A sales cart tool reports the number of purchases, how many views to your cart, and total revenue which is good information to have but is it useful? What if you could correlate sales data to a specific traffic source or knew which landing page was contributing to the most conversions? That would be powerful data…and setting up Google Analytics eCommerce reporting allows you to do just that!
Google Analytics Ecommerce helps you understand the performance of your marketing campaigns.
Tying purchases to the source/medium report you can see how much money you are making by traffic source. Having the ability to see conversions by landing page allows you to make changes or improve on them to increase conversions. These are two powerful pieces of information you have at your fingertips.
If you know what marketing activities are making you money and which ones are not then you can be doing more of what is working and less of what’s not working.
I walk you through exactly how to enable your Google Analytics Ecommerce reporting to ensure the right things are turned on so you can begin receiving information from your cart tool. Then I cover what you need to do on your cart tool end to make sure you are passing that information along appropriately. Google Analytics and your cart tool need to be integrated so this information is transferred over.
Pro Tip – Google Analytics Ecommerce is not a one-way street. It needs to be turned on in Google Analytics and also integrated with your cart tool to pass information.
How to set up Google Analytics Ecommerce Reporting
To begin, head over to your Google Analytics admin settings and decide which view you want to turn Ecommerce on for. It’s important to note that turning it on in one view does NOT mean it’s turned on in all views. You will need to turn it on for each individual view that you want to have Ecommerce displayed on. There is no harm to have it turned on for each view. My recommendation is to enable Ecommerce in every view so that all views are collecting this data.
In the view click on the Ecommerce setting. The ‘Ecommerce Setup’ menu will pop up. This is where you will toggle ‘ON’ the setting. You will then notice a secondary type of setting for ‘Ecommerce Enhanced Reporting’ pop up. Toggle this ‘ON’ as well.
There are certain features, depending on the sales cart tool, that may use enhanced eCommerce to pass extra information. With that being said the majority of the time you won’t use or need the Enhanced Ecommerce information (just note some of the reports that used enhanced eCommerce do require advanced customization). The best practice is to have it enabled as well to ensure you are not missing out on anything that may be shared. Once you have enabled both Ecommerce and Enhanced Ecommerce hit Save.
Accessing Your Ecommerce Data
Navigate to your Acquisition report > All Traffic > Source/Medium. This is the report that shows you where your traffic is coming from. In the Acquisition section, you are able to view the numbers of users by traffic source and if they are new, along with number of sessions. The behavior section gives us data as to how they acted once they got on your site. You can see your bounce rate for each source, if your users view multiple pages per session, and how long was their average session duration. And now on the right hand side (drum roll), this is where you will see your conversion information.
Once your sales cart tool is sending over actual conversion data you will start to see revenue by traffic source and which is creating the most amount of revenue for you. You can filter by time period by changing the dates in the top corner of the report.
The number of users does not always equal more revenue.
There is not always a direct correlation between the number of people (ie. how much traffic you are getting) and revenue. This insightful information allows you to see exactly how your marketing efforts are actually translating into sales. Otherwise, you may not know what campaigns or landing pages are driving sales and which are not. Use this information to make better-informed decisions on where you should spend more or less time when it comes to marketing.
Set up Ecommerce Reporting on your Cart Tool
Now that you have enabled eCommerce in Google Analytics it’s time to install the tracking code in your cart tool. Google Analytics allows you to collect and report on this information but we need this data to be passed from your cart tool. Adding your Google Analytics property ID in your cart tool is how your cart tool will know where to send over the information.
Google Analytics Ecommerce is a native integration to most cart tools making it super easy to set up. Cart tools such as ThriveCart, Woocommerce, Shopify and Kajabi (to names a few) are among those platforms where all you need to do is go into the tool’s settings and/or integrations menu and add your Google Analytics Property ID. Your Google Analytics Property ID is found in your admin settings > Property> Property Settings. Once this is added the platforms are integrated and the information will be passed through.
If you are a ClickFunnels user like myself you will probably be disappointed to learn that ClickFunnels is one of those tools that does not have this native Google Analytics integration. Learn why I use ClickFunnels as a sales page builder but ThriveCart as the sales cart tool. If you use a different cart tool than the ones I mentioned above and unsure if the cart tool integrates, Google ‘GA Ecommerce reporting and cart tool name’ to find out how to integrate them and if it’s possible or not.
Reporting Made Easy
Setting up Google Analytics Ecommerce reporting and integrating with your sales cart tool is a powerful way to analyze your revenue and optimize your customer journey. If you want an easy way to look at traffic without having to go into Google Analytics we have dashboards just for you. Datable. uses a tool called Google Data Studio to create dashboards that pulls data right from your Google Analytics account. The information is visually displayed in a way you can actually understand and know immediately what actions you need to take to get different or better results. Our dashboards save you time and energy and allow you to feel CONFIDENT in making decisions as a CEO. Check out our dashboards shop at Datable.
