As your business grows, you may find that it has changed. Whether it be due to the marketplaces it inhabits or the audience it reaches, your business may feel different compared to the business vision you started with. Should you rebrand?

Rebranding your business

Rebranding your business is the process of changing your company’s image. As people, we change our images overtime. Our clothing style may change with what’s popular, and our interests evolve as we experience new things. The same applies to our businesses.  Rebranding your business involves changing various elements such as your company name, logo, design, messaging, and so forth.

Just as we change as people, it’s normal for your company to change overtime and need a partial or complete rebranding. However, rebranding is a big deal and needs to be approached with careful planning. Without a proper plan, your business can be negatively impacted by rebranding, so it’s important to be sure that your business will benefit from an image change.

When should I consider rebranding?

Since rebranding has risks, it’s important to be sure that you are starting the rebranding journey for the right reasons. Some signs that you should consider partial or complete rebranding are:

1. Your business focus or strategy has changed

When you first started your business, you had a vision in mind. Your products, services, and mission were the founding drivers of your business, but over time, those founding goals may not reflect where your business stands now. Your company may have grown to include totally different products or services while others have faded out. Your overall mission statement may have evolved as your once small audience grew to include a variety of customer types. In a moment like this, where your business has outgrown its original focus and strategy, rebranding is an effective solution to make it easy for old and new customers to understand what your business is for.

2. Your target audience has shifted

Audiences change whether we like it or not. The customers your business attracted in the beginning may be very different or much broader today. The ways they find you may have changed. Your company may also have grown to new marketplaces and locations, each requiring different ways of talking to different groups of customers. Rebranding your messaging, slogans, call for actions, voice and so forth to better communicate with your evolving audience is important to making it easy for new customers to find your business and feel at home with it.

3. Your branding is outdated

With eCommerce businesses especially, technology is completely different than it was 20 years ago! Designing a website comes with so many more options now, allowing us to make beautiful, sleek online shops. Visual art has evolved with time as well. The kinds of logos that resonate with audiences today are different than others, especially when you consider that your logos are not only on your site, but also on social media, mobile apps, and so forth. Visually rebranding to make your site and brand visually distinct and attractive to your audience is important to standing out, especially in the world of eCommerce.

4. Your marketplace has evolved

The products and services you originally started with may have been niche and in demand at the time, but are they still today? New competitors and technological advancements can cause your current branding to no longer stand out. Updating your catalog of products and services to evolve with improved solutions is necessary to stay current even if it requires changes to your branding. Keeping an eye out for business opportunities and pitfalls in your marketplace that you can take advantage of or avoid are also worthwhile rebranding opportunities.

5. Your customers desire change

When you think about customer feedback that you have received, does anything stand out? Is there something that your customers either keep complaining about or keep asking for that requires a rebrand for your company? Your customer words are important, so encouraging customer feedback and analyzing it can help you find signs that your brand may need tweaked or updated.

Want to learn more?

Rebranding isn’t easy, but it can be a necessary step in some cases. Here at BCSE, we are facing the struggles of rebranding right now! Listen to our podcast where we share our own questions and journey surrounding rebranding, specifically when it comes to changing your company name!

When it comes to your eCommerce business, having conversion goals is key to optimizing your business’s online presence and improving its conversion rates. However, not all goals are created equal: how do we create conversion goals that truly work for us and generate results?

What are conversion goals?

Conversion goals are created by putting yourself in the shoes of your users. Conversion goals are the specific actions that you want your users to take when they interact with your website and marketing material. Some common actions you may want your customer to take are:

• Purchasing your product or service.
• Generating a lead by signing up for your newsletter, downloading a freebie, or requesting a quote.
• Signing up or registering for an account on your site.
• Submitting a form for inquiries, feedback, or support.
• Engaging with your site for certain periods of time and/or multiple times.
• Following and reacting to your business’ social media accounts.
• Booking appointments, reservations, or consultations.
• Donating or volunteering (for nonprofit organizations.)
• Providing feedback or filling out a survey.
• Referring a new customer to use your products & services.
• Requesting a free trial or demo of your product or service.

Types of Conversion Goals

Primary Goals

Primary goals are the most important actions that you want a customer to take when interacting with your business. For many companies, “making a purchase” tends to be the most common primary goal. Other common important conversion goals could be “generating a lead” or “requesting a trial or demo of your products.” Overall, your primary goals are actions that have a high chance of turning visitors into customers.

Secondary Goals

Secondary goals are actions that support your primary goal. If your company’s primary goal is for customers to “make a purchase,” you may be tracking events such as downloading a freebie, interacting with your site for long periods of time, or following you on social media. Secondary goals note important steps in the customer journey that bring visitors closer to our primary goals.

What makes a good conversion goal?

Clear & Concise

Having clear goals is the first step to creating a good conversion goal. Your goals should be specific and actionable. For example, “increasing engagement” is not a clear goal. It is too vague to measure and could apply to multiple aspects of your users’ experience. Instead, your goal should be “increase email signups.” This latter goal is easier to focus on and clearly tells you what part of your site you will be working on.

