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As an ecommerce business, it is imperative that you keep an eye on your key performance indicators (KPIs) and to use them to improve your marketing campaigns further.
When it comes to ecommerce tracking, nothing can beat Google Tag Manager (GTM). It is a powerful tool that allows you to add and update your tracking tags without tweaking your website code.
Tracking critical interactions of your ecommerce site via GTM helps you identify the factors that drive sales and the sources that bring in the most traffic.
But before you start analyzing all of this data, you need to configure a proper tracking setup. In this guide, you’ll learn steps to implement ecommerce tracking with Google Tag Manager.
As a pay-per-click (PPC) advertiser, the more data you have, the better you can optimize your marketing campaigns. With only standard tracking configuration, you can’t find out the root cause of your cart abandonment or where people are leaving your sales funnel.
For instance, if you observe that more than half of your prospects are exiting your funnel at the same point, you can investigate that phase of your funnel and determine what could be causing the problem.
Maybe you’re overwhelming the customer with too many steps in your checkout process, or perhaps your site navigation is too confusing and not user-friendly.
Without info on your sales funnel, you can’t track the customer journey and pinpoint problems that deter them from completing a purchase.
When you initiate ecommerce tracking with Google Tag Manager, it provides you with all the essential data to identify which products are performing better than others. You can use this data to review everything – from price to product description to the checkout process.
Shopping campaigns provide you with an exciting opportunity to showcase your best products to online customers. But if you wish to effectively track your shopping campaign, keep the following factors in mind:
Define clear objectives for your shopping campaign. Ask yourself, “What am I looking to achieve with this shopping campaign?”
This approach will help you set clear success metrics before creating your plan to attain those objectives.
Bids have a direct influence on the visibility and results of your shopping campaign. Therefore, it is crucial to determine whether you should opt for smart or manual bidding.
By using the available automated options, you can ensure that your products appear for the right search queries, helping you meet your campaign goals.
The structure of your shopping campaign acts as the foundation for reaching your goals. Keep in mind the objective that you want to achieve across your different product areas and ways you can organize your entire product inventory to align with different objectives.
Divide your ads into related groups following a tiered, broad-to-narrow structure. This method will:
Standard shopping campaign priorities have no impact on your search relevance or the probability of your product to appear for a particular query. Instead, priorities help you determine which products and their corresponding bids are most significant to your business.
For instance, an online jewelry store may opt to prioritize competitive bids from a seasonal campaign displaying Mother’s Day products by setting the campaign priority to “high.” As a result, its bids will remain strong against the competition whenever they start their Mother’s Day campaign.
When advertising in multiple languages for the same target country, it’s best to develop separate campaigns for each language by using custom labels. For instance, if you are targeting Germany, consider setting up a custom label that uses the values “Swiss” and “French.” This way, you can easily set your budget, bids, and negative keywords by language.
It is recommended to regularly monitor your Products tab to identify any areas that need improvement. Plus, it’ll also help you resolve various problems. For instance, you can make sure that your best products are eligible to appear by filtering for the maximum number of clicks or conversions. You can even now during this pandemic period can take advantage of free product listing and analyze your unpaid clicks.
Split your inventory to develop product groups that are in line with your best-performing products–next, leverage conversion tracking to optimize your bids further. For instance, if one group of products has a low cost-per-action (CPA), consider increasing your bid to yield more conversion volume.
Also, think about spending more of your budget to yield more conversions. Contrarily, if a group of products has a high CPA, consider lowering that group’s bid to preserve your budget for other groups that can get more conversions for you at a lower cost.
The best place to identify opportunities for campaign optimization is your competitive landscape data. Here are the most important competitive metrics that you should regularly review:
Click share is the best metric to understand your position with respect to your competitor. A low-value click share with a high impression share shows that you might not be appearing in the topmost results to attract valuable clicks.
Identify ways to make your ads distinguishable and adjust bids in accordance to grab more click share. This is especially true on mobile, where small screen size brings in more visibility and traffic to topmost results.
Impression share helps ensure your ads reach as many customers as possible. If you are generating a low impression count, but earn relatively decent profits from those impressions, consider increasing your bids or optimizing your data quality to get more of those valuable impressions. Impression share also gives you idea how much opportunity you are still having.
Don’t ignore your search lost due to rank and budget. It will give you idea the percentage of time your ads weren’t shown due to poor ad rank or budget.
When looking for incremental opportunities for growth, most search marketers try to find ways to estimate how much they can scale up their paid search effort, and what would be the impact on ad spend, and efficiency. You’ll see how to aggregate and dig into impression share data, and how to estimate incremental opportunities based on those impressions missed due to insufficient budget or rank.
