The Enhanced Ecommerce feature in Google Analytics helps you collect behavioral data for your ecommerce business. This includes how users interact with on-site marketing, product pages, and the checkout process. But it can also measure very specific things like:
- Clicks on a product link
- Views of the product detail pages
- Impressions and clicks of internal promotions
- Adding or removing a product from a shopping cart
- Initiating the checkout process for a product
- And purchases and refunds
To begin, you need to turn on Enhanced Ecommerce in your Google Analytics settings. In Google Analytics, select the “Admin” tab and navigate to the view where you want to turn on Enhanced Ecommerce. Under the View column, click Ecommerce Settings.
Under Step 1, Enable Ecommerce, set the status to ON. Note that you can also enable related product data if you wish. Click Next step. Under Step 2, Enhanced Ecommerce Settings, set the status to ON.
Optionally, you can enter labels for each of the checkout steps you want to track. Labeling the steps of your checkout process will make it easy to understand if users abandon your checkout and where they drop out in the process.
Click Submit when complete.
Once you have enabled Enhanced Ecommerce, additional ecommerce reports will show up in the Google Analytics navigation. However, to see data in the reports, you’ll first need to add JavaScript code to your web pages that will load the Enhanced Ecommerce plugin. This plugin contains a number of JavaScript methods that you can use to collect your various ecommerce data.
Once you have installed the ecommerce plugin, you will need to write additional code to call the Enhanced Ecommerce methods you wish to use. This code sends ecommerce related data, consisting of name-value pairs, with a hit.
It’s important to understand that your website must dynamically pass ecommerce data to Google Analytics Ecommerce tracking code. So, if the Google Merchandise Store wanted to send information about product 943, an Android Squishable, that information must be passed into the Google Analytics ecommerce code.
Let’s look at an example of how this might be set up to collect product impression data.
A product impression is when a user views a product on your website. Product impressions can occur on product pages, in a product carousel, or in a related products unit. If you want to track a product impression, you can use the “add impression” method to pass product data to Google Analytics. Note that you will need to customize this code to include data for your specific products.
Many of the code snippets in the Enhanced Ecommerce plugin work in a similar manner. You insert the code on your product pages so that it can send ecommerce data at various points in the shopping process. So, if you want to track when a user adds a product to the cart, you can add the addProduct method to your website when the user takes that action.
You can collect data about each step of the checkout process and choose which steps you’ll want to track based on your business.
As you can see, you’ll need to be able to add code to your website to be able to track all the steps of a checkout process. You’ll also need to create code that dynamically passes data about your products into the Google Analytics ecommerce code. However, once you’ve implemented it with your online store, it’s a powerful way to understand and improve your ecommerce website.
