Google Analytics ecommerce tracking is a feature through which you can track ecommerce data (like sales amount, number of orders, billing location, average order value, etc) of a website/mobile app in Google Analytics.
If you run/manage an online store/app, you can’t just depend upon the analytics reports provided by your shopping cart. You need Google Analytics Ecommerce tracking set up for your website.
It is only by using Google Analytics ecommerce tracking, you can correlate sales data with website usage data like sessions, bounce rate, traffic source/medium, landing pages, etc.
Such type of correlation analysis is required in order to understand the performance of your landing pages and marketing campaigns. Otherwise, you may never know which landing pages and/or campaigns are driving sales and which are not.
With Google’s robust set of reports, we can understand which products sell well, and what are the best products viewed or bought by the customers. You can also be able to view revenue per transaction and the number of products per transaction and all this information will help you make informed decisions about your sales and business.
Ecommerce tracking is essential, not only to understand how your products and website is performing but also helps in understanding the path and variables that lead to successful conversions.
Step-7: Paste the Google Analytics tracking code on all the pages of your website (in the head section <head>…</head>). If you use a template file then paste the code in the header template file like header.php.
Step-8: Navigate to your website and then navigate to Real Time > Overview report in your Google Analytics account:
If you see the number of active users in your real time overview report then it means, Google Analytics (GA) has been successfully installed on your website. However, if you see 0 number of active users then it means, GA tracking is not correctly installed:
Step-9: Navigate to Conversions > Ecommerce > Overview report:
Whenever you navigate to one of the ecommerce reports of a GA view for which ecommerce tracking is not enabled, you see the message “This report requires ecommerce tracking to be set up for the view“. You would need to enable Ecommerce reporting for each view in which you want to see the ecommerce data.
Step-10: Click on the ‘Admin’ link at the bottom left-hand side:
Step-11: Click on ‘Ecommerce Settings‘ under the view column:
Step-12: Switch on the ‘Enable Ecommerce‘ toggle button and then click on the ‘Save’ button:
You have now successfully enabled Ecommerce reporting for your view. If you now navigate back to Conversions > Ecommerce > Overview report, you would no longer see the message “This report requires ecommerce tracking to be set up for the view“:
However, you still won’t see the ecommerce data because you have not installed the ecommerce tracking code on your website.
Just because you have enabled ecommerce tracking reporting in GA does not mean that you have also set up ecommerce tracking. All you have done so far is allowed your GA view to collect and report on ecommerce data.
Step-13: Integrate your shopping cart (like Shopify) with Google Analytics. Check the help documentation provided by your shopping cart for more details. Following are the help documentation for the most popular shopping carts:
Note: Shopping cart vendors generally won’t help you in setting up ecommerce tracking for your website. You would need to hire a developer (who has experience with the Google Analytics Development environment) to install ecommerce tracking for you.
ga(‘ecommerce:addItem’, { ‘id’: ‘1234’, // Transaction ID. Required. Same as in the transaction data. ‘name’: ‘OKEJeans’, // Product name. Required. ‘sku’: ‘SKJ49’, // Product SKU. ‘category’: ‘Men Jeans’, // Product Category or variation. ‘price’: ‘76.65’, // Product price. ‘quantity’: ‘1’ // Product Quantity. });
ga(‘ecommerce:send’);
This ecommerce tracking code is usually placed after the following line of code ga(‘create’, ‘UA-123456-12’, ‘auto’); and just before the following code ga(‘send’, ‘pageview’);.in the Google Analytics Tracking Code:
ga(‘ecommerce:addItem’, { ‘id’: ‘1234’, // Transaction ID. Required. Same as in the transaction data. ‘name’: ‘OKEJeans’, // Product name. Required. ‘sku’: ‘SKJ49’, // Product SKU. ‘category’: ‘Men Jeans’, // Product Category or variation. ‘price’: ‘76.65’, // Product price. ‘quantity’: ‘1’ // Product Quantity. });
ga(‘ecommerce:send’);
ga(‘send’, ‘pageview’);
</script>
Here the code in bold letters is the ecommerce tracking code. The rest is the Google Analytics tracking code.
However, this code is still not complete. To actually retrieve ecommerce data from your shopping cart, you need to add a server-side script to the code above.
Step-15: Ask your developer to add a server-side script (like PHP, ASP, etc) to your commerce tracking code. Your server-side script should loop through all the products purchased in a transaction and send product data for each of them to the Google Analytics server.
So your actual ecommerce tracking code will look very different once the server-side script is added to it.
For example, here is how your ecommerce tracking may look like if you used PHP:
Note(1):Do not use this ecommerce tracking code on your website. It is just an example and is not even a complete code.
