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About the Author
Mitch (@mitchellharper) is the co-founder and CEO of BigCommerce. Way back in 2007 he built what eventually became BigCommerce as you know it. Today he runs the company alongside Eddie and along with our 100+ team members, is passionate about helping businesses succeed with e-commerce. Mitch spends time between our Sydney and Austin offices and is giving the keynote at TechConnect 2012 in Sydney on April 19th. |
Earlier this week we released BigCommerce 5.6 and the most popular feature is SocialShop, our new (free) Facebook application which lets you get your products in front of Facebook’s 400 million active users by adding a “Shop” tab to your fan page. Here’s a quick video I put together if you haven’t see it yet:
We’re big believers that Facebook has become the first true social platform, and we’re doing everything we can to help you take advantage of that – both to attract new customers to your BigCommerce store and also to build relationships with your existing customers.
In this post I’ll demonstrate how you can use Google Analytics to track visitors and sales from Facebook, and more specifically from your BigCommerce SocialShop.
The first thing you’ll want to do is signup for a free Google Analytics account, which you can do here. Google Analytics is a simple service that allows you to track visitors to your website. You can also setup goals to track certain actions on your website such as newsletter signups, orders, etc, but I’ll save that for another post.
The process of signing up for Google Analytics is very straight forward but if you’d like step-by-step videos then take a look at the Google Analytics YouTube channel here.
After setting up your Google Analytics account you’ll be given some tracking code to add to your website. To add the tracking code to your BigCommerce store, login and click the Settings -> Analytics Settings menu. You’ll see this screen:
Tick the “Google Analytics” option and hit save. You’ll see a new tab next to the “General Settings” tab. Click on it and paste your Google Analytics tracking code into the text box then hit save:
Google Analytics tracking is now integrated into your BigCommerce store. All traffic to your website will now be tracked and can be viewed and filtered through Google Analytics.
Please note: If you want to track the dollar value of orders (highly recommended), then make sure you turn on ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics. BigCommerce will then automatically pass order data back so it can be tracked.
That’s all it takes to setting up Google Analytics tracking. To see traffic and orders from Facebook, login to Google Analytics, click “View Report” next to your website and then click “Traffic Sources” on the left:
Under “Top Traffic Sources” click the “view full report” link and type “facebook” into the search box at the bottom of the screen and click go:
You’ll now be able to see the number of visitors who arrived at your store from Facebook. You can filter traffic by all sorts of metrics, but again, I’ll save that for another post.
To track orders, click the ecommerce tab on the left menu and again, type “facebook” into the search box under the “Top Revenue Sources” section. If you find you’re attracting a significant portion of new customers from Facebook, you might want to think about experimenting with Facebook Ads to drive traffic to your BigCommerce SocialShop on Facebook. Here’s a great article about Facebook Ads if you want to learn more.
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Mitchell Harper Reply:
July 28th, 2010 at 6:30 pm
Hi Steve. If they only have one affiliate on Facebook then integrating Google Analytics into their BigCommerce store and looking at traffic and sales that list Facebook.com as the referrer would do the trick.
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