Enhanced Ecommerce (EE) is a Google Analytics plug-in that provides merchants with better insights for the shopping behavior of users.
Enhanced Ecommerce tracking requires your developers to send lots of extra product and checkout information in a way that Google Analytics can understand. So why use it?
Note: Update: If you are using GA4, the new version of Google Analytics, Enhanced Ecommerce will be a bit different. Read more about GA4 for ecommerce
Why use Enhanced Ecommerce?
The main benefit of Enhanced Ecommerce (EE) over standard ecommerce implementation is the sheer number of valuable reports merchants have access to with EE. Enhanced Ecommerce is necessary to get complete checkout funnel reporting and similar reports in GA.
Not only that, but merchants can segment data based on ecommerce events — which users visited your product pages, where the customer journey hit a roadblock (e.g. a customer pondered a product but didn’t add it to cart, etc.) or during which steps of the checkout process a user abandoned their cart.
It’s essential to capture checkout funnel events, and EE helps with that. Tracking checkout funnel steps in Google Analytics doesn’t just offer insight into the checkout journey, it also gives you the tools you need to set up custom funnels.
Ultimately, this kind of data helps merchants zoom in on their sales funnel and alter the parts of the process that don’t lead to conversion.
GTM data layer for ecommerce tracking
Enchanced Ecommerce implementation is no small feat, but it also depends on a number of factors — the size of your store, the number and type of Google Analytics custom dimensions you need to add, etc.
Without question, Google Tag Manager is the simplest and best way to enable Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Analytics.
If you already use Google Tag Manager (GTM) to track page views, you must send ecommerce data via Google Tag Manager.
If you don’t already use GTM, it’s simple to set up: just activate Enhanced Ecommerce within your Google Analytics tags and use a dataLayer as an ecommerce data source. Just make sure the dataLayer contains all ecommerce data.
Step 1
Enable enhanced ecommerce reporting in the Google Analytics view admin setting, under ‘Ecommerce Settings’
Step 2
Select names for your checkout steps (see point 4 below):
Step 3
Get your developers to push the product data behind the scenes to the page ‘dataLayer’. Here is the developer guide.
Step 4
Make sure the following steps are tracked as a pageview or event, and for each step set up a Universal Analytics tracking tag:
- Product listing view
- Product detail view
- Add to cart event
- Remove from cart event
- Checkout step 1 (views the checkout page)
- Checkout step 2 etc – whatever registration, shipping or tax steps you have
- Purchase confirmation
- Refund
Step 5
Send the data to Google Analytics using the Data Layer. Instruct the tags to look into the Data Layer and pull the key-value pairs from the eCommerce object pushed most recently into dataLayer by selecting the correct Google Analytics variable.
Step 6
This step involves checking the setup. After you have configured everything in place, you’ll need to check your entire. What you should be looking for is:
- Are all the keys configured in the dataLayer.push() getting picked up and being sent to Google Analytics?
- Is the payload length too long?
- Is there a risk of data duplication with some hits?
To debug these, you really only need three tools: GTM’s own Preview mode, the Google Analytics Debugger browser extension, and Google Chrome browser’s DevTools. Yes, there are plenty of other tools you can use, but these have proven to be more than enough in my own experience.
GTM data layer for ecommerce tracking
Wrapping up
Need some more help? Get in touch with our lovely team of Google Analytics experts and we’d be happy to answer any questions!
At Littledata, our Google Analytics connection is the easiest way for you to automate GA for Shopify stores. With Littledata’s app, you get:
- GTM and Google Analytics data layer that works automatically for ecommerce tracking, including checkout funnel tracking
- Seamless connections with apps like ReCharge and CartHook
- Raw data that remains available in Google Analytics or Segment
- Accurate analytics for Shopify with complete sales and marketing events captured automatically
Try our Google Analytics app for Shopify free for 30 days on any plan. On Shopify Plus? Learn more about Littledata Plus.