Enhanced Ecommerce: Data is your business’ gold
Enhanced Ecommerce (EEC) is a Google Analytics functionality, which gives companies an opportunity to get better insights in the shopping behavior of their users. When we compare EEC with standard Ecommerce implementation – the main advantage is that we get access to a lot of new valuable reports (Maxlead, 2017). This extra data allows companies running ecommerce sites to make more informed decisions. There are many different ecommerce sites, in which visual experiences are different, but they generally share the same structure. However, each user experiments the ecommerce site in a different way (origin device, interests, the moment in which they intend to buy, source/media, among others). Because of this, it is important to understand what is going on in the site in a granular way. This is what Enhanced ecommerce is useful for, to obtain data about the users concerning how they interact with the ecommerce site.
Once you connect Google Analytics to your site, by default, it provides information about the session such as where do users connect from and what devices as well as screen resolutions they are using, but it does not show what products do they look at, which ones do they add to cart, and with which ones do they start a checkout process. All this data that is not provided by Google Analytics by default, it is provided by Enhanced ecommerce. For example, one of the reports is a funnel that tells you, from the amount of people who entered the site, the amount of users who arrived to the product view, from those, it shows how many have added products to cart, from those, how many started the checkout process and how many actually made the transaction. This allows the company or the marketing department to know what is going on every step of the way, how many people are going through which steps as well as the site’s conversion rate: from all the people who entered the page, what percentage actually purchased products. From this data, different hypotheses can be drawn: Is the company targeting the correct audience? Are the products too expensive? Is the value proposal not being caught by the client and so they left the site unmotivated?
The mentioned hypotheses or questions would be impossible for ecommerce managers to answer with what Google Analytics offers by default, since it would not show all the necessary data. This is why Enhanced ecommerce is so important and so required by our clients at Onetree; without it, they would work with their businesses blindly.
Enhanced ecommerce also allows us to obtain reports filtered by products. For example: which are the products that are seen the most, looked for the most, added to cart the most, bought the most, how much revenue does a specific product generate, among other aspects. This means that the company or the marketing sector can know how users interact with the products and what is going on with each line of products, category, or specific product. As a consequence, this information allows the organization to make decisions to optimize the business and sell more.
All in all, these are the different events captured using the Enhanced ecommerce functionality (some previously mentioned):
Purchases: This is the most important part of Enhanced Ecommerce.By collecting the purchases from the website, one gets access to the sales reports in Google Analytics so you can filter by source,medium,country or any other segment of interest for the business..
Checkout steps: Implementing tracking of checkout steps will provide with valuable checkout behavior reports, one will be able to tell in which checkout steps users drop off. This way, the company can focus on these steps and optimize them.
Product detail page views: One of the biggest advantages of implementing this part is that one will get access to the ‘Buy-to-Detail’ metric in Enhanced Ecommerce reports. ‘Buy-to-Detail’ is the ratio between the number of sold products to the number of the detailed page views of that product, which is what we first described in this article.
Add to Cart / Remove from Cart actions: Similar to Product detail page, this part will give access to ‘Cart-to-Detail’ – it is the ratio between the number of add to cart events to product detail page views.
Product impressions / Product clicks: By adding these two events, we will get a better idea about which products are clicked on the most and in which position within the list they appear.
It is also possible to enrich these basic dimensions with the company’s own product scoped dimensions and metrics. For instance, similar to price one can send margin as custom metric, or by using product scoped custom dimensions one can send more detailed product characteristics (Maxlead, 2017).
Nowadays, we find ourselves in a data-driven world and every day this game is ruled by major changes, such as the implementation of GDPR, CCPA or similar regulations that have been defined to protect the data collected by websites of millions of users navigating online. These streams are defining new ways to collect data, thus generating the need of strong tracking systems, such as server side measurements. Important pieces of information, such as purchase events, are extremely important to drive decisions. By using server side tracking we made it possible at Onetree for several clients to collect with a 99.5% match rate the information of each transaction placed on their systems. This implementation has allowed them to understand their audiences better, setting their marketing strategies and to optimize their conversion rates.
The importance of Enhanced ecommerce lays on the importance of having the most possible amount of information to make decisions. “If I tell you to close your eyes and go to a certain place, it will be much more difficult for you to arrive than if I give you a map and explain different routes to get there. The same thing happens with your ecommerce site, the more data you have, the better decisions you will make for your business”, says Carlos González, Project Management at Onetree. Enhanced ecommerce allows the company to detect problems in the ecommerce site’s user experience, in their products, prices, to improve them as much as possible so that they do not affect sales and conversion rates can be ameliorated. At Onetree, we deliver all this information by a data tracking team, an Adobe Commerce team, and Analytics professionals.
References
What is Enhanced Ecommerce and why do you need it? (2017, december 5). Maxlead. Recovered on march 21, 2022, fom https://maxlead.com/en/what-is-enhanced-ecommerce-and-why-do-you-need-it/