As an e-commerce business, understanding your customers’ behaviour on your website is crucial to your success. With the introduction of Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and the retirement of Universal Analytics (UA), you now have more powerful tools at your disposal to track and analyse your website data more effectively.
In this article, we focus on one standout feature, GA4’s enhanced measurement capabilities. This feature automates the tracking of certain user interactions, providing valuable insights that can inform your business strategies.
What is enhanced measurement in GA4?
Enhanced measurement is a functionality in GA4 that allows automatic tracking of certain types of events without needing to add any additional code to your website. This means that, as soon as you set up GA4, you’ll immediately start collecting valuable data about how customers interact with your website.
With enhanced measurement, GA4 can automatically track the following types of events:
- Page views: this is a basic tracking feature that registers every time a user views a page on your website
- Scrolls: GA4 records when users scroll down your pages, which can provide insights into how much of your content users are actually seeing
- Outbound clicks: this feature registers when users click a link that takes them away from your website, helping you understand what external content or resources are drawing your users’ attention
- Site search: if your site has a search functionality, GA4 will automatically log whenever a user submits a search
- Video engagement: GA4 tracks when users start, pause, and finish videos on your website, giving you a better idea of how users engage with your multimedia content
- File downloads: this feature logs whenever a user downloads a file from your website
If you set GA4 up on your online store, you need to set up ecommerce events in your website or GTM account in order to bring through event like:
- View item: a customer viewed a product page in your store
- Add to cart: a customer added a product to the cart
- Add to wishlist: a customer added a product to their wishlist
- Begin checkout: a customer started the checkout process
- Add payment info: a customer added their payment information successfully
- Purchase: a customer completed the checkout process
For a list of all recommended ecommerce events to set up, click here
How enhanced measurement benefits e-commerce businesses
For e-commerce businesses, these automated tracking features provide a wealth of insights about how users engage with your site, which can inform various aspects of your business strategy:
- Product engagement: Understanding how users engage with your product pages (e.g., scroll depth, video plays) can help you optimise these pages to improve engagement and ultimately, drive conversions.
- User experience (UX) optimisation: By tracking site search and outbound clicks, you can identify gaps in your website content that may be leading users to search for information or leave your site altogether. These insights can guide improvements in your site navigation and content to provide a better user experience.
- Marketing strategy: Tracking file downloads can be especially useful if you offer digital content like e-books or white-papers as part of your marketing strategy. By understanding what content users are downloading, you can tailor your content strategy to better meet their interests and needs.
Better insights, but easier
With its enhanced measurement features, GA4 provides e-commerce businesses with a powerful, automated tool for tracking user interactions and gaining valuable insights. By making the most of these features, you can gain a deeper understanding of how customers engage with your website, guiding you in optimising your content, improving your user experience, and refining your marketing strategies to drive success in the competitive e-commerce landscape.
GA4’s new, improved features hold some interesting opportunities. We’ve touched on GA4’s funnel analysis feature here and their predictive metrics here. If you’re looking to implement GA4 for your e-commerce business, we can show you here.
BY CRAIG RUNDLE
Director at Tin Soldier
Craig, Founder and Director at Tin Soldier lives and breathes digital. Being slightly geeky, since the late 90’s he has been involved and watched the internet grow from one page websites through Web 2.0 and more recently with the advent of AI technologies. Craig’s passion is ecommerce, in particular creating great customer experiences through personalisation, content and connected systems.