5 Areas where Enhanced Ecommerce Provides Deeper Insights

Even with the remarkable rise of online retail enhanced ecommerce is designed to keep pace. It’s fair to say there are five main benefits that enhanced ecommerce enables merchants to understand and take advantage of Google Analytics (GA) to provide deeper insights into their customer’s journey. They are: shopping/purchasing behavior, ecommerce performance, merchandising performance, product attribution, and CRM integration. Unsure whether you should be levering enhanced ecommerce? Here are five benefits to consider.

“Enhanced Ecommerce is undoubtedly an excellent feature of Google Analytics. It provides us with a set of reports that truly extend the capabilities of funnel-based website analysis.“
– Shawn Gannon, Director Digital Marketing

Shopping/Purchasing Behavior

Shopper Purchasing Behavior allows merchants of GA to track shopping and checkout behavior. Not only does it give insights into product page-views, cart additions and removals, transactions started, transactions abandoned, and transactions completed; the information is also packaged into a compact and visually appealing graph that makes it easy to view in one place during the shopping and checkout process.

Consider some of the following questions, which these reports would help answer:

• How many customers view product detail pages then add a product to their cart before starting the checkout process?
• At which stage are my customers most likely to drop off?
• How are my users navigating my checkout funnel? Is there a checkout step that is causing users to drop out of the funnel?

Ecommerce Performance

Ecommerce Performance provides merchants the ability to track general e-commerce success metrics including: revenue, conversion rates, average transaction quantity, average order value, and the rate that products are added to a cart and purchased after being viewed.

Merchandising Performance

Merchandising Performance lets merchants measure both internal and external marketing efforts that support shopping and checkout behavior. This includes reports centered around: internal promotion measurement, order coupon measurement, product coupon measurement, and affiliate attribution.

Consider some of the following questions, which these reports can help answer:

• How are my internal promotions (like product or category banners) driving users to areas of my site? How are they contributing to conversions?
• How are coupons (either at a product level or an order level) being used by customers? How effective are these coupons? How often are they being used?
• How are my different product lists (i.e. related products, cross-sell products, up-sell products, etc) performing at an aggregate level?

Product Attribution

Production Attribution will enable the effectiveness of product lists and customer interactions with them to be measured. These reports include a “last action” attribute which gives credit to the last product list (i.e. impression, add to cart, checkout, etc.) that the customer interacted with prior to the conversion. These reports are extremely useful, as they would help to answer questions such as:

• What on-site behavior is driving my users to convert?
• Which products are my site visitors actually interested in?
• How effective are my internal merchandising efforts at driving customers toward the conversion funnel?
• What are the last actions a customer took before converting?

The Benefits of a CRM Integration

When CRM data and Google Analytics data exist in silos, it’s difficult to truly understand the intersections between a customer’s interaction with your website, calls or emails – and how those actions play into a conversion.

With a CRM and GA integration you can expect to get insight into the purchase behavior of a prospect or customer for their entire lifetime, from start to finish. You’ll be able to glean more insight into how your website – the content it provides and all the campaigns that are driving traffic to it – are actually contributing to your bottom line.

Any attribute that you collect about your users can then pass through to GA. These include details like: lifetime value, age, gender, number of marketing emails opened, number of phone calls made, number of times chat used. Importing this data into GA would enable you to answer questions such as:

• How many interactions on average does a typical customer make across all my marketing efforts (website, emails, etc) before they convert?
• Who are my highest lifetime value customers, and how does their behavior on the website differ from everyone else?
• How are customers interacting with my brand outside of my website (calls/email/chat), and what are the signals that indicate the intent to purchase?

******

As you can see, when Google Analytics is more fully leveraged, it provides merchants with tremendous insights into the entire customer journey.  These actions provide merchants with an illuminated, data-driven path to follow and take advantage of metrics that are already available, if only engaged.