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Ecommerce analytics help you understand what’s going on with your online store and make better business decisions. Best of all, you can get them in Google Analytics at no extra cost.
But, when you want to look at specific metrics only, most analytics platforms give you a lot to process at once.
An ecommerce dashboard with Google Analytics metrics refines the process for you so you can get the insights you need fast.
In this blog post, you’ll learn more about Google Analytics ecommerce dashboards and how to use them effectively. You’ll discover these topics:
An ecommerce analytics dashboard is a group of visualizations based on your ecommerce store’s data. Most dashboards cover a specific goal or topic, such as traffic or audience behavior.
Ecommerce dashboards provide the following benefits:
Maximize the benefits you get from your ecommerce dashboard by following our dashboard best practices and tips to build a better dashboard. A good ecommerce analytics dashboard has these traits:
To improve the performance of your online store, it’s vital to have access to useful and actionable data. But, with so many metrics available to track, it may be hard to determine which ones will actually help you move the needle.
That’s why we have created a concise dashboard template that only tracks the most important metrics for analyzing the core elements of your ecommerce businesses, such as:
And more…
Now you can benefit from the experience of our Google Analytics 4 experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing the most important KPIs for monitoring your online store’s performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in ecommerce reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your Google Analytics 4 account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
With all those best practices said, you still might not know what KPIs and metrics to start with. We consulted 20 Ecommerce experts about their thoughts on dashboards, 19 of whom use Google Analytics for their Ecommerce websites. They shared five key metrics with us:
All these metrics relate specifically to customer behavior at different points in their purchasing journey. They indicate how many customers want to buy, how much they want to purchase, and the overall value they bring to your store.
Before creating your ecommerce Google Analytics dashboard, set up your Google Analytics account for ecommerce tracking.
Then, sign up for an ecommerce reporting software like Databox and connect your Google Analytics account. Databox lets you connect your integration and choose your data source at the same time in this menu.
After you choose Google Analytics, you’ll decide what metrics to track on your dashboard. Your software may ask you to connect your account at this point, but Databox leaves that step for later.
From there, you’ll authorize your connection to Google Analytics using your login credentials. You’ll then choose the exact data source and view.
Congrats! You have a Google Analytics dashboard for your ecommerce store now.
We also asked 20 ecommerce experts about their top Google Analytics ecommerce dashboard templates. To help you understand their priorities here’s a little more information about them.
Nearly fifteen out of the 20 respondents use two to five dashboards, meaning they keep their data analysis varied but focused.
More than 15 of the 20 respondents agree that different businesses need different data dashboards, that customizable metric display is important, and that ecommerce is one of the most competitive industries.
Out of the experts who responded to our poll, 13 are store owners, and 7 work for agencies that serve ecommerce businesses. Ten of the total respondents manage single-brand stores, seven work at multi-brand stores, and three analyze data for marketplaces.
Now, let’s see what dashboard templates these ecommerce pros prioritize. You can find even more templates in our gallery of ecommerce examples.
“The most important Google Analytics dashboard for your eCommerce business is the eCommerce Overview dashboard,” says Maggie Simmons from Max Effect Marketing, a multi-brand agency. “This dashboard will show you the total number of visits, the number of new visits, total revenue, and total sales rank. These are all important metrics to look at and analyze so that you can determine if any changes need to be made or if other factors may be preventing your eCommerce business from reaching its peak potential.”
See these metrics in action in Databox’s Google Analytics (Ecommerce Overview) Dashboard Template.
It gives an overview of all your transactions, revenue, and visitors using these metrics:
At a glance, you’ll understand how much money your store is making and how your visitors contribute to it.
Plus, using Databox’s drag-and-drop editor, you can change the order of your metrics or the visualizations you use. You can also include or exclude metrics as you see fit.
Ryan Stewart of Webris, a multi-brand agency says, “In my experience, the most important Google Analytics dashboard for eCommerce is the Audience Overview. This dashboard contains information about your visitors, the pages they visit on your site, and where they come from. It provides insights into how your customers behave, enabling you to decide how to improve your website.”
