Go deeper with data: Why you need Enhanced Ecommerce Analytics

Advice

Do you sell products online? Do you want free actionable insights?

… thought so.

Enhanced Ecommerce Reporting is an often under-utilised tool in Google Analytics that provides ecommerce and digital marketing managers with the data they need to:

Generate insights at a product, brand and category level
Identify major friction points and barriers to conversion
Improve ROI

We love Enhanced Ecommerce, because the reports enable data-driven decision making, ultimately making every dollar you invest in digital work harder.

The best part about these reports is that they are completely free to access.

So, what’s on offer?

1. Shopping Behaviour Analysis

Get clarity around shopping progression and abandonments with the Shopping Behaviour Analysis report — a visualisation of your shopping funnel.

Armed with this data, you can answer questions like:

What % of customers are making it to the checkout?
Compared to [x period], what % of customers are looking at products?
Where are customers leaking from our shopping funnel?
Where are the strengths in our shopping funnel? The weaknesses?

You can also use this report to inform key top and middle of funnel conversion rate optimisation strategies, with the goal of driving more customers closer to the checkout.

2. Checkout Behaviour Analysis

So now you have greater visibility over the shopping funnel, what about those pesky users abandoning the checkout? Well lucky for you, Enhanced Ecommerce reporting also includes the Checkout Behaviour Analysis report.

Take one look at this tab in Analytics, and you’ll likely be able to identify your conversion killers — perhaps a surprise shipping cost, a highly visible coupon code field or a frustrating payment experience.

Use this data, combined with site recording software, to answer questions like:

What is the average conversion rate of a user who adds a product to their cart?
Why are customers abandoning at the last stage?
Would free shipping help our conversion rate?

It’s worth noting this data is only beneficial if you have the ability to run split testing in your checkout, so best check your platform capabilities first.

3. Product Performance

User-related insights are undoubtedly useful, but what about product insights?

The Product Performance Report enables a true deep dive into your inventory, with the ability to analyse product performance using standard ecommerce metrics (e.g. revenue) as well as behaviour-driven metrics like product views and add-to-carts.

Drill down into your data by Product, ProductSKU, Product Category, Product Brand, or Shopping Stage and answer questions like:

How has [x product]’s performance changed over the past year?
How has [x category]’s performance impacted sales of [x product]?
Which brands are performing the best? Worst?

4. Sales Performance

Have a tricky sales problem that needs solving? The Sales Performance Report is here for you.

The Sales Performance report has two key dimensions: transaction and date. Look at revenue, tax, shipping, refund amounts and quantities in the one report, and take a deep dive into transaction trends and anomalies.

5. Product List Performance

We’ve talked about users. We’ve talked about products. But Google! What about our categories? Never fear — PLP insights aren’t far away with the Product List Performance Report.

Not only does this report give you the option to analyse behaviour-driven metrics related to your categories, it can also be enabled for search results pages and a variety of blocks on your product pages (think cross-sell, up-sell and related product blocks).

Bonus: This report also introduces a new ecommerce metric: Product List CTR. You’ll gain greater visibility into the performance of each of your categories in terms of product views from that category, and be able to track this performance over time. This is a favourite metric to test among the Digital Experience team — it’s a middle-of-funnel approach that often yields impressive results.

Bonus: Marketing Reports

In addition to these five Enhanced Ecommerce reports, you can also use the reports nested under the ‘Marketing’ tab to generate insights around particular promotions, coupons and affiliate codes.

So how do you get it?

As mentioned, Enhanced Ecommerce reporting is free, as part of any Universal Analytics setup.

However, the time it takes to set up Enhanced Ecommerce reporting will depend on your platform, platform version and the whether or not you have custom implementations/integrations.

Regardless of your technology stack, the first step is to turn Enhanced Ecommerce reporting on in Google Analytics.

How to turn on Enhanced Ecommerce reporting in Google Analytics

Navigate to settings by clicking the ⚙️in Google Analytics
In your chosen ‘View’, click ‘Ecommerce Settings’
Under ‘Ecommerce Set-Up’, set the status for both ‘Enable Ecommerce’ and ‘Enable Enhanced Ecommerce Reporting’ to ‘ON’
Set up checkout labelling by inputting the names of your checkout process, as defined by your site
Click ‘Save’

Depending on the platform you’re using, this may be all you need to do. If the five reports mentioned above aren’t pulling in correctly, your gtag.js file is likely going to need some tweaking.

This process may involve a number of custom development hours — a completely worthy trade off when you consider the world of insights that Enhanced Ecommerce reporting provides.

This is where we can help. Send our client solutions team an email for a custom tracking proposal and see just how easy it is to unlock the power of Enhanced Ecommerce.