E-Commerce Tracking with Google Analytics

If you operate an online shopping store and have ever wondered what influences some products to sell well while others fail you may want to consider setting up E-commerce tracking with Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking all kinds of valuable data and statistics and it makes for a great tool when product tracking is needed. When implemented correctly you can track your websites ROI, product purchase, conversion rates and more. The following is a tutorial demonstrating how to get tracking set up on your store.

Step #1:

Enabling e-commerce tracking in your websites profile.

Step #2:

Adding Google Analytics tracking to your receipt page.

For this step you will want to confirm that the same Analytics code that is being used in the rest of the site is also present in your stores receipt page. Additionally this will require that you make some changes to the code base, this is covered in the third step.

Step #3:

Adding the _addTrans() method into the Google Analytics script, in order to correctly track individual transactions.

This third step in the process requires the _addTrans() method. This Method indicates that a transaction has taken place but in order for this to work correctly you will have to add descriptive arguments to this method. Your website code will need to then be configured in such a way that it retrieves these values from your merchant software and populates the correct information.

Ex. Order ID*, Affiliation, Total*, Tax, Shipping, City, State, Country

Your websites code will need to retrieve dynamically the vales from your e-commerce merchant software in order to populate the accurate data.

Here is a sample from the Google Analytics learning center:

_addTrans() Begins a call to _addTrans() to launch a transaction.
Order ID*, Affiliation, Total*, Tax, Shipping, City, State, Country

_addItem() For each product a visitor purchases, call_addItem()
Order ID*, SKU/Code*, Product Name, Category, Price*, Quantity*

_trackTrans()
Sends both the transaction data and the item data to the Google Analytics servers.

If you operate a shopping cart where the checkout process is handled on a different domain or sub domain then you will need to track activity across domains. Form more info on this please refer to Google’s training on tracking across multiple domains.