I hope you will learn a lot from this interview. I am super happy to introduce Shruti Dugar, who has launched her 50+-year-old family business on Amazon which is now contributing 35-40% of their overall business revenue.

My questions are in heading form, her answers (in her own words!) are below each question.

Let us jump in.

Tell us about yourself & your business

Hi, I’m Shruti Dugar. By education, I did my graduation in Journalism and Mass Communication. I hail from a family-business background. Ours is a fifty-plus-year-old store dealing in traditional women’s apparel, specifically Bengal sarees, suits, and handmade silk scarves in Kolkata.

Why did you choose to sell online & on Amazon?

We were considering expanding to a new outlet so I thought why not give online a try? My brother bought a DSLR and I thought I’d better utilize it efficiently, so one day I took the camera to our store and started clicking pictures of the sarees.

I took the pictures and edited the white background and thought I’d upload it on either Amazon or Flipkart. I’d prepared all the essential documents and went on to update them on these portals. I chose to sell on Amazon because their rules were very liberal and clutter-free.

What is it about online selling that excites you most?

What excites me the most is, of course when I get notified of the new order and all that can happen only when I can deliver the product which is unique, different, and in demand. One thing that keeps me motivated is our products are traveling places, even to the remotest part of India.

My happiest day was when our product was shipped to Canada, our first international sale online. Comments from my customers are what excites me to upload new stocks every day!

How much money did you have to get started with?

As I said, I had stocks but no capital. So my initial investment was only the DSLR.

How many products do you have today?

We have over 1000 unique products live now.

How did you get your first order?

It took 15 days since we first went live on Amazon to get our first order. I wasn’t aware of the nitty-gritty like how the buy-box functions, how SEO works in Amazon so every day I would thoroughly go through Amazon Seller Central and read more about it and apply it to my inventories.

What percentage of your total business revenue comes from Amazon?

Now, 35-40% of our business revenue comes from Amazon.

Do you think there is any mentality difference when it comes to offline & online?

Yes, there’s a lot of difference in mentality when one shops online. Online buyers have a plethora of options to choose from but offline it is still restricted. Offline, they are focused on their needs but online is vast and sometimes the buyer gets overwhelmed with so many options and sometimes does not even purchase any item altogether!

What are the top challenges you face when selling on Amazon? Did you overcome any? How?

The most obvious challenge when dealing with apparel is obviously the return. To be honest, we can take only precautions and package the product diligently and follow up with the customer taking their feedback. Now, I package all the products personally and see if there are any discrepancies, I fix them.

How has your amazon business grown and changed over the years?

Yes, my business has grown considerably over the years. Through Amazon, we made a good customer base and now they contact us directly if they need any product in bulk or want customizable products. Many people living in Kolkata from far off places come to our store and also recommend others so that’s genuinely very good.

Do you encourage more people to sell on Amazon?

100%. If you can offer uniqueness, you are going to be a hit on Amazon.

What’s the biggest piece of advice you could give to somebody about selling on Amazon?

Don’t wait to have a perfect or life-changing product. Just grab a phone with good camera quality and click good angles of the product you’re offering.

Do your proper research obviously but just start with whatever you have right now. Your failures will teach you automatically.

It will be a rollercoaster ride with lots of returns and positive feedback and everything will be worth it!

I hope you enjoyed this conversation.

The post Interview With An Amazon – Seller How to Sell More on Amazon appeared first on Bharathidasan Moorthi.

1. You can choose any of the following options to sell online based on your expertise and resources(time, money, and manpower) Sell on marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, etc.
2. Launch your own e-Commerce store

You can sell using either(or both) of these methods or both. Both have their own share of advantages and disadvantages. But you must use your precious resources like time & money effectively to maximize the results.

You have to make the right choice for your business and also make the most of your resources..

In this article, you will learn different factors that need to consider selling online.

• Control
• Transaction Fee
• Store Policy
• Visibility
• Customer Details – Know Your Customers Better
• Credibility, Trust, & Loyalty
• Marketing Expenses
• Infrastructure – Payment Gateway/Logistics
• Profit Margins
• Potential for more sales & Scalability
• Branding
• Speed
• Multiple marketplaces

And by the end of this blog post, you will be in a position to decide for yourself which is the best way to sell your product online.

Control

Control is the primary difference between both the selling options we have discussed above.

Selling your product on your own eCommerce store ensures that the complete control lies with you, right from content, product, user experience, and customer details.

On the other hand, you can decide what goes on in the marketplace by controlling the content that you update but how it is displayed or communicated can’t be controlled by you.

Marketplaces choose to go with the format that they think is good for them, not for you. Also, you won’t have access to any data about transactions/marketing activities.

For example, if you implement marketing activities offline or outside of the marketplace, you won’t know how effective it is.

