Google Analytics can provide valuable insights into the performance of your WooCommerce store and give you valuable insights for improvements based on real data.
If you’re starting or running a multilingual WooCommerce store, guesswork and hoping for the best isn’t going to get you far.
Successful businesses thrive on data to make decisions and your store should be no different.
Fortunately, Google Analytics is a free tool that can provide more data than you could ever need and most of it can be incredibly valuable.
If you’re running a WooCommerce store, multilingual or otherwise, learning how to use Google Analytics really could be the difference between success or failure.
Google Analytics dashboard
Google Analytics is a free service offered by the search giant to provide insights and analytical tools to assess the performance of a website.
If you run an eCommerce store, you can get even more data from it that can help you create the most efficient store possible.
Benefits of Using Google Analytics for Online Stores
Businesses survive and thrive on data. Your WooCommerce store will be the same.
Sure, the products, aesthetic appeal, speed and engagement of your store will have an impact, but it’s data and how you use it that will decide if it’s a success or not.
Data provided by Google Analytics can help to:
Measure conversion, average order value, cart abandonment and other metrics
Provide accurate data to help make decisions
Assess your store’s current performance
Get context for improving future campaigns
Visualize entire customer journey through analytics
Measure Conversion, Average Order Value, and Other Metrics
There’s a lot more to running an eCommerce store than fulfilling orders and counting your profit.
Efficiency is everything.
The more visitors you convert into customers, the more profit you’ll make.
The higher the average order value, the more money you make from each customer.
The number of abandoned carts you experience can tell you whether your buyer journey is optimized or not. The point at which the cart is abandoned can highlight blockers to conversion and tell you exactly where to look to make improvements.
Trends, data and making data-driven decisions translate into profit.
Want to add a new product line? Let data tell you what’s popular and what’s not in your store.
Want to take advantage of a new trend or TikTok craze? Let data tell you which product is closest or which would work best.
Want to identify items to offer in a seasonal sale? Let data tell you which products sell best and which sell slowest so you can combine them into an offer.
Assess Your Store’s Current Performance
Do you know what sells and what doesn’t? It would help you a great deal to know which products are your most popular or the least popular, just like it would also help you to know exactly when someone abandons a cart in your store.
All these things are critical for running an efficient store and can make a huge difference to its success or failure.
You may have other ways of measuring these things, but Google Analytics collates all that and so much more in one place.
Get Context for Improving Future Campaigns
If you run paid ads and offer coupons or discount codes, wouldn’t it be nice to see exactly how successful they are?
That’s something Google Analytics can tell you.
Once you enter the codes and URLs to track, Google Analytics can tell you what coupons or codes are used and when. It can also tell you how many referrals you get from Google Ads.
This information can tell you how marketing campaigns are performing and helps you make informed decisions about where to invest your marketing budget. This is great for informing some of your future campaigns and allows you to focus on adjusting specific areas that might need optimisation. Ignoring this kind of data can land up costing your business in the long run.
Visualize the Entire Customer Journey Through Analytics
Set up Google Analytics correctly and you can follow the customer through their entire journey on your website.
You can track how long they stay, what pages they visit, what keywords they use in store search, whether they use translated pages or stick to your defaults, what part of checkout loses most customers and so much more.
By following the customer journey, you can identify where you lose the most customers, what pages need to be optimized to increase time on page and what stage of your sales funnel you need to optimize to reduce abandoned carts.
There’s a lot to it, but it’s an incredibly valuable insight!
Setting Up Google Analytics 4 and Accessing a Report
You’ll need to set up Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for it to begin generating data. It’s a straightforward process but may take a few days to generate usable data.
If you’re running an eCommerce store, you’ll also want to look at setting up Enhanced eCommerce, which is a separate process that may take a little time.
The busier your store is, the faster you’ll have data to play with.
Once Google Analytics has been set up for a couple of days, it will begin generating data.
If you run a busy WooCommerce store, you may like to check the Realtime overview. It’s a real-time report of what’s happening in your store at that very moment.
The Realtime overview in Google Analytics
Access it from Reports → Realtime within Google Analytics.
Once in the report, you’ll be able to see user activity for the past 30 minutes.
Select View user snapshot to see what any current user is doing, where they are and how long they have been on your site.
To access more eCommerce data from your WooCommerce store, you’ll need to set up GA4 a little more by adding eCommerce Events.
You may need to add another Google tag or change your existing one for this.
5 Ways to Use Google Analytics to Optimize Your Multilingual WooCommerce Store
The Reports snapshot in Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a key resource for any store owner, whether you use WooCommerce or offer multilingual pages or not.
The amount of data you can access can be overwhelming at times, but once you know where to look and what to look for, it becomes much more manageable.
Here are the 5 ways we recommend using Google Analytics to optimize your multilingual WooCommerce store:
Use upsells or cross-sells to improve Average Order Value
Use cart abandonment tools to help recover abandoned carts
Optimize product titles and descriptions for common search terms
Optimize checkout to reduce lost orders on the checkout page
Create offers for less popular products to help boost sales
Let’s take a quick look at each.