Note(2): The actual ecommerce tracking code will vary depending upon your CMS and shopping cart.
Step-16: Set up a funnel for your checkout process in Google Analytics. To do this, first determine all of the web pages which make up your shopping cart funnel (including the URL of the order confirmation page).
Transaction (or ecommerce transaction) is a purchase order.
For example, 1,736 transactions mean 1,736 purchase orders were placed on the website.
The ecommerce overview report shows the total number of transactions carried out on the website in a specified time period. Each transaction is identified through a unique ID known as the transaction ID.
Here, 4419144621 is a transaction ID.
A single transaction can include several products or several units of the same product as a person can buy several products in one transaction or several units of the same product in one transaction. For example, a person can buy an iPhone and an iPad in a single transaction or a person can buy 10 units (or pieces) of iPhone in a single transaction.
Note: The value of transaction ID is of type ‘string’.
Revenue
The revenue that you see in the Ecommerce Overview report is the total revenue.
Total Revenue = Total Product Revenue + Total Tax + Total Shipping
For example, the total revenue in the Ecommerce Overview report was calculated as:
Your total revenue figure in the Ecommerce Overview report depends upon how the ecommerce tracking has been setup.
If your client decided to exclude tax and shipping amount from the total revenue, then your total revenue and product revenue amount would be the same.
If the tax information and/or shipping information is not supplied while setting up ecommerce tracking then Google Analytics can’t report such information in its reports and they won’t be included in the computation of total revenue.
Note: The value of revenue is of type ‘currency’.
Average Order Value
Average value or average order value (AOV) is the average value of an ecommerce transaction.
Average Value = Total Revenue/Total Transactions
For example, the AOV in the chart above was calculated as:
AOV = $236,857.90 / 1,736 = $136.44
Note: The value of the Average Order Value is of type ‘currency’.
Unique Purchases
Unique purchase is the total number of times a product or a set of products was a part of a transaction.
There are two categories of unique purchases in Google Analytics:
#1 Total Unique purchases of a set of products
#2 Total Unique purchases of a product.
Note: The total unique purchases of a product are not equal to the total number of units sold for the product in one transaction. For example, the total unique purchases of the first product are 75.
But many people wrongly assume the 75 units of the first product were sold in one transaction. This is not the case.
The 75 figure tells you that the first product was a part of a transaction 75 times. It doesn’t tell you the number of units sold for the product in one transaction.
In order to find the number of units of a product that were sold in one transaction, follow the steps below:
Click on a product link in the ‘Product Performance’ report (under Conversions > Ecommerce).
Add ‘transaction ID’ as a ‘secondary dimension.
Sort the ‘Unique Purchases’ column in decreasing order.
You will now see a report like the one below:
Note: The value of Unique Purchases is of type ‘number’.
Per session value is the average value of a session of your ecommerce website.
Per session value = Total Revenue / Total Sessions
For example, in the chart above,
The per session value for all traffic sources is calculated as: $280,650.01 / 1,182,618 = $0.24
The per session value of the traffic from Google Organic is calculated as: $77,228.80 / 210,212 = $0.37
The higher the per session value, the more valuable the traffic is for your ecommerce business.
Note(1): You can determine per session value through ‘E-commerce’ Tabs found in various reports.
Note (2): The ‘per session value’ is of type ‘currency’
Where can you see ecommerce metrics in Google Analytics?
In order to view your ecommerce metrics in Google Analytics. follow the below steps:
Step-1: Login to your Google Analytics reports console.
Step-2: On the left-hand navigation bar, go to ‘Conversions’ and then locate ‘E-commerce’ underneath it.
Under this subheading, you’ll be able to find the shopping and checkout behaviour of the users, transactional information, sales performance and how long it takes for the users to purchase on average.
Let us look at each tab individually and see what information it provides:
Overview Tab
This report provides you with a quick overview of what exactly is happening on the ecommerce side of your business. This report includes information like overall revenue, transactions, avg order value.
Shopping Behaviour Analysis
This report provides an insight into how new vs returning visitors behave when shopping on your site. It also shows you how users progress through a sales funnel.
If we have a look at the report, you can notice that it all starts with ‘All sessions’ on the left-hand side, followed by product views, adding to cart, checking out and making a transaction.
You can view where exactly the users are getting dropped off in each stage.
You can use this report to analyze the pain points in the customer journey. For example, if you are noticing that users are mostly getting dropped off from a particular page, you can investigate the reason and work on improving the performance of the website.
