Statistics about the usage of your online shop provide you with valuable and actionable information. If you know details about the behaviour of your shop’s visitors, you can improve your shop accordingly.

With Google Analytics there is already a powerful analytics tool available to you that you can easily connect to your shop in order to get statistics.

You can gain even more information with Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce. This is an extension for Google Analytics that offers further statistics especially for online shops. With this, you can for instance find out how many of your customers leave the checkout process in your shop at specific steps without buying something. By identifying these drop-off points you can take measures for improvement. If you for instance find out that many customers leave your shop at the step “Payment” you probably should review if you offer the right payment methods.

 

In order to enable Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce you first need to set up Google Analytics in your shop. You can find instructions for this in the article Google Analytics. Then follow the steps below.

1. Under http://www.google.com/analytics log in to your existing Google account.

2. Select ADMIN or the gear symbol.

3. Select E-commerce Settings.

4. Under Enable E-commerce set the switch to ON.

5. Under Enable Enhanced E-commerce Reporting set the switch to ON.

6. Now you can assign labels to your checkout steps. This makes it easier for you to later distinguish the steps. Under Checkout Labeling select Add funnel step to add a new step. Then enter a name for the step under Label name.

We recommend entering the following steps that reflect those in your online shop:

  • Login

  • Address

  • Shipping

  • Payment

  • Check and order

7. Save the changes.

8. Next you should make sure that the correct currency is defined in Google Analytics. To do this, select View settings.

9. Under Currency displayed as select the correct currency.

10. Save the changes.

Enhanced Ecommerce is now enabled for your shop and you can view the new statistics in your Google Analytics account as explained below.

 

1. Under http://www.google.com/analytics log in to your existing Google account.

2. Select Conversions.

3. Select E-commerce.

4. Select Shopping Behavior. It might take a while until this menu item is visible to you after enabling Enhanced Ecommerce. Try to reload the page if it does not show up.

5. Here you can see the so-called sales funnel:

  • The first column shows you the overall sessions of visitors in your shop.

  • The second column shows you in how many sessions a customer visited at least one product page of your shop.

  • The third column shows you in how many sessions a customer added at least one product to the shopping basket.

  • The fourth column shows you in how many sessions a visitor entered the check out.

  • The fifth column shows you in how many sessions a user made an actual purchase.

Below the columns there are numbers that show you how many sessions “got lost” in the process. With this information you can easily see at which steps of the checkout customers make the decision to not buy something from your shop.

 

You can view the statistics either in real time or in retrospect. Real time means that you can follow the behaviour of your customers as it is happening. Please note that it may take a while until you can see statistics of past events.