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Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Universal Analytics


May 28, 2014

At this week’s Google Analytics Summit 2014, Google announced its new Enhanced Ecommerce features for the Universal Analytics platform. Here are answers to some top questions about the feature.

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Download our solution brief PDF on Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce features.
Or watch our 30-minute webinar on Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce.

How will Enhanced Ecommerce improve Universal Analytics?

The new Enhanced Ecommerce feature in Google Universal Analytics provides native support for today’s digital shopping experiences. With Enhanced Ecommerce, businesses can immediately gain clear insight into the most important metrics about shopper behavior and conversion: what products are viewed, where they are viewed, when they are added to carts, how the checkout process works and where customers get lost, and even details like payment methods.

What problems does Enhanced Ecommerce solve?

Two chief issues have included how to understand the presence and use of on-site promotions as well as how to account for product returns and order cancellations. Enhanced Ecommerce solves both these challenges by providing reports for on-site promotional campaigns and promo code usage, pricing discounts, and returns and cancellations. Using these features, businesses can readily analyze which promotions drive incremental sales and remove the effect of cancelled or returned orders from revenue reporting and attribution, making data more accurate and trustworthy.

Enhanced Ecommerce for Universal Analytics – new features that provide rich segmentation, insights into pre-purchase behavior and product performance analysis .

How will Enhanced Ecommerce data improve site performance?

Enhanced Ecommerce data improve site performance two ways. First, with product impression-to-view and view-to-purchase reporting, businesses will be able to better understand which products appeal to customers more and thereby enhance exposure to those products. Second, with Promotion tracking and analysis, businesses will be able to understand which on-site promotions drive better sales performance. Finally, through the improved checkout process measurement, it will be easier and faster to identify where shoppers bail out of the purchase funnel. This is the highest-value, lowest-hanging-fruit. Losing people who have already added a product to your cart is atrocious. With clear visibility into funnel loss we can improve performance by addressing the causes of loss at those steps in the checkout process.

What other challenges will Enhanced Ecommerce help to overcome going forward?

Enhanced Ecommerce will help businesses overcome many challenges. One of my favorite new reports is the Abandonments report. This lets you easily identify sessions that do and don’t have any shopping activity sliced by dimensions such as new or returning, geography, source or medium, and more. You can also easily see sessions that do have shopping activity and how many shopped but didn’t add items to the cart, abandoned carts, or abandoned checkout. As an example, I’m looking at a report that indicates a 74.4% checkout abandonment rate. That insight is shockingly simple: over 7 out of 10 people that add something to the cart and start to checkout don’t complete it! This is the kind of data that can drive change more readily than, say, simple conversion rates for Ecommerce orders.

Want to learn more or get a demo?

We’d love to show you around the new Google Analytics enhanced Ecommerce reports – contact us to learn more or schedule a demo!