In this blog post we will give you an introduction to the new Enhanced Ecommerce functionality in Google Analytics.
Enhanced Ecommerce is part of Universal Analytics
Enhanced Ecommerce was rolled out as one of the major improvements of Universal Analytics. It is an improved version of the ecommerce tracking available in Classic Analytics (ga.js).
That previous version of Google ecommerce tracking did a good job of collecting information about online transactions, but it was unable to provide insights into how customers arrived at those transactions. Enhanced Ecommerce captures the more complex processes that customers go through before and after they make purchases: viewing and interacting with products, adding and removing items from their shopping carts, responding to promotions, or requesting refunds.
If your ecommerce website uses Universal Analytics, you should take advantage of the power of Enhanced Ecommerce. If you have not yet upgraded your site’s tracking codes, you should make Enhanced Ecommerce part of your upgrade plan.
Enhanced Ecommerce focuses on Customer Behavior
Enhanced Ecommerce zooms out from transactions to see a wider ecommerce picture. In this view, a transaction is the most important action, but it is only one in a series of actions that customers take. Reports like the Shopping Behavior Analysis in the image below allow us to understand and optimize the customer experience at every step. This report shows the funnel of website visitors progressing through each step of online shopping and the number of visitors who abandon shopping at each step.
Understanding how customers use your website and how they interact with your products will allow you to optimize your shop and increase your conversion rates.
Enhanced Ecommerce collects richer, more detailed data
Enhanced Ecommerce allows you to collect much more detailed product data and more user actions than ever before. Enhanced Ecommerce also introduces new metrics like Product Detail Views, Products Added, Cart-to-Detail ratio, and Buy-to-Detail ratio, which provide some powerful insights.
This improved data can be used to optimize your ecommerce site and your marketing campaigns. For example:
- You can create remarketing campaigns to recapture users who have abandoned the shopping cart by targeting them with ads for the products that originally interested them.
- You can identify which products sell very well but are not viewed very often to feature these products more prominently.
- You can discover which products are very popular but do not sell well to analyze the reasons of their low performance and test some improvements.
Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Analytics is a powerful tool that we strongly recommend for ecommerce websites. Stay tuned for our tutorial to learn step by step how to implement Enhanced Ecommerce.
If you have questions about Enhanced Ecommerce, feel free to send me an e-mail.
