Analytics, Search Console, Merchant Center and Ads. A Guide to Google Services for Online Store Owners.
If you’re just getting started with e-commerce, or are launching a new store and are a bit rusty, you might be somewhat knocked back by the number and complexity of Google “services” you need to set up. Of course, technically none of this is obligatory but given the dominance of Google in search and discoverability, it should probably be seen as required.
This isn’t a deep dive into each of the services. I just want to enumerate and summarise the different services you need to look out. There’s plenty of information out there and documentation for setting up each one, this is just an overview to get your oriented. We’ll cover:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Google Merchant Center
- Google Ads / Adwords
Analytics
The most basic and simplest setup. Google Analytics is the canonical site-analytics service. It gives you an overview of who’s been on your site, where they have come from and where they go afterwards. Even if you don’t spend a lot of time trawling the vast amount of data it spits out, it’s still worth setting it up just to get a picture of how much traffic your site is getting.
Over the years (like most of Google’s services), setup has become complicated. There’s a hierarchy of concepts like Account > Property > View that you need to get your head around, but once you’ve set it up and injected your tracking ID into your site, there’s nothing more you need to do.
Pakk site owners just need to copy the tracking ID from Analytics and paste it into the ‘Google Analytics ID’ field in Website > Setup. Remember to do this separately for each of your Pakk sites.
Search Console
After Analytics, this is your second port of call. Setup involves “verifying” your domain. There’s nothing you need to do in your Pakk account, but domain verification requires you to be able to setup a TXT record with your domain provider, which can be a little tricky if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Once you’ve verified your domain you get access to a whole load of information related to how the Google “searchbot” sees your site. On the surface this may seem very similar to what Analytics provides, and if you don’t fully understand the difference, don’t worry about it too much, just think of it as another source of analytics data about your site. The data in Seach Console is more like a content and performance breakdown of your site in the eyes of Google.
After verification, you should submit a sitemap. This is a link to simple file, which Pakk generates for you, which lists all the pages on your site. Basically, you’re making life easier for the Google crawler by telling it exactly what’s on your site. Pakk sitemaps are at https://{your domain}/sitemap.txt. You only need to set that up once and it updates automatically every day.
Once you’ve set up Search Console, keep an eye on it to spot any problems or issues with your site and try to fix them quickly.
Merchant Center
Yet another Google data portal that you, as a site owner, need to worry about. I hope you like blue graphs, because there’s a whole lot more coming at you again.
Merchant Center is shopping focused. It’s about getting your product data into Google’s radar so it can list them in both organic and paid product listings.
As a Pakk customer, it’s quite likely you’ll want to run multiple sites out of your Merchant Center, so the first thing I recommend you do is request upgrade to a “Multi Brand” account. You can do that from inside the “Advanced” settings in the “Account Settings”. They say it can take a few days to approve your request — it’s always been more or less immediate for me.
There’s quite a lot to set up in Merchant Center — its mostly business details, address, phone, branding etc etc. Spend the time to do it properly — Google Shopping listings are a powerful way for your customers to find you.
Once you’ve got all the metadata set up, you need to get your products in. Luckily, that’s easy with Pakk. Add a new feed and choose the ‘Web Crawl’ method. This will add a product feed based on all the “semantic data” we inject into every page — so no need to mess about with CSV files or API integrations. It can take a day or so for the products to appear but once they are in, they should get updated regularly. Keep an eye on it though.
Ads / Adwords (optional)
OK, so this one really is optional. Ads are the paid adverts that appear next to the organic results in Google.
Why might you want to pay to appear there? Because its quick and effective and generally a good patch until you are able to build up your organic traffic.
Why might you NOT want to pay to appear there? Because it can get very expensive very quickly and managing the setup and maintenance of your campaigns is no small undertaking and can often require the help of a professional CPC manager — which just means even more expense.
If you’re really new to this, I’d recommend any of the following routes:
- Spend a small amount of money on paid shopping listings. This is the easiest to set up and is almost totally automated. Even just a few Euros/Pounds a day can get you started.
- If you can spare more than 500 a month, find a pro to manage your account for you (we can help recommend someone)
- Forget about it and concentrate on other forms of marketing
Google Ads is a long term investment. It can work out very expensive at the start but businesses that benefit from repeat custom can see a decent ROI as time goes by and cost-per-acquisition drops accordingly.
