There’s a lot you can do with e-commerce tracking even if you’re a non-commerce site. You can use the e-commerce reporting to monetize lead gen forms and measure visitor interactions with a form.

The Need

Let’s say we have a lead gen site that sells books, cars and jets (a completely unlikely combination). The site has a very simple lead generation form that let’s the user choose the item they are interested in and their time frame for purchase.

We want to measure which fields visitors fill out, the values they choose, and the overall value of the form.

The Implementation

To measure the above I created a simple form using HTML and JavaScript. Here’s what the form looks like:

And here is the source of the above form:

When the visitor submits the form the JavaScript code assigns a value to both the item that the visitor chose and their time frame for purchase. It then calculates a total value for the form by summing both values.

In this example a form that includes a high priced item (like a jet) and a short time frame (buy now!) is worth more than a low priced item with an unknown time frame. I chose arbitrary values for each item and each time frame, but you could derive these values from business data.

After manipulating the data the code places both pieces of information in the GA e-commerce format where they are happily whisked away to Google.

I decided to do all of the calculations in JavaSript because it was easy. You could create a “form calculator” on the server side, but you would still need to format the data like a transaction in order to send it to Google Analytics.

The Data & Analysis

Remember, we’re using the e-commerce framework to equate products to form choices. So any report that displays product information will really show form elements and their values.

The best example of this is the E-Commerce > Product Performance > Product Overview report. This report simply lists all of the products that were purchased in all of the transactions.

Based on the way I created the code, each “product” in the report will be a combination of the item that he visitor is interested in and their time frame for purchase.

How is this data actionable? This information is the direct voice of the visitor. The visitor is literally telling us what they want and when they want it.

From the report above we can see that everyone wants a jet. Most visitors did not specify a time frame for purchase but one visitor wanted a jet today. I’d call that a hot lead!

Another report that is very useful is the E-commerce > Transactions report. In our configuration this report lists all of the forms that have been submitted and the value of each.

The great thing about this report is we can drill into each transaction and review the specific form details. If I click on the first transaction in the report above I get the details of the form (see image below).

I know this example is not that exciting, but image a form with many, many fields. You would be able to see all of the visitor’s choices and better understand what made a specific form valuable.

The effect of using e-commerce tracking for a lead gen form goes far beyond the e-commerce reports. Remember many reports in Google Analytics have an e-commerce tab that displays monetary metrics related to the data in a report.

For example, the Traffic Source > All Traffic Sources report will show metrics like average order value, transactions and revenue for each traffic source. If you use standard goal tracking you will only get conversion rate. I think this is far more valuable.

A Reminder

You’ve probably figured out that you can use e-commerce to collect many different types of data. Please be mindful of your site’s visitors and the Google Analytics privacy policy. It is not permitted to collect personally identifiable information using Google Analytics.

This is part 4 in a multi-part series on e-commerce tracking. You may be interested in parts 1, 2 and 3:

Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking Pt. 1: How It Works
Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking Pt. 2: Installation & Setup
Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking Pt. 3: Why EVERYONE Should Use It

Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking Pt. 4: Tracking Lead Gen Forms is a post from: Analytics Talk by Justin Cutroni

But, as their names imply, these reports are focused on commerce. But not all websites are commerce based. What if we have a lead gen website? We want to measure how long it takes to get a lead, not make a purchase.

Herein lies the problem: there is no “time to conversion” or “visits to conversion” report in Google Analytics.

To get around this little issue EVERYONE should use GA e-commerce tracking to measure conversions, regardless of site purpose.

The Reports

Before I talk about how to set up e-commerce tracking for a non-commerce site let’s discuss the Visits to Purchase and Time to Purchase reports and how they can be used. Remember, in this application of e-commerce tracking “purchases” are really just conversions.

Here’s the first report we want to use, the Visits to Purchase report.

The Visits to Purchase report shows how many visits a visitor generated before they converted. The chart above shows that most visitors convert on the first visit. This is good. It means that visitors come to the site, find what they need and convert. This can also be very bad, it means that we have one chance to get someone to convert. If they do not convert on the first visit then we may not get another chance.

Let’s pair this data with the Time to Purchase report to better understand how much time passes between a visitor’s initial visit and their “conversion” visit.

The data indicates that everyone converts on Day 0, or the current day. This makes sense since most everyone converts on their first visit.

But what if most conversion occurred on the second visit? If conversions happen on the second visit, but still on Day 0, it means that visitors are probably doing some research prior to conversion and are checking another site on the same day before returning to our site to convert.

Knowing how many visits to a site it takes to convert a visitor is very actionable. What if the data indicates that visitors convert after the third visit? This means that we need to get a visitor back the site a third time to have any chance for a conversion. We may change our keyword bidding strategy to target visitors that are further along in the conversion cycle or we might try to collect an email address to send them additional information via email.

The key concept is that this data explains how many times we need to get the visitor to return to the site in order to generate a conversion.

If we do not using the e-commerce code to track “conversions” then we do not have access to this information.