Stewart continues, “The metrics I see most often are bounce rate and average time on site. These metrics show me how users are interacting with my site—or not interacting!—and help me decide what steps I should take next in order to improve that interaction. The insights this dashboard provided were invaluable in helping me understand my customers’ behavior while on my site and where they went when they left it.”
Databox’s Google Analytics Audience Overview Dashboard uses metrics like the ones Stewart mentioned to help you understand your audience’s behavior. By understanding where your users and sessions are coming from, you’ll have a better idea of how to optimize your store accordingly.
It tracks these metrics specifically:
Customize the color, metrics, and visualizations as you’d like to view your data the way you want.
Out of the Google Analytics dashboards Kurt Walker uses for Mill City Home Buyers, a single-brand store, “The most significant dashboard that is helping us is the Sales Performance dashboard,” Walker says.
“Sales is an integral aspect of the operations of an ecommerce website. We regularly have to monitor how our metrics are performing to keep an eye out for any irregularities. Some of the metrics we’ve included in our sales performance dashboard are Cost per Acquisition, Sales Conversion Rate, and Refund and Return Rate. The dashboard has provided us with several insights, such as the cost of doing sales or revenue generation trends,” Walker continues.
At RevenueGeeks, a multi-brand store, Elisa Bender counts on the same type of dashboard. “In my experience, the eCommerce Sales Performance dashboard proved to be the most important for my business. That’s because it allows me to see what products are more popular with the public and how well my company’s sales and profits are doing. As a result, I can develop targeted strategies to drive my sales up. It contains metrics like the number of customers, conversion rate, and profit margins,” Bender says.
Bender continues, “It gave me a deeper insight into the products that were being sold more and the type of customers who bought them. So, I could develop strategies that solely catered to this niche audience. What’s more, is that I was able to understand the different factors that increased my revenue. As a result, I could forecast future revenues and develop ways to boost them.”
Databox’s Google Analytics Ecommerce Sales Dashboard uses similar metrics to help you monitor your ecommerce sales. This template focuses on purchases, orders, and costs to give you critical revenue numbers.
All of its featured metrics include:
If you’d like to use some of the metrics our experts mentioned using in their sales dashboards, drag and drop them using Databox’s Dashboard Designer. Add or replace whatever metrics you’d like to create a truly custom sales performance dashboard.
Kyla Smith from Evolve Fit Wear, a multi-brand store, implements an ecommerce product performance dashboard in the store’s analytics. Smith says it contains the following metrics: “Product revenue, unique purchases, average price, product refund amount, cart-to-detail rate, and buy-to-detail rate.”
“This dashboard helps give insights into which products are the best-sellers,” Smith says. “With this information, I can optimize my site to showcase these products on the homepage and through email marketing campaigns to potentially increase my sales. Secondly, it helps me understand which products are underperforming so I can either mark down the prices on those products or create a new collection to try and give customers more exposure to them.”
The Google Analytics Product Revenue Dashboard Template for Databox achieves similar goals.
It lists revenue by product alongside metrics that add context like transactions and AOV. Here’s the full list of included metrics:
Move the metrics around however you’d like in Databox’s drag-and-drop interface to put them in an order that makes sense to you.
What’s the top ecommerce Google Analytics dashboard for Jeffrey Aspacio at RedLettersPH, a single-brand agency? “It’s the Customers Checkout Behavior report, with Enhanced Ecommerce configured,” Aspacio says.
Aspacio explains, “This report contains the checkout steps and the metrics that are tracked include session drop-offs for each step and events were set up to track errors encountered by users in any step of the checkout funnel. This tracks a metric called the “error rate”, making sure this decreases over time. The type of error is pushed to the event label in Google Analytics’ Top Events report. When a certain error type is persistent, recommendations are provided to the developers to investigate and resolve the issue.”
Track your customer checkout journey with Databox using the Google Analytics (Ecommerce: Checkout Behavior) template. It displays each stage of checkout in a pipeline to show you where bottlenecks happen.
You’ll monitor these metrics:
Databox can also display other forms of data in a pipeline or funnel for other ecommerce situations, such as in the marketing to sales funnel. Choose the “Funnel” or “Pipeline” visualization from the Dashboard Designer’s Visualization Types category.
