How does Ecommerce Tracking work in Google Analytics?

If you have a website where you are selling stuff, you need to set up ECommerce Tracking. This allows you to track how your website traffic translates into sales. To do this effectively, you’ll want to record detailed transaction data, including:

  • Transaction total
  • Products sold
  • Any tax added to the sale

Basic Ecommerce Tracking

Basic Tracking works by adding additional code to your thank-you pages that confirm a sale. There are two data types used:

  • Transaction Data: Revenue, shipping, tax data.
  • Item Data: Information about the items sold, including:
    • Name
    • SKU code
    • Item category
    • Quantity
    • Transaction ID

Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking

Enhanced ECommerce provides more data and requires additional code on various pages, such as:

  • Product pages
  • Checkout steps

This tracking offers five data types:

  1. Impression Data: Insights on product views, brand associations, variant details, and product positions.
  2. Product Data: Information on individual products and coupon usage.
  3. Promotion Data: Information about promotions viewed by customers.
  4. Action Data: Revenue data, tax, shipping costs, and tracking specific checkout steps.
  5. Product and Promotion Actions: Actions related to adding/removing products from shopping carts and checkout initiation.

Setting up E-Commerce for Google Analytics

  1. Check Conversions in Google Analytics Admin to locate your Ecommerce reports.
  2. Ensure that the ECommerce toggle is set to ON in View settings.
  3. Work with your developers to set up proper tracking, using tools like Google Tag Manager for data population.

Required Data Variables for Basic ECommerce:

  • Required:
    • transactionID
    • transactionTotal
  • Optional:
    • transactionShipping
    • transactionTax
    • transactionProducts (recommended)

To get richer information, include:

  • Name
  • SKU
  • Price
  • Quantity
  • Category (optional)

Requirements for Enhanced ECommerce:

  • Clicks on product links
  • Viewing product details
  • Impressions and clicks of promotions
  • Adding/removing products from a cart
  • Initiating checkout

Things to Keep in Mind

When performing audits, common issues can include:

  • Active staging sites not filtered out
  • Incorrect timezone settings in View settings

Analytics was primarily designed to track user behavior on the website, not for comprehensive inventory or CRM needs. It provides sales data but not details like refunds or cancellations.