One More Reason to use E-Commerce

There is one other reason why I like to use e-commerce tracking to track conversions. Google Analytics will only track one conversion per visit. If a visitor converts multiple time at the same goal Google Analytics will only count one conversion.

However, GA will track multiple purchases per visit. Is this a big deal? Not really. But if you want to make the data as accurate as possible, and have a goal that can be achieved multiple times per visit, then try using a transaction to track it.

Plus, using e-commerce to track conversions adds an extra “goal” to each profile, bringing the total to 5. Woo hoo!

Installation & Setup

There are three basic steps necessary to use the e-commerce tracking code on a non e-commerce site. While the steps are similar to those described in my previous post on installation there is one big difference. Let’s walk through each step.

Step 1: Activate the Reports

The first step in setting up GA e-commerce tracking is enabling the e-commerce reports. Log into GA and edit the profile settings. Specify that your site is an e-commerce site. This enables the e-commerce reports.

Remember, the e-commerce reports is a profile setting that is “off” by default. You’ll need to activate the reports for each new profile you create.

Step 2: Tag your Receipt Page

I know this seems like a silly step, but make sure you add the GA tracking code you your receipt page. You must have the standard GA tracking code on your receipt page in order to track purchases.

Step 3: Install the Code

This is where the installation differs from the standard installation. To measure purchases with Google Analytics you need to add the following code to your thank you page. The code does not need to be modified in any way.

<script type="text/javascript">
   var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ?
"https://ssl." : "http://www.");
   document.write("<script src='" + gaJsHost +
"google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'>" +
"</sc" + "ript>");
</script>

<script type='text/javascript'>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXX-1");
pageTracker._setLocalRemoteServerMode();
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();

// Some simple code to create a fake order ID
var timeObj        = new Date;
var unixTimeMs   = timeObj.getTime();
var unixTime      = parseInt(unixTimeMs / 1000);
var orderID        = pageTracker._visitCode() + '-' + unixTime;

pageTracker._addTrans(
      orderID, // required
      "",
      "",
      "",
      "",
      "",
      "",
      ""
);

pageTracker._addItem(
      orderID, // required
      "",
      "",
      "",
      "1",  // required
      "1"   //required
);

pageTracker._trackTrans();
</script>

You’ll notice that I added the e-commerce code to the regular GA page tag, but you can add it anywhere on the page. I just like keeping things together, it seems more organized to me.

You’ll also notice there is a lot of missing information in the above code. I’ve added the bare minimum for the tracking to still work. Don’t worry about the missing data, GA will still track a transaction, i.e. a conversion, and we will be able to use the Visits to Purchase and Time to Purchase reports.

That’s it. Once the code has been added you’ll start to see some data in your Visits to Purchase and Days to Purchase reports.

Got an interesting story to share about your e-commerce implementation? I would love to hear about it below in a comment.

Remember, this is part 3 in a multi-part series on e-commerce tracking. You may be interested in parts 1, 2 and 4:

Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking Pt. 1: How It Works
Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking Pt. 2: Installation & Setup
Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking Pt. 4: Tracking Lead Gen Forms

Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking Pt. 3: Why EVERYONE Should Use It is a post from: Analytics Talk by Justin Cutroni

This isn’t the most exciting stuff (that will be part 3), but a correct setup leads to correct data. :)

Step 1: Activate the Reports

The first step in setting up GA e-commerce tracking is enabling the e-commerce reports. Log into GA and edit the profile settings. Specify that your site is an e-commerce site. This activates the e-commerce reports.

There are other e-commerce settings that don’t get much use (unless you’re an international site). You can specify one of 25 different currencies (wow!) and the number of decimal places you would like displayed (1,2 or 3). Even if you use USD you can specify 3 decimal places. Go ahead and try it, it’s interesting.

Remember, e-commerce reports is a profile setting that is “off” by default. You’ll need to activate the reports for each new profile you create.

Step 2: Tag your Receipt Page

I know this seems like a silly step, but make sure you add the GA tracking code you your receipt page. You must have the standard GA tracking code on your receipt page in order to track transactions. The reason is that the e-commerce tracking code is stored in the ga.js. If this file is not included on the receipt page then you can’t track transactions.

Step 3: Install the Code

This is the hard part: code construction. As we learned in part 1, GA uses a JavaScript collection technique to track e-commerce transactions. Your server code must inject transaction information into the GA JavaScript before sending the receipt page back to the browser. When the receipt page renders in the visitor’s browser the JavaScipt executes and sends the transaction info to GA.

Let’s take a look at the code:

<script type="text/javascript">
pageTracker._addTrans(
      "order-id", // required
      "affiliate or store name",
      "total",
      "tax",
      "shipping",
      "city",
      "state",
      "country"
);

pageTracker._addItem(
      "order-id", // required
      "SKU",
      "product name",
      "product category",
      "unit price",  // required
      "quantity"  //required
);

pageTracker._trackTrans();
</script>

The first thing that you’ll notice is that there are three distinct parts to the JavaScript. Each is a different method. The first section, identified by the _addTrans() method, creates the transaction and stores all the information about the transaction.