With your own store, you can always get the analytics setup and get access to all the marketing and sales data you need.

Transactions fee

When a sale takes place on your own eCommerce store, you will only have to pay the payment gateway fee. But yes, remember that you are also paying for marketing your online store, website maintenance, etc.

Whereas in the case of marketplaces, you have to make payments such as listing fees, commission, etc, Usually this ranges from 10% to 25% of the product price depending on the product category and the marketplace.

Store Policy

Every marketplace has its own store policy for listing products and they may change them at any time. In the worst case, they may even block your product listing/category.

You will never know what will happen at any time and you’ll always be dependent on them for your sales. This makes the marketplace selling slightly unpredictable.

You will not be having any such issue if you own an eCommerce store, as you decide what you want to sell in your store.

Visibility

If you launch the product on the marketplace, you have an opportunity to showcase your product to the massive existing customer base of the chosen marketplace.

But, visibility for your product depends on a lot of factors such as uniqueness, conversion rate, reviews, content, etc.

There are chances that your product might be lost among so many products listed on the marketplace under the same category as yours.

Marketplaces are best for unique products that get more visibility. It’s advisable to stay away from the marketplace for selling the same kind of products if it is already crowded.

In the case of your own store, you can decide which product needs to be highlighted.

Customer details – Know your customers better

Understanding your customer’s persona is the key to your online business to grow and improve your offerings.

You have ownership of the customer’s details and connect with them through different channels to communicate with your customers when you own the online eCommerce store.

You can use these details to upsell/cross-sell/launch new products.

Most marketplaces do not allow the store owners to contact the customers or in most cases, the customer details are not shared with you. So you won’t be able to communicate with the people who have purchased products on marketplaces and understand their experience.

Credibility, Trust, & Loyalty

As a new online store, gaining people’s trust will be the biggest challenge. You can add more elements to your website that increase credibility such as product stories, press mentions, testimonials, industry-related badges, etc.

You should know that it takes time to build credibility & trust. But it will be rewarding in the long run which will increase the number of loyal customers who love your products.

Marketplaces already have millions of customers those trust their services and products. You can take advantage of this and enjoy sales by just listing the product on marketplaces (Yes! Your product should be great otherwise bad reviews will eventually lead to fewer sales).

Marketing Expenses

Customers won’t just flow in once you have launched the store.

You need to go out (Not really, go out, but you can simply run ads from your desk) and promote/market your eCommerce store to drive traffic to your store.

You need to tell a story about your product to the right audience. This plays a crucial role in your store’s success and it is the key.

The more money you put in marketing, the more traffic you get. Not only money, but you also need marketing expertise or hire experts to drive targeted traffic and convert them into sales.

Having said that, certain marketing activities involve zero investment, but they take a lot of time.

On the other hand, marketplaces are good at driving targeted traffic to their sites.

All you need to do is list the product and optimize the product listing with all the necessary details to help potential customers make the right buying decision.

Some marketplaces provide marketing options inside their platforms. Amazon offers options to market your product through its service called, Amazon Marketing Services.

Infrastructure – Payment Gateway / Logistics Issue

When you sell your product on marketplaces, all the technical things such as online payment collection, security, or logistics will be taken care of by the platform.

They have their own infrastructures for supporting the sellers. Once you signup on their platform, you can access all the services provided by them.

However, you need to pay for these services based on the number of orders that you receive. But in most of the platforms, there won’t be any charges unless you make any sales. It’s a win-win situation as you don’t pay them anything until you make a sale.

But you need to take care of all these things on your own or through help from professionals when you own an eCommerce store.

Though eCommerce platforms like Shopify, make it easy to integrate payment gateway and other services, still you need professional assistance if it involves much more technical things.

Profit Margins

Expenses are involved in both, marketplaces as well as an eCommerce store. You can decide which is the best choice considering the profit margins and efforts involved in both.

Below is the list of expenses involved to give you a fair idea of how this works. It varies from marketplace to marketplace and country to country.

Potential for more sales & Scalability

It should come down to what your business goals are and how you see the future of your store.

Even if you have a best-seller product on the marketplaces when you list the new product you have to begin from the beginning. And your sales growth depends on the category growth in the marketplace. You can’t really decide your sales growth.

If you sell some of your products successfully in your store and build a very good customer base, then you can launch your future products and you can expand your overall category and product offering.

Your sales growth is proportional to the resources that are available to you.

Branding

You might lose your brand when you are selling on marketplaces as people will likely remember the marketplace name and not your brand.

You will be doing marketing for the marketplace indirectly not your own brand and there is a higher chance that your customer might be exposed to your competitor’s products and you losing a sale to them.

You can build your brand and loyal customer base when you are selling in your store, which will help you in the long run.

Why do want to market someone else company when you can do it on your own.

