WooCommerce Conversion Tracking 101: Beginners Guide to Boosting Online Sales
Would you like to be able to track conversions in your WooCommerce store? Setting up conversion tracking is a great way to understand your store’s performance and improve your marketing strategy.
So in this tutorial, we’ll explain the benefits of tracking conversions on your WooCommerce site. Then we’ll show you how to set it up in Google Analytics and with a WordPress analytics plugin.
Content:
- Benefits of Tracking WooCommerce Conversions
- Enabling WooCommerce Conversion Tracking in WordPress
- How to Boost Your WooCommerce Conversion
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Conclusion
Benefits of Tracking WooCommerce Conversions
Conversion tracking is an essential tool for online businesses using WooCommerce. It allows store owners to measure how effective their marketing campaigns are. The analytics reports will help you make data-driven decisions to improve your sales.
With conversion tracking, you’ll get valuable insights into customer behavior. You can learn more about what drives conversions by tracking website visitors’ actions, such as clicks, views, and purchases. And then you can optimize your store and marketing campaign based on the data.
Additionally, conversion tracking lets you measure your return on investment (ROI). You can then determine your most effective campaigns, and divide your advertising budget more efficiently.
After enabling conversion tracking in WordPress, you’ll find helpful information to help you grow your business. And here are some common metrics to look out for:
- Shopping Behavior: shows how visitors interact with your store before purchasing.
- Checkout Behavior: shows an overview of your checkout process. It also identifies if some steps prevent users from completing their purchases.
- Product performance: shows the number of sales each product brings to your store. You’ll see the top-performing product and the least-performing ones.
- Cart Abandonment: when you set up eCommerce tracking in WordPress, cart abandonment shows the percentage of users that abandon their cart. Knowing this, you can recover abandoned carts in your store.
Setting Up WooCommerce Conversion Tracking in WordPress
The easiest way to enable conversion tracking is with a WordPress plugin.
For this guide, we’ll use the MonsterInsights plugin, a Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. Although the basic plugin is free, you’ll need to buy the premium version to access the eCommerce addon. The pricing starts at $99.50 per year for a single-site license.
Setting Up MonsterInsights Plugin
Before getting started, you’ll need to install and activate the MonsterInsights plugin on your WordPress site. You also need to connect your website with Google Analytics.
For steps on this, please see our tutorial on creating a Google Analytics account. Also, check our guide on connecting Google Analytics to WordPress using MonsterInsights if you haven’t previously done that.
When setting up Google Analytics, make sure to create a GA4 property on your analytics dashboard. This is because Google has stated that Universal Analytics will stop receiving reports on July 1st, 2023. So if you are still using universal analytics, please see our guide to learn how to switch to Google Analytics 4.
To enable eCommerce tracking in WordPress, you need to install the eCommerce addon by MonsterInsights. For this, go to Insights >> Addons and click Install next to the eCommerce addon.
Once the installation completes, the status changes to Active.
To start tracking your WooCommerce conversions, you’ll need to enable eCommerce tracking in GA.
Enabling eCommerce Tracking in Google Analytics
Enabling eCommerce tracking shows you real-time reports about your store’s performance.
Sidenote: You can skip this step if you’re using Google Analytics 4. GA4 automatically activates eCommerce tracking when you set it up.
To start, log in to your Google Analytics account, look under the left sidebar, and select Admin.
Next, click on Ecommerce Settings to open additional options.
In the ‘Ecommerce Settings’ page, toggle on the Enable Ecommerce option. Also, toggle on the Enable Enhanced Ecommerce Reporting option that appears.
Finally, click the Save button to complete the setup.
After enabling enhanced eCommerce tracking, head back to your WordPress admin dashboard. Then go to Insights >> Settings to access the MonsterInsights settings.
MonsterInsights will automatically detect the eCommerce plugin you’re using. Toggle on the Use Enhanced eCommerce option if you’d like to view advanced tracking reports. Be sure to click Save Changes after making your changes.
Viewing Your eCommerce Report
After enabling eCommerce tracking on your Google Analytics account, you can view reports about your store performance.
