Ecommerce Tracking in Google Analytics.

How to use Ecommerce Tracking in Google Analytics. Check these step by steps.

Ecommerce Tracking Part 1: How it Works

This post is the first in a series of e-commerce transaction tracking with Google Analytics. Why is e-commerce tracking important? Well, transaction data is a vital piece of information when analyzing online business performance.

Sure, it’s great to measure things like conversion rate, but revenue is much more tangible to many business owners. Having the e-commerce data in your web analytics application makes it easier to perform analysis. Do you need to set up e-commerce tracking? No, but it sure helps.

The Big Pictures

E-commerce tracking is based on the same principal as standard pageview tracking. JavaScript code sends the data to a Google Analytic servers by requesting an invisible gif file. The big difference is that e-commerce data is sent rather than pageview data.

But how does Google Analytics get the e-commerce data? That’s the tricky part. You, the site owner, must create some type of code that inserts the transaction data into the GA JavaScript. Sounds tricky, huh? Well, its not that bad.

Step by Step: How it Works

Let’s break it down and walk through what actually happens.

1. The visitor submits their transaction to your server.
2. Your server receives the transaction data and processes the transaction. This may include a number of steps at the server level, such as sending a confirmation email, checking a credit card number, etc.
3. After processing the transaction the server prepares to send the receipt page back to the visitor. While preparing the receipt page your server must extract some the transaction data and insert it into the Google Analytics JavaScript. This is the code that you must create.
4. The receipt page is sent to the visitor’s browser.
5. While the receipt page renders in the visitor’s browser the e-commerce data is sent to Google Analytics via special GA JavaScript.
6. Here’s a basic diagram of the process. Again, the biggest challenge during implementation is adding code to your web server that inserts the transaction data, in the appropriate format, into the receipt page. I’ll cover the setup in part 2 of this series.

What Data can be Tracked?

Google Analytics collect two types of e-commerce data: transaction data and item data. Transaction data describes the overall transaction (transaction ID, total sale, tax, shipping, etc.) while item data describes the items purchased in the transaction (sku, description, category, etc.). All of this data eventually ends up in GA reports. Here’s a complete list of the data:

Transaction Data

1. Transaction ID: your internal transaction ID [required]
2. Affiliate or store name
3. Total
4. Tax
5. Shipping
6. City
7. State or region
8. Country

Item Data

1. Transaction ID: same as in transaction data [required]
2. SKU
3. Product name
4. Product category or product variation
5. Unit price [required]
6. Quantity [required]

A few notes about the data. First, the geo-location data is no longer used by Google Analytics. The new version of GA tries to identify where the buyer is located using an IP address lookup.

Also, you should avoid using any non-alpha numeric characters in the data. Especially in the numeric fields. Do not add a currency identifier (i.e. dollar sign) in the total, tax or shipping fields. this can cause problems with the data.

Google BaseFeed With New Attributes

If you're a Google Product Search provider, you've always known that Google classify attributes into three categories: "required," "recommended" and "optional." Google has recently updated the list of attributes in each category to make it easier for providers to submit their product information and prioritize the attributes relevant to their products. Here is an updated list of attribute requirements, along with some information on what the categories mean.

Required attributes are attributes that you're, well, required to include for all your items. Google won't be able to process and approve items in your feed that are missing required attributes. The following is a list of required attributes:

description

id

link

price

title

Recommended attributes are ones that Google strongly recommend including for your data feeds, and Google consider them as important as required attributes. However, Google realize that not all providers and items have this information available; therefore, if your feed contains items without this information, Google will still process them, but it will be more difficult to ensure that they appear for relevant search queries. The following is a list of recommended attributes:

brand

condition

image_link

isbn

mpn

upc

All other attributes are optional attributes. Optional attributes give you more ways to describe your items and additionally help shoppers find your products.

Google hope that this update will make it easier for you to create data feeds and prioritize the time spent on them. For more information on these attributes, you can visit our feed guidelines here. Also, keep your eyes out for status messages on the data feeds dashboard that will provide additional guidance on the attributes Google is recommending for your items.