The Checkout Behaviour Analysis
With the help of this report, you can analyze how exactly the users have moved from one step to another before they reached the checkout page. Just like the shopping behaviour report, you have an option in this report which provides insights about the drop off rate at each step.
Product Performance Report
The product performance report in your analytics gives valuable insights into how customers are interacting with your online products.
In this report, you have an option to view your report by product SKU, product name, product category or product brand. It gives detailed insights about how exactly each product is performing, what are top revenue-generating products.
Sales Performance Report
The sales performance tab shows sales and transactional information for individual product orders. This report provides key insights about your sales metrics like revenue, transactions delivery, refund amount etc.
Product List Performance
Product list performance gives you in-depth information on how each individual product or individual set is performing. It basically allows you to track how clusters of data of products in your online store are performing.
How to Fix Common Issues with Ecommerce Tracking
Duplicate Transactions
Duplicate transactions in Google Analytics mean a single transaction is counted more than once.
If this is the case, it completely skews your complete reporting because along with transactions it also messes up revenue, quantity and other metrics as well. To fix this issue, make sure that “_trackTrans” command is called only once per the transaction.
Make sure your thank you page loads only once or make sure user can view this page only once and the transaction is counted only once.
Ecommerce Code Firing multiple times
In some cases, there are chances that the users will bookmark the confirmation page and refresh the page. In such scenario’s the ecommerce code is fired multiple times and data is sent to Google analytics.
As a solution for this issue, we can set up a new field which will be called ‘transaction flag’. Once the transaction is completed this value should be set and ecommerce data should be sent to Google Analytics. Then, the next time the user loads the confirmation page if this value is already set then don’t send fire the ecommerce code.
Missing Transactions in Google Analytics
It is common that you would notice a discrepancy in transactions between your internal system and Google Analytics. However, if this discrepancy is more than 5% then you should investigate the reason for this issue.
There could be several reasons that you would see this issue.
When writing numbers to web pages, some coding languages will automatically insert commas for numeric values. Let’s say for example if the average cost of some product on your website is 1856rs, then if it is written as 1,856rs it would create a problem in Google Analytics reports.
In such cases, JavaScript would have issues parsing these values which contains commas into Google Analytics unless they are specified as a string.
To avoid this issue, we need to ensure that we do not add commas in the numeric values while sending data to Google Analytics.
Apart from these issues, there could be multiple issues with ecommerce implementation. One of the best ways to debug the issues is to use Google’s ecommerce troubleshooter. This tool helps you to identify and resolve all the issues with your ecommerce tracking and reporting.
This troubleshooter provides you with an option to select the issue and provides possible workarounds to fix it.
The plugin contains the functionality for ecommerce tracking in GA. You have to load this plugin, otherwise, your ecommerce tracking won’t work.
Note: The ‘ecommerce’ command should always be called after you have created the tracker object and before following, commands are executed: ecommerce:addTransaction, ecommerce:addItem and ecommerce:send
‘ecommerce:addTransaction’ command
This command is used to create a visitor’s transaction and to store all the information about the transaction.
This command is used to add a product to a visitor’s transaction and to store all the information about the purchased product.
Syntax:
ga(‘ecommerce:addItem’, { ‘id’: ‘1234’, // Transaction ID. Required. Same as in the transaction data. ‘name’: ‘OKEJeans’, // Product name. Required. ‘sku’: ‘SKJ49’, // Product SKU. ‘category’: ‘Men Jeans’, // Product Category or variation. ‘price’: ‘76.65’, // Product price. ‘quantity’: ‘1’ // Product Quantity. });
‘ecommerce:send’ command
This command is used to send all of the ecommerce data to the Google Analytics server.
Syntax: ga(‘ecommerce:send’);
Note: without using the command, you can’t send ecommerce data to Google Analytics.
Important Points about Ecommerce Tracking in Google Analytics
#1 It is common to have data discrepancy between Google Analytics sales data and your shopping cart sales data.
All major pre-built shopping carts have the functionality to handle cancelled orders, test orders, promo/discount codes, unfulfilled orders and refund (partial or full).
Google Analytics does not have any such in-built functionality.
Once a user is served an order confirmation page, the ecommerce tracking code is executed and the transaction is recorded by GA. If the user later asks for a refund, cancels the order or the order is not fulfilled then these changes don’t automatically reflect back in GA ecommerce reports.
Thus depending upon the volume of cancelled orders, refunds and unfulfilled orders your website gets every day, you may see either small or large data discrepancy between GA sales data and your shopping cart sales data.
Remember GA was never designed to function as accounting software. So do not expect 100% accuracy in sales data.
Since Shopping cart handles sales data much better than GA, so whenever you are in doubt, trust your shopping cart data more.
