If you own or operate a pet store website, understanding your website traffic and the data that it collects can be beneficial to your pet store marketing efforts, campaigns, and strategies. However, if you’ve ever opened up Google Analytics, you know that as far as free software goes, it’s a beast. There are countless toggles, filters, settings, categories, tools, and more that are arrayed as soon as you pull it up.

It can be overwhelming. Where does one even start?

So, our team at Pet Engine Marketing thought it’d be a good idea to start providing some of that information for our readers. We’ll help you get to learn Google Analytics, tell you where to click and what you need to know to understand the data at your fingertips, and ultimately how to use that data to bring in more revenue, improve the efficiency of your pet store marketing dollars, and grow your business.

If you haven’t already, take a look at some more of our free resources for pet store owners, like our Blog, which is full of tutorials, tips, strategies, and advice for a variety of pet store marketing categories: pet store websites, pet store social media, pet store strategy, and so on. You can also subscribe to join our email marketing, or join THE Group for Marketing Help for Pet Businesses on Facebook.

Before we talk about creating your account, let’s take a few minutes to dig into the benefits of even having this on your website and on your radar - what’s the point?

Benefits of Using Google Analytics for your Pet Store Website

There are several KPI (key performance indicators) that are presented in Google Analytics that are critical in understanding the marketing health of your business, which in turn influences the online, financial, and physical wellbeing of the business (and its owner!).

How many people visited my website this month? This quarter? This year? Was it more than the last period?
How many people purchased from my website?
Where are people getting stuck on my website before they purchase?
How many of the people on my website are using a mobile device?
Where are most of the people on my website coming from? Local or far-flung?
Which pages or products are my most viewed?
How long are people staying on my website?
Is my pet store's social media driving quality traffic to my website?
How about my pet store SEO? Are my other marketing tactics working the way they’re supposed to?

At Pet Engine Marketing, tracking and measuring your marketing tactics and their effectiveness is the backbone of everything we do it. If it gets measured, it gets managed - and improved! Google Analytics is the ultimate tracking tool for your website, and it can help inform you to make better marketing decisions, hone in on your audience, and drive more sales.

If you’re a pet store owner and you understand the benefit of tracking and measuring your marketing ROI, but you don’t have the team or time to do it within your organization, maybe it’s time to reach out to a professional pet store marketing agency and see what your growth opportunities are. Contact us to set up a free 30-minute consultation and marketing audit to see where the path goes.

Getting Started with Google Analytics

First things first, you have to sign up and install Google Analytics on your website. It’s free (check out the Freesources section on our Blog for other free platforms you can use!) and easy enough.

Don’t worry, it shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes!

Log in to an existing Google account (like Gmail) or create one.
Go to https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/ and click “Sign Up”
Create an Account Name and a Property Name - this can just be the name of your store/business/website for simplicity (it’s not a big deal). Set your appropriate time zone.
Confirm, and get your UA Tracking ID.

So, your account is all set up! But it’s not connected to your website. You have to use that UA Tracking ID and install it on your website.

Most website building platforms have a specialized, easy place for you to put this Tracking ID. Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Wordpress…they all have it. If you need assistance for those, take a look at their resource index for installing it.

If for some reason, it’s not available, then the solution is still easy. Take your Google Analytics global tracking code and place it in the header tag of your website. If you need help with this, contact your site administrator or third-party website provider - something we can do for you if you utilized one of the Pet Engine Marketing services.

And that’s it! Once the code or Tracking ID is installed, your website begins tracking visitors. You can open up the Google Analytics dashboard and you can see yourself in real-time on your pet store website.

Before you poke around on your own (we’ll get into more strategies, deeper understanding, and more layers at a later date), use this helpful mini-glossary of Google Analytics terms so you have a better idea of what you’re looking at.

Google Analytics Mini-Glossary

Users – This is the equivalent of “people” that visit your website.

Sessions – A “session” is when a user spends time on your website. You will always have more sessions than users because some people return to your website. You cannot have more users than sessions because one user is responsible for one or more sessions.

Traffic Sources – A “traffic source” is a method of entry to your website, or how people find your pet store website. Typically, this is broken into several areas categories like:

Direct - when a user searches for you specifically on a search engine
Organic - when a user finds you through a search engine but they didn’t type in your pet store’s name specifically
Social - when a user reaches your website by clicking a link on one of your pet store social media platforms
Referral - when a user reaches your website through a link on another website
Email - when a user enters your website via email
Other - when a user enters your website via other means or methods

Bounce Rate – The “bounce rate” is the percentage of sessions in which a user visited one page on your website and didn’t interact, go to other pages, click any buttons, or otherwise do anything on that page before leaving your website. This is useful in understanding where and why visitors are leaving or becoming unsatisfied with your pet store website content.

Pageviews – This is the total number of pages viewed by users during your specified date range.

Pages / Session – Pretty straightforward, it’s the average of how many pages are visited on your website per session.

Using Google Analytics for Your
Pet Store Website
Conclusion

Well, that’s plenty to be getting on with! It’s time for you to head into Google Analytics, familiarize yourself with the layout, get lost a little bit, learn a few things, poke around, and explore. We’ll be back soon with another free pet store resource, part two on using Google Analytics for your pet store website.

Until then, happy tracking! No better time to start than today!