Speed

Listing your products on marketplaces is straightforward and it can be done in a day if you just have all the product details & documents ready.

But launching your own online store involves a lot of activities like choosing a domain for your store, server, website development, payment gateway, logistics, etc.

eCommerce platforms such as Shopify and Bigcommerce make it easier to create eCommerce stores, still, you might need to work on the other aspects of the business process. It usually takes one-three months to launch your own eCommerce store.

Multiple marketplaces

In any country, there will be multiple marketplaces that are popular among the people. Once you choose to sell your product on different marketplaces, then you have to invest time to focus on all the marketplaces.

So, Which is best for your business?

There is no common answer to this question because all businesses are not the same.

To decide which is the best for your business — Marketplace or own eCommerce store, Answer the following questions and think about your business goals:

• Where are your potential customers hanging out?
• How much time do you have?
• How much money do you need?
• What kind of resources do you have?

By answering the above questions, you can choose the best way to sell your products online.

However, as a thumb rule,

If you believe that your product is truly unique and deserves the time and effort to be marketed individually, it’s worth looking into selling via your own online store.

If it is a more generic product, it is probably best to sell on Amazon and eBay.

Even if you are selling through your own online store, you can use marketplaces as one of the sales channels that fuel your sales and supports your store financially.

You can use coupons, product packages, and other marketing activities with the packaging/invoices when you are selling in the marketplaces.

Final Thoughts!

Look at your business goals and products to help you to decide and prepare for the future!

Still, confused?

Do you need help in choosing the right way to sell your products online? Comment below or just shoot me an email to hear back from me with suggestions.

All the best!!!

The post Ecommerce Store or Marketplace? What is the Best Way to Sell Your Product Online and Why! appeared first on Bharathidasan Moorthi.

Launched a new product on Amazon and the sales are not growing as you have projected?

Now is the time to embrace Amazon Marketing Services(AMS).

Amazon has millions of satisfied and loyal customers across the globe. Amazon marketing campaigns help you to reach shoppers on Amazon who might be interested in your products based on the keywords they search and their past shopping behaviors.

In this article, I’m going to cover different PPC marketing campaign types (which means you only pay when shoppers click your ad) available on Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) and how to use them to boost sales.

Different Amazon Ad Campaign Types

Amazon provides 3 different ad campaign formats through the seller central dashboard.

1. Headline Search Ads (HSA)
2. Product Display Ad(PDA)
3. Sponsored Products Ad(SP)

Let us see how & when to use each of the campaigns and get the most out of your ad budget.

1. Headline Search Ads (HSA)

Headline search ad appears on top of the search result page and the ad appears based on the keyword you bid for. If you are familiar with Google Adwords, this campaign is more like the Google Search Network Campaign type.

You can use any page with your products/Custom URL(displaying specific products)/Amazon brand page as a landing page where you can showcase the featured products. This type of ad appears both on the mobile site, mobile app, and desktop version of Amazon.

Here is an example of the Headline search ad by Jabra Brand for the keyword “wireless Bluetooth headphone”.

You can either choose the default Amazon template with a minimum of 3 products & headline text on the ad or you can use your own custom graphic.

Note: The Default Amazon template’s Click Through Rate (CTR) beats custom graphic CTR, because of its native design.

Get the ad running by adding the relevant keywords to show up your ad, budget, and bid. Tools like SEOStack show the most used search terms for any product or category. You can use any one of the following keyword match types for bidding: Exact Match and Phrase Match.

2. Product Display Ad (PDA)

Sponsored display ad appears below the Add to Cart button on the product details page/Amazon home page.

Here is an example of a Product Display Ad (PDA). Check out how Bluestar tries to steal customers from Voltas by showing their Bluestar’s competitive product on the Voltas AC product page.

You can use two types of targeting:

1. Product Targeting

Product targeting helps you to target specific product pages on Amazon and you can narrow down the targeting based on the product type. You need to manually choose on which product page your ad should appear. Ideally, you can target related products/competitor’s products for better conversion.

2. Interest Targeting

You can broaden the audience reach by choosing interest targeting. You can target shoppers who have a particular interest.

Amazon has already grouped the shoppers based on their past shopping behavior on Amazon. If you are promoting fiction book, you can target customer’s those have an interest & bought the fiction books on Amazon already.

You can simply choose the product that you want to promote and put a headline for the ad using the Amazon template/use a custom graphic.

3. Sponsored Products Ad

Sponsored product ads help you promote a particular product listing based on the keyword shoppers searching for. This ad appears as part of the search results above or at the bottom of the search results. Once shoppers click on the ad, they will be directed to the product detail page.

You can choose two types of targeting:

1. Automatic Targeting

This type of targeting is good if you are just starting with AMS ads or launched a new product. But you don’t have control over where the ad appears. 