Aligns with Business Objectives

Your conversion goals should be in line with your business objectives as a whole. Afterall, working on a goal that isn’t relevant to your business goals could lead to wasted resources and unimpactful results.

Takes into Account User Intent

When creating conversion goals, you need to understand not only what you want from your customers, but what your customers want from your business. What are your customers’ needs right now? Where are they looking for solutions? When are they ready to make a purchase? Understanding where your customers are on the customer journey and how to give them what they want while also achieving your own goal is key to a successful conversion goal.

Quantifiable & Measurable

Your goals should not only be clear but should also be something you can track and make data-driven decisions on. For example, if your goal was to “increase email signups,” you can make your goal much more specific by making it to “increase email signups by 20% in the next quarter.” With your improved goal, you have a percentage number to quantify the goal’s success against. You also have a time-limit that you can use to measure how realistic your goal is compared to the efforts your company could manage in that time-span.

Achievable

When it comes to setting our goals, you need to make sure that you aren’t being unrealistic. For example, if our conversion goal is to “increase profit”, we may ideally want to increase profit by a very large margin. However, is that realistic? Setting unrealistic goals results in your goals never generating successful results since the goal itself isn’t achievable. Use past data and research to set achievable goals and adjust as needed.

Prioritization

When putting resources towards your conversion goals, it’s important to prioritize them. Which goals are your primary goals? Which are your secondary goals? Arrange them according to the impact they will make on your overall business objectives. Another way you can arrange them is based on the customer’s journey: What will your customer do first? What actions will they take next?

Testing & Iteration

Often times, we can’t say for sure if our conversion goals or the efforts we put towards them will be successful. That’s why it is important to consider the variety of efforts we can put towards our goals and conduct tests to see which approach is most successful. For example, let’s say one of your conversion goals is for more customers to “sign up for my newsletter.” You may have a variety of Calls-to-Action (CTAs) that you and your team feel could make your newsletter signup button more attractive. Test multiple CTAs and see if there is one CTA that gets more clicks than the other!

Tracking & Analytics

Measuring your conversion goals can be hard, but with the help of tracking and analytics, you can better measure if your conversion goals are being met. Using tools such as Google Analytics 4 can help us monitor key metrics that relate to our goals. For example, if we are tracking how long users visit or interact with our site, we can track “User engagement” to better understand what holds their attention and what doesn’t.

Want to learn more?

Conversions goals act as a roadmap to achieving your business objectives! Read our blog or listen in to our podcast for more tips and guides on making your business the best it can be! If you want more hands-on guidance for improving your website, join the waitlist for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, she will dive into a variety of important factors that aim to optimize your website.

Whether it be for personal or business communications, we use email daily. Newsletters, invoices, bank statements, personal conversations, and even more sensitive information such as passwords and personal identification data are shared via email all the time. The potential of acquiring valuable information makes email a prime target for target for cyberattacks & data breaches: How can we protect ourselves when using email?

Keeping Our Emails Safe

Email security is more important than ever. With sensitive data being exchanged via email, including passwords, financial data, personal data, and so forth, you need to be able to protect yourself and your business. Compromised email security can lead to identity theft, financial loss, reputation damage, and unauthorized access to other accounts, personal or business. The best way to avoid an email security breach is to educate yourself and your fellow colleagues or employees about what an email attack can look like and the steps you can take to prevent them.

Common Email Security Threats

Phishing

Phishing attacks are one of the most common email attack email users encounter. Email phishing is when an attacker attempts to impersonate a legitimate organization to trick you into giving them information. An example could be an attacker pretending to be Amazon and asking you to update your payment information. Another example could be an attacker pretending to be your bank, asking you to reset your password. In both cases, these emails are designed to look like the organization they are impersonating and contain some sort of call to action with a link. Following the link results in a prompt to give them the desired information.

Malware

An email malware attack is when an attacker attempts to impersonate a legitimate organization to trick you into clicking or downloading a malicious file or link to your computer. For example, a malware attack could an attacker pretending to be a billing email that sends you a PDF statement or link to view your statement. In both cases, clicking would result in downloading a malicious file containing a virus that infects not only your computer, but other devices on your network.

Spoofing

Spoofing attacks occur when an attacker impersonates a legitimate user, acting like them to steal sensitive information. While phishing and spoofing attacks sound the same, the big difference between spoofing and phishing is that a spoofing attack tends to be manual in nature and involves disguising not only the email, but the email address as well to successfully deceive readers.

Email Eaves Dropping

Email eaves dropping involves an attacker intercepting & reading your email conversations in search of valuable information. Emails are often sent as plain text, meaning that as they are sent from your computer to the email server, an attacker could catch and read them. An example of this could be an attacker intercepting an email that contains your login credentials for an account or service.

