Every business wants to know their customers better and learn about their needs to fulfill their expectations better. How to do that? The answer is simple — Magento analytics.
It's an insightful tool that gives you a supernatural ability to engage more clients, get a better position in SERP and drive more sales. All by making informative decisions based on actions customers perform on your store.
So today you'll learn more about Magento analytics, how it benefits you and whether default Magento features are enough. We'll also share details on how to set up Google Analytics for your store and gather more data with the advanced .
What is Magento Analytics?
Magento analytics is a process of gathering valuable insights into your store's performance, products, sales, customer behavior, shopping journey, and other processes. It allows you to quickly identify pitfalls and optimize your store's experience for better results.
Analytics give you leverage you can use to make your marketing campaign more effective and targeted.
Benefits of Magento Analytics
Making business decisions is never easy. But it could be a little easier if you make them based on solid data about your store performance. That's exactly what you get with Magento analytics.
1. Identify best-selling products
Analyzing these reports helps you to see how much revenue each product is generating, identify best-sellers and discover low-performing items. So, you can adjust your catalog and make necessary changes to earn more.
- Compare current and past sales: Review how product sales have changed over a selected period to spot trends.
- Monitor the stock levels: Ensure that your best-selling products are always available for an uninterrupted shopping experience.
- Review search terms report: Discover the most searched products to predict customers' demands and fulfil them.
- Analyze customer feedback: Find out which products are gaining popularity and why.
- Inspect returned product data: Identify frequently returned products to avoid a drop in sales and wasted inventory space.
2. Get customer insights
By knowing your customer' desires, past purchasing habits and location, you can provide a more personalized experience and fulfil their expectations.
- Review customer reports: Identify the most valuable customers by the number of purchases per person and their value.
- Analyze the repeat customer data: See who returns to your store more frequently and is a potential high-value customer.
- Check geographic reports: Identify which region generates the most sales by viewing customers' locations.
- Monitor customers' reviews and ratings: Monitor what people like and adjust your strategies.
- Review customers' wish lists: Learn about your customers' preferences better, and check which items they add to their wish lists.
3. Discover better marketing channels
These Magento analytics help you to optimize your marketing budget and decide the best time for sales, discounts and special offers..
Moreover, it allows you to adjust previous strategies or create new ones to gain more customers and increase sales.
- Check the sales source: Discover websites and ads have brought new audiences to your store.
- Monitor social media influence: Determine which platforms bring you more visitors and work on increasing your presence there.
- Review ad effectiveness: Check whether ads, sales and promotion campaigns have led to sales.
- Analyze email marketing success: See if sales have increased after each email campaign.
- Optimize budget: Use Magento analytics to understand where to invest more and where to step back.
4. Evaluate your sales efforts
Evaluating your sales efforts is crucial for the success of your business. It provides insights into your store's performance, shows sales strategy effectiveness, and helps to identify areas for improvement.
- Check the visitors' conversion rate: Understand the effectiveness of the sales funnel, and see the percentage of visitors who converted.
- Review the average order value: Track the amount of money customers spend per transaction to reevaluate your pricing and decide on improvements.
- Calculate the customer lifetime value: Estimate the long-term value of customer relationships, identify the most valuable customers and find the strategies to improve customer loyalty.
- Check the shopping cart abandonment rate: Try to understand what can be the reason for abandonment (difficult navigation, confusing checkout, absence of preferable payment methods, etc.) and eliminate it.
- Analyze the revenue by traffic source: Identify which marketing efforts bring the highest sales and optimize your marketing strategies.
Analytics in Magento: What Insights Do You Get?
Since there are two versions of Magento — Open Source and Commerce — not all Magento users have the same access to Magento analytics.
If you're using Open Source, all information about your business performance is gathered under the standard Magento 2 reports.
The data is a bit "raw" and limited, in comparison to advanced Magento reporting. Nonetheless, you can still identify your strongest points and understand what to improve.
Magento Business Intelligence (BI) system, on the other hand, presents information in advanced charts, tables, graphs and diagrams. The focus on the visuals gives you a 360-degree look at your business.
(Source — Adobe Experience League)
The data gathered is more advanced, too. That's why this Magento analytics tool is available only to Adobe Commerce users.
But don't be disappointed too soon. You don't need to switch to the Commerce Magento to get powerful insights about your business. It's enough to set up a free Google Analytics 4 account and have full control over what gets tracked:
- visitors' age, gender, location and interests
- session duration, sources, mediums and campaign
- visitors' devices and browsers
- best performing products, pages and coupons
- important button clicks and form submissions
- each step of the shopping journey
But the best part is — you're not limited to the default reports Google Analytics offers. You can create as many custom reports as you need using the metrics and parameters available.
So, the question now is, how do you start?
How to Integrate Google Analytics in Magento?
The process of setting up Google Analytics for your Magento store comes down to a few steps.
1. Configure a Google Analytics property
To start the process, go to Google Analytics and press the Get started today button.
Next, create an account name to identify yourself on the dashboard.
In the Account Data Sharing Settings section, decide which data you are ready to share with Google.
Note: regardless of whether you check all the checkboxes or not, you will still add Google Analytics to your Magento without any issues.
Then, create a Google Analytics Property name, choose the Time Zone, desired Currency and go to the Next step.
After you give some general information about your business and choose your objectives, just hit Create and agree with the Google Analytics Terms of Service.
Finally, you need to set up a data stream. That is, tell Google Analytics where the information should be tracked from. Here, choose the Web platform.
Give the Website URL and the Stream name before clicking the Create stream button. Now your GA4 property is created and you are ready to start collecting data.
2. Get GA4 tracking IDs and script
Right after creating the Google Analytics property, you will be guided to the Web stream details, where you'll get the Measurement ID (which you need for later).
Now you need a Google script to insert into Magento to start tracking data. Just scroll down to the Google tag section of the panel you're on (Web stream details) and find the Configure tag settings option.
Note: to navigate here from the Analytics dashboard navigate Admin (gear icon) > Property settings > Data collection and modification and choose your data stream.
Then switch to the Admin tab to open the Installation instructions.
And finally, switch to Install manually to copy the Google tag.
3. Add Google Analytics to Magento 2
Now copy the Google tag code and your Measurement ID to insert them into your Magento.
For that, go to Stores > Configuration > Sales > Google API > Google Gtag > Google Analytics 4 and enable it. Then paste your Measurement ID and Save the settings.
After that, navigate to Content > Design > Configuration, and press Edit near a corresponding website.
Scroll down to the HTML Head option, and paste the Google tag into the Scripts and Style Sheets field. Now you're all set.
Note: Don't forget to Save the data and refresh your Magento cache to update the changes and avoid errors.
You're all set. Now, every time Google script is loaded Google Analytics will receive data about important eCommerce events. But that's not it.
Leverage Google Analytics 4 in Magento with GTM
Analytics plays a key role in a data-driven world, since it helps businesses work on their strategies and make informed decisions. That's why the way you collect data matters.
You can be totally satisfied with default Magento analytics or basic Google Analytics 4 and the insights it brings to the table. But for more detailed performance reports, you should use GA4 together with the Google Tag Manager (GTM).
On top of gathering more data about actions people take on your store, GTM allows you to set up a server container and not load the GA4 script at all.
This way, all tracking data is passed from server to server, avoiding any ad blockers and cookies. So you never lose any transactions and always get accurate information about your store dynamics.
Determine what works best for you, and we'll be right here to support your choice with multiple guides on different tracking options.
