Based on the Google Analytics Audit Checklist article we have created a useful infographic we thought you might find interesting. Feel free to share.

In this article we have listed tools you can use to help you audit your Google Analytics setup that we continually use. We're not affiliated with these products and our recommendation is based on us using them.

Having analytics to rely upon when you have an ecommerce store is crucial. Analytics can uncover more than just how many visitors you have/where they come from. You can find out what channels perform the best, where visitors drop out or what content performs well.

Scroll mapping helps us improve understanding of the way the average visitor consumes content. Scroll heat map enable us to visualize the exact extent of visitor scrolling on our website pages and where they give up.

The process of optimizing a website begins with research, the aim of which is to discover problems and issues on the site. However, not every issue is equally important.

Nearly every website has Google Analytics set up to track basic metrics so they can analyze what’s going wrong (and right), and use that information to improve their website’s performance. That’s the purpose of analytics. Yet most people stare at their Google Analytics dashboards and think, “Well, I guess that looks good. We’re up .0002 percent from last month.”

To put together the whole puzzle of customer research, you’re going to need comprehensive website technical analysis to identify every opportunity for enhancement. Why? Because your ability to get useful insights from the three methods above depends on one very important pre-condition: Your website must work properly.

The conversion optimization process consists of multiple steps that overlap and interlock. Many of these steps are based on data and research, so your initial step should always be to set up your data-gathering tools. Heuristic analysis is Step Zero of any conversion optimization process worth its salt.

Together, the ideas of relevance and clarity represent the cornerstone of successful communication between people. High-converting ecommerce stores need to have both to be effective. Clarity means that you’re conveying your meaning in terms that can be understood by your conversation partner (or audience). Relevance simply means that what you are saying makes sense in the framework of conversation.

We will now, as a practical exercise, present the step-by-step process of creating ecommerce customer personas by using Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager as the main tools. Why those tools? Because they are an industry standard, used by over 70% of marketers to gather quantitative data. They’re also free, and for an SMB ecommerce website, they’re a great starting base to get the personas you need. More advanced tools can come later.