NEW: Enhanced Ecommerce Data for Google Analytics

In late May, Forrester Research reported that online retail sales are expected to grow more than 57% to $414 billion by 2018 in the US.  With this expected growth, Google’s timing couldn’t be better.  More and more midsized businesses are looking to drive insights from their marketing data. In the past, this has been reserved for the data nerds and web analysts, but this update will make previously advanced configurations easily accessible and analyzable for marketers and merchandisers.

About

Enhanced Ecommerce (ec.js) is a plugin for Universal Analytics (analytics.js).  If you have not transferred your Google Analytics property to Universal Analytics, please review this UA transfer guide to do so.

The feature is in Beta, meaning it may not be available for all Universal Analytics users at this time.  Under Admin > View you’ll see Enhanced Ecommerce setting available underneath Channel Grouping.

What’s New

Shopping Behavior - How often users viewed product details, how often they added and removed products from their shopping carts, the number of times each product was included in a checkout, and the number of unique purchases; along with cart-to-detail and buy-to-detail ratios.

“Conversion rates and attachment rates by product will be extremely insightful when looking for opportunities to improve user experience.” - Matt Brown, VP of Marketing

Checkout Behavior - allows marketers to evaluate the parts of the funnel where users abandon the checkout.  In addition, the feature set includes advanced ecommerce segmenting abilities to view site interactions prior to checkout abandonment and to use in remarketing campaigns.

Product List Performance - based on tagging of ec.js you can logically group different products site wide.  Examples include Up-sell blocks, Cross sell blocks, Related products or Search results pages.

Internal Promotions - Internal Promotion Name will be a primary dimension.  When tagged it will easily allow merchandisers to compare impact and success of various promotions.

“This used to be an extremely manual measurement process that meshed event tracking on banners, coupon code data and % change reports for discounted products, I’m looking forward to having more concise data in one place.” - Dan Greco, Web Analyst

Import Refund Data - Previously, Google Analytics never supported refunds, so net revenue numbers needed to be pulled from the ecommerce store provider/CRM.  With enhanced ecommerce, marketers and merchandisers will easily be able to see what channels and products are refunded most often to get a more accurate calculation of ROI and product popularity.

For more information you can sign up today for Google’s new Analytics Academy course on Enhanced Ecommerce! Or connect with DO for more on Ecommerce analytics.