Negative keywords are a great way to avoid displaying your products to irrelevant customers. However, including a large number of negative keywords can considerably reduce your overall traffic, and may even cost you valuable opportunities with relevant users. Eventually, it can damage your ad performance unless you carefully review your negative keywords lists regularly.
Tracking conversions from your ecommerce website is significant not just to log your transactions but also to determine where your sales are coming from. But you can only track all this if you can bring data into Google Analytics. For this, you’ll have to set up and enable ecommerce tracking needs in Google Tag Manager.
Tags are important for your ecommerce business, and you can set them up in Google Tag Manager while the results of these tags can be seen in Google Analytics.
Before we jump on to setting up ecommerce tracking with Google Tag Manager, let’s first take a look at the key differences between ecommerce and enhanced ecommerce tracking.
Typically, ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics focuses on info such as Total Orders, Total Tax Cost, Total Shipping, Product Purchased, etc.
On the other hand, enhanced ecommerce tracking allows you to use Google Tag Manager in a more efficient way. Although you have many features available, you don’t have to use all of them.
Some of the features include:
Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you set up ecommerce tracking with Google Tag Manager.
Step 1:
The first step is to enable ecommerce reporting in Google Analytics. To do so, go to the admin setting and select ‘Ecommerce Settings.’ Under View section enable ‘Ecommerce’ and ‘Enhanced Ecommerce Reporting’.
Step 2:
Once ecommerce reporting is enabled in Google Analytics, you can include as many steps as you want to track. Suppose you want to track the ‘Add to Cart’ step. In the Checkout Labeling section, go to ‘Funnel Steps’ and then provide the name of the step that you want to track. click ‘Save.’
Step 3:
The next step involves diving into the data layer, which includes info such as events or variables that you want to pass to GTM. You can also set triggers in GTM depending on the values of variables (for instance, fire a remarketing tag when purchase_total > $200) or depending on the specific events.
There are several codes that you can use for tracking purposes.
Here’s an example code that you can include in your webpage to track items at ‘Add to Cart level’.
Please note that you’ll have to alter the value with your data variable in your webpage JavaScript. You can replace product name, price, brand, category etc dynamically with your JavaScript variables. Otherwise, you won’t receive exact values.
< script >
dataLayer.push({
‘event’: ‘addToCart’,
‘ecommerce’: {
‘currencyCode’: ‘USD’,
‘add’: {‘products’: [{‘name’: ‘T – Shirt’,
‘id’: ‘12345’,
‘price’: ‘0.25’,
‘brand’: ‘XYZ – Brand’,
‘category’: ‘Apparel’,
‘variant’: ‘Gray’,
‘quantity’: 1
}]
}
}
});
</script>
Step 4:
Open Google Tag Manager to set up the Tag for ‘Add to Cart’ scenario. Go to the Overview screen of GTM and select ‘Add a new tag’.
Enter your tag name (such as ‘Add to Cart’). Next, go to ‘Choose tag type’ and select ‘Google Analytics: Universal Analytics.’ It will help you analyze the gathered data in Google Analytics.
Select ‘Event’ as the track type. For the category, you can specify any name (suppose ‘Ecommerce Tracking’). Keep in mind that this is the name that you will see in Google Analytics.
Under the ‘Action’ tab, select ‘Event.’
If you don’t want non-interaction to count toward your bounce rate, specify ‘Non-interaction Hit’ as ‘True.’ Otherwise, if the event fires on a webpage, Google Analytics will set your bounce rate to 0.
Next, choose Google Analytics Setting from the drop-down menu and select ‘Enable overriding settings in this tag.’ Now, go to the ‘Ecommerce’ section and specify ‘True.’ Check ‘Use data layer.’
Now it’s time to save your tag.
Remember, tags fire in response to events. In GTM, a trigger listens to your web page or mobile app for certain kinds of events (such as ‘Add to Cart’).
Step 5:
The next step involves checking the configuration of your tag. After everything is set up, click ‘Submit.’
Step 6:
This step involves waiting for users to interact with your website so that you can collect the desired data. Visit Google Analytics to check the data under the ‘Realtime’ section.
Once your set event is triggered, it will start showing under ‘Event Category.’
To study more analytics about your event performance, check out the ‘Conversions’ and ‘Ecommerce’ sections.
Under this Ecommerce section you can find different reporting for your website based on how you configured that.
Remember that your shopping campaigns are the window of your ecommerce business – they are essential to engage today’s increasingly demanding customers.
Ecommerce tracking with Google Tag Manager is the best way to track the performance of your shopping campaigns. You can then use this data to optimize your campaign better, which should yield more conversions, as your customers won’t be able to resist buying from you.
When you’re ready to take your optimization up a gear, read our blog, Google Shopping Campaign Optimization: The PPC Manager’s Guide.
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