5 Must-Have Google Tools For Scaling Your Ecommerce Business

If you’re running and managing an eCommerce store, you’ll need all the help you can get to make it easier and more efficient to track its growth.

Fortunately, there’s a whole slew of free and paid eCommerce tools designed to help you achieve your goals such as increased sales and revenues, return on investment (ROI), and business growth.

While it’s not always easy to know the tools that will be helpful for your eCommerce business to succeed, Google offers some free, yet powerful, tools that you can use to help you take your online store to the next level.

Here are the five must-have Google tools for scaling your eCommerce business.

Google Tools For Scaling Your Ecommerce Business

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics should be a default Google tool for every eCommerce store owner. Since the tool was introduced in 2005, it’s been serving up foolproof data for many industries running online stores or websites, from business to manufacturing, travel, and more.

It’s a go-to Google tool that will help you scale up your eCommerce business because eCommerce thrives on data, and especially accurate data to help your business rise to new levels.

On the flip side is misinterpreted data, which will drive your business to its knees, because it makes all the difference between whether you’ll convert or lose a lead. Every sale counts for any startup or online store that wants to expand.

When used correctly, Google Analytics can analyze your store’s success and help you develop new strategies to help you continue driving revenues. However, if you don’t know how to use it, you could make poor decisions based on faulty data.

There are some steps you can take to use Google Analytics effectively and ensure that you drive sales and scale your eCommerce business. Here are just a few of them:

• Evaluate eCommerce store data: Google Analytics has a specialized feature that offers a comprehensive report on your store so you can develop efficient campaigns and sales strategies around your offerings.

You can see your customers’ spending habits, products they buy most, and preferred price ranges so you can stop second-guessing when it comes to your products.

• Optimize your content: to provide value to your customers based on what they want using the native Search Term report in Google Analytics. You can view what your visitors look for on your site without using conversations or surveys.

The report shows what words, content, and products your customers want to see. Such data can boost your search engine rankings and give you a glimpse of what your site lacks from a visitor’s perspective.

• Understand and familiarize yourself with your customer’s journey: every buyer follows a process before they decide to buy your product or service.

The journey may be different for each business, but you can use personalized customer service to understand the customer’s pain points and how to address and solve them.

Google Analytics helps you find the touchpoint where your visitors stop engaging with your store through the Behavior Flow report.

With this report, you can find out the customer’s drop-off points on your store and determine their journey based on different components of your store.

This way, you can deliver tailored content to your customer’s journey based on what you find and meet the customer where he’s at.

• Understand what your customer likes and why they visit your store: Google Analytics helps you see the customers’ interests through the Affinity Categories report, which differentiates interests by demographic.

This is critical in making sales because you get to align your brand with what your audiences value most, and then create the content and personalize marketing upon these interests.

• Find out how long it takes to convert leads: this explains how your customers’ minds work. Through the Path Length report, you can see how many interactions they take before they make a purchase and the conversion value per path length.

You can use this to determine whether to create longer campaigns or focus efforts elsewhere.

• Stay organized and informed using annotations for better SEO management: Google Analytics helps you track occurrences to understand what causes good or bad changes in your store, whether it’s a marketing campaign, website redesign, or more.

• Get a view of your customers’ attention span: Google Analytics offers a Landing Page report that shows you stats based on customers’ attention span – how they engage with your site.

You can see the bounce rate and duration for each page, know which ones get more engagement and which ones don’t provide value. This helps you improve landing pages for increased engagement and ranking.

• Know what your customers are actually worth: through the Lifetime Value report, you can know how much a customer is actually worth based on whether you acquire them via email, social media, paid search, or other channels.

This helps you focus your efforts on what will bring in more revenue.

• Work out the length of time spent on your pages: Google Analytics helps you figure out how long your customers are willing to spend on your store pages.

This way, you can develop the right products, content with enough details to alleviate their pain points, and determine the ideal items or content to put on your store.

2. Google Ads

Nothing beats the power of eCommerce Google Ads when it comes to eCommerce marketing. However, you need to understand and implement the ads properly in a well-optimized marketing strategy in order to drive targeted traffic (that converts) to your online business.

Google Ads help reach the right potential shoppers at the right time, so you don’t end up leaving money on the table.

Google Ads allows you to bid on phrases or keywords (search terms) and your ads are placed in YouTube videos, search pages, or other niche-relevant content across different sites depending on your campaign type.

In order to win the bids, you need to have relevant keywords, headlines, and ad copy, plus a relevant destination URL. You can bid using options such as cost per click (CPC), Impressions, cost per view or cost per thousand impressions, maximize clicks or conversions, and more.

For eCommerce, you can test your marketing strategy using the popular types of ads like:

• Google Search ads: these show on the search results pages at the top, bottom, or side based on what the shopper searches for. The ads include a headline, URL, and description.

• Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs): these ads are good if you have a large inventory, as they offer optimization for better results. These ads draw on web content to suit the searcher, meaning an ad is created automatically for those searching for whatever you sell.

• Google Remarketing ads: these ads work with your remarketing lists to help you reach more potential shoppers with focused messages and you spend less.

• Google Shopping ads: these ads draw on product data such as SKUs, images, or pricing and match potential shoppers searching for certain products.

• Google Display Network: these are text and image ads on third-party sites that are suitable for building awareness and visually appealing products to reach shoppers seeking niche-related content.