Strategies to Enhance Email Security

Create Strong Passwords – Creating passwords that are hard to crack is an essential part to protecting your emails and email account. Passwords should be decently long as well as complex, containing letters (uppercase and lowercase), numbers, and symbols. The complexity of our passwords is usually held back by what we can remember. Using a password manager, such as KeyPass or 1Password, can help you have unique passwords for all your accounts while only having to remember one, complex password.

Enable 2-Factor Authentication (2FA) – Multi-factor authentication may make logging in feel longer or tedious, but having something like 2FA enabled on your email lessens the likelihood of an attacker getting into your email account. This is because 2FA often requires us to verify ourselves on another device, a device an attack may not have access to.

Encrypt Emails – Encrypting emails is the process of scrambling our plain text emails into something unreadable. The email can only be unscrambled by the recipient of the email, meaning that your email cannot be easily read during transmission! For any sensitive or business emails, encrypted emails are very important.

Update Email Software – Keeping our email clients & operating systems up to date is key to making sure that any vulnerabilities discovered are fixed as soon as possible.

Only Email on Secure Networks – When you are out and about, let’s say, at a coffee shop, be mindful of the emails you send. Public Wi-Fi networks are prime targets for data interception, so when it comes to emailing on them, it is best to not share any sensitive information until you are back on a secure, password protected network.

Incorporate Email Filtering & Antivirus Software – Since email attacks are a known issue, most email services offer email filtering & antivirus scanning services for users. Moving certain emails to “Spam” or “Junk” as well as warning users about questionable emails received are some of the ways our email clients can help us.

Encourage Email Education – The most important and impactful way that we can prevent email attacks and data loss is to make sure that we practice and teach mindful emailing to our colleagues and employees. Often times, knowledge about email security varies drastically between different people at the same job, so making sure that each worker knows to be cautious with email and the data we send is key to keeping our businesses and personal information safe.

Analyze Suspicious Emails – Email attackers work hard to make their emails look legitimate, but often times, there are ways we can identify suspicious features about these emails that show their true nature. One way we can do that is to hover over links in the email. Is it the correct domain name? Do you recognize it? Never click on a link you are unsure of.

The Future of Email Security

As with all technology, email continues to evolve. That also means that the attacks against email will continue to change and advance as well. Keep up with email security practices as well as email security news. When you find yourself reading an email that you don’t think is right, step back from it and do not hand over sensitive information until you and your team can conclude its authenticity.

Want to learn more?

Keeping your business secure is the key to your success! Check out our latest podcast episode where we dive deeper into website security and the strategies we can use to keep sensitive data safe.

When it comes to nurturing long-term customers, it’s important to put yourself in their shoes: What keeps you coming back to certain shops and products? For many, the answer to this question revolves around shops that resonate with them. The marketing of products and services is most successful when customers feel seen and heard. That’s where segmentation marketing can turn a one-time buyer into a lifelong customer.

What is segmentation marketing?

Segmentation marketing is the process of dividing your customer base into groups based on commonalities around what they respond to and how they shop. Since some of your customers may have different pain points, desires, and experiences than other customers, segmenting allows you to speak to each group of customers in a way that resonates specifically with them. Overall, segmenting is the process of creating tailored experiences for large groups of customers.

By incorporating segmentation into your marketing strategies, you can better foster customer loyalty by creating a brand that really speaks to your customers. Through retention, you also encourage higher conversion rates overtime and can create better products and experiences for your customers since you can understand them more deeply through segment testing. All of these give your company a competitive edge over other businesses.

How can we segment our customers?

There are a variety of ways you can analyze your customer base and divide them into segments. Some common groupings are based on the following:

• Demographic – you can segment your customers on factors such as age, income, gender, race, education, and occupation.
• Geographic – you can segment your customers based on their physical location.
• Firmographic – If your customers are other businesses, you can segment your customers based on factors such as employee count, office space, customer markets, revenue, and so forth.
• Psychographic – you can segment your customers based on their personalities, lifestyles, opinions, and interests.
• Behavioral – if you have data collected on your customers, you can segment them based on how they act: what they buy, spending habits, ads they click on, and so forth.

How do I get started with segment marketing?

Define your goals

Before you start pondering segments and strategies, it’s important to define what you want to get out of segmentation marketing. Increased customer retention, improved engagement, boosted sales, and so forth are possible goals you may want for your business. These goals will guide you as you establish your segments.

Identify segmentation opportunities

To divide your customer base up into segments, you need to understand who your customer base is and determine what criteria would be applicable to your specific market. As with most content creation, you need to have a good understanding of what kinds of people your products and services are for. What are their pain points, needs, and expectations? What are some commonalities between them that pop out immediately to you? It is in this step that you will start to determine what kind of segments best suit your customer base: demographic, psychographic, behavioral, etc.  

Note: Be wary of being too niche

When you begin to create segments, you need to keep in mind the size and profitability of them. We can segment our customer bases into a variety of small groups with niche interests and characteristics, but if creating and implementing marketing campaigns for those niches cost more than what your company would gain in return, the segment may be too niche to work. Be careful of dividing your customers into too small segments.