If you choose this targeting type, Amazon shows the ad for the keywords related to the product and based the product information. The ads also appear under related products in product suggestions.

2. Manual Targeting

Manual targeting helps you choose the keywords for which you have to appear. It works like a Headline search ad but the ad is shown as part of the search results. You can choose a keyword match type and bid for individual keywords. Negative keywords help you to exclude some keywords for which you don’t want the ad to appear. This targeting type delivers the best ROAS.

AMS Campaign Reports

AMS provides detailed reports on the campaign’s performance which helps you to optimize the campaign to deliver the best results. The report includes the following metrics.

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Click-Through Rate(CTR)
• Average CPC (ACPC)
• Estimated Total Sales
• Spend
• Advertising Cost Of Sale (ACoS)
• Units Sold
• Detail Page Views(DPV)
• Add to Cart(ATC)

Promotional Credits

You can avail of free promotional credits from Amazon to start with Amazon marketing activities but they vary across the markets. For India, it’s INR 2,000 and $100 for Amazon US.

Over to You

Now go and set up campaigns with free promotional credits. If you have any questions & difficulties, post them in the comments section below.

The post Amazon Marketing Services: 3 PPC Campaign Types To Sell More appeared first on Bharathidasan Moorthi.

But very few website owners really focus on optimizing the performance of the web forms. You may lose your potential customers because of poorly designed web forms with unnecessary fields.

Forms are one of the most important elements of any website. Forms are used to collect information from your site visitors either by using a lead generation form, email subscription, or check-out form of an eCommerce store. Here is the stat from Formisimo:

“On an average, 67% of potential customers who start filling in a form don’t complete it.”

With the help of Form Analytics, you can understand what factors are responsible for incomplete visitor forms, so that you can make the necessary changes increasing the conversion rate.

In this blog post, you will be learning

• What is Form Analytics?
• Why should you use Form Analytics?
• Best Form Analytics tools
• Basic metrics of Form Analytics
• How to track Forms using Zarget
• How many fields should your Forms have?

What is Form Analytics?

Form Analytics will help you get detailed insights about how users are engaging with the web forms and what is stopping them from filling the form successfully. It will help you look beyond conversion rate and abandonment rate.

Why should you use Form Analytics?

Form conversions can be tracked in Google Analytics by creating goals based on Thank You page or custom events. However,  form analytics will give you much better insights through different metrics.

Below are a few questions for which you can get answers from Form analytics:

• Are you asking for too many details from your customer and is that causing checkout abandonment?
• How many visitors have interacted with your form?
• At what time during the form filling process, are your visitors abandoning the form?
• Which fields are often not filled by the visitors?
• What is the average time a visitor takes to register the form?
• Is there any issue with the form design or the number of form fields?

For those of you thinking, “Is form analytics worth your time?”, let’s look at the following success stories.

• Expedia eliminated ONE field (company name) resulting in a $12 million profit – Read more about it here.
• ImageScape increased their conversion rate by 120% by reducing their form fields from 11 to 4.

Best Form Analytics tools

You can implement form interaction tracking in Google Analytics by adding a few lines of custom code to your website. You can learn how to it here and if you are fond of Google Tag Manager read this.

But if you are not comfortable with those custom codes, many exciting conversion rate optimization tools are available to make form tracking easier.

Most of these tools provide Form Analytics feature along with other conversion rate optimization features like A/B testing, Heatmaps, Session Replay, Funnel Analysis, etc. You can start tracking your forms by simply adding the corresponding JavaScript code to the site.

• Zarget
• Hotjar
• Clicktale
• Formisimo
• Inspectlet
• MouseFlow
• MouseStats

Basic Metrics of Form Analytics

• Drop Offs By Form fields –  The fields where visitors left the form before abandoning the form
• Interaction Rate – Percentage of visitors that have interacted with the form
• Engagement Rate – Percentage of times a particular field is filled
• Form Validation Fail Rate – Percentage of times the form validation has failed
• Time Spent – How long does it take to fill each field and the whole form?
• Average Fill Rate – Percentage of people that fill every form field
• Refill Rate – How often people change the value of form fields
• Blank Field Rate – Percentage of visitors who ignored a particular field
• Conversion Rate – Percentage of visitors that have completed the form
• Abandon Rate  – Percentage of visitors that left midway during the form filling process

How to track Forms using Zarget

Zarget is one of the best conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools in the market. Form Analytics is part of their CRO toolset. You can sign up for free 30 days trial period (for up to 5,000 visitors) which provides access to all the CRO features including form analytics.

Once you sign up, add the JavaScript code provided by them into the website through multiple integration options or directly add the JavaScript code to the site.

Starters, Refocus, and Corrections Report – This gives insights on how well the visitors understand particular form labels and what information is to be typed. Ambiguous form labels lead to more corrections in the form of data. Remember, the higher the number of ambiguous form fields, the higher will be the rate of form abandonment.