Jared Hendricks from Feruo, a single-brand store, is a self-proclaimed “religious Google Analytics user.” Hendricks vastly prefers Universal Analytics (UA) over the upcoming Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and uses an acquisition and goals conversion dashboard based on UA.
“Here, I can set up predefined rules and see what customers I am getting, and from where. I utilize UTM tags to determine which marketing efforts are bringing me the most valuable customers. I also check the steps customers are going through and combining that with heatmaps (MS Clarity) I can determine what necessary changes/improvements I should make in the landing page to drive the max sales,” Hendricks explains.
“The latest GA4 does not have this level of user behavior tracking in goal conversion so far and it is truly disappointing. This I believe is the single most important dashboard every ecommerce store should religiously implement to remove any friction from their customer acquisition process,” Hendricks adds.
If you want to track where user acquisition happens in your marketing, try the Google Analytics Acquisition Snapshot Dashboard Template. This dashboard tracks traffic sources, page performance, and keyword performance to offer a comprehensive view of your acquisition points.
Check out the full list of metrics:
Do you also consider GA4 difficult to use? As you get ready for the full switch, our Google Analytics 4 Acquisition Overview Dashboard Template will lend a hand. It monitors user numbers to help you connect visitor trends with revenue trends.
This dashboard includes all of these metrics:
Databox offers plenty more GA4 templates, all of which you can customize as you wish. The Databox GA4 integration gives you access to all your most important GA4 metrics in one place to help you adjust to the new platform.
“The Google Analytics dashboard that proved to be most important for our business would be Customers’ Shopping Behavior,” says David Lee from Neutypechic, a single-brand store. “ This provides us with a quantitative measure of why individuals choose to shop at our store. It allows us to understand the motivations of consumers and what eventually impacts their buying decisions. This allowed us to fill gaps in the marketplace and identify required products before they run out.”
Lee continues, “A customer shopping behavior contains the following metrics:
It provides our business with insights such as what products consumers are interested in and whether they are first-time buyers or repeat customers. Once we have these insights, an informed decision can be made.”
The Google Analytics (Ecommerce: Shopping Behavior) template for Databox takes a slightly different approach to tackle the same goal. It displays a pipeline of sessions that progress through the shopping experience to show how far your customers typically get.
This template displays the following metrics:
If you’re looking for a dashboard with more of the metrics David Lee mentioned, feel free to start one from scratch or modify this template by dragging and dropping your preferred data.
“As a CEO, I have released and worked on many long-term campaigns for our company. I have noticed that email campaigns are becoming a more efficient and effective way to communicate and engage with our customers. That’s why Email Google Analytics eCommerce Dashboard is my favorite dashboard for 2022,” says Chris Walker of Legiit, an online marketplace.
Walker continues, “The dashboard gives us a performance report for the email campaign that we launch while providing a bounce rate for the traffic from the email campaign. Importantly, it shows us the revenue from the email campaign which helps us track our progress so that we can meet the objectives of our company. The dashboard has helped us gain insights that we can use to improve our strategies so that we can focus on increasing our sales and monitoring how our resources are being used.”
Databox’s Google Analytics Email Marketing Dashboard Template analyzes email performance in a variety of contexts, including ecommerce. It tracks what email campaigns sessions come from and how many sessions come from your email campaigns overall.
You’ll see all of these metrics on this dashboard:
If you consider email an important pillar of your marketing strategy, you’ll also discover many more email marketing templates for Databox, including ones with Google Analytics metrics.
Databox has a low barrier to entry so business owners of any skill level can analyze their metrics right away. It has a free forever plan perfect for users focused on a few data sources. Plus, the easy-to-use Dashboard Designer and templates make anyone a pro at creating their own dashboards.
Since it’s so easy to use Databox, it’ll become easier and faster to look at the Google Analytics metrics that matter most to your store. Sign up for free today.
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Melissa King is a freelance writer who helps B2B SaaS companies spread the word about their products through engaging content. Outside of the content marketing world, she writes about video games. Check out her work at melissakingfreelance.com.
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