Establish your ideal customers

Once you have a collection of valuable segments, an activity that can help you get started brainstorming content for each segment is to identify your ideal customer for each segment. Who are they? What do they want? What are their struggles? What do they respond to in existing marketing? By answering questions like these, you can start to come up with ideas for content that will again resonate with each segment.

Craft target messages and offers

With your ideal customer per segment in mind, create marketing material that is tailored for each group. One thing to keep in mind is that the message should be coherent per segment and, to a degree, should make sense in the narrative of your overall business message. An example could be that you sell apparel and are dividing up your marketing based on the products bought. How you talk about shoes may be different than how you talk about dresses. Your company’s main message may be to sell quality apparel. That message should still be present in your segment marketing for both shoes and dresses.

Implement, Measure and Refine

Once you have your content created, it’s time to incorporate those into your communication channels. An important factor to keep in mind is planning out how you will track the success of each segment implementation. For your website, you may use an analytics program like Google Analytics 4 to track how engaged your customers are with your segmentation marketing. For your emails, you may use built in analytics from your email management system, such as with AWeber, to keep track of how well your segment is working. Overall, you want to determine the success of your segment marketing and change it as needed.

Note: Stay updated on your customer base

It’s important to keep in mind that your customer base will grow and change with time. Certain segments of customers may change in their preferences and needs, meaning that you need to stay up to date with your customers’ desires and the successfulness of your existing segments. You may need to dissolve some segments and divide your customers into new ones as your customer base evolves. The best way to stay informed is to collect and analyze data on your customers and segment campaigns.

Where to use segmentation strategies

Once you have a segmentation strategy set up, you can incorporate it into your marketing. Some common places you incorporate your segmentation marketing into are on are your website, social media channels, ads, and customer emails. All of these places are customer facing and may be the first place that a customer is introduced to your products and services. Each communication channel will need tweaks in terms of how you incorporate your marketing into them, but ideally, they should be sharing a coherent message to your segmented group.

Want to learn more?

The better you understand your customers, the better you can craft a business message that meets them where they are! Read our blog or listen in to our podcast for more tips and guides on making your business the best it can be! If you want more hands-on guidance for improving your website, join the waitlist for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, she will dive into a variety of important factors that aim to optimize your website.

When searching in Google, Google serves what it considers to be “the best” sites first. How these sites reach these top positions can be complex, but one collection of metrics that Google takes into consideration is a site’s Core Web Vitals. Originally, there were three main vitals to measure, but now, a new vital has been introduced: Interaction to Next Paint (INP).

What are Google’s Core Web Vitals?

Google’s original Core Web Vitals were released in the summer of 2021 and were created in order to better measure a user’s page experience. Many of these metrics have to do with how fast your page feels. Currently, there are three Core Web Vitals to consider:

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How fast does the largest piece of content on your site take to appear? For example, this could be your banner image or video.
2. First Input Delay (FID): How long does it take for your site to respond to a click from a user? After landing on your page and clicking an item in your menu, how long does it take for the next page to load?
3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): How stable is your site when loading? Think of your site when it first populates. Does everything jump around as your text, images, buttons and so forth load in?

What is Interaction to Next Paint?

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is a new metric that focuses on how responsive your page is to all user interactions. Let’s say a user clicks on a button. This button may take them to another page, causing the information presented to them to change. INP measures the time between that user’s click and the presentation of the new page.

Taking a closer look, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is measured through the sum of three events that take place between a user’s click and the final presentation of request content:

1. Input Delay – The amount of time that passes between when the user clicked on your page to when the corresponding event is triggered.
2. Processing Time – The amount of time it takes to execute the code associated with the triggered event in the back-end.
3. Presentation Delay – The amount of time between when the back-end code is finished executing and when the user is presented the final content.

Isn’t INP just like FID?

As you may notice, it sounds a lot like First Input Delay (FID). INP differs from FID because, rather than measuring only a user’s first interaction with a page, INP measures all page interactions. FID was used more as a base for determining first impressions. INP aims to better measure the responsiveness of your entire site. In March, 2024, INP is expected to become a Core Web Vital and replace FID.

What is a Good INP Score?

A good INP result is a an INP below 200 milliseconds. If your site is below 200 milliseconds, your site has great responsiveness! If your site is somewhere between 200 and 500 milliseconds, that’s a sign that your site’s responsiveness needs some work. If your INP is above 500 milliseconds, your page has very poor responsiveness in the eyes of Google.

How do I measure my site’s INP?

Measuring INP by hand would be difficult if not impossible. Using tools such as Google’s Page Insights, we can measure all available Core Web Vitals in one place! INP is already included in the report.

How can I Improve my Site’s INP?