Hesitation Time Report – This report is calculated based on how much idle time a user spends on a particular field. If the hesitation time is more for a particular form field then you can understand that the form field is confusing and the user doesn’t understand what has to be typed in that field.

Blank Report – This helps you understand the rate at which the users are leaving a particular field empty in the form filling process. The high blank rate for a particular field indicates that most users are not ready / hesitate to provide the asked information. Most of the time, mentioning how you will be using the collected information will solve the problem.

Note: You can get more insights about forms by combining form analytics with other CRO tools such as session recordings.

How many Fields should your Forms have?

This is the most asked question during the form designing process. Well, the answer is It Depends. There is no “One size fits all” answer. You have to think from your users’ perspective and decide what is information you need to know about your leads. Most importantly Test, Test, Test!

The proper combination of A/B testing, form analytics, and being clear on what information you need to know about your lead will answer all your questions.

Always keep in mind, “Ask the details that only matters”.

Recommended Reading

• https://conversionxl.com/reduce-form-fields/
• http://acquireconvert.com/conversion-optimization/

Where to begin

Choose and integrate any one of the forms of analytics tools from the above list. You might find some interesting insights into your website’s forms. Do let me know how this post was useful to you and what your findings were after using the tools!

The post Form Analytics – How To Improve The Performance of Your Forms appeared first on Bharathidasan Moorthi.

As bloggers, we worry about the high bounce rate in our Google Analytics dashboard. And it is one of the frequent queries I encounter from new bloggers.

“My blog’s bounce rate is too high, how do I deal with it?”.

Below is the Google Analytics dashboard screenshot shared by a blogger with a similar problem.

You can see that the average session duration is only 27 seconds and the bounce rate is 85.36%. But most of the time these bounces are not bounces at all.

If you are facing the high bounce rate issue in your analytics tool dashboard too, read on. In this post, I share with you one of the common reasons for high bounce rates and how to avoid them.

But, before finding the causes for a high bounce rate, let’s understand what bounce rate is.

What Is Bounce Rate In Google Analytics?

Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).

Most of the time, a user bounces back from your website if they didn’t find your content as informative/useful/relevant to them.

But you should understand that a high bounce rate not only occurs because of your content, but it might also have to do with something about how the bounce rate is calculated technically. Consider the following situations.

Scenario 1: A user lands on one of your blog posts, reads the whole article, and leaves your site.

Scenario 2: A user visits any of your product pages and places an order over the phone.

Both the above cases are not exactly bounced, but according to the standard definition of bounce rate, they are considered as bounces since the users had visited only one page and left the site. Such miscalculations result in a high bounce rate.

What’s the solution to this problem? Adjusted Bounce Rate!

What is the Adjusted Bounce Rate (ABR)?

Adjusted Bounce Rate (ABR) is calculated by tweaking the actual Google Analytics tracking code and sending an event based on the time spent on the page.

For example, trigger an event if a user spends a minimum of 30 secs (customize the time based on your website) on a page. This event will be considered interaction with a website. Even if the user doesn’t visit the next page, it won’t be counted as a bounce.

[Tweet “Why is adjusted bounce rate important? Because you cannot make better decisions with wrong data.”]

How to set up Adjusted Bounce Rate (ABR) in Google Analytics

Plain code

If you have added Google Analytics code manually, simply add the following code to your Google Analytics tracking code.

setTimeout(ga('send','event','adjusted bounce rate','30 seconds'),30000);

The above code will trigger an event after 30 seconds (30000 milliseconds). You can change this based on your requirement.

Using a WordPress plugin

Adjusted Bounce Rate WordPress plugin makes it easy to implement the adjusted bounce rate in WordPress websites.

After you install the plugin, you can find Adjusted bounce rate settings under the Settings menu. You can specify when to fire the event and event names in the settings.

Minimum Engagement – The number of seconds to wait before firing the first engagement. ( Typically 30 secs, you can decide this based on your site)

Engagement Interval – These events will fire for every specified time.

Maximum Engagement – The maximum number of seconds to track these events.

Adjusted Bounce Rate using Google Tag Manager

If you are using Google Tag Manager to manage all your tags, you can create a tag to fire an event after a specified time. Here’s how you do this.

Click on create new Google Analytics tag,  choose the track type as an event then specify the event category, type, and event label.

Once you create the tag, you have to configure time as the triggering point. Choose the trigger type as a timer. And enter the time interval you need this event to trigger in and choose the web pages.

You can check this in preview mode to see if the event gets triggered at the specified time.

Conclusion

You can check the impact of the Adjusted bounce rate in the below screenshot.

