WooCommerce: Identify Profitable Traffic Sources in 3 Steps
Are you running ad campaigns?
Tracking the profitability of advertising campaigns is easy, thanks to tracking pixels, but what about your other channels?
You might know how many visitors you get from Google and social media sites, but how many of these visitors convert into sales?
If you can figure this out, you’ll know exactly which channels to double down on and which ones to ignore.
The good news is that there are analytics tools that make it easy to find out how many WooCommerce sales you get from each traffic source.
Here are three easy steps you can follow to find this data today.
1. Track your referrers
To start, you’ll need an analytics tool to track where your visitors came from.
In analytics, we call traffic sources referrers because they are the sites that referred a visitor to you.
While many options are available, we recommend our plugin, Independent Analytics, which is built exclusively for WordPress and WooCommerce.
Independent Analytics is an alternative to Google Analytics and will track your visits without using cookies or violating GDPR laws.
If you’d prefer to use Google Analytics, we have a list of analytics plugins here you can browse for WordPress integration.
With an analytics plugin installed, your site will start collecting data on where your visitors are coming from. Here’s an example of the Referrers report in Independent Analytics:
As you can see, there’s a list of each referrer along with the number of views and visitors it delivered to your site.
Now that you’re tracking your referrers, the next step is to connect it with your WooCommerce sales data.
2. Connect sales to the referrers
The WooCommerce plugin has excellent sales reports, but it doesn’t track your traffic sources, so it can’t provide data on their profitability.
Luckily, there are easy ways to start tracking sales per traffic source.
Automatically with Independent Analytics Pro
One of the best features in the Pro version of Independent Analytics is the integration with WooCommerce.
This integration automatically connects new sales with their traffic sources. Once installed, you’ll start seeing orders and net sales values attached to each referrer like this:
The integration includes five different WooCommerce metrics, including Orders, Nets Sales, and Refunds.
If you run paid advertising campaigns via AdWords or Facebook, you’ll also appreciate the Campaign tracking feature, so you can see the number of clicks and sales coming from each campaign too.
And the best part is that the tracking is automatic without any coding or configuration required.
Using Google Analytics
You can find similar data with Google Analytics.
Using segmentation, it’s possible to create a report showing your revenue from each referring site.
However, this keeps “referral” sites separated from search engines and direct traffic, so you can’t view sales data for Google and Instagram side by side, for instance.
It also doesn’t include the number of orders or refunds, and the revenue number may not be as instructive as Net Sales, which includes refund deductions.
To integrate eCommerce tracking with Google Analytics, you’ll need to add custom Javascript code or use another WordPress plugin for the integration. There are plugins, like MonsterInsights, that can handle the integration for you, but it costs $199 (and then $399/year after that).
On the other hand, Independent Analytics Pro adds this tracking immediately with zero configuration (and it’s still on sale for new customers).
Ask your customers
One more way to connect sales to your traffic sources is to simply ask your customers.
You can use a WooCommerce checkout customization plugin to add a field to the checkout page that asks them how they found you.
This can be a good idea even when using another analytics solution because it can provide unique data. For instance, a customer might tell you that a friend told them about your product, and that’s something you wouldn’t know otherwise.
At this point, you’ve got your sales data connected to your referrers, but there’s one more small step to finding your most profitable channels.
3. Sort by net sales
The last thing you’ll want to do is to sort your channels by their sales to find out which ones are driving the most revenue.
This is as easy as clicking the column header to sort.
You might want to play around with the various columns, sorting by Net Sales, Orders, and Refunds, too.
It’s also a good idea to sort by Visitors and monitor traffic sources with a high conversion rate. You may find, for instance, a channel that only generated a handful of visitors but is converting better than most other traffic sources.
Start analyzing your marketing tactics
If you want to optimize your marketing, you need to know which tactics perform the best.
The key is to use a plugin like Independent Analytics Pro to connect your WooCommerce sales data with your referrers and campaigns. This makes the analysis as easy as sorting your referrers by their net sales.
Download a free copy of Independent Analytics
Armed with this knowledge, you can get to work prioritizing and de-prioritizing your tactics to get the most growth out of your marketing.
Thanks for reading this guide on finding the profitability of your WooCommerce store’s traffic sources, and feel free to drop a comment below if you have any questions.
Originally published at https://independentwp.com/blog/woocommerce-find-profitable-traffic-sources/ on February 23, 2023.
