The all-knowing Google algorithm never sleeps. Like a master chef perfecting a recipe, it continually adds new ingredients to enhance the search experience. Now, Google is cooking up a new and improved analytics recipe – introducing Google Analytics 4 after many years of serving up Universal Analytics.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest version of Google’s web analytics platform that offers new features and capabilities for measuring and optimizing website performance. One of the key benefits of GA4 is its enhanced e-commerce tracking, which allows you to collect and analyze data on the shopping behaviour and transactions of your website visitors.
Benefits of GA4 integration with your e-commerce cart
By integrating your e-commerce cart with GA4, you can gain valuable insights into your online sales and profitability, such as:
- Which products are most popular and profitable
- Which marketing channels and campaigns drive the most conversions and revenue
- How customers interact with your website and shopping cart throughout their purchase journey
- How to optimize your website design, layout, and checkout process to increase conversions and reduce cart abandonment
- How to segment and target your customers based on their purchase history, preferences, and behaviour
In this article, we will show you how to integrate your e-commerce cart with GA4.
How to integrate your e-commerce cart with GA4
Before you can integrate your e-commerce cart with GA4, you need to create a GA4 property and a data stream for your website. A GA4 property is a container that holds all the data and settings for your website analytics. A data stream is a source of data that feeds into your GA4 property, such as a website or a mobile app.
To create a GA4 property and a data stream, walk through these steps:
- Step- 1: Sign in to your Google Analytics account and click the ‘start measuring’ button.
- Step – II: Provide the Account name. Here, I have entered ‘Digital Googly’. Afterwards, you need to click next.
- Step – III: Provide property name, reporting time zone and currency. Then click on ‘Next’.
- Step – IV: Describe your business – provide relevant business details like industry category and business size.
- Step – V: Choose your business objectives: here, we will select ‘drive online sales’ for the integration of an e-commerce Cart. Afterwards, you need to click ‘Create’.
- Step – VI: Now accept the Google Analytics Terms of Service Agreement by ticking the “I accept” box.
- Step – VII: Now we need to set up data collection from your source (the Web, an Android app or an iOS app). Pick your source, and later, you’ll receive instructions for adding a data collection tag to that source. Since we are working for an e-commerce website, we’ll go for Web.
- Step – VIII: Now, we are going to create a data stream. Here, you must put your website URL and give a name for the ‘stream’. We have given the name ‘sale’.
Your web stream will be like this
- Step – IX: This is our final step. Click on “View Tag Instruction”, and it will land you on an installation instructions page. Copy the Google tag Code provided therein and paste it into the code of every page of your website immediately after the <head> element. It is advisable not to add more than one Google tag to each page.
And bang! You are set to make the most of GA4 features for your e-commerce website.
There are usually three ways to add GA4 tracking code to the website without availing of the Google Tag Manager:
- You can connect the measurement ID to your existing UA property in the universal analytics.
- You can add a new ‘Config’ directive in the existing code on the website.
- You can copy and paste the GA4 tracking code script in the <head> section.
Fundamentals of a GA4 report
GA4 offers much more powerful reporting capabilities, although there will be a learning curve. The new Reports tab comes with pre-set e-commerce reports to help you start the journey. But you can also customize it into complex reports as needed. Let’s look at the fundamentals of a GA4 report.
- Site Traffic: This standard metric tracks visitors. GA4 calls it “Traffic Acquisition” instead of “Channels.”
- User Engagement: GA4 goes beyond visits to see what users do on your site, like pages visited or actions taken. It can also help you gauge page quality and remarketing efforts.
- The bounce rate is gone in GA4. Engagement rates better demonstrate user behaviour per visit.
- Events: An event is any user interaction in quotidian, like playing a video or clicking a link. Enhanced events capture deeper data like scroll percentage or downloads.
- Conversions/Goals: This parameter in the reporting will demonstrate the success of your marketing efforts. It can capture a wide deal, from the number of purchases made to interactions with a chatbot.
Though at first glance, GA4 might appear like a big learning curve, the pain is worth the rigorous analytics and results. Talk to our digital marketing company if you are looking to integrate GA4 into your e-commerce site to make better assessments of your marketing efforts.