Implementing an Adjusted bounce rate is not the only solution for your high bounce rate problem. However, it provides you with an improved version of the standard bounce rate. And it also gives you a clear idea of how your visitors interact with your website.

I hope you have now learned how to adjust the bounce rate for your site. If you have any queries regarding this or would like to share your suggestions and feedback, do comment below!

The post Adjusted Bounce Rate and How To Set It Up – Explained! appeared first on Bharathidasan Moorthi.

Though there are many factors like website navigation, usability, and, website content that can cause a high bounce rate on your website,  site speed is considered to be the primary factor among them all.

46% of people will leave a site if it fails to load within 3 seconds in the mobile browser.

The problem with most of the bloggers like us is, we can’t afford to spend so much money and resources for website performance optimization, and also you can’t lose the traffic because of the slow loading page.

To help with this problem and make mobile websites faster, Google recently launched an open-source project called AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) by partnering with many other companies and publishers to improve the page speed in mobile phones.

In this post, I will cover,

• What is AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)?
• How to configure AMP in WordPress Site/Blog?
• Designing AMP articles and Tracking AMP pages with Google Analytics

What is Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)?

AMP is a stripped version of your site which is specially designed to give better speed and interface to the user. AMP framework is built using AMP HTML, AMP JS, and AMP CDN to optimize your pages for better performance.

Any page should have two versions – the Original Version and the AMP version. With regard to SEO, the AMP version is canonicalized. So, we need not bother about the duplicate content.

If you have already enabled Facebook’s instant article for your blog, it will have an effect on Facebook because it is a  closed infrastructure.

By configuring AMP on your site, you can make your pages load almost instantly which will result in a low bounce rate, more page views, more ad impressions, and more ad earnings.

Why does it matter?

• Instant Loading  – AMP version of the site will load within 2-3 seconds.
• Since the page loading speed is one of the main factors for causing a high bounce rate, by enabling AMP, you can reduce the mobile visit’s Bounce Rate drastically.
• As page speed is one of the 200 factors that affect search results, AMP pages will have an advantage in SERP, especially in mobile search results. Google also shows AMP pages in search results at the top as Carousel so that you might have an advantage in SERP.

How to Configure AMP on WordPress Site/Blog

WordPress has developed a plugin to Enable Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) on your WordPress site.  You can download it from git hub or directly install it from your WordPress site.

Once you activated this plugin, it will automatically create an AMP version of all posts. You can check newly created AMP posts by appending “/amp/” or ”?amp=1” in your blog post URL.

For example, if your blog post URL is www.example.com/hello-world/

You can see the AMP version at,www.example.com/hello-world/amp/ or www.example.com/hello-world?amp=1=

Restrictions:

1. Right now this plugin works only for blog posts not for pages.
2. This plugin will create only the AMP version of your post and it won’t be ensuring serving the AMP version while your visitor accesses it through mobile phones. You can ensure that the AMP version of your post is serving mobile users by redirecting mobile users to this AMP version.
3. Right now this plugin won’t be displaying Featured Images in the AMP version but still, there is a way to add it through code. You can learn it here.
4. This plugin uses only the default styling.
5. This plugin will remove the commenting option.

Append “#development=1” to the URL, like www.example.com/hello-world/amp/#development=1

And open the console in Google Chrome while loading to check any mistakes. If you don’t have any errors, you should be getting the result shown in the image below.

You can also markup the AMP posts and can make sure it works with the markup testing tool. Right now AMP versions have a lot of restrictions like you can’t have a contact form, third-party JS,  or a regular commenting system. It can only be made possible through iFrame presently.

Styling AMP Articles

The above plugin will create only the default template of the AMP version. If you need to make those to match your brand, you need to add some more custom CSS to it.

To make this easy Yoast has developed Glue For Yoast SEO AMP plugin.

You need to use Yoast SEO for this plugin to customize the AMP pages and also to ensure that AMP posts have proper markup using the markup checkup tool.

Once you enable this plugin you will be getting the AMP option in the SEO menu of the WordPress dashboard.

Tracking AMP with Google Analytics

You need to add analytics code separately to assess how AMP affected the site’s performance. If you are using Yoast Analytics Plugin, then you need not bother because this plugin automatically adds the Google Analytics Tracking Code in AMP post.

Otherwise, enter Google Analytics Tracking Code in this option to add it in AMP posts.

Indexing AMP Pages

After creating AMP pages, you check the indexing status of AMP pages in Google Search Console in the Search Appearance option. You can also check if any AMP page has an error.

Conclusion

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is still in the early stage, and we can expect more updates from Google on this. And, right now, AMP is not having any influence in Google’s SERP, but it may have in the future.

So, let us be future-ready. Also, make our mobile visitors happy with AMP Pages.

If you have any problem in configuring AMP Pages on your site, let me know in the comments section.