Knowing exactly why your INP score is poor can take some investigating. A few best practices to consider though when it comes to improving site’s INP are as follows:

• Optimize your Code – Sometimes, the back-end process of triggering and executing an event can be what is negatively impacting your site’s INP. Optimize your code by removing unused code, rewriting slow scripts, and splitting up code into smaller tasks at a time.
• Use browser idle time to your advantage – When there is a lot to load on a page, it may be best to pick and choose what loads first! Things such as chat bots, for example, can be set to load while the user’s browser is idle, allowing the important content to load faster.
• Keep your pages simple – If your site has a lot of content, loading a new piece of content in general may be slow. Avoid using too many large images, videos, animations, and so forth that will slow down the responsiveness of your site.
• Consider loading content that is visible to the user first – Content-visibility is a CSS property that can control when an element renders. You can use it pick and choose what you load on a new page. You can use content-visibility to load only want the user sees on their screen while loading the rest as needed.

Want to learn more?

To retain customers, we need to create quality user experiences. Read our blog or listen in to our podcast for more tips and guides on making your business the best it can be! If you want more hands-on guidance for improving your website, join the waitlist for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, she will dive into a variety of important factors that aim to optimize your website.

Looking to bring more customers to your site? One way that you can incentivize customers to browse your products is with digital coupons! By incorporating promotions and special deals into your email and social media marketing strategies, you can encourage customer loyalty and repeat customers. Lucky for us, making coupons in Magento 2 is quick & easy!

Coupons in Magento 2

In Magento 2, you can create coupons for your customers to use at checkout. Magento 2 supports various types of discounts that can be applied through coupon codes. You can make coupons that give percentage-based discounts, fixed amount discounts, free shipping, buy-one-get-one (BOGO) offers, and more! You can also automatically generate coupon codes in bulk. Whatever your promotional goals are, Magento 2 coupons are flexible and easy to create.

How to make a Single Coupon

If you are wanting to make a specific coupon, such as a “Spend $100 and get $20 off” discount of a “buy 4 get 1 free” discount, it may be best to create it by hand. In Magento 2, coupons are created in Cart Price Rules. There are multiple attributes that we can choose to fill in or leave blank depending on the coupon we are creating.

To get started on your coupon, we must do the following:

• First, Log into your Magento 2 Admin.
• In the left-hand menu, go to Marketing -> Promotions -> Cart Price Rules.
• Once in Cart Price Rules, go to the right-hand corner and click Add New Rule.
• When creating a coupon, there are three main sections we need to fill out: Rule information, Conditions, and Actions.

• Under Rule information, fill out the following:
  • Rule Name – Internal name of your coupon.
  • Website – if you have multiple websites, where does this coupon apply? If the coupon is for all of your websites, select all options by holding Ctrl + Shift on your keyboard and clicking all of your sites.
  • Customer Group – If your coupon is limited to certain customer groups, which group is the coupon for? If the coupon is for everyone, select all options by holding Ctrl + Shift on your keyboard and clicking all of the groups.
  • Coupon – Use the dropdown menu to select Specific Coupon.
  • Coupon Code – Enter the code for your coupon. If we are using the $20 off $100 example, we may put “20OFF100.”
  • Uses per Coupon – How many times can the coupon be used? If this coupon is for a specific customer, such as a special email deal, we may want to set the number of uses to “1.” If this coupon is for everyone, we may want to leave it blank.
  • Uses per Customer – How many times can a customer use the coupon? In general, we may want to set this to “1” so that customers can’t repeatedly use the coupon. If it is a coupon that customers can use an unlimited number of times, we will want to leave it blank.

• Under Conditions, we will determine the conditions needed in order for the coupon to be valid:
  • Click on the small green plus symbol.
  • Using the Please choose a condition to add dropdown menu, select what part of the purchase the coupon is based on. For example, if the coupon is based on price, we may choose “subtotal.”
  • By selecting a condition, the condition will appear. Click the … by “is” and fill in the blank for the condition. In the case of our $20 off $100 example, we would type the amount that the subtotal must be in order to qualify for the coupon: “100.”

Note: If your coupon applies to all products, do not set a condition

The conditions section of your coupon only needs to be filled out if there are specific products or spending thresholds that customer must reach to get the discount.

• Under Actions, fill out the following:
  • Apply – using the dropdown menu, select how the discount works. Using our $20 off $100 example, we may select a “Fixed amount discount.”
  • Discount Amount – How much is your discount? In our example of $20 off $100, we would put “20.” If you were doing a BOGO coupon, you would put the number of additional items the customer would get free.
  • Maximum QTY Discount is Applied To – if your coupon is quantity restricted, enter the max number of items that the coupon will discount. If your coupon is not related to quantity, leave as “0.”
  • Discount QTY Step (Buy X) – if your discount applies depending on the number of items purchased, such as a BOGO coupon, you will put the number of items that need to be in the cart before the discount applies. For example, a Buy 4 get 1 Free deal would mean that this quantity would be “4.”
• Once done, click Save in the right-hand corner. Congrats! Your coupon is ready to test and use!

Note: Make sure to test your coupons

As with any new additions or changes to our websites, testing is important. Make sure to that your coupon works correctly. Using our $20 off $100 example, add $100 worth of items to a cart and apply the code to see if the $20 discount is applied. If it is a BOGO coupon, add the appropriate type and number of items to your cart and apply the code to see if the correct number of the items are discounted.

