Set up ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics
Set up ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics
1. Use the Google Tag Assistant Chrome extension to check that your Google Analytics pageview tag is firing correctly through Google Tag Manager.
This is crucial. If the tag is overlooked or set up incorrectly, the following steps will not work correctly.
2. In GA, click on Admin > View Settings > E-commerce Settings and toggle Enable E-commerce on.
Leave Enable Enhanced E-commerce Reporting disabled if you want regular ecommerce reporting, or enable it for more advanced metrics reporting. If you aren’t sure, leave it disabled for now. Enhanced is much more advanced and you’ll need the help of a developer to set it up. Enhanced reporting tells you how someone bought where regular ecommerce reporting tells you what they bought.
3. Open GTM, preview in debug mode to view the dataLayer variables available to you, and set up your transaction track types to collect the transactions.
Do you have everything you need already? Some ecommerce platforms will be set up to integrate automatically. For example, Shopify allows you to use a third party plugin like littledata.io to transform your dataLayer and grab all the variables you could ever want. Required variables: transactionId transactionTotal name sku price quantity Optional variables: transactionAffiliation transactionShipping transactionTax transactionProducts category
4. Once you have your variables and dataLayer collecting all the data that you will need, set up the Transaction track type as a tag in GTM.
If you chose enhanced ecommerce reporting, ask your developer to set up the tracking.
5. Preview the changes you made in Google Tag Manager and perform a transaction on your site to check that the data is exactly how you want it to be in GA.
Now is the time to trim/format the data so the storage in GA so that the analysis will be easier.
6. If you need to set up cross-domain tracking, open GA, navigate to Admin > Property column > Tracking info and click on Referral Exclusion List, then add your other domains.
This may be necessary if you’re using 3rd party checkout options like PayPal, or if your site uses multiple domains. Don’t confuse sub-domain with cross domain tracking; Google Analytics automatically tracks subdomains. For example, if a website uses PayPal checkout, by default PayPal will be credited with the referral when a user pays. Setting PayPal as a referral exclusion means that GA will stitch together that session and exclude PayPal as the session jump.
7. Consider setting up enhanced ecommerce reporting to obtain more insight into your checkout funnel.
If you are interested in seeing how users are progressing through your cart and checkout, enhanced ecommerce will offer more information and provide some helpful visuals in GA. It does lack some granularity, though. Alternatively, use advanced GA event tracking and set up a custom report in Google Data Studio. This will allow you to look at conversion rates at every step of the funnel for users, not sessions. By default in GA, goals and ecommerce transactions are session-based rather than user-based.