The post Configure Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) For WordPress Site – A Step-by-Step Guide appeared first on Bharathidasan Moorthi.

With the help of web analytics tools, you can very well understand people’s behavior on your site and other information like their gender, device, location, the page they have seen, etc.

These data and reports will help you to make a smarter and efficient decision in optimizing your ad spends and marketing activities. You can also understand what is stopping your customers from buying your product or opting in for your newsletter.

Some of the things that you can learn are:

Who is coming to your site?

Where are they coming from?

What are they doing on your site?

Are they doing what you want them to do?

Which campaign gave you more conversion?

Still, many people are not using any of the web analytics tools because neither they understand their importance nor they know how to use them. The truth is, installing analytics tools like Google Analytics on your site is easy.

In this post, we will be focusing on creating a Google Analytics account and setting up GA on a new WordPress site.

Why Google Analytics

Many analytics tools are available in the market. Such as,

• Mix Panel
• KISS Metrics
• Piwik
• Open Web Analytics
• Adobe Analytics

However, Google Analytics has its advantages.

10 million websites use Google Analytics, and you too should fall in this category. This is because it is,

• Powerful
• Easy
• It is FREE!

If you ever wondered how Google Analytics (or any analytical tool) collects data, the answer is a small JavaScript code (you need to add this to your site) and cookies.

Cookies are the small piece of information stored on a computer once a visitor visits your site. These cookies are used to store different information about the visitors, such as the last visited date, log in details, browsing history, and time of the visit, etc.

Creating Google Analytics Account

All you need is a Google account to create a Google Analytics account. You can also use your business email id if you have bought it with Google.

First, go to Google.com then search “Google Analytics” and click the relevant link or directly visit the following link https://analytics.google.com.

Now click on the Sign Up option and log in to your Google account.

Before proceeding to the next step, understanding the Google Analytics account structure is a must.

Google Analytics is organized into three levels: Account, Property, and View.

Account: Account name implies the company name. Within one Google Analytics account, multiple accounts can be created (up to 100).

Property: Each account (company) can have multiple web properties (up to 50) such as website, mobile app, kiosk, etc.

Say, for example, an e-commerce company may have a website and mobile App. Both the website and mobile App should be regarded as two different properties under one account.

Views: Each property can have multiple views (up to 25). Views are used to separate and filter the original data flowing into the data. ( You can create a filter to exclude people visiting from a particular range of IP addresses).

In the next step, enter details of the website of the mobile app you want to track.

1.  Choose what you want to track. Either the website or mobile App ( the Default option is a website).
2. Enter the account name; you can use your company name for this.
3. Each account/company can have multiple properties such as a mobile app and website. Give names like yourcompany-website, yourcompany-App.
4. Enter the name of the website you want to track.
5. Choose a proper category that suits your website.
6. Select the time zone you want the report to appear and click submit.

Once you complete the above steps, you will be provided with the Tracking ID.

It is unique to the property which you have created. Below that, there will be a tracking code that you have to install on your site.

Depending on the platform you have used to build the website, it will change. We will discuss elaborately how to add tracking code to the WordPress site.

Different Ways to Install Google Analytics Tracking Code To WordPress Websites

1. Theme Options

Most of the paid WordPress themes give the option to add Google Analytics tracking code inside the theme settings itself. But, not all themes have this option.

Read the documentation of the theme you are using and use the option of Google Analytics tracking code if you have one.

2. Plugins

WordPress plugins help to customize websites quickly. Many plugins are available in the WordPress free plugin directory for adding tracking code to the site.

Some of them are Yoast Analytics, Google Analyticator, Google Analytics Dashboard for WP, WP Google Analytics.

Yoast Analytics plugin has over one million active installs with the rating 4 out of 5. This plugin has options for excluding logged-in users, tracking external links, and tracking downloads such as PDF, DOC files.

You can also link to your GA account so that you can see your Analytics data in your WordPress dashboard itself.

Configuring this plugin is quite easy. After you have installed this plugin, navigate to the “Analytics” option in the WordPress dashboard menu, then click “Settings”.

Two options are provided to install the tracking code.

• Connect your GA account, it will automatically take the code and will insert it on the website (you have to use this feature to use the dashboard option).
• The second option is to enter your UA code (Tracking ID) manually.

You can also select the settings you want like ignoring users, if you are not clear, just leave default settings and save changes.

3. Header and Footer Plugin

Using this plugin, you can add anything in the header and footer of your site such as a script to your site, for example, Google Analytics Tracking, Facebook Pixel, etc.

Post-installation of this plugin navigates to “Settings” in the WordPress dashboard then, just copy and paste the tracking code. It will add that code to the footer of every page of your site.

Always insert the scripts in the footer (Adding any scripts to the header of the site may slow down website speed).