How to make Auto-Generate Multiple Coupons

If you wanted to create multiple coupons of the same type, such as creating 10 coupons that give $20 off a cart above $100, there are a few additional steps we need to take.

To auto-generate coupons in bulk, we must do the following:

• First, Log into your Magento 2 Admin.
• In the left-hand menu, go to Marketing -> Promotions -> Cart Price Rules.
• Once in Cart Price Rules, go to the right-hand corner and click Add New Rule.

• First, we need to create our coupon just as we did when creating our single coupon above. Fill out the Rule information, Conditions, and Actions sections based on the kind of discount you want these coupons to have.
• Once you have completed the basics of your coupon, hit Save in the right-hand corner and re-enter your coupon.
• With the basics of your coupon created and saved, under Rule information, go under your Coupon Code and select Use Auto generation.

• Next, scroll down to the Manage Coupon Codes category. Here, you will need to fill out the following:
  • Coupon Qty – how many codes do you want to generate?
  • Code Length – how long do you want the codes to be?
  • Code Format – what kind of format do you want to use? You can select Alphanumeric, Alphabetic, or Numeric.
  • Code Prefix – if you want all of your codes to begin the same way, you can create a prefix here. For example, you could put “SALE” and all generated codes would begin with “SALE.”
  • Code Suffix – if you want all of your codes to end the same way you can create a suffix here. For example, you could put “SALE” and all generated codes would begin with “SALE.”
  • Dash Ever Character – do you want your code to be divided by dashes? You can divide a specific number of characters with dashes. This can help make the code more readable when the customer is trying to type it out.
• Once done, click the Generate button under the form. It may take a moment to generate your coupon codes. Once the codes are generated, congrats! You have multiple codes to share with your customers now!

Want to Learn More?

Want more Magento 2 content? Contact us and tell us what you would want to learn about! In the meantime, read our blog or listen in to our podcast for more tips and guides to help you through your eCommerce journey!

It’s official. Universal Analytics has been retired, making Google Analytics 4 the go-to for future Google Analytics business insights. By this point, GA users may already have a GA4 property either manually created or auto generated for us. New GA users may just be getting started with a new property entirely. Either way, there are some first steps we can take to start getting our new GA4 property up and running.

You have your GA4 Property. Now what?

Whether it be migrated by hand, auto generated by Google, or a new clean slate entirely, our GA4 properties need some extra tweaks to ensure that they are working properly and can start being used in our business strategies.

Choose your Preferred Report Collection

As you browse your GA4 property and read Google’s documentation on it, you may notice that your property looks different from the documentation. Specifically, when you look at your Reports, you may find that the category of reports you have varies from what you’ve seen in both the documentation and other tutorials.

In GA4, there are two types of report collections you could have: Life cycle reports and Business objectives. Both collections contain the same reports but organize them differently to fit the type of goals they assume you have. While Life cycle reports are the default report collection, you may find that your reports fall into the Business objectives Collection. This is caused by options you checked during the creation of the property.

When answering Google’s prompt concerning your business objectives, if you chose any of the first four options rather than the baseline option, your property would be installed with the Business objective collection. Currently, no collection is better than the other, so having one collection over the other isn’t a detriment to your analytics. However, if you prefer a certain collection, you can change or add that collection into your reporting category.

To change or add a report collection to your GA4 property, you will need to do the following:

• Log into Google Analytics.
• Make sure you in the correct account and GA4 property.
• In the left-hand column, click Reports.
• At the bottom left-hand side of your reports collection, click Library.
• In the first row called Collections, you will see both the Business objectives collection and Life cycle collection.
• Click the three dots of the collection you want to either use or remove. Click Publish or Unpublish to add or remove the collection from your report tab. Note that you can have both collections if you want to experiment!

Review the Change Log

For GA users who had their Universal Analytics (UA) property auto-migrated by Google to GA4, it may be useful to review the changes and steps that were taken to create your new GA4 property. By reviewing the change log, you can better understand what parts of your UA property Google was able to migrate over, allowing you to identify any sections that you will need to migrate on your own. To do this, you can take a look at your property’s change log.

To access your change log, you will need to do the following:

• Log into Google Analytics.
• Make sure you in the correct account and GA4 property.
• In the bottom left-hand corner, click the gear icon for Admin.
• In the Account column, select Account Change History. Here you can see the changes made to the property and filter them via date, location, and more!

Check out your Setup Checklist

All GA4 properties come with a checklist that you can use to set up basic analytics. Some steps in the checklist are a must while others are optional depending on your goals and existing analytics strategy. Overall, the GA4 checklist is a great place to get started, whether you are a veteran of GA or brand new.

To view your checklist, you will need to do the following:

• Log into Google Analytics.
• Make sure you in the correct account and GA4 property.
• In the bottom left-hand corner, click the gear icon for Admin.
• In the Property column, select Setup Assistant. Here you will find Google’s setup checklist to help guide you. Note that some of the tasks may not suit your needs. If that’s the case, click the arrow on the right-hand side and click Mark as complete for any tasks that are either finished or unnecessary.

