How to Add and Use Google Analytics on BigCommerce

Why you need Google Analytics for your BigCommerce site

You can monitor how many people are browsing your business at any one time using Google Analytics Real-Time statistics. Google Analytics' real-time data allows you to monitor if a current offer is generating more traffic to your business, the impacts of social network posts on store traffic, traffic driven by content updates, and more, making it a must-have tool. To get started with Google Analytics, you'll need to sign up for a Google account and validate it.

BigCommerce Google Analytics connection leverages the Universal Analytics (UA) feature and supports Enhanced Ecommerce and Site Search.

Before you start: register for Google Analytics

If you have already signed up for Google, you can follow the steps below to create a new Analytics account and log in here.

Here’s what you’ll have to do: 

1. Head for Google Analytics and click ’Login’. 
2. In the left sidebar, find ‘Admin’. 
3. In the left drop-down list click ‘Create new account’. 
4. The setup page of the created account will come up. 
5. Fill in all the fields required and click ‘Save’. 
6. Done! Your new Analytics account has been successfully created! 

After that you’ll need to get a Universal Analytics tracking ID. 

A Google account for businesses lets customers to leave their comments on the platform. It might be very beneficial to embed Google reviews on any website.

Requirements & Limitations

Also, get acquainted with all the requirements and limitations for the web pages:

• Optimized One-Page Checkout must be used by the store.
• Checkout Labelling in Google Analytics must correspond to the checkout processes in your shop.
• A custom domain must be applied to your store.
• You must have data tags in your theme to get the most out of Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce. To collect the essential data for the "Product List Performance Report" in Google Analytics, you'll need to utilize our data tag solution. Cornerstone is currently the only theme with built-in data tags (2.6.0 or later).

How to get Google Analytics Tracking ID

1. If you already have a Google account, click the ‘Admin’ tab, if you’re not logged in - do it. 
2. Make sure you’ve chosen the correct ‘Property’ and ‘Account’. 
3. After you’re done, click on the 'Tracking Info', choose 'Tracking Code' and you’ll find your Tracking ID. 
4. Copy it and enter it in the Google Analytics Account Number field. 
5. Save the changes. 

Remember that in individual cases it requires nearly 24 hours for your BigCommerce statistics to retrieve to Google Analytics. After it opens up, you’ll be able to go ahead to using the analytics and getting profitable data for your website statistics. 

Now we’ll find out how to make sure your event tracking works appropriately. 

How to check if Google Analytics event tracking is working

Sometimes, validating the event data can be done manually. If you’ve noticed that your website is suspiciously low on visitors, then go to the 'Real Time > Events' panel in the Analytics and double check if everything’s ok. 

In certain cases it can be fairly tricky work. If you’re still doubtful if the setup of the event was executed accurately or if your BigCommerce website is actually busy, then determining any good effect of your changes becomes an unachievable thing. Make sure that the event tracking is working accurately on your website as is a significant constituent of using Google Analytics. And Google has an instrument to facilitate the search for errors and mistakes. It’s called Google Analytics Debugger. It is an extension for Chrome which can be effortlessly found on the Chrome online store. 

After installation, go to the page where you have created Google events. Right click any element of the web page to open the console, and after that click the console tab. Then, follow these steps: 

1. Hit the plugin icon. This will launch it. 
2. The page will be refreshed and the console will be filled with lots of stats. 
3. If you’re seeing it, the tool works fine. 
4. Find the 'Clear Console' button in the top left corner and perform the event. This will give you a clean state. 

It’s better to spend some time on researching the console and its work as it will be of a really great help in understanding what data exactly is being sent to Analytics. 

How can I detect the most popular pages on Google Analytics

After you’ve found and you can view the stats on your BigCommerce website, it's the right moment to check what pages receive the most views per year. First, look at the left sidebar and search for the 'Behaviour' section. After clicking it, select 'Site content' - 'All pages'. 

You’ll see a generated report for all of your content and the total amount of page views. Keep in mind that ’page views’ are considered as the number of times the page has been loaded by browsers. It’s an initial way of measuring your website popularity, but it will assist you in quickly revealing the top pages. All that is left for you to do is to explore the list of the most visited pages of your website and feature the needed ones. 

