How To Nail Goal Tracking For Your Ecommerce Store

Most ecommerce businesses understand the importance of setting up goals in Google Analytics. However, many businesses also end up setting just basic goals like “sales” and “cart audience”

While that is a good start, a thriving ecommerce business needs to understand their user journey at different touch points to enable better decision making and really grow revenue.

Tracking multiple touch points makes sure that you understand where customers come from, what they do in your store and what triggers (or does not trigger) them to make a purchase.

Data-driven marketing is one of the best ways to grow your business. And it starts by measuring KPI’s that matter.

In this article, we talk about

• Enhanced ecommerce tracking and how to set it
• Important goals to be tracked
• Important events to be tracked
• Visualising funnels and making data-driven decisions.

Setting Up Simple Goal Tracking

The most basic way to get started with this is identifying different URL’s in the customer journey and set them as goals.

We recommend that for an ecommerce business, you feed in your goal pages like successful transaction, add to cart, payment page etc as these goals.

An Introduction To Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking

If you’ve already installed Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking, then you should be familiar with accessing transaction and revenue data.

Before delving into Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking, it’s important to fully understand what can be measured through the transaction and revenue data available to you.

Be empowered by the following insights available to you through Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking:

• Average Order Value: Retrieve data on the average cart value.
• Days and Sessions to Transaction: Analyse the number of days and sessions on your website a user took before converting into an ecommerce sale.
• Ecommerce Conversion Rate: The percentage of user sessions on your website, which results in sales.
• Periodic Performance Data: Measure and compare different date ranges to determine fluctuations in sales conversion, traffic, and goal completions.
• Revenue: View the total revenue collected over a period of time, as well as the highest and lowest performing channels for revenue.
• Unique and Total Transactions: Identify the number of unique or first-time transactions, as well as the total number of transactions gathered over the specified period.

The reports available through Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking include:

1. Ecommerce Overview
2. Product Performance
3. Sales Performance
4. Transactions
5. Time to Purchase

Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking Reports

Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking opens you up to entire new world of tracking data. More specifically, it allows you to measure user interactions with products on your website. This tracking extends to the user experience of viewing products, impressions, product clicks, and the user checkout process.

By installing Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking, not only would you get access to the above insights, your business would also benefit from a series of 10 powerful analytics reports. These reports include:

1. Ecommerce Overview
2. Shopping Behavior Analysis
3. Checkout Behavior Analysis
4. Product Performance
5. Sales Performance
6. Product List Performance
7. Internal Promotion
8. Order Coupon
9. Product Coupon
10. Affiliate Codes

Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking Reports

Setting Up Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking

Assuming you have already set up regular Ecommerce Tracking, there are two main options for implementing Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking.

To implement enhanced ecommerce, you need to make some changes at the view level

Important Ecommerce Goals To Measure

Add to Cart Tracking

Tracking how many people clicked the add to cart button is obviously important.

A simple way to do this is to create this into an event.

Here is a simple event tracking code you can use and add to all your “Add To Cart” buttons

onClick=”ga(‘send’, ‘event’, { eventCategory: ‘Site Events’, eventAction: ‘Click’, eventLabel: ‘Add To Cart’});”

When people start clicking on the button, the events would be triggered and you would be able to view the data in Google Analytics

Account Creation:

In a similar fashion, whenever someone signs up, you can trigger a new event that records new signups.

onClick=”ga(‘send’, ‘event’, { eventCategory: ‘Registration’, eventAction: ‘Submit’, eventLabel: ‘New User’});”

Cart abandonment funnel:

Tracking how users abandon your funnel is equally important. This gives you an understanding of different areas that you need to work on in terms of improving your conversion ratios. Understanding the rate of abandonment, as well as where it occurred will provide the necessary insights required to make improvements.

The best way to do this is to create a funnel.

Once you set up your final goal as “Successful Order” don’t forget to add the steps before that- cart and checkout.

Email Subscriptions:

You may be providing an incentive for sign-ups which means users end up subscribing to your mailing lists for offers, promotions, and blog posts. It’s imperative that these leads are nurtured closely.

To track them, you could go with either one of the options

• If the URL changes after sign up: You can create a new goal by adding a destination such as /thankyou-sign up
• If the URL remains the same, you can use an event tracking code like this
  
  onClick=”ga(‘send’, ‘event’, { eventCategory: ‘Newsletter Signup’, eventAction: ‘Submit’, eventLabel: ‘New Subscriber’});”
  

Vital event listener goals:  

Specific page visit

Understanding product views are critical. As you’ve already set up a cart page goal/event, it’s best to put up event tracking for product views.

This code can be set up on your product images and titles. A sample event code tracking code is shared below

onClick=”ga(‘send’, ‘event’, { eventCategory: ‘Site Events’, eventAction: ‘Click’, eventLabel: ‘Viewed Product’});”

On a similar level, you should also track

• How many people went to the customer support page.
• How many people viewed the returns and refunds policy. This would give an idea of how many users check these details before buying a product.

Mobile tracking

Mobile vs desktop ecommerce tracking is a vital operation. In today’s world, the penetration of smartphones is increasing with each passing day.

To understand which steps people take on mobile, it’s best to create dashboards/custom reports to understand this.



You could add a segment for mobile and tablet traffic to start tracking goals from different platforms. This would give a clear idea of how people are interacting with your platform from different devices.

Site Search Results

This is a very powerful KPI as it tells you what exactly are people looking for on your platform.

Image : business2community.com

Understanding the user journey and touch points is vital for every ecommerce business.

Understanding what drives the customer further down the funnel, as well as tracking these movements successfully is a great way to grow your ecommerce businesses.