Make sure your Property is Collecting Data

For our GA4 property to be of use to us, setting up a connection between our new property and our website is one of the most important steps. Without data to collect, our reports are currently useless. For GA users who were auto migrated to GA4, your property may already be collecting data via a Google Tag Manager tag. However, it’s important to double check that your data stream is working properly.

To check if your site is connected to your GA4 property, you will need to do the following:

• Log into Google Analytics.
• Make sure you in the correct account and GA4 property.
• In the bottom left-hand corner, click the gear icon for Admin.
• In the Property column, select Data Streams. Here you will see your data stream. There is usually only one data stream per property. Right away, in the right-hand side of the data stream, you will see if your property has been receiving data from your websites. If the message No data received in the past 48 hours is there, your property may not be connected, incorrectly connected, or hasn’t processed the connection yet.

If your data stream is not collecting data, you will need to manually set up a connection between your site and your GA4 property. For further instruction on how to do this, read our blog on the three main methods to connect your website to GA4.

Update the Default Data Retention Settings

With a new GA4 property, your property may be set to retain only 2 months of data by default. For many of us, 2 months of data retention can negatively impact our business strategies since we wouldn’t be able to establish trends that take place over the course of months. Lucky for us, this setting can be updated.

To update the default data retention settings, you will need to do the following:

• Log into Google Analytics.
• Make sure you in the correct account and GA4 property.
• In the bottom left-hand corner, click the gear icon for Admin.
• In the Property column, select Data settings -> Data Retention. Here you will find your current data retention period and can change is by clicking the small arrow. You can retain data for either 2 months or 14 months.

Add a Filter for Personal Traffic

When analyzing your reports, you want the numbers involved to be accurate. One way to make sure your reports are correctly reflecting your website’s traffic is to filter out yourself from that traffic. We often browse our own sites for the sake of testing and review, however, that traffic can be included in your reports as customer traffic. To keep both you and your team’s traffic from muddling your reports, we can tell our GA4 property to ignore our interactions with our sites.

 To filter out your personal traffic, you will need to do the following:

• Log into Google Analytics.
• Make sure you in the correct account and GA4 property.
• In the bottom left-hand corner, click the gear icon for Admin.
• In the Property column, select Data Streams.
• Select your data stream. Then, click Configure tag settings.
• On the right-hand side of settings, click Show all.
• In the list of settings, click Define internal traffic.
• Next, click Create. Follow the prompt to create an internal traffic rule. Make sure to remember your traffic_type value for a future step.

• When done, click Create.
• With our rule setup, we can now create our data filter. First, go back to Admin via the gear in the left-hand corner.
• In the Property column, select Data settings -> Data Filters.
• In the right-hand corner, click Create filter and choose Internal traffic. Complete the prompt to create a data filter. Note that the value you place in Parameter name should be the same as our traffic_value from the previous steps.

• Once done, you can create it in Testing mode to test out the filter. Once you and your developers are sure that it works, return to your data filter and change it to Active to activate the filter.

Add New Users

While setting up your GA4 property, you may want to start giving access to the property to your team. To do this, you will need to add your team members as users to the property.

To give access to your property to other users, you will need to do the following:

• Log into Google Analytics.
• Make sure you in the correct account and GA4 property.
• In the bottom left-hand corner, click the gear icon for Admin.
• In the Account column, select Account access management. Here you can see users who have access to the property. To add another user, click the blue + symbol in the right-hand corner and select Add users. Follow the prompt to identify your user and the roles you want them to have.

Connect any Other Google Properties you Use

If your business strategy involves other Google tools, such as Google Search Console or Google Adds, you can add sections for those tools in your GA4 property, allowing you to see everything in one place.

To connect your other Google tools to your GA4 property, you will need to do the following:

• Log into Google Analytics.
• Make sure you in the correct account and GA4 property.
• In the bottom left-hand corner, click the gear icon for Admin.
• In the Property column, scroll down to the Product Links. Under the Product Links section, you will find a collection of Google properties that you can connect to. Choose the products that you want to connect to and follow the Link button to get started.

Just getting Started with GA4?

Want to learn more about GA4? Check out our GA4 blog posts for more insights on using GA4! If you are just getting started with Google Analytics 4, take our free GA4 crash course to get started! If you want to start using GA4 but don’t have the means or time to set it up yourself, we can setup GA4 for you!

On July 1^st, 2023, Google will officially transition from Universal Analytics (UA) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Existing UA Properties will stop collecting data, which means that if you want to continue using Google’s Analytics tools in your eCommerce strategies, you will need to migrate to GA4. Where do we get started?

How do I migrate to GA4?

To begin migrating to GA4, you must first create a GA4 property. In March of 2023, Google began auto-migrating users to Google Analytics 4, so you may find that you already have a GA4 property in your properties list. However, if you do not have an auto-created property, the first step to migrating to GA4 is to create a new GA4 property.