Tip: If the Analytics report contains any old content from your BigCommerce website, it’s a good opportunity to modify it for approaching use, for example you can add some new facts and get rid of the outdated info. Refreshing your created content is fantastic as it doesn’t demand significant amounts of time as writing new materials. 

Now that you understand the essentials, let’s check whether Google Analytics is working properly on your site. 

How to check if Google Analytics is working

Applying the Analytics on your BigCommerce site correctly is critical as it can’t bring together stats correctly if something was done wrong. First of all you are to recheck the tracking code - it must be live on your website. Here you’ll need Google Analytics Debugger. 

Users who have faced issues with the work of Google Analytics on their websites, can use this tool to troubleshoot their tracking code as well. 

Like we said before, the extension can be explored on Google Chrome Web Store. If you haven’t installed, do it, it yet and then follow this easy guide: 

1. Open the website you need to test. 
2. Click the Debugger icon at the browser to turn it on. 
3. Press 'Ctrl-Shift-J' to open the Chrome Javascript console. 
4. Check whether your Analytics code contains any error messages in the ‘Console’ section. 

For other browsers there are also a bunch of plugins created, for example, Analytics Debugger or Ghostery. Set up one of them to prevent your work with Analytics from any bother. 

After you’ve made sure everything works correctly, you can start tracking other enhanced indicators for your BigCommerce website. 

What is the bounce rate in Google Analytics and why you should track it

Bounce rate in Google Analytics means a condition when a user lands on a BigCommerce website page and then quits without triggering another request to Analytics, in particular opening other pages, clicking CTAs, etc. Therefore, if a user opens your webpage from Google search, then browses the page, but does not click any internal links or interact with your website in any other meaningful way, then such a user is considered to be bounced. 

That is why, bounce rate is defined as the percentage of sessions that result in bounce - sessions that start and end on the same page. It's a really important metric as each page’s bounce rate affects the site's overall bounce rate. 

Showing Google Reviews to the audience has proved to be one of the most successful strategies for lowering the bounce rate.

Tip: If you know that there’s a page on your BigCommerce website or a set of pages that you know may affect your overall percentages, they may be excluded from your Analytics reports. 

Find info on bounce rates of your BigCommerce website on the Conversion, Behavior, and Acquisition tabs of the GA left sidebar. 

Are there any differences between escape rate and bounce rate in Google Analytics? 

You may have observed that some reports in Google Analytics contain the Escape rate metric. It doesn't equal the Bounce rate and here’s why. 

Bounce rate appears in the report in case of a sole page session occurrence on your BigCommerce site. In contrast, if a user visits any of your site pages, then goes to the shopping cart or product page and leaves, this exit influences Exit rate. 

Why is it important to track your website’s bounce rates? 

Bounce rate is a crucial metric for comprehending how your site visitors use some individual pages on the website. Knowing it, you can maximize your business strategies by implementing Analytics to motivate your users to interact with your %платформа% website pages. 

Keep in mind that in some cases great bounce rates are not inevitably a bad thing. Here’s why: 

• It’s ok to have high bounce rates if there’s only one page on your website. For example, it can be a landing page, or if your website content is meant for a single-page session. 
• High bounce rates are unpleasant for sites that are depending on users’ visiting more than one page - ecommerce first of all. 
• Try various strategies for improving bounce rate. Improving your UI might work really good, so try adding new engaging elements, like Bigcommerce Google reviews.

After discovering the best solution on lowering (or not) your bounce rates on your BigCommerce website, it’s time to see how you can take advantage of some other features of Analytics. Specifically tracking campaign URLs. 

How to to find tagged URL data in Google Analytics

Tagging URLs with UTM codes helps web administrators determine specific referral sources in GA for your BigCommerce site. With the help of this feature, you can keep apart visitors referred to specific campaigns to get better comprehension of their behaviour patterns and also form more precise audience lists. 

If you’ve decided to start applying URLs with UTMs across any of your marketing campaigns, it’ll be necessary to know where to look exactly in Analytics to explore the info the tags provide. 

If everything is set up accurately, go to the Acquisition section in the left sidebar of the Google Analytics, then choose Campaigns and click All Campaigns: 

All the information there will be broken down by the campaign name. Remember that if your marketing campaign hasn't got any clicks, the URL won’t be mentioned in the report until it gets at least one click.