E-Commerce Tracking in Google Analytics
E-Commerce Tracking in Google Analytics
E-Commerce Tracking in Google Analytics
The purpose of website conversion analytics is to track activity on your site, to analyse this data and then to optimise the site for better performance. One of the (many) great features in Google Analytics is that it allows you to accurately track and measure e-commerce transactions. This not only allows you to calculate the ROI of your various marketing campaigns quickly, but also allows you greater insights into how visitors are interacting with your site and your products.
E-commerce tracking in Google Analytics integrates with any ecommerce site and is fairly easy to set up. Firstly, you need to ensure that you've enabled e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics. You set this in the "Profile Settings" page of your account.
Once you've enabled e-commerce tracking, you'll need to add a customised tracking code to your shopping cart pages to ensure that the tracking data is sent to Google Analytics. This can be done through an include, or simply hand-coding it into the pages' HTML. Effectively, there are three methods that are involved in tracking ecommerce activity on a website.
The start of the transaction:
First, you will need to invoke the _addTrans() method to begin a transaction. You could think about this as somebody walking into your store and picking up a basket. The transaction object essentially stores all the information about a single transaction including order ID numbers, the delivery address and shipping charges.
Add items to the transaction:
Now, as a person continues to browse though your site, they may add one or many items to their basket or shopping cart. Each of these items needs to be individually identified and contains unique information. This information is gathered using the _addItem() method.
As items are added, they are associated with a specific transaction (the same basket) using the same order ID number.
This method has several arguments which are matched by position so it's important to include all of the parameters, even if some of them are blank. These parameters are as follows: _addItem(orderID, sku, name, category, price, quantity).
The SKU (stock keeping unit), price and quantity arguments are required to track the items correctly. However, it's recommended to populate all the argument fields correctly as these will influence how data is reflected in reports.
Tell Google Analytics about the transaction:
The final step in this transactional process is to submit the transaction to Analytics. This is usually done upon check-out . To do this, it's necessary to call the third and final method in e-commerce tracking: _trackTrans(). This will send the transaction and item data to Google Analytics.
For a more detailed explanation of these methods, and examples of customised code snippets, check out this post on Google Code about e-commerce tracking objects.
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