How to create sales performance reports in Google Analytics 4

The key to growing your ecommerce subscriptions is understanding your customers — why they subscribe, pause, churn, or upgrade their subscription.  Accurate subscription tracking has always been a challenge for Shopify and BigCommerce stores, and that hasn’t changed in the newest version of Google Analytics, GA4. Shopify’s newly released GA4 integration tracks “certain ecommerce events” after applying tags, but subscription events are missing. Luckily, first-party tracking has come a long way since the early days of Shopify. For brands interested in capturing data across the entire customer journey, the solution is easier than you may think. No, you don’t need custom GTM — that can be time-consuming and costly to maintain — you just need the right app that tracks subscription events in GA4 automatically. [tip] Try our free GA4 Conversions Checker to make sure your GA4 property is tracking complete conversion and transaction data. [/tip] Once you’ve successfully tracked your recurring orders in GA4, you’ll need to build out reports to understand your subscription sales performance over time. Building segments in GA4 sets the foundation for deeper analysis.  In the latest installment of our GA4 courses, we walk you through how to build segments for first-time and recurring orders in GA4. How to create segments for subscriptions in GA4 GA4’s segments feature allows users to slice and dice their data into smaller subsets, empowering data-driven brands to understand trends between customers with similar characteristics, including whether or not they’re subscribed to your product. This is true whether you’re selling individual products by subscription, or product bundles. Get started by creating a new custom dimension in your Google Analytics 4 property — ‘affiliation.’ By adding ‘affiliation’ as a custom dimension, you’ll be able to analyze subscription data and answer specific questions to your business’s needs.  Add these custom dimensions to a copy of your sales performance report with custom event segments, and you’re off to the races! Use the insights from your first-time orders and recurring orders segments to understand your subscription sales performance, analyze the real return on investment (ROI) of your subscription sales, and build out in-depth reports with actionable data. [note] Users can also use the custom dimension for affiliation in a filter and apply it to a custom report. [/note] Follow our step-by-step guide below to take a deep dive into your subscription sales performance: https://youtu.be/aLRsAp3EhWM Get more GA4 With GA4’s deadline quickly approaching, check out the rest of our free resources to jumpstart your GA4 journey: Extending our Recharge integration to work with GA4 and Facebook CAPI GA4: What Shopify stores should do TODAY to keep up with the new version of Google Analytics How to track ecommerce conversions in GA4 10 reasons to switch to GA4 GA4 Glossary of Terms: What you need to know to get started

Recently, Ari Messer, Co-founder and CMO at Littledata, caught up with Awtomic—who provides shoppers and merchants with the best tools to manage subscription products and membership services easily. Brands that have subscription models at the core of their business know that in 2023 increasing their retention rate for new and existing users is key to their growth. Ari shared the importance of using data effectively in decision-making by understanding consumer behavior and attribution saying:  “The marketing mix for every brand is a little different. To reach high-value customers you have to adjust marketing and not just aim for a big purchase at the beginning but for the right kinds of engaged customers. You have to use your data to build community.”   Many brands struggle with consistent, trustworthy data which can lead to poor decisions and ineffective marketing. Littledata’s app helps merchants clean up and organize their data sources so that they can make informed decisions—saving hours of implementation time and data maintenance.  Merchants' biggest problems with Google Analytics include inconsistent data, missing data, and double tracking. Littledata helps clean up these problems and provides consistent data by grabbing serverside and clientside data from their Shopify or BigCommerce store and sending it to destinations like Segment and Google Analytics (UA +GA4). The result is that merchants can confidently make decisions based on accurate data, including LTV and cohort analysis. This includes one-off or recurring orders which is something many brands struggle to sort out by doing analysis.   Of course, brands are looking at data to increase their bottom line but big players in the space also are using data to drive creative campaigns for their target audience which in turn amplifies their brand’s community and often reaches higher value customers. Looking to stay on top of the Shopify and BigCommerce data scene? Join the thousands of brands who receive news and updates from Littledata, sign up for our newsletter.