How To Use Server Side Tracking On Ecommerce Sites [Podcast]

With a staggering 98% open rate, SMS marketing should be part of every DTC brand’s marketing strategy. The best part is that SMS marketing works well for both acquisition and retention. With Littledata’s new Postscript integration, you can better track which SMS campaigns are driving sales and exactly when and where customers are converting. Narrowing down campaigns to the channel level in Google Analytics 4 gives your business a single source of truth for attribution. 1 of every 5 orders is missed by merchants who rely solely on Shopify’s tracking, and this is getting even worse with recent privacy changes. With proper tracking of your SMS campaigns you can up your analysis of key ecommerce metrics gathered by Littledata like AOV, LTV, and more. Helping your team save time, money, and resources by setting up tracking or doing analysis manually. Littledata even lets you see which SMS campaigns perform best for different types of orders (e.g. subscription recurring orders, first time subscription orders, one off purchases, upsells).  Merchants continue to dive into channel data in order to optimize their campaigns and understand customer behavior. Knowing how channels are performing and contributing to key ecommerce metrics enables merchants have a better understanding and build custom reports in Google Analytics 4's newly launched exploration tool. Allowing merchants to have better insight and control over their data. A popular example is Funnel exploration which allows you to see direct or indirect steps around efforts like SMS and how they play a role in the customer journey. Benefits of using Littledata with SMS include: Single source of truth in Google Analytics. See which SMS campaigns are driving sales and exactly when and where customers are converting. Better marketing attribution. Littledata’s app magically stitches sessions together so you can understand performance across paid and organic channels. And build better audiences in Facebook Ads, Google Ads and more. Audience building. Littledata captures complete data about browsing behavior, checkout steps and purchasing behavior (orders, refunds, repeat purchases) for more accurate retargeting campaigns and audience building. Complete subscription tracking. Many subscription ecommerce merchants use Postscript to power their SMS/text marketing, and Littledata integrates with leading subscription apps like Recharge, Smartrr and Ordergroove to track recurring orders directly in Google Analytics 4 and tie them back to customer touch points like email, SMS and Facebook Ads. Littledata’s no code solution offers easy setup without the need for developers. Simply add the correct UTM parameters when setting up your Postscript campaigns and our app will start stitching sessions together behind the scenes. See for yourself with a free 30-day trial. [note] Learn more about our Postscript connection here [/note] Curious about how to succeed in a world without third-party cookies? Learn more about why top DTC brands are moving to server-side tracking.

It’s been reported that over 4,000,000 websites use Shopify for their ecommerce sales channels. From finding the right product to listing and selling—merchants are some of the busiest people in the world. And in a few short months they will all have a common problem when it comes to their Google Analytics accounts as Universal Analytics is officially deprecated. However, current Littledata users will not have this issue and in fact many are already starting to make the switch to Google Analytics’ next evolution and release of Google Analytics 4 (GA4).  Littledata launched our Shopify and BigCommerce beta connection to GA4 in early 2022. We’ve seen hundreds of current and new customers install our app—which stitches together client-side and server-side tracking—we know pretty fancy stuff. On top of that, we launched GA4 Courses which is complimentary for ecommerce professionals to learn how to proactively setup and use GA4 reporting and explorations now built on event based tracking instead of session based tracking. Giving ecommerce brands the tools they need to track the customer journey from end-to-end in a matter of a few clicks.  With that—we are excited to announce we are officially out of beta! Our team stands at the ready to help you as you migrate to GA4 or launch a completely new ecommerce business together. Available on both Shopify and BigCommerce it is a breeze for many businesses to set up and start viewing tracked events from first touch-point through the checkout process and even post-purchase events.  “This is a pivotal moment for ecommerce analytics,” says Ari Messer, Littledata co-founder and CMO. “GA4 can seem intimidating from the outside, but once you start poking around you’ll find it to be far more powerful and flexible than Universal Analytics. We were the first to market with GA4 tracking, and over the past year we learned a lot from real test cases with top DTC brands on Shopify and BigCommerce. We can’t wait to see what merchants do with our new tracking – so far the results focus on finding higher ROI on organic channels while eliminating waste on paid channels.” [note] New to Littledata? Read our verified reviews on G2 [/note] Data-driven brands like Geologie have gotten around this Google Analytics roadblock early on and made the move to GA4—with success to tout in the industry they’ve used data as a key function of their business for acquisition and retention marketing to their subscribers. Citing recently the extensive work it would have taken to set up tracking manually, learn Shopify’s API in detail, developing, maintaining and more. Ultimately, in all businesses it comes down the resources you want to dedicate or deploy. If you are a small team this gives you access to the same tools that industry leaders like GRIND use. If you are a large scale enterprise ecommerce business it buys back hours of work for your developers and marketing team members to focus on putting the data into action vs. managing the conversion tracking.  Celebrate with us by trying out our GA4 connection free for 30 days, no strings attached. In that time, we challenge you to set up new reports in explorations, build audiences for your Google Ads, and if you are still feeling ambitious try out our Meta Conversions API for Facebook and Instagram Ad campaigns.  [tip] Don't know where to start? Book a demo with our specialists [/tip] As always, a special thank you to our customers who make it possible for us to continue to dream, build, and be inspired by data!