4. Add Code Directly

If you are familiar with editing code, you can use this option, but this one is not advisable.

Open the Functions.PHP (find it in the theme editor section) file in the theme section. Copy the GA tracking code and paste after <body > tag.

5. Google Tag Manager

Google tag manager helps you to organize tags on your site. As a beginner, you can safely ignore this step as of now. Later, you can switch to this. You can easily Get Started with Google Tag Manager with the guide by Conversion XL.

When you want to add more tags, that might hurt your site’s speed and performance. But, this tool will help you optimize the site’s performance by reducing loading times drastically.

Site speed will affect your conversion. Amazon says, for every one-second delay in page loading it affects one percent conversion.

eCommerce Tracking Through Google Analytics

The universal basic tracking code is limited to the data collection of the visitors.  If you are running an eCommerce store, you need to add extra code and settings.

This additional code will help to know the product performance and the customer journey from visiting the category page to the checkout page.

For that, you need to enable eCommerce tracking in Google analytics. Navigate to the Admin section of your GA dashboard, then select Ecommerce Settings.

By default, related products tracking will be in disable mode, turn on that option. Proceed to the next step.

In the next step, enable the enhanced eCommerce reporting option. Make sure you give labels to the customer navigation path in your online store which customer has to go through to complete order.

The usual customer path would be the Category page, Product page, Cart page, Checkout section, and Thank You page.

Define the customer funnel on your site so that you can understand which funneling stage has more leakage and fix it.

Once you have completed the above step, you need to implement code to send data from your site to Google Analytics.

You can send the following link from your developer to implement on your site. Otherwise, you can hire someone from sites like UpWork, PeoplePerHour for the minimum per hour rate to do this task for you.

If you have used WordPress WooCommerce to build your online store, Enhanced Ecommerce Google Analytics for Woocommerce Store plugin enables you to do the same.

Once this plug-in is installed, you will be getting options in the settings and you can configure it quickly.

Enter your UA code and website name, check the Add enhanced E-commerce tracking code option. Unselect “Add universal tracking code” as you have already installed that code, you need not add it again.

How to Check Google Analytics is Collecting Data or Not?

A simple way to check whether Google Analytics is receiving data or not is by opening an incognito window and then going to your site.

Now, you can see one active user in the Real-Time dashboard of Google Analytics which means GA is receiving your website data correctly.

If you have done these so far, congratulate yourself. You have installed Google Analytics code on your website successfully.

But, sometimes, you might not have got the data even though you completed the above steps. Learn how to debug the google analytics tracking code in the next section.

Debugging Google Analytics Tracking Code

If you are not receiving data, it might be because of the following reasons.

• The code might not have implemented correctly. You might have made some typo error. Check with your Tracking ID and the tracking code added to your site.
• You can check whether you have added a code or not. Clear cache and try again.
• To check whether you have implemented Google Analytics correctly, install the chrome extension, and try. Google Analytics Debugger Google Chrome extension.

Get Clean Data – Filter Internal Traffic

By default, Google Analytics will create one view name “All Web Site Data” which contains data about all the traffic to your site.

But when you want to understand about all visitors/customers you must exclude traffic from your company’s internal people like your developers, marketers, and admins.

For that, you need to create a filter to remove those visits. Google Analytics (GA) gives the option to filter the visits based on the attributes you specify. But, this option will permanently delete data from your account. So, it is recommended to have a backup of your website visitors’ data.

Create a new view in the GA dashboard by following the given steps and create a filter in that view to filter out traffic from your company.

Creating New View In Google Analytics

1. Click Admin
2. Select Views, then click new view
3. Give a name to the new reporting view and select Time Zone
4. Click Create view.

Next, select the new view you have created, and create a new filter using the following steps.

Creating a New Filter in Google Analytics

1. Click on the Admin
2. Then navigate to Filters (In View section)
3. Click Add Filter to create a new filter.
4. Give a name to the filter ( make sure it is easy to identify)
5. In the type of filters option – Choose Predefined
6. Choose to exclude option for removing traffic
7. Select the “Traffic from the IP Address”. As we are going to eliminate traffic from your company IP address range.
8. Select “Begins With” to cover the wide range of IP, that covers over all your company IP address.
9. You can find your IP address by searching “What is my IP” in Google. If your company’s overall IP is not changing in the first two parts of the IP address, then enter that. For example, if your company IP address always starts with 74.125 then enter this.
10. Next click Save. Now, you have successfully created a filter to exclude traffic from your company.
11. But, make sure that you often check this IP address range in case the range differs from the previous one.

Conclusion

Enjoy analyzing. Struck with any of the above steps? Or have any questions about setting up google analytics? Comment here or mail me.

The post Add Google Analytics Tracking Code to WordPress Site: A Step-by-Step Guide appeared first on Bharathidasan Moorthi.