The second section, identified by the _addItem() method, is used to add an item to the transaction. You need to create an _addItem() section for each different item, or SKU, in the transaction. The order ID in the _addItem() method must be the same order ID used in the _addTrans() method. That’s how GA ties an item to a transactions.

The final section is the _trackTrans() method. This method actually sends the data to GA by requesting the __utm.gif file once for the transaction and once for each item in the transaction. So if you have 3 different SKUs in a transaction there will be 4 requests fot the __utm.gif.

The above JavaScript can appear anywhere on your receipt page. Just make sure that it appears after the main GA page tag. The reason is that the e-commerce code is part of the pageTracker object. If the pageTracker object has not been created then you can’t call the e-commerce methods.

Just to reiterate a point: you must create server side code that outputs the transaction data in the format above. If you do not have access to your shopping cart code, and your cart provider does not provide e-commerce tracking, then you may be out of luck.

Once the code has been installed you should begin to see e-commerce data in your reports.

Notes and Suggestions

Like many things in Google Analytics, there are some things that can trip you up:

• If you do not wish to pass a certain piece of data to GA then do not add anything between the quotation marks. The only required fields are the order ID, the unit price of each item and the quantity of each item. Everything else is optional.
• Do not use currency identifiers or commas (to separate thousands) in any of the numeric fields (i.e. total, tax, shipping). These characters have caused problems in the past.
• Each piece of transaction data that you send to Google Analytics becomes a data element in GA, just like any other piece of data in GA (geo data, campaign data, browser data, etc.). You can do all sorts of neat things with filters and e-commerce data. More on this later.
• The affiliate or store name field is no longer used in the GA reports. However, the data is still collected by GA so you can use it in a filter.
• The transaction geographic data collected by GA is no longer used BUT it is collected. Google Analytics determines the location of the user, and thus their transaction, based on their IP address. The old version of the GA tracking code used the data specified in the transaction. Like the affiliate field, the data can be used in a filter.

Up Next

In the next post I’m going to talk about some creative ways to use e-commerce tracking. Specifically, why I believe that everyone should use e-commerce tracking on their website.

This is part 1 in a multi-part series on e-commerce tracking:

Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking Pt. 1: How It Works
Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking Pt. 3: Why EVERYONE Should Use It
Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking Pt. 4: Tacking Lead Gen Forms

Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking Pt. 2: Installation & Setup is a post from: Analytics Talk by Justin Cutroni

Sure, it’s great to measure things like conversion rate, but revenue is much more tangible to many business owners. Having the e-commerce data in your web analytics application makes it easier to perform analysis. Do you need to set up e-commerce tracking? No, but it sure helps. :)

The Big Pictures

E-commerce tracking is based on the same principal as standard pageview tracking. JavaScript code sends the data to a Google Analytic servers by requesting an invisible gif file. The big difference is that e-commerce data is sent rather than pageview data.

But how does Google Analytics get the e-commerce data? That’s the tricky part. You, the site owner, must create some type of code that inserts the transaction data into the GA JavaScript. Sounds tricky, huh? Well, its not that bad.

Step by Step: How it Works

Let’s break it down and walk through what actually happens.

1. The visitor submits their transaction to your server.

2. Your server receives the transaction data and processes the transaction. This may include a number of steps at the server level, such as sending a confirmation email, checking a credit card number, etc.

3. After processing the transaction the server prepares to send the receipt page back to the visitor. While preparing the receipt page your server must extract some the transaction data and insert it into the Google Analytics JavaScript. This is the code that you must create.

4. The receipt page is sent to the visitor’s browser.

5. While the receipt page renders in the visitor’s browser the e-commerce data is sent to Google Analytics via special GA JavaScript.

Here’s a basic diagram of the process. Again, the biggest challenge during implementation is adding code to your web server that inserts the transaction data, in the appropriate format, into the receipt page. I’ll cover the setup in part 2 of this series.

What Data can be Tracked?

Google Analytics collect two types of e-commerce data: transaction data and item data. Transaction data describes the overall transaction (transaction ID, total sale, tax, shipping, etc.) while item data describes the items purchased in the transaction (sku, description, category, etc.). All of this data eventually ends up in GA reports. Here’s a complete list of the data:

Transaction Data

• Transaction ID: your internal transaction ID [required]
• Affiliate or store name
• Total
• Tax
• Shipping
• City
• State or region
• Country

Item Data

• Transaction ID: same as in transaction data [required]
• SKU
• Product name
• Product category or product variation
• Unit price [required]
• Quantity [required]

A few notes about the data. First, the geo-location data is no longer used by Google Analytics. The new version of GA tries to identify where the buyer is located using an IP address lookup.

Also, you should avoid using any non-alpha numeric characters in the data. Especially in the numeric fields. Do not add a currency identifier (i.e. dollar sign) in the total, tax or shipping fields. this can cause problems with the data.

Like this post? Check out the rest of the series:

Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking Pt. 2: Installation & Setup
Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking Pt. 3: Why EVERYONE Should Use It
Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking Pt. 4: Tacking Lead Gen Forms

Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking Pt. 1: How It Works is a post from: Analytics Talk by Justin Cutroni