How does Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce help e-commerce managers?

A standard Google Analytics implementation allows ecommerce managers to track sales at an elementary level of a purchase using goals and transactional tracking. However, it doesn’t allow brands to track customer behavior at a product and user journey level before making a purchase/final decision. 

Benefits of Enhanced Ecommerce

As an ecommerce manager, It gets imperative to track products which are added to cart as there are issues of abandonment. Also, it helps to identify dropouts by tracking the entire user journey from product views i.e. from each category level to the final purchase. 

Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce enables users to track impressions, add to cart and other user journey details at a product level using a very simple implementation. 

An elementary implementation of Enhanced Ecommerce tagging gives you data for individual products, most importantly, we can easily add categories and brand properties which helps us to evaluate the data from various perspectives. For example tagging colours, size analysis will give you an understanding of which colour and sizes are the best sellers. These properties take string values, so you can create any category and brand taxonomy that’s relevant to your business.

In Google Analytics, data collected using enhanced ecommerce gets visible under product performance in conversion and ecommerce category and subcategory.

Tracking Product Performance using Enhanced Ecommerce

Using the shopping behavior tab , brands can measure the journey with the following steps such as:

  • Product List Views show how many times the product was visible in a category listing page
  • Product Detail Views show which products details were viewed. This is traditionally known as Product Detail Page (PDP)
  • Product Add to Cart. This metric shows how many times a SKU was added into cart. This is a good measure of a soft goal in user journey. In case transactions of the website are low, add to carts are a good substitute to prioritize product led communication.
  • Product Remove from Cart The metric shows removal of product from the cart. 
  • Product Checkouts. This metric indicates the start of the checkout journey.
  • Unique Purchases. Purchase of each product.
  • Cart to Detail Rate. This metric Is the ratio of product added to cart by how many times a detailed page was shown for that product. This is a good indicator to understand the trend of the product and It is an important metric we use in Deepflux for product prioritization in retailers’ portfolios.
  • Buy to Detail Rate. This metric indicates the ratio of purchase of a product to detailed product pageviews of that product. This is again an important metric to consider when prioritizing products in the portfolio.

Data shown using Enhanced Ecommerce feature in GA

Implementation of Enhanced Ecommerce 

There are two methodologies of enhanced ecommerce implementation ,depending upon the framework on which the website is built. In case of a framework based website like Shopfiy, there are various plugins that enable enhanced ecommerce implementation. However if the website is not built on a standard framework, custom implementation using tag management and backend development will be required.

Implementation #1: Standard Framework based plugin implementation

If you are using a standard framework like Shopify, Magento and WooCommerce, enabling enhanced ecommerce is a simple process as a lot of ready to use built-in integration plugins exist 

  • Shopify has a ready to use Google analytics integration where Enhanced Ecommerce can be enabled by clicking a checkbox
  • WordPress with WooCommerce users can try the Enhanced Ecommerce Google Analytics Plugin.
  • Magento and their Enhanced Ecommerce  extension.

Shopify Plugins for enabling Google Analytics

Implementation #2:Custom Implementation using Tag Management

This method would require you to make changes in data layer and tag management level. Different methods or events would need to be pushed using datalayer.push method and then captured in tag manager. 

There are three major steps in this implementation. 

  1. Pushing the events to the data layer using backend changes using dataLayer.push method
  2. Capturing the information in tag manager using defining custom triggers and tags for each event.
  3. Enabling enhanced ecommerce within GA

Details of the custom implementation can be found at Google Analytics resource library . This method requires multiple rounds of debugging and changes till all events like product detail page to add to cart are passed and tracked correctly .

Steps to enable enhanced Google Analytics in Custom Platforms

In summary, Google Analytics enhanced e-Commerce is an important tool to track and target audiences across the customer journey. It also becomes imperative to identify any leakages which might be occurring and testing them. DeepFlux makes extensive use of GA in our Fashion AI solution to help target the right audiences. In the initial phase of onboarding engagement, our in-house experts help you set up your GA in the optimal way. 

Schedule a demo today by sending a mail at – contact@deepflux.io

DeepFlux is a Fashion AI SaaS startup that is helping e-commerce managers improve the productivity of their day-to-day tasks and decision-making.

By Abhimanyu Vyas