Enhanced E-commerce in Google Analytics is a powerful and immense step forward for online stores and capturing shopping data. The purpose behind the Enhanced E-commerce addition is to understand customer behavior and the general effectiveness of marketing products versus just having transactional data alone.
Enhanced E-commerce Requires Changes To Your Site
To use Enhanced E-commerce, a few changes are required. First, a change in Google Analytics admin to set up the needed listeners for additional e-commerce data. Second and certainly more involved, is the programming that powers your online store needs to be changed. These programming changes are necessary, as they send specific data to Analytics for processing – more on that below.
It’s important to note that Enhanced E-commerce is not enabled by default in Google Analytics. However, with these changes come a deeper understanding of shopping habits, sales regeneration, and segmentation.
Let’s take a look at some of the new data available to us.
Product Insights
Not only does Enhanced E-commerce gather more information about how users shop, it also gathers more information about products and how users interact with them.
Product Impressions, or how many times a product has been viewed, and Product Clicks, or how many times a product was clicked to view its details, are now possible. This allows for reports about conversion rates by product, and can also take into account the position of the product on the list page as well – meaning we can test the old adage of “products closer to position 1 sell better.”
Cart Adds are now a measurable metric, allowing you to see how many times products were added to carts. This compliments the final insight, Checkouts, which shows how many times a product was purchased.
Together, these insights give you a full picture into how many times a product had impressions, was clicked, added to a cart, and purchased.
Checkout Insights
Shopping Behavior Analysis allows you to view your checkout process as a customizable funnel. This is important to see, because it can highlight if there were issues moving from one step to another. Perhaps users want to know how much shipping is, and then bail out there? Perhaps they falter at the payment page. You can segment users to see which ones have issues, allowing for tremendous insights.
Shopping Insights
Custom funnels can now be created and observed. These funnels can visually yield critical information about shopping processes from product views, behaviour, and even checkout transactions. Now, merchants can understand how far users go through the buying process by seeing the most popular paths, the biggest exit points, and which channels bring better sales.
Linking Enhanced E-commerce to Adwords also allows for segments to be created directly from the funnel – allowing useful target groups to be identified immediately.
If your cart supports them, Coupon Tracking is also available and can show how much lift coupons provide for sales – and with report data available by coupon code, dollar amount, or discount, you can quickly see which tactics work best to create sales.
Internal Promotions are also trackable – meaning product promotions for things such as homepage hero graphics and sidebar links and images can determine if valuable real estate is needed to promote products.
Cart Abandonment is a dirty term, but digging in to abandonment provides information that developers and marketers can use to understand why transactions weren’t placed – and where users bailed.
