Google Analytics To Be Supported By ProductCart Shopping Cart Software

By Nolan Apostle

EVENT CITY CREATIVE

May 27^th, 2007

 

So are you an Internet Retailer? Do you sell products over the global Internet? Do you currently sell on eBay or some other electronic online sales business? If so, then you probably know how difficult it is to find out where your Web orders are really coming from, right? When someone comes to your site, or one of your many sites and purchases something how do you know where they came from? Until now, if you were using Early Impact’s, ProductCart shopping cart software, just like many using various e-commerce software products for their online storefront, you couldn’t really tell where they originated from.

ProductCart-powered stores can now take full advantage of Google’s service to track sales and Web statistics. Additionally there is a free update to its product that will allows its customers to take full advantage of Google Analytics, the Web statistics service provided by Google. Without any of that kind of information it’s virtually impossible for an online retailer to measure the return on its marketing investments.

Google Analytics and ProductCart can help online store managers find out what’s generating the most sales on their Web storefronts. Order data is automatically transferred to Google Analytics from a ProductCart-powered Internet store. Then, Web statistics and online sales are intelligently merged by Analytics into a variety of highly useful reports.

Google has made it quite easy for the ProductCart customers to activate the powerful system. They only need to copy and paste their tracking code from Google Analytics into their store’s interface. The task only takes a few minutes. Once the code is in place, it’s pretty cool what the user can do from there:

1. Track store-specific Web statistics

A plethora of interesting statistics related to a merchant’s online catalog will be available through their Google Analytics account. For example most frequently viewed products and categories, most popular entry pages, most active times of the day, and so much more.

2. See reports that combine Web sales with traffic information

3. ProductCart automatically notifies Google Analytics of a new order, with details down to the item level. The information received from the shopping cart is then processed by Google Analytics and presented in meaningful reports that can help understand where a specific order originated. For example – an Internet merchant will be able to see which keyword phrases used on a search engine like Google or Yahoo! ended up generating online sales. Or whether Web orders mostly originate from search engine traffic or other Internet marketing initiatives.

4. Adjust for refunds and cancellations
New features have been added to ProductCart to allow users of the shopping carts to notify Google Analytics when an order is returned or cancelled (including partial returns).

5. Google Checkout and Google Analytics
ProductCart is a Google Checkout certified shopping cart. The software has been updated so that orders that are placed with Google Checkout are also tracked by Google Analytics. ProductCart users can also setup special Google Analytics “goals” to monitor shopping cart abandonment rates and other interesting metrics.

“Seeing exactly which keyword phrases used in a search translated into orders (or sales leads) really changes the way you look at your Web statistics” said Massimo Arrigoni, CEO of Early Impact. “For instance, our reports recently showed sales originating from customers looking specifically for a ‘Gift Registry‘ feature. Clearly, they needed shopping cart software with that functionality. This tells us that it might make sense to do additional marketing focused on the ‘gift registry’ features in our software. We never had that kind of insight in the past.”

Google Analytics is a service provided by Google free of charge to most websites. For more information, please visit http://www.google.com/analytics/.

The ProductCart shopping cart software is available from Early Impact and its resellers. All Web designers and resellers enjoy discounts, sales leads, and priority technical support. Existing users can update their storefront to take advantage of the integration with Google Analytics free of charge. For more information about ProductCart and Google Analytics, please visit: http://www.earlyimpact.com/productcart/googleanalytics.