre-season preparation, digital retailers can set themselves up for seasonal success in 2014.  If you’re a Google Analytics user, you can tailor this analysis and approach to your business, using your own data and the data available in our benchmarking tool.  For more strategies for the holiday season, check out our holiday tips blog post and best practices checklist.


About the Data
In order to perform this analysis,we looked at billions of sessions across millions of Google Analytics accounts. We used session and transaction trends; and we looked at the percentage of sessions that included a transaction to calculate transaction rates. The data includes only accounts that have authorized Google to share website data in an anonymous way (read more). For questions, comments, or praise please contact us at gaqi@google.com 


Posted by Daniel Waisberg and Jocelyn Whittenburg from the Google Analytics team.
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Google Analytics installed on this blog tells me that about 8% of you are reading this post from a mobile device right now. How many of your customers are completing purchases on their mobile devices today? Do you know how many are looking for driving directions to your store right now? Whatever that number is, expect it to continue increasing as a percentage of your total traffic, and for there to be significant incremental query demand in your keywords from mobile devices over time.

As usage of mobile devices for both digital and physical commerce grows, so does the number of touch points for reaching your customers on the portable web. Mobile devices are not just used for communication anymore; in fact, only 27% of time spent on smart phones are devoted to communication (calls, texts, skype), while 60% of time is web-based, including web apps, games, social, search, maps, and other activities. So, how many touch points are you covering in your mobile strategy?

If you have a mobile application out there, great! (I hope you’re promoting it and not just letting it sit in the marketplace and collect dust at rank #128,395). Don’t think you have all your bases covered with that app, though. Mobile app markets are just one of the many touch points where your customers may be expecting to find you. The number one place they are expecting to find you is on your own domain. In addition, they expect that you have thought through and developed an excellent experience catering to their small screen and mobile network speeds. Here are five reasons why you should develop a mobile optimized version of your site in addition to your mobile app:
  1. 63% of all online adults said they would be less likely to buy from the same company via other purchase channels if they experienced a problem conducting a mobile transaction
  2. 68% - Users prefer mobile sites to apps for browsing for products (eMarketer October 2010) 
  3. 40% of mobile users would visit a competitors site if they are dissatisfied with the performance of the mobile site
  4. 58% expect websites on your phone to load almost as quickly or faster than desktop sites
  5. Mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access devices worldwide by 2013, which means very soon, more views of your site will be from mobile devices than on desktops (Gartner)
So it’s not just what you could gain by taking action, it’s also what you could lose if you don’t. Also, if 2013 sounds pretty far away when you already have a to-do list that’s miles long, just remember that Mobile web adoption is ramping up about 8x faster than desktop web adoption did in the mid '90s. So, before your customers head over to a competitior’s mobile-friendly site instead, get a comprehensive strategy together and mobilize your website!

Posted by Tiffany Lin, The Google Retail Team
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