#2 Test orders can very easily skew your ecommerce data in Google Analytics
It is common for web developers to place test orders while testing an application. But it is not common for them to reverse test transactions in Google Analytics.
All the test orders need to be reversed, otherwise, they can greatly inflate your sales data.
Ask your developer to provide you with a list of all test orders placed on the website, at least once a month and then at least deduct them from your analysis, if you can’t reverse them.
If your website gets more than 250k sessions a month and you don’t use GA premium, there is a good possibility that your website is suffering from data sampling issues. When GA sample your data badly, you can’t trust the metrics reported by it.
Your ecommerce data from revenue to ecommerce conversion rate could be 10 to 80% off the mark.
This is a very common issue I encounter while doing a GA audit.
A duplicate transaction can take place when an ecommerce tracking code is executed more than once without placing any new order. Duplicate transactions can easily skew your ecommerce data.
Frequently Asked Questions About Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking
Why do you need ecommerce tracking?
If you run/manage an online store/app, you can’t just depend upon the analytics reports provided by your shopping cart. You need Google Analytics Ecommerce tracking set up for your website. It is only by using Google Analytics ecommerce tracking, you can correlate sales data with website usage data like sessions, bounce rate, traffic source/medium, landing pages, etc.
Such type of correlation analysis is required in order to understand the performance of your website landing pages and marketing campaigns. Otherwise, you may never know which landing pages and/or campaigns are driving sales and which are not.
What is ecommerce conversion rate?
Ecommerce conversion rate is the percentage of sessions which results in ecommerce transactions (in a given time period). Following is the formula to calculate ecommerce conversion rate:
Transaction (or ecommerce transaction) is a purchase order. Each transaction is identified through a unique ID known as transaction ID.
A single transaction can include several products or several units of the same product as a person can buy several products in one transaction or several units of the same product in one transaction. For example, a person can buy iPhone and an iPad in a single transaction or a person can buy 10 units (or pieces) of iPhone in a single transaction.
What is average order value?
Average value or average order value (AOV) is the average value of an ecommerce transaction.
Average Value = Total Revenue/Total Transactions
For example, the AOV in the chart above was calculated as:
AOV = $236,857.90 / 1,736 = $136.44
What are unique purchases?
Unique purchase is the total number of times a product or a set of products was a part of a transaction.
There are two categories of unique purchases in Google Analytics: #1 Total Unique purchases of a set of products #2 Total Unique purchases of a product.
The total unique purchases of a product is not equal to the total number of units sold for the product in one transaction.
"How to use Digital Analytics to generate floods of new Sales and Customers without spending years figuring everything out on your own."
Here’s what we’re going to cover in this training…
#1 Why digital analytics is the key to online business success.
#2 The number 1 reason why most marketers are not able to scale their advertising and maximize sales.
#3 Why Google and Facebook ads don’t work for most businesses & how to make them work.
#4 Why you won’t get any competitive advantage in the marketplace just by knowing Google Analytics.
#5 The number 1 reason why conversion optimization is not working for your business.
#6 How to advertise on any marketing platform for FREE with an unlimited budget.
#7 How to learn and master digital analytics and conversion optimization in record time.
My best selling books on Digital Analytics and Conversion Optimization
Maths and Stats for Web Analytics and Conversion Optimization
This expert guide will teach you how to leverage the knowledge of maths and statistics in order to accurately interpret data and take actions, which can quickly improve the bottom-line of your online business.
Master the Essentials of Email Marketing Analytics
This book focuses solely on the ‘analytics’ that power your email marketing optimization program and will help you dramatically reduce your cost per acquisition and increase marketing ROI by tracking the performance of the various KPIs and metrics used for email marketing.
Attribution Modelling in Google Analytics and BeyondSECOND EDITION OUT NOW!
Attribution modelling is the process of determining the most effective marketing channels for investment. This book has been written to help you implement attribution modelling. It will teach you how to leverage the knowledge of attribution modelling in order to allocate marketing budget and understand buying behaviour.
Attribution Modelling in Google Ads and Facebook
This book has been written to help you implement attribution modelling in Google Ads (Google AdWords) and Facebook. It will teach you, how to leverage the knowledge of attribution modelling in order to understand the customer purchasing journey and determine the most effective marketing channels for investment.
About the Author
Himanshu Sharma
Founder, OptimizeSmart.com
Over 15 years of experience in digital analytics and marketing
Author of four best-selling books on digital analytics and conversion optimization
Nominated for Digital Analytics Association Awards for Excellence
Runs one of the most popular blogs in the world on digital analytics
Consultant to countless small and big businesses over the decade