Use Upsells or Cross-Sells to Improve Average Order Value (AOV)
An upsell is where you offer a better or more expensive option than what a shopper has selected. A cross-sell is when you recommend additional products compatible with what’s in the cart.
Upsells try to encourage the shopper to spend more on an item. Cross-sells encourage them to buy more items.
Both are exceptionally effective tactics to increase average order value.
Use Google Analytics data to identify your big sellers and products that don’t sell so well. Identify pairings where you could upsell or cross-sell those slow sellers when a customer adds a big seller into their cart.
Data about ecommerce products in Google Analytics
Use Monetization → Ecommerce purchases in GA4 to identify your best sellers and your worst sellers.
Use upsells if appropriate and cross-sell wherever possible to feature lower selling items on the same page as your big sellers.
This will use the attraction of popular items to pull slower movers into their gravity while the shopper is in the buying frame of mind.
Use Cart Abandonment Tools to Help Recover Abandoned Carts
Abandoned carts are inevitable in eCommerce. But, if you can recover even a small percentage of them you could boost your store profits with very little effort.
Navigate to Conversions → Ecommerce → Shopping Behavior in your Google Analytics report to see abandoned cart rates.
You’ll need Enhanced eCommerce to see this report, but it’s well worth the effort.
Viewing shopping behavior in Google Analytics
If the rate is high, look at optimizing your checkout page, add more payment methods, and reduce any extra fees added at checkout. Needless to say, you’ll also want to do the same for all language versions of your sales funnel for maximum conversion.
And if you create follow-up emails, don’t forget to create a series for each language you have on your store as we don’t want anyone to miss out!
Optimize Product Titles and Descriptions for Common Search Terms
Did you know Google Analytics can collect data on how customers use your search function?
If your store has a search function, and all the best WooCommerce WordPress themes have it, you can configure GA4 to collect data on their search terms. It won’t collect data from Google Search (you’ll need to use Google Search Console for that), but nevertheless it might still give you clues about how to optimize for Multilingual SEO too.
Select Admin → Site Search → View Settings. Turn on Site Search Tracking under Site Search Settings.
From there, use frequent search terms to optimize product titles and descriptions to include them wherever relevant.
Remember to check translated pages too. If you have permanent translated pages in a multilingual WooCommerce store, make sure to include them in tracking.
Optimize Checkout to Reduce Lost Orders on the Checkout Page
Data provided in Conversions → Ecommerce → Shopping Behavior in GA4 should provide the insight you need.
You can set up a Goal to track cart abandonment, which may make life a little easier.
Use Create Goal and Checkout Complete as the action.
Data about ecommerce products in Google Analytics
You’ll need to create a funnel that includes the URLs of your cart page, checkout page, and successful purchase page if you use them.
Then give GA4 at least 24 hours to begin collecting data.
Then check Engagement → Conversions → Goals to see the results.
Identify where you’re losing most purchases and optimize that page to keep checkout as short and as frictionless as possible.
Some WooCommerce templates provide custom checkout pages while some plugins enable you to create streamlined pages to maximize conversion.
Create Offers for Less Popular Products to Help Boost Sales
You can use Monetization → Ecommerce purchases → Product Performance again to identify what products sell and what don’t.
You can use the numbers under Unique Purchases and Quantity. Sort them from lowest to highest to see what isn’t selling.
Viewing conversions in Google Analytics
Use this data to analyze the product, price, title, description and entire product page. Optimize it as much as possible to reflect the same quality as your bigger selling products.
Monitor performance to see if your changes have an effect and refine as required.
If they still aren’t selling and fit comfortably into your niche, consider paid ads, offers, coupons and other incentives to drive sales.
If you find a particular translated page isn’t performing, revisit the translation to make sure it’s accurate and portrays the product how you want it to and of course, don’t forget to check that you are using the multilingual keywords that users are actually searching for in Google Search.
This is especially true for automatically translated text. Software is good, but sometimes, nothing can beat human translation!
Using Google Analytics in Translated WooCommerce Stores
Google Analytics can be a little overwhelming at first as there is so much to configure and so much data available.
But, if you run an eCommerce store, multilingual WooCommerce store, or any type of website, it’s well worth getting to grips with it.
The insights it can provide can be game-changing!
We would recommend spending some time getting to know the system and where everything is. Link Google Analytics to your store and give it time to begin generating data.
Then, use these tips to get started analyzing and optimizing your store to boost your profits.
We have just scratched the surface of what is possible with Google Analytics and how it can help an eCommerce store. Look out for more insights in future posts!
About Author:
Sujay Pawar is the CEO and Co-Founder of Brainstorm Force, the company behind Astra. He’s passionate about the online space and writes articles to help entrepreneurs and freelancers succeed online. A father, a Youtube addict, and the brain behind numerous world-class products, you can connect with him on Twitter (@sujaypawar).
How can we make WPML better for you?
Share your thoughts and comments about our plugin, documentation, or videos by booking a Zoom call with Agnes, our Client Advocate. Your feedback matters and helps us improve.