• YouTube ads: these ads work on YouTube and include TrueView ads to drive site traffic and increase video engagement, Bumper ads (short, 6-second ads), non-skippable ads, and outstream ads that display on partner sites and apps.

• Google Gallery ads: these ads combine visuals and Search but they’re still in beta form though they’re predicted to be a game-changer.

3. Google Merchant Center

If you need a one-stop-shop to manage and advertise your products online, Google Merchant Center is your best bet.

The Google tool allows you to upload your products and manage how your in-store and online inventory appears on Google while using the information to run ads and reach target audiences.

Google Merchant Center integrates into other Google services for better oversight and control of Google-based eCommerce and marketing.

With Google Merchant Center, you can do the following:

• Display product and store information so that potential buyers can find the details whenever they search on Google

• Reach more shoppers and get more sales across Google’s suite of networks and sites by displaying products to relevant customers across free and paid channels

• Discover actionable insights and reports on price, merchandising, and more so as to drive your store’s strategy

• You can also manage all Google interactions through Google Merchant Center and increase visibility for your store, remarket to remind visitors of products they’ve viewed, and more.

To register with Google Merchant Center, you just need an existing Google account, verified site, and business (Google My Business).

You also need to give the full data on your products including shipping, pricing, and availability, plus integration offered by your eCommerce store to sync all the required data.

The tool is free to use and upload your inventory. However, you pay if you want to run Google Shopping ads, and this depends on the payment model type – CPC or Cost Per Engagement (CPE).

4. Google Tag Manager

As an eCommerce store owner, it’s imperative to track your KPIs (key performance indicators) and use them to further enhance and improve your marketing efforts and campaigns.

With Google Tag Manager, you don’t have to edit or tweak any code; just add and update tracking tags so as to identify the factors that drive sales and which sources drive the highest volume of traffic to your site.

Tracking for eCommerce stores helps you optimize your campaigns so you can see where or why people abandon carts or your sales funnel to follow their journey. This information helps you determine the best performing products and review your copy, pricing, and checkout process.

The data also helps you create a better experience for your customer and improves sales.

There are two different implementation methods in Google Analytics, which you can add to your store using Google Tag Manager, and that help you with eCommerce tracking:

1. Standard eCommerce report: that lets your review purchase activity on your store or app and displays average order value, product and transaction information, conversion rate, and time to purchase among other details

2. Enhanced eCommerce report: that builds on the standard report and adds information like when customers add items to carts, when they begin checkout, and finally finish purchases.

This can help you see issues like cart abandonment or why customers don’t finish purchases, so you can optimize the conversion funnel or identify what inhibits cart completion.

Google Tag Manager is packed with lots of great solutions that ease the tagging process. These include:

• Tag technology: that gives you full control over how tags are defined and fired. This comes with other solutions such as AMP support, tag pausing, define reusable variables, mobile app support, asynchronous tag loading, tag blacklist, and tag sequencing.

• Usability: for marketers and IT teams with an interface that’s easy to use, folders to organize tags and other elements, instant search and autocomplete, preview mode to see your changes before deploying them, and you can publish changes in seconds.

You also get version history, site tag overviews, and workspaces to work on tags simultaneously with your teammates.

• Accounts and user roles: to help you share access with your teammates and control permissions to help them work safely together. This comes with features like multi-account or multi-user support, user-level permissions, approvals, and zones.

• Triggers: to control when and how tags are fired to get the required data. This works through custom events, form submission, auto-event triggers, clicks, page views, and history changes.

• Templates: to help you adopt new marketing solutions when you have native templates for Google and third-party marketing tags and measurement.

The tools to help you with this include custom HTML tags/image tags/custom JavaScript tags and templates.

• Integrations with Google Ads, Campaign Manager 360, and third-party vendor tag support to simplify code publishing and help remove errors.

• Automated tag management: to customize your store with the Tag Manager API so you can build your own solutions and set integrations for your current workflow. These are made possible through apps scripts integration and the Tag Manager API.

5. Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools help you evaluate and maintain your eCommerce store’s performance in search results.

The free service is available for anyone who owns a website and delivers information from the largest search engine with insights on how it views your site so you can uncover any issues that need to be resolved.

While you don’t need to use it for your site to be displayed in search results, you can get information that will help you improve your marketing efforts.

Functional eCommerce requires a resource that can offer all the data you need to understand and improve your store’s relationship with Google Search, and Google Webmaster Tools provides that.

If you’re new to Google Webmaster Tools, it may seem challenging but you can still get the most possible benefit out of it with a little help.

Some of the things you can do with Google Webmaster Tools include:

• Evaluating the search performance for your store
• Know whether other sites link to your store and find out the search terms that bring up your store in search results
• Know which search terms drive the most traffic to your store and alter the content that Google shows in search results
• Find out and resolve issues with spam

To set up Google Webmaster Tools, verify that you’re the store owner by uploading an HTML file or adding an HTML tag. You can also select your domain provider and use Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager to verify your store or site.

Once you set up your account and your store is verified, you can access lots of information and actionable data to help you optimize your store.

You can also get Google alerts, adjust our settings to get specific data to your email/inbox, see user queries where your site appeared in the search, and even submit XML sitemaps.

The tool is a great resource upon which you can base your store’s marketing decisions for the future.

Wrapping Up

It can be hard to know which Google Business tools to use for your eCommerce business out of the many incredible tools the software company offers.

While running an eCommerce store can be demanding, you don’t have to pore through the over 200 Google tools to scale your business.

These five Google tools are enough to help you make your days more productive and help your business grow.