Just installed your Google Analytics for the first time?
New to Web Analytics?
Did someone tell you to look into design, usability, and path analysis for your first project?
Considering that there are so many metrics and dimensions to deal with, just by tagging Google Analytics tags on every page on the site. Analysis and reporting could get extremely complicated.
What I recommend is to relax and look at the basic metrics, but applying smart segmentations. If you're going to puke before looking at the data, might as well puke after looking at bad data.
I've asked my family's friend to see if I can check out e-commerce data and use it anonymously. So here you go.
Very high level data, including overall site visits (which something we may not care at all). The important thing is to leverage available segments and apply few basic custom segments to better position yourself in a pool of data.
What I did here is applied "Visits with Transactions", "Non-bounce Visits", and "Users who visited the shopping cart, but did not purchase". It is amazing that even a site with average bounce rate of 32%, can have a significantly bad data that is puke-able.
First, visitors adding item to cart was only 5% of all site visitors. I think that's pretty bad, but let's assume that is good. Now, what about only 2% of the shopping cart visitors completing the order (0.1% of all site visitors)?
This pretty much paints the big picture of different level of opportunity pie, and how much qualified visitors you're brining into the site. Is this still good or bad? I don't know, maybe the average order value is super high ($1,000 or more..) and this site is making huge money... but that's something you and your business need to decide and set goals.
Looking at average pageviews with those segmentations (same as pages per visit), it is amazing that visits with transactions are going through roughly 31 pages just to convert. Notice that visitors who hit the cart page, but didn't ordered was 17 page views. That means people who hit the cart and ordered are going through 14 additional pages on average. Definitely some opportunity to optimize the conversion process. What does your data show?
Average time on site shows a similar story, and it is quite obvious that customers are going through some rough experience just to convert.
Just applying simple segmentation to high level data like visits, page views, and average time on site, can give you some very high level, but very insightful data to initiate of some more data diving.
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