With the advent of Enhanced Ecommerce for Universal Analytics, a new scope was introduced for Custom Dimensions and Metrics. Product scope can be used to send information about each product that is sent through Enhanced Ecommerce, but it’s not exactly the most logical or intuitive thing to wrap your head around.
In this #GTMTips post, we’ll take a look at how to implement Product-Scoped Custom definitions via Google Tag Manager, and I’ll quickly explain how they work in relation to queries and reports you might want to build on top of them.
One of the glaring omissions in the Enhanced Ecommerce reports of Universal Analytics is the ability to calculate cart value for products. Cart value, here, is the value that has been added to the cart.
This value can be used to query for products that have the highest discrepancy between cart value and generated revenue. These are missed opportunities of the highest caliber.
With some Custom Metrics magic, we can, however, get cart value into our reports, and we can find our most and least “effective” products with just a glance:
Enhanced Ecommerce is a very nice improvement to the pretty lame, transaction-based Ecommerce tracking in Universal Analytics. Instead of staring blindly at what happens on a receipt page, Enhanced Ecommerce expands your entire webstore into one large funnel labelled “Shopping Behavior”, and you’re able to zoom in on the Checkout funnel as well. Also, the addition of product-scoped tracking is incredibly useful, and it’s enabled us to think of any asset (our content, for example) on our site as something we could track through the Enhanced Ecommerce reports.
My fingers have been tingling to write this article. Ever since I implemented Enhanced Ecommerce on my blog a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been getting such an impressive amount of useful data that it’s mind-boggling.
In this article, I’ll walk you through the steps I went to implement the solution, along with examples of the data I can now access through Google Analytics’ reporting interface. As you might have guessed, if you’ve read my articles before, I implemented Enhanced Ecommerce with Google Tag Manager.
I’ve noticed that setting up eCommerce in Google Tag Manager (and now the new Enhanced ecommerce) is very difficult for many. I’m sure part of the problem is that eCommerce is for many users the moment that GTM forces you to take steps in to the developer’s domain, since it’s obvious that you’ll need to add some code to the web page.
This isn’t a tutorial on how to do eCommerce in Google Tag Manager.