Google recently announced Enhanced Ecommerce came out of beta, so its now officially out there. This ‘optimized ecommerce’, as Google calls it, provides e-tailers with even more tools to get insight into the behavior of their visitors. But what exactly are these new tools and what can they do for you?
Funnels vs. Waterfalls
Enhanced ecommerce provides you with an insight in the full customer journey: from the moment someone enters your site to the moment they checkout. For starters, the display of all the steps during the checkout process has completely changed. Previously everyone created a goal funnel to track which step it was that most customers dropped out. In the improved Enhanced Ecommerce reports, this is displayed horizontally via a waterfall display.
Another advantage of Enhanced Ecommerce is that you no longer need a separate URL for each step in the checkout process. This means that with a so-called ‘one-step-checkout’, where the URL doesn’t change between step 1 and 2, you can still measure the drop-out rate between steps through importing events.
On top of that, Enhanced Ecommerce offers the possibility to segmentate the display and compare different periods. This way you can easily measure the differences between mobile and PC traffic for instance, or the results of a specific campaign.
Payment behavior analysis
Through the payment behavior waterfall, each step of the payment process is visualized: from checkout to the thank you page. It’s possible to add extra characteristics to each step, like the chosen payment method.
It’s also possible to create a separate segment for customers who prematurely left your shopping cart, and use this information for re-marketing later on.
Shopping behavior analysis
The second waterfall report is based on all visits, including those who only visited the homepage. Hereby you can see which percentage of visitors looked at a product page, or the amount of visitors without adding a product to the cart (no cart addition).
Product performances
Just like in traditional ecommerce reports, Enhanced Ecommerce shows you what products are the best sold products. Additional, Enhanced Ecommerce provides you with the possibility to see how many times a specific product page is viewed and a product is added to the shopping cart. These events translate itself into add-to-cart-ratio and look-to-book-ratio.
You can also analyze the product reports on basis of product category, brand and shopping phase. Through custom metrics such as color, size and margin you can go even deeper into analyzing product performances.
Implementation
Enhanced Ecommerce uses an ec.js-plugin, which has to be added to the Google Analytics tracking code. Furthermore, Enhanced Ecommerce is only available for Universal Analytics, so for everyone who is still using Classic Analytics: this is a good moment to upgrade.
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