Ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics

What is ecommerce tracking in GA4?

Ecommerce tracking is a feature of Google Analytics 4 that tracks users’ shopping activity on your website. By default, GA4 keeps track of website metrics like pageviews, traffic sources, session duration, and bounce rates. It doesn’t automatically track ecommerce-specific data like revenue, cart abandonment rates, or conversion rates.

That’s where ecommerce events come in. Enabling ecommerce tracking in your GA4 works by enabling ecommerce events (more on that later). 

Ecommerce events are online shopping activities that GA4 logs, and metrics refer to the data you see in various reports.

This is a must-have for every ambitious ecommerce marketing team because it allows you to

• Spot products that convert more customers vs. underperforming products

• Track how different marketing campaigns and channels influence revenue

• Find friction points in the customer journey to increase your store’s conversion rate

• See changes and trends in transactions and revenue over time

Where can you find ecommerce insights in GA4?

You’ll find ecommerce data in several places in your Google Analytics 4 interface. One of them is Reports > Monetization > Ecommerce purchases:

You can view how users progressed on your store from the moment they started their session, through viewing products and adding them to cart, to making a purchase in the Reports > Monetization > Purchase journey report:

Beyond the Monetization set of reports, you can view ecommerce data in many other reports that aren’t specific to ecommerce. Enabling ecommerce events lets you enrich various reports with ecommerce data.

For example, you can view conversion rates and revenue for different user acquisition channels, along with standard website data like the number of new users and average engagement time. You’ll find this under Reports > Acquisition > User acquisition:

And on any screen of your GA4 interface, click the chart icon at the top right corner and select Ecommerce to quickly access high-level data like weekly revenue trends or best-selling products.

What types of online shopping activities can you track in GA4?

You can track many different shopping-specific user actions in Google Analytics 4, which gives you plenty of context about your online store’s performance.

Key ecommerce actions you can track with GA4 include

• Login and sign-up

• Site search

• Add to wishlist

• Add to cart

• Remove from cart

• View cart

• Begin checkout

• Add payment info

• Add shipping info

• Purchase and refunds

By tracking these, you can finely tweak and customize ecommerce reports in your GA4 account for maximum insights.

8 ecommerce insights you need in GA4 for maximum success

Once you’re ecommerce set-up is in place in your GA4, here are the metrics and insights you need to monitor on a regular basis:

1. Product revenue

The Item revenue metric shows the total revenue you earned from individual product sales in a given period.

Find it in the Reports > Monetization > Ecommerce purchases report. Your list of products will be sorted by the number of times each item was viewed, but you can sort it by item revenue (descending or ascending) by hovering over the 'Item revenue' column title and clicking on the arrow.

This report shows you your biggest revenue makers as well as underperforming products, which can inform your future promotions and product updates.

2. Cart abandonment rate

Check your store’s overall cart abandonment rate by building a funnel report in Explore > Funnel exploration. Use the settings on the left to tweak actions for your funnel steps.

Start by building a standard funnel with steps like 'Session start', 'View item', 'Add to cart', and 'Purchase'. The drop-off between the last two steps is your cart abandonment rate.

The table below the visualization further breaks down your cart abandonment rate into device categories—desktop, mobile, and tablet.

3. High- and low-converting traffic sources

Head to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition to see which sources bring you the most traffic, engagement, repeat visitors, and revenue so you can use that information when planning future marketing campaigns and activities.

In the example below, email brings in the longest engagement per session. Organic search generates six times more traffic than email, but has less than double the revenue. In this case, email is a channel with a lot of untapped potential.

4. High- and low-converting landing pages

Where your visitors start their journey with you can make a tremendous difference in how their journey across your website unfolds.

Look for clues in the Reports > Engagement > Landing page report, which lists landing pages based on the traffic they got in a specified period, along with useful data like session length, conversions, and revenue.

Take the example below. Both of these landing pages are product category pages. One of them kicked off 20 times more sessions than the other, but generated only a quarter of its revenue.

This is a clue that visitors are struggling or get confused when landing on that specific page—or that it doesn’t align with their expectations.

5. Traffic and conversions on different devices and browsers

In Reports > Tech > Tech details, you’ll find metrics like users, engagement rates, conversions, and revenue based on the devices, browsers, screen resolutions, and operating systems your visitors use.

This report gives you context about the user experience on your website, like how many people use smartphones vs. desktops to browse your site and which device they’re more likely to convert on.

6. High- and low-performing campaigns

If you’re running dedicated marketing campaigns, you’re likely already using UTM parameters in your campaign-specific links. That makes it easy to jump into your GA4 reports to see the impact of these campaigns on your ecommerce results.

Head to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition where you’ll get quick access to campaign-specific data. At the top of the first column, select the Session campaign dimension. If you click the plus sign next to it, you can select Session source/medium to easily distinguish between channels.

In the search bar right above these dimensions, you can type in a common denominator if you want to directly compare campaigns of the same format or on the same channel, like email or newsletter.

7. Comparisons between segments

How do different visitor segments compare to each other? Think: age groups, countries, coupon code users, and loyalty tiers.

Go into any standard report (like the Reports > Monetization > Overview below) in GA4 and click the Add comparison button at the top. This opens a menu on the right-hand side that lets you define the conditions you want your user segment to match.

Use this to see how different groups interact with your ecommerce website, like how engaged they are, how much they spend, and what products they like most. 

Layering segments on top of other reports we mentioned earlier, like campaigns, devices, and landing pages, helps you get better at tweaking your products, categories, and emails, so you can meet customer expectations—and improve their experience.

8. Comparisons over time

Finally, use ecommerce tracking in GA4 not only to learn what happened last month or quarter, but also how metrics like revenue, cart abandonment rate, and conversion rate change over time to gauge the current pulse of your online store, and track its progress over a longer period of time.

Find this option at the top right corner of your GA4 reports (below is the Reports > Monetization > Overview example) by clicking on the date range. Toggle on the Compare option next to the calendar and either choose from predefined periods, or custom select your own.

Win more customers with powerful ecommerce data

Tracking ecommerce events with GA4 is essential in understanding what users do while shopping on your online store. But that doesn’t paint the full picture—it only shows what happens, but not why it happens.

You need the context behind your visitors’ actions to make the right decisions, like UX improvements or product updates. Use qualitative insights from Hotjar to find out how your visitors feel about their shopping experience, what they struggle with, what they need more of, and why.