If you have been using the traditional e-commerce tracking and have found it a little redundant or thought you would do better with a bit more information, you are in luck, and you will love the enhanced e-commerce reports that have been added on to Google Analytics. And if you have trouble getting your way around, we suggest using this guide to understand the Enhanced eCommerce implementation using Google Tag Manager.
The difference between the two
The difference between the traditional e-commerce tracker and the enhanced e- commerce tracker is that you will get much more information and data with the enhanced tracker. In comparison to the standard five-point report that the older version would provide, the newer enhanced version offers a ten point report, with inclusions of – Shopping Behaviour Analysis, Checkout Behaviour Analysis, Internal Promotion, Product List Performance, Order Coupon, Affiliate Code and Product Coupon.
Let’s take an in-depth look at what these new categories have in store.
Product List Performance
It is an analysis based on the logical grouping of your products on your site. It allows you to analyze the performance of the product listings on your site and whether or not it contributes to the overall performance of your site. For example – if you are a retail clothing site and your customer looks for trousers on the search bar, and your site displays everything that you have tagged as ‘trousers’ on the page. You can use the Product list dimension to tag what you want – which could be related products, things that ‘trouser’ buyers may be interested in.
Shopping Behaviour Analysis
This is probably the most fun you can have with analyzing data. It is an excellent way to look at your customer behavior right from start to finish. Shopping Behavior Analysis gives you a pattern or a behavior analysis of your visitor and puts a number to it – that is the number of drops you have at each stage of the process. This periscopic view is great to allow you to make modifications and understand the pattern of your customers.
Check out behavior
Similar to the Shopping Behavioral Analysis, Checkout Behaviour looks closely at the checkout pattern of your customers. Checkout Behavior allows you to see the dropping points and frequency of abandoned products, giving you tools to understand the visitor’s journey better.
Internal Report
This gives you a performance report of the activity you are doing on your site. For example – if you have a sale directing people to that section of your site, it will give you a report on its performance and or its success or failure.
Order Coupon
Order coupon allows you to see the performance of a Discount coupon that you have launched, review its success and performance on your site.
Product Coupon
This report is very similar to the one above, except that it checks how coupons perform at a product level rather than at an order level. This is great to see how these fair against each product.
Affiliate code
This is an excellent way to analyze how affiliate programs have contributed to the progress of your e-commerce site. This is a great tool if you are dealing with a lot of affiliate programs and want to measure their progress in terms of reciprocation on your site.
What else is new?
With the addition of all the new reports, the Enhanced Ecommerce report takes into consideration every little detail of your site analyzing it and presenting it as a concise report. The perks don’t end there, through the Enhanced Report you not only capture much more data than you could with the traditional tracker, but you can also send it to Google Analytics.
With the previous version, one could only send two parameters – transactional data and item data. But with the Enhanced tracker, you can send Impressions data, Product Data, Promotion Data as well as Action data to Google Analytics, which is great to analyze your data further. Apart from that, you can also upload Refund Data to Google Analytics, wherein manual uploading is required.
How to get it
All this build up about the Enhanced Ecommerce Report must have surely got you eager to dive in. But this is where it can get a little complicated. There is a prerequisite to using the Enhanced Ecommerce Tracker, i.e. you need to be using the Universal Analytics.
All in all the Enhanced Ecommerce report is a significant upgrade from the previous version and have great add-ons that can really help you understand your site and business better. We highly recommend it.
