3 ways to use GA4 to help your eCommerce store grow
By now the majority of eCommerce stores are all set up on Google Analytics 4 and Shopify is due to release a native integration in March. Time is of the essence because we know Universal Analytics ('UA') will stop receiving data from July this year - and there's no extension in sight. But are you actively using GA4 now, instead of closing the tab and continuing to rely on UA?
If you aren't using it, you're not only in for a rough transition for your reporting when the deadline hits, but you're actually missing out on some great insights to grow your online revenue right now. I've been posting a lot about the need to move to GA4 simply because UA is shutting down, but there's also a lot of benefits to enjoy once you make the switch!
Here are a few I wanted to share with you:
Better understand your PPC performance with new GA4 dimensions & metrics
If you run paid media, uttering the words 'iOS14.5' is enough to make you want to flip your table. I predominantly manage a lot of paid advertising for my clients across Meta, Google, Pinterest & Tiktok and the past few years have seen a real transition in how we can now analyse performance. Gone are the days of our (better) ability to track an ad click through to purchase within a 30 day period, because the vast majority of users (in the US they estimate approximately 96%) will opt out of ad tracking when offered, making it very hard to track purchases with particular ads or campaigns.
The result: retargeting audiences shrink and reported ROAS has declined for most. Attribution windows have shrunk to a view far shorter than the average customer path to purchase. Sure, Meta has introduced sweeteners like 'modelled conversions' but we can't rely on those metrics with the confidence we once had.
The challenge is: paid ads are still a fundamental part of our channel mix for growth and whilst it's harder to assess performance, it's certainly not impossible - we just have to rely on more signals across different platforms. Your agency may be reporting solely on an individual platform's ROAS, but you need to be analysing your entire channel mix.
There are two GA4 metrics & dimensions I love in GA4 which I analyse against my paid campaigns: Engagement Rate metric and First User dimension. Engagement rate tells me the percentage of engaged users (those who visited a page for 10+ seconds, 2 page views or had a conversion event) and the First User dimension allows me to analyse this data based on the channel or campaign through which a user first visited the site.
Take a look at your GA4 First User Acquisition report, if you use the First user campaign dimension on the top left (and your UTM tracking is correctly setup for all paid channels), you'll be able to analyse Engagement Rate, Average Engagement Time and Events (eg. Add to cart) - this helps us understand the quality of top of funnel traffic investments, even if they've opted out of ad tracking or are not converting within the Meta and Tiktok 7 day attribution window.
I personally like creating custom Explore reports to analyse paid media (and I'll show you how to do this in my GA4 course).
Troubleshoot your purchase funnel with Funnel explorations
One of the biggest challenges of GA4 is that most of the value lies in how you slice and dice the data, which is relatively limited in the Reports section - you need to get comfortable using Exploration reports.
Your eCommerce funnel is an essential report to stay on top of. It can explain why your conversion rate may be down, where users are getting 'stuck' or abandoning, how long their average path to purchase can be - and can therefore it should inform your entire marketing strategy from retargeting to email flows.
We all know what an eCommerce funnel looks like - Visit, View Product, Add to Cart, View Checkout and Purchase. But unlike UA, GA4 gives us greater customisability and the ability to view a funnel from the very first visit - this is thanks to greater accuracy with User ID tracking (allowing Google to tell if it's the same user visiting your store regardless of session count or device).
One of my favourite Exploration reports is the Funnel report where you can setup a custom eCommerce funnel using "First open/visit" as the initial step. If we broaden the date range to 30-90 days, we can see elapsed time between each stage of the funnel and use these insights to guide the timing of our Welcome and Abandonment flows. We can then add different breakdowns such as First user campaign or source, to understand the specific step completion rates by channel or even as granular as event. The possibilities for customisation are endless, and they enable you to dig deeper into your data to understand how customers are behaving once they get to site, specific to where they came from.
Use Automated Insights to get a quick gauge on what's happening on your store
Automated insights are a bit hidden in GA4 - you can find them on a card in your Reports Snapshot (Find the card and click the button: "View all insights").
When analysing our data, we can sometimes get a bit complacent or templated in our approach, looking at the same reports and the same metrics every week - that's not necessarily a bad thing, as I'm a huge proponent of only reporting on metrics that actually tell us something, rather than filling a report full of overwhelming numbers.
But in my experience, some of the best insights have come from free analysis - just looking at the data out of curiosity rather than to solve a problem, to better understand my customer behaviour, channel attribution and retention rates.
Here's where automated insights have been handy: to spark ideas. It's well worth looking at this page every week or so and seeing what comes up - any insight you encounter should have a reason. For example, if transactions were up over 100% - was that because we ran a sale? If New Zealand traffic grew substantially, have we been investing in that region - and how engaged are those sessions?
GA4's automated insights identify outliers and major variations in trends. They can serve as handy jumping off points to dig further and identify those insights you may have missed when analysing the raw data (and I hope they will continue to improve as GA4 gains more data) and I think it'll become very popular for those of us who are time poor!
Start learning GA4 for eCommerce now
I launched GA4 for eCommerce back in August last year in response to my clients asking for in depth training on Google's newest data platform and the response has been fantastic.
It's an online learn-as-you-go training specifically designed for eCommerce store owners, marketers and agencies (anyone in eCommerce, really) and I show you how to transition to and master GA4. You and your team will learn how to:
Integrate Google Analytics 4 for with your eCommerce store with a full eCommerce integration
Customise your GA4 so it's accurate from the setup data
Analyse your data using GA4’s new Exploration reports and use the data to drive actionable insights
Reconcile your GA4 data with Universal Analytics’ historical data for ongoing comparisons
Backup your UA data before Universal Analytics is deleted
Enrol in GA4 for eCommerce now
Any questions? Let me know or get in touch!