To create a new property, you will need to do the following:

• Log into your Google Analytics account.
• Make sure you are on your desire UA property.
• Click the gear icon in the lower left-hand corner to go to Admin.
• In the second column called Property, click the blue “Create Property” Button.
• Follow the prompts to create your new GA4 Property

• Follow the prompts to create your new GA4 Property!

Connecting your website to GA4

Once your GA4 property is created, you want to connect your GA4 to your website so that you can start collecting data. If you just created a new property by hand, you may be automatically sent to Tag Instructions. If you are using an auto-migrated GA4 property, you will want to go to Admin -> Data Streams -> View Tag Instructions.

Before getting started, it is important to know that there are 3 ways to connect your GA4 property to your website that depend on how your Universal Analytics account was connect:

1. Analytics Tag (analytics.js)
2. Google Tag (gtag.js)
3. Google Tag Manager

Note: Which migration method is the easiest?

Depending on how you connect Universal Analytics to your website, there are suggested methods to use to make the migration as easy as possible:

If you used an analytics tag to connect your UA property to your website, the easiest way to connect to your GA4 property would be to use google tag.

If you used a google tag to connect your UA property to your website, the easiest way to connect your GA4 property would be to continue using google tag.

If you used Google Tag Manager to connect your UA property to your website, the easiest way to connect your GA4 property would be to continue using Google Tag Manager.

Migrating from UA Analytics Tag to GA4 Google Tag

For those who used the analytics tag to connect their UA property to their website, the best course of action is to replace that analytics tag with a google tag. The analytics tag, analytics.js, is a snippet of code that you or your developer installed in the header of your webpages in order to start collecting data in Google Analytics. Your new GA4 google tag will work much the same.

To replace the tag, we need to do the following:

• In your GA4 Property, go to Admin -> Data Streams.
• Click on your data stream. There will most likely only be one stream to click.
• Click View Tag Instructions at the bottom of the list.
• Under Install Manually you will find a your google tag code. Copy the code snippet.

• Go to your website and find the analytics.js snippet in the code of your website. It should be in the header. Replace that snippet with your new google tag code!

Note: Installing the google tag snippet can vary per platform

When it comes to installing your google tag snippet successfully, the location can vary. Some platforms may let you insert the code in one location and automatically attach that code to the rest of the headers. Others may have required manually inserting the code on every page. Talk with your developer about what is involved so that your code can be correctly installed.

Migrating from UA Google Tag to GA4 Google Tag

For those who used the google tag to connect to their UA property to their website, the best way to transition your data stream to GA4 is to replace your UA google tag with your new GA4 google tag. The only differences between these tags are the measurement IDs. In universal analytics, this ID starts with “UA” and is followed by a string of letters and numbers. Your GA4 measurement ID is the same, excepted instead of “UA” it starts with “G” followed by a string of letters and numbers.

To replace the tag, we need to do the following:

• In your GA4 Property, go to Admin -> Data Streams.
• Click on your data stream. There will most likely only be one stream to click.
• Click View Tag Instructions at the bottom of the list.
• Under Install Manually you will find a your google tag code. Copy the code snippet.

• Go to your website and find the gtag.js snippet in the code of your website. It should be in the header. Replace that snippet with your new google tag code!

Migrating from UA Google Tag Manager to GA4 Google Tag Manager

If you are already using Google Tag Manager (GTM) to connect your UA property, connecting your new GA4 to tag manager is easy. To start collecting data on your GA4 property, we need to add a new tag to GTM. To do this, we will need our GA4 Measurement ID handy.

To track your new GA4 property in Google Tag Manager, we need to do the following.

• In your GA4 Property, go to Admin -> Data Streams.
• Click on your data stream. There will most likely only be one stream to click.
• In the right-hand area of your data stream, you will see your measurement ID. Copy your ID for future use.

• Next, go to Google Tag Manager.
• Select your Tag Manager Account.
• In the left-hand column, click Tags.
• Click New.
• Click Tag Configuration

• In tag types, select Google Analytics: GA4 Configuration.
• Title the Tag in the left-hand corner.
• Paste in your measurement ID.
• Click Triggering and select All Pages
• Click Save in the right-hand corner to complete your GA4 tag!

Note: Are there any other ways to migrate my data streams to GA4?

Other than these three methods, there are other methods you can consider that depend on your specific platform. Some platforms have built-in mechanisms, plugins, or add-ons that aim to help you connect your Google Analytics properties to your website. Research what your platform has to offer in terms of Google Analytics tools.

Next Steps for GA4 Migration

Whether you are manually migrating your UA account to GA4 or are working with Google’s auto created GA4 property, it’s important to keep in mind that more complex analytics will need further migration. Google’s auto-migration migrates the basics of your previous UA account, but any customized analytics you or your developers have set up will need manually migrated and re-thought to suit the new GA4 environment. To learn more about GA4, check out our GA4 blog posts.

For more help with setting up the basics of GA4 and understanding how to use it, take our free GA4 crash course to help you get started!