We’ll show you how to access the reports on the MonsterInsights eCommerce dashboard and Google Analytics account.
MonsterInsights
To view WooCommerce conversion tracking data from the WordPress admin area, go to Insights >> Reports. Then select the eCommerce tab.
MonsterInsights shows you the total add to cart events occurring in your store. You’ll also see the percentage of new customers and abandoned carts from the eCommerce dashboard.
If you want to export the report, click Export PDF Report. It’ll generate a PDF version of the report, which you can share with your marketing team.
When you click View Full Top Products Reports, you’ll be redirected to your GA4 property to view more eCommerce reports.
Universal Analytics
On your Google Analytics dashboard, go to Conversions >> Ecommerce to view your store’s performance.
Next, select the Overview sidebar menu. This would open up a broad overview of your website performance.
From the sidebar menu, you can view your shopping behavior, checkout behavior, product and sales performance, etc.
Google Analytics 4
To view your eCommerce performance on GA4, click on the Reports tab.
After that, go to Monetization >> Ecommerce purchases to view your WooCommerce performance.
Here, you’ll see purchase events and conversion events over a period. GA4 will also show you products users add to their carts.
This information can be useful in determining the number of users abandoning their carts and those making purchases.
How to Boost Your WooCommerce Conversion
Now you know how to enable conversion tracking for your WooCommerce website. Next, we’ll share some tips to help you boost your WooCommerce conversions.
1. Recover Abandoned Cart
When you set up conversion tracking on your online store, you’ll also see information about abandoned carts on your website.
Abandoned cart issues occur when a user fails to purchase after adding a product to their cart and accessing the checkout page.
It can occur due to the unavailability of multiple payment methods or because of unsolicited extra charges. To learn more, please see our tutorial on recovering abandoned carts in WooCommerce.
2. Upsell and Cross Sell Products
Another way to boost your WooCommerce conversion is to recommend alternative and related products to users. This process is known as upselling and cross-selling. This boost will result faster when you apply a sales funnel optimization agency to strategize your sales conversion.
To upsell products to your customers, you’d need an upselling plugin. See our review of the best WooCommerce upsell plugins to decide which plugin to use.
3. Improve Your Website Speed
A fast-loading website ensures users don’t spend much time waiting for your content to load. If your website takes a long time to load, it may deter users from completing their purchases.
Ways to improve your online store’s speed include compressing your product images and upgrading your WooCommerce hosting.
For a complete tutorial though, see our WooCommerce speed optimization guide. If you’d like, you can hire our experts to speed up your store while you focus on managing your online business.
4. Email Marketing
Chances are, some users who interact with your store won’t come back again. To prevent this from happening, you can use a pop-out intent box to collect emails from potential customers.
Once you’ve collected their emails, you can use email marketing software to send them announcements and discount offers.
5. Run Paid Adverts
You can use WooCommerce conversion data to promote your website on popular ads platforms. Platforms such as Google ads, and Bing ads allow you to run paid ads to promote your eCommerce business.
Further, if you’re running Facebook ads, you can add the Facebook pixel tracking code to your website. This allows you to study your customer journey and Facebook conversions.
WooCommerce Conversion Tracking (FAQs)
These are answers to users’ top questions about tracking conversions in WordPress.
How do I track conversions in WordPress?
To track your conversions in WordPress, you’ll first need to set up Google Analytics. Then enable eCommerce tracking on your GA dashboard. After that, you’ll need to use an analytics plugin to connect your website with GA for better analytics.
Which WordPress plugin is best for conversion tracking?
One of the best plugins for tracking WooCommerce conversion is MonsterInsights. However, it is a premium plugin. We recommend using the free WC Conversion Tracking plugin if you’re low on budget.
Conclusion
eCommerce conversion tracking gives you insights into your website performance. When enabled, you’ll see products that drive the most sales to your business.
This guide explained the benefits of tracking your eCommerce store’s conversion. We then showed you how to enable conversion tracking for WooCommerce using a WordPress plugin.
When managing a WooCommerce store, you may occasionally run into errors. We’ve compiled a list of the most common WooCommerce errors and how to resolve them.
