Google Analytics: Getting Started with Enhanced Ecommerce

Enhanced Ecommerce is a recently introduced Google Analytics ecommerce feature that enables the collection and analysis of rich ecommerce behavioral and transactional data.

Specifically, Enhanced Ecommerce helps marketers and ecommerce managers better understand customer behavior and the effectiveness of their merchandising efforts. It provides unique insights into:

• The number of visitors who viewed specific products
• The number of users that added or removed a product from their shopping cart
• The number of completed or cancelled transactions

In addition, Enhanced Ecommerce enables you to track conversions at the product, average order value, and even refund action levels.

Enhanced ecommerce makes it easy to capitalize on this information by generating a series of funnel-based reports, through the use of the Product ID dimension and Google Tag Manager support, all available through a standard account with Universal Analytics enabled. Most importantly, these reports show you where to best focus your energy to improve the conversion funnel.

In this post I’ll walk you through:

• I. Benefits of Enhanced Ecommerce tracking
• II. Enhanced Ecommerce (EE) Measurement Model
• III. Enabling Enhanced Ecommerce (EE) in Google Analytics

Before you begin

To collect Enhanced Ecommerce data in Google Analytics, your current on-site GA tracking code needs to be modified to collect the metrics and dimensions described below. I will cover the specifics of code tracking in my next post: “The Intermediate Guide to Enhanced Ecommerce.”

Once Enhanced Ecommerce tracking is set up and enabled, you will be able to access features when you log into Google Analytics under: Conversions -> Ecommerce

I. Benefits of Enhanced Ecommerce

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of Enhanced Ecommerce:

1. Enhanced Ecommerce tracking provides a comprehensive range of Ecommerce Engagement data about your customers with tailored reports such as the 'Shopping Behavior' report.
2. Enhanced Ecommerce enables you to create product lists that logically group products in your store to help you organize and sort them.
3. Product Performance report provides shopping metrics such as: Cart to detail rate, Buy to detail rate, Product List views, Product Detail views, Product Adds to Cart, Product Removes From Cart, and Product Checkouts to help review your website's performance.
4. If you want to measure the impact of your internal and external product marketing, “Marketing reports” can help you with this. To jog your memory, internal marketing is done via internal promotions and external marketing is done via order-level coupons, product-level coupons and affiliate websites.

The following reports are included in Enhanced Ecommerce, available through Google Analytics, and can help you reap the above benefits:

1. Shopping Behavior Report

The shopping behavior report provides full information about your purchase funnel performance. It shows the number of user sessions at each stage of your purchase funnel, the number of sessions that moved from one step to the next, and how many users abandoned the funnel at each stage.

This report can be found by navigating to:
Conversions > Ecommerce > Shopping Analysis > Shopping Behavior

2. Checkout Behavior Report

The checkout behavior report provides insight into visitor/session flow and engagement with your checkout process. It shows the number of user sessions at each stage of your checkout process, i.e. the number of sessions that moved from billing, through to shipping, payment, review and actual transactions.

The report can be found by navigating to: Conversions > Ecommerce > Shopping Analysis > Checkout Behavior

3. Product Performance Report

This report provides insight into the performance of individual products in your sales funnel. There are two top-level views: sales performance (i.e. quantity sold, revenue) and visitor behavior (i.e. product views, cart activities).
Both views of the Product Performance Report can be found by navigating to:
Conversions > Ecommerce > Shopping Analysis > Product Performance

Here is what this report looks like:

4. Product List Performance Report

This report enables you to measure the sales impact of grouping products together using dimensions such as Product List Position and Product List Name.

This report can be found by navigating to:

Conversions > Ecommerce > Shopping Analysis > Product List Performance

Here is what this report looks like:

5. Coupon and Affiliate Marketing Report:

This report enables you track and provide reports on transactions generated from coupons and affiliate marketing.
This report can be found by navigating to:
Conversions > Ecommerce > Marketing (You can find four reports at this level, but I'll give an example of the first one) > Internal Promotion

Below you can see the following report that shows the Impressions, Clicks, Transactions, Revenue and more, from each promotion:

The same report structure applies to all other reports under the “Marketing” section.

II. Enhanced Ecommerce Measurement Model

Next up, let’s have a look at user interactions and Enhanced Ecommerce commands (or data that JavaScript communicates/sends to Google Analytics) through the conversion funnel of your ecommerce site:

In order to implement Enhanced Ecommerce properly, it is key to understand the above commands at each stage of the funnel.

III. Enabling Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Analytics

Step 1:
Go to the ‘Admin’ section of Google Analytics and select “Ecommerce Settings”:

Step 2:
Enable Ecommerce and click “Next”:

Step 3:
Enable Enhanced Ecommerce, then define the FUNNEL STEPS and “Submit” the setting changes:

Note:

Defining Funnel Steps is optional, but if you do define them, then the labels in the funnel should be the same as the defined labels in your ec.js tag for measuring “Checkout Steps.”
I will go into more detail on code specifications in my next article: Intermediate Guide to Enhanced Ecommerce.
These labels will appear in the “Checkout Behavior” report (as described above).

Conclusion

In order to take full advantage of Enhanced Ecommerce, there are a few specific actions that you’ll need to plan ahead for:

1. Carry out a thorough review of your site from a shopping and product standpoint, rather than a page-by-page perspective.
2. Take note of the key elements in your shopping funnel, i.e. how you group products into product sets, what key behaviors are important to you, etc.
3. Update your Tagging. If you’d like to be able to track all the new interactions that Enhanced Ecommerce can now report, then you’ll need to set up specific tags in Google Analytics’ Universal Code or the data layer of Google Tag manager (which I will be covering in part 2 of this article).
4. Product ID metadata. It used to be that products were categorized and then SKUs added. Enhanced Ecommerce however, extends the capabilities of product data by allowing reference information to be uploaded. Figure out how you can regularly upload of this information and what structure is required.

Have you started using Enhanced Ecommerce? How’s it going? Let us know in the comments!

Ready to get started? Download the Google Analytics module directly from your back office or through PrestaShop Addons.