Revenue Missing From an Online Shop's Analytics

Visits and no orders

Open Analytics for many small online shops and the picture looks busy: visits by day, pages viewed, where people came from. What it does not show is a single order.

The Ecommerce section reads zero, or invites you to set it up. The shop has been selling for years.

Ecommerce tracking is a separate feature, off until someone switches it on. The Analytics code records visits; it records sales only if the shop sends them.

So every decision about where to spend has been made on traffic, which is a different thing from customers.

What the reports cannot tell you

• Which sources produce sales, not just visitors.
• Which newsletter led to orders, and which only to clicks.
• Which AdWords campaigns paid for themselves.
• Which products people buy after arriving from a search.
• How many visits a customer makes before buying.
• The average order from each kind of visitor.

The first is the one that changes budgets. A source sending many visitors and few buyers looks like a success in a traffic report, and the one sending fewer, better visitors looks like a failure.

Two switches, not one

Ecommerce data needs two things in place, and many shops have only one of them.

The first is a setting in Analytics. In the admin area each view has Ecommerce Settings, with a switch called Enable Ecommerce. Until it is on, that view reports no transactions.

The second is code on the order confirmation page that sends the order: its number, total, tax, shipping and the items in it. Without that code, the switch shows an empty report.

Neither works backwards: orders taken before both were in place are never added.

On the common shop platforms

Shopify sends order details itself when the Analytics code goes into its own Google Analytics setting. Code pasted into the theme by hand misses the checkout, which does not use the theme.

WooCommerce, the shop most often added to WordPress, needs an extension that sends each completed order. A general Analytics plugin records visits, not purchases.

Other shop systems vary: some have a setting, some need a module, and a custom-built shop needs its developer to add the code by hand.

For whoever maintains the shop, the job is usually small.

Payments that finish somewhere else

Shops that take payment through PayPal have an extra gap. The customer leaves to pay, and may never come back to the confirmation page where the order is sent to Analytics.

PayPal's auto return setting brings buyers back automatically. Without it, some close the tab as soon as PayPal says the payment went through.

Those who do return arrive from paypal.com, so Analytics credits PayPal with the sale rather than the newsletter or search that brought them. Adding paypal.com to the referral exclusion list, found under the property's tracking information, fixes that.

A worked example

A lock box installer fits wall-mounted key safes for property managers, home care agencies and families, and sells the boxes themselves through an online shop that ships across Canada.

Each month it sent a newsletter to past buyers, posted on Facebook and paid for a listing in an online directory of suppliers to property managers. Analytics showed visits from all three, and the owners judged them by those numbers.

The Ecommerce report was empty. The shop's own Analytics setting had never been used; the code sat in the theme, where it counted visits and never saw a checkout.

Their developer moved the code into the shop's setting, switched on ecommerce in the view, set the currency to Canadian dollars and excluded PayPal as a referrer.

A month later the reports showed orders by source. The newsletter, which sent the fewest visitors of the three, was behind most of the sales, and the directory listing was not renewed.

Set the currency first

Each view has a currency setting, and the default is the US dollar. A Canadian shop should change it to Canadian dollars before the first order is recorded.

Otherwise every report labels revenue in the wrong currency, which confuses anyone comparing it with AdWords costs or the bank statement.

Tag the links you control

Analytics can credit a newsletter only if it can recognise visits from it. Many email programs open links without saying where they came from, so those visits land in the direct traffic pile.

Campaign tags fix that: a few extra words at the end of each link naming the source, medium and campaign. Google's URL builder writes them, and most mailing services can add them automatically.

The same works for links in Facebook posts and on partner sites. Anything tagged appears in the reports under its own name, with its orders beside it.

Check it against the orders each month

Analytics and the order system will never agree exactly. They should not be far apart.

Once a month, compare the orders and revenue in Analytics with the shop's own order report for the same dates, and note the gap.

A steady gap is normal. A gap that suddenly widens means something changed: a theme update that removed the code, a new payment option that skips the confirmation page, or a refreshed receipt page counting one order twice.

Why the totals differ

Some customers block Analytics in their browser, and some pay without ever returning to the confirmation page.

Refunds stay in Analytics unless the shop sends them too, phone orders never appear, and tax and shipping may be counted differently. Knowing which apply to your shop makes the monthly gap readable rather than alarming.

The counter-case

A shop with a handful of orders a month, nearly all from one source, learns little from ecommerce reports. The order list already says who bought.

A business selling mostly by phone or through marketplaces will also see only a slice of its sales in Analytics.

Even then, switching it on costs little, and the history starts building from that day. Turn it on, make sure each order is sent once, and judge sources by sales rather than visits.

This week

1. Open the Ecommerce report and look for orders.
2. Switch on ecommerce in the view settings.
3. Ask who maintains the shop how orders are sent.
4. Set the view currency to Canadian dollars.
5. Exclude PayPal as a referrer, if you use it.
6. Tag every newsletter link from now on.
7. Compare with the order system every month.

Step three is what settles whether the rest means anything. The switch without the code reports nothing, and only the person who maintains the shop knows which setup it has.

Another Analytics report that sits empty until someone switches it on is covered in age and interest reports nobody switched on.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.