Key event tracking, when enabled in Merchant Center, allows you to monitor your sales using specific key event metrics related to purchases. Key event tracking helps you identify which products and keywords are most successful for your business.
This article explains how key event tracking works and provides instructions on how to set it up in Merchant Center.
In this article
- Benefits of key event tracking
- How key event tracking works
- Set up key event tracking
- Remove key event tracking
- Frequently asked questions
Benefits of key event tracking
- Performance measurement: Key event tracking enables you to measure the success of your product sales. When used with a web analytics tool, key event tracking allows you to track how effectively your products are showing for free on Google. Key event tracking helps you get performance reports with insights about your free product listings – like whether they’ve led to purchases and how they compare to your overall Google traffic.
- Continuous Improvement: Key event tracking provides a feedback loop for ongoing optimization of your products. You can continually refine and enhance your product offerings, and website based on product traffic and data-driven insights, leading to better results over time.
- Improved metrics: Key event tracking plays an important role in understanding and improving metrics such as clicks, impressions, and click-through rate (CTR) to improve your online advertising and marketing.
How key event tracking works
After a customer clicks on your free product listings, key event tracking adds a bit of additional information—a parameter called a result id—to the URLs customers click through.
Example
If someone clicks on your free listings from www.example.com, the final URL will look like www.example.com/?srsltid=123xyz.
The result id is created at the time of an impression. If a customer clicks the same free listings again, the same result id will be used.
Set up key event tracking
The 3 steps involved in setting up key event tracking include:
- Enabling auto-tagging
- Linking a key event source with 2 options:
- Link to Google Analytics property - This option requires linking an existing Google Analytics account.
- Apply tags on your website - This option requires you to change your website’s code.
- Setting up a tag on your website
Key event tracking can either be automatically enabled by default for some Merchant Center accounts or enabled at the account level by an admin, depending on the account setup. To enable key event tracking, follow the steps below.
In your Merchant Center account, click the Settings and tools icon
.
Click Key event setup.
Toggle on Auto-tagging. A banner will appear confirming that the auto-tagging feature is turned on. Now you can start adding key event sources.
Click Add key event source. You can either select to go through Google Analytics or through applying tags to your website.
In “Select how to track product purchases”. You can select either “Link Google Analytics” or “Link your website”.
If you have a Google Analytics 4 account, you can select “Link Google Analytics” and you can link your accounts to send key event details on purchases from Google Analytics to Merchant Center.
If you do not have a Google Analytics 4 account, you can use a Google tag that sends purchase details directly from your website to Merchant Center and you need to select “Link your website”, click Next.
On the “Receive Tracking” page, click Receive tracking.
- Under “Configure conversion tracking data”, add “Tracking name”.
- Select “Attribution model”.
- Select a “Lookback window” of 7, 30, 40 days. 40 days is the recommended lookback window.
- Click Next.
Click Send tracking.
- Under “Link your website tag to Merchant Center to track purchases”, click Set up.
- In “Google tag” section, select
- Click Set up. Wait for the Google Tag Manager UI to render.
- You should see a Google Tag connected to the Merchant Center destination under the “Your Google Tag” section.
- Click Installation instructions.
- Follow steps based on if a website builder was used or if a manual installation can be done.
- Close Google Tag Manager UI and click Next.
- If another tag should be used after clicking "Set Up":
- Click Admin.
- Click Manage Google tag.
- Click Combine with another tag.
- Click Choose a Google tag to combine.
- Select a tag. Follow the steps and click Save.
- Close Google Tag Manager UI and click Next.
- If another destination should be mapped to this tag after clicking "Set Up":
- Click Admin.
- Click Manage Google tag.
- Click + Destination.
- Click Choose a destination.
- Select the destination. Follow the steps and click Save.
- Close Google Tag Manager UI and click Next.
- In “Google tag” section, select
Click Define purchase event.
- In “Define how to track a purchase event”, add the key event URL (this URL denotes a key event).
- Click Done.
After you’ve configured the connection with the key event source, you’ll need to refresh the page to view the key event source added to the table in Merchant Center.
After you’re all set up, you’ll start viewing key event metrics in your performance dashboard.
As a reminder, you must ensure you're providing users with clear and comprehensive information about the data you collect on your apps, and getting consent for that collection where legally required.
Remove key event tracking
To remove key event tracking, follow these steps:
In your Merchant Center account, click the Settings and tools icon
.
Click Key event setup.
In the table's "Actions" column, select Remove access for the "key event source" you want to remove.
In the pop-up window, click Remove access.
Frequently asked questions
How do I view traffic from free listings in Google Analytics?
For Google Analytics 4 properties, the traffic source is “Shopping free listings”. For Universal Analytics (the previous version of Google Analytics) properties, free listings traffic is reported with all other free listings traffic sources from Google (with “google” as the traffic source and “free listings” as the medium).
Learn more about traffic sources in Google Analytics.