With Google Analytics Standard Ecommerce, you gain a standardized setup and insight into how your site is doing. You can track and view product and sales performance, and understand how long it takes for a customer to complete a purchase.

However, if you want to dig further into the detail (and you do!) you will need Google Analytics (GA) Enhanced Ecommerce (EE) enabled. This will supercharge your transactional and impressions data, and give you lots of new useful dimensions and metrics.

In this Accelerate article, we’ll be looking at what the different Enhanced Ecommerce conversion reports offer. In GA, you will find these under Conversions – Ecommerce. Without further ado, let’s dig in and look at the benefits of Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce!

Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce vs. standard ecommerce

GA Ecommerce Enabled GA Enhanced Ecommerce Enabled
GA ecommerce enabled GA enhanced ecommerce enabled
Why You Need Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce-1 Why you need GA enhanced ecommerce

What is Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce?

Overview

This report is similar to the one that comes with GA Standard Ecommerce tracking and gives you an eCommerce performance overview. But with EE, you get more granular data. By default, unique purchases and quantity have been left out, and instead, a new marketing block has been added. Given that you track all of it, this block will show you:

  • Campaigns: Your Google Ads campaigns or custom campaigns that you have manually tagged with the utm_campaign parameter.
  • Internal promotions: These are typically onsite banners, such as a sales campaign.
  • Coupon codes: Coupon codes used for a specific product, or for the entire order.
  • Affiliations: Affiliate sites contributing to your eCommerce performance.
Ecommerce Overview

Shopping Behaviour (EE report only)

Shopping Behaviour Analysis gives you insight into your customers’ shopping activity. Out of all your sessions and visitors, you will see how many of them viewed a product, added something to cart, entered the checkout and made a purchase.

You can view this from a session or abandonment point of view. In the example below, looking at the visitors coming from the United Kingdom, you can see that 3,187 sessions have been tracked, and 2,707 (or 84.94%) of these have not engaged in a shopping activity. With data like this, you can start making assumptions and build a hypothesis. If you compare it to the other countries, is this higher or lower engagement? If the engagement is lower, maybe there are local and logical explanations to this, or maybe an opening for applying tactics from better-performing markets to the UK?
Shopping Behaviour Analysis

Checkout Behaviour (EE report only)

The Checkout Behaviour Analysis drills into the different checkout steps. The steps can vary a bit depending on the type of site and checkout, but typically you have steps for cart, shipping, billing and success. The Checkout Behaviour report is similar to the funnel you get when setting up a goal, but it has a lot more useful data.

The key benefit with this report is that you get to analyse drop-off points in the checkout flow. For example: if you see that you have an unusually high drop-off for the payment step, you might need to consider adding more, or different, payment methods. Or perhaps there is a technical issue in the checkout, preventing visitors from completing the purchase. Analysis like this, coupled with customer surveys, customer experience reviews and heatmaps are very powerful tools and give you great insight into potential areas of improvement.

Similar to the Shopping Behaviour Analysis, you can view the data by default dimensions such as browser, campaign, device or user type. Taking it one step further, you can also create segments based on this, so that you can monitor and follow up on those groups of customers separately. A segment is a subset of your Analytics data and allows you to perform remarketing activities, such as offering a loyalty discount code or a special deal to users that have not completed their purchase.

GA Checkout Behaviour Analysis

Would you like more advice on this topic?

Learn More >

Product Performance

The Product Performance report is available in GA Standard Ecommerce tracking as well, but with EE there are some key differences. Except for tracking items such as revenue per product, quantity bought, and average price, you also get product refund amount, cart-to-detail rate, and buy-to-detail rate. I will outline these below:

  • Product refund amount: Total refund amount associated with the product. If your site is struggling with a high return rate, this data point could be useful to add to give you insight into which products are rendering the most returns.
  • Cart-to-detail rate: Product adds divided by views of product details. This tells you how often a product is added to cart after being viewed. If a product is viewed often, but seldom added to cart, you might want to consider replacing it or changing the product data or price.
  • Buy-to-detail rate: Unique purchases divided by views of product-detail pages. This tells you how often a product is bought after being viewed. If a product is viewed often, added to cart, but seldom bought, this might also be cause for reviewing the product offering.

Produktresultat

Sales Performance

With GA Standard Ecommerce tracking, you typically only get the sales performance for date and the sum of the revenue made on that day.

With EE, the report is beefed up, and by default, you get transaction ID, revenue, tax, shipping, refund amount and quantity. Normally, you send the revenue and shipping amounts excluding VAT and track the VAT in a separate column. There is no column summing the values together here, but you can easily create a custom report and view this metric there.

Also, in EE, you get the data, percentage, performance, comparison and pivot view options – something that is not present in this report for GA Standard Ecommerce tracking.

Försäljningsresultat

Product List Performance (EE report only)

The Product List Performance report lets you view different lists and how they are performing in terms of views, clicks, add to cart, checkout, and revenue. A list is typically a category view, search results page or related products – but it can be anywhere a product is listed really.

This report can be very useful and makes it easy to see which lists are the most popular and viewed, which products within these lists perform the best, and how much revenue the lists and products have generated.

In addition, you can also see which products are generating clicks, add to cart and checkouts.

The primary dimensions of this report are:

  • Product List Name: The name of the product list in which the product appears.
  • Product List Position: The position of a product in the product list.
  • Product: The product names of items sold.
  • Product SKU: The product codes of items sold.

These dimensions make it possible to look at the data from different angles and, e.g. pinpoint which list a product was displayed in, what position it had in that list, and how much revenue it generated.

Produktlistresultat

Marketing (EE report only)

With EE, you also have the option to track purchases made with a coupon code (product or order level), impressions and clicks of internal promotions (such as banners displayed to promote a sale) and affiliations assigned to eCommerce transactions. These items live under the Marketing tab under eCommerce in GA.

Summary

Enhanced Ecommerce gives you better and more powerful insights into the shopping behaviour of your visitors. Based on the actions that your visitors take, such as visiting the product detail page but not adding anything to cart or making a purchase, you can create segments and retarget these visitors accurately. If you work actively with this type of data and reports, it can be used as valuable input for efforts to improve merchandising efforts, conversion rates, and revenue.

A short recap of the different reports we have covered:

  • Overview: Gives you an eCommerce performance overview with revenue, CR, transactions, AOV as well as campaigns, internal promotions, coupon codes and affiliations.
  • Shopping Behaviour (EE report only): Insights into your customers’ shopping activity, namely: viewed product, added something to cart, entered the checkout, and made a purchase.
  • Checkout Behaviour (EE report only): Drills into the different checkout steps. Allows for analysis of drop-off points in the checkout flow, and makes it possible to create segments based on this data.
  • Product Performance: Revenue per product, quantity bought, average price, refund amount, cart-to-detail rate and buy-to-detail rate.
  • Sales Performance: Transaction ID, revenue, tax, shipping, refund amount and quantity.
  • Product List Performance (EE report only): Lists and how they are performing in terms of views, clicks, add to cart, checkout and revenue.
  • Marketing (EE report only): coupon codes, internal promotions and affiliations.

Would you like more advice on this topic?

Learn More >

Vaimo can assist you with the setup of EE that typically involves activating EE in GA, sending new data into the data layer, and modifying your GTM container to pick up and push that data into GA.