Google Analytics eCommerce Tracking For WooCommerce

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

If you’re running a website for your business, Google Analytics is the best website analytics tool available, with detailed reports telling you how well it’s performing. And, if you run an eCommerce website, thanks to the advanced Google Analytics eCommerce tracking features that you can set up, it becomes an even more powerful tool.

In this post, we’ll give you a quick and easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide on how you can set up Google Analytics eCommerce tracking as well as how to set up WooCommerce Google Analytics.

WooCommerce is one of the best eCommerce WordPress plugins available, and by learning WooCommerce conversion tracking, you’ll be able to improve your store’s conversion rates.

What Is Google Analytics eCommerce Tracking?

If you run an online store, setting up Google Analytics eCommerce tracking will help you track any shopping activity on your website. Ecommerce tracking also lets you see vital additional information and powerful metrics, including total and average revenue, conversion rates, product revenues, cart and checkout conversion rates, abandonment rates, and more, as well as an important understanding on:

• Products with a high (or low) number of sales
• The number of products per transaction
• Changes and trends in transactions and revenue over time

By having access to this additional data, you can optimise and improve your online store’s conversion rates, as well as understand where your sales are coming from (organic SEO, PPC, social media, referrals, etc). Knowing which channels are contributing most to your sales will help you make better decisions on where to spend your marketing budget for the best value and return on investment.

What Are The Benefits of Using Google Analytics For WooCommerce?

For any kind of business website, user data is essential. But, Google Analytics eCommerce tracking for a WooCommerce site is vital, giving you even more benefits. Its powerful metrics can dig deeper to monitor every aspect of your customer’s sales journey so you can measure, optimise and improve it using real-life data. Here are five significant eCommerce tracking metrics that will benefit your sales growth:

1.   Sales Conversion Rates

While lots of site traffic is good, it only really makes a difference if it converts into sales. The sales conversion rate measures the exact percentage of site visitors who make a purchase and checkout completely, as well as telling you which page they made their purchase from. Getting a handle on this will tell you if your marketing and advertising is working – or not.

2.   Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)

It might be costing you money (through marketing or advertising) to get customers onto your site and buying from you. So, tracking your Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) is crucial – if it’s costing you more to get them to your site than they’re spending when they’re there, your bottom line will suffer.

3.   Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

Tracking your customer’s lifetime value (LTV) can forecast how much repeat revenue they can bring to your site over a reasonable timeframe. This takes a lot of historical data, but Google Analytics can project this using key metrics including revenue per user, sessions per user and goal completion per user.

4.   Average Order Value (AOV)

Increasing the Average Order Value (AOV) for any customer is a major target for any eCommerce store. Both frequent purchases and new purchases can be tracked to give you detailed metrics of the AOV, helping you to influence shopping habits, increase the LTV and improve the CAC/LTV ratio.

5.   Cart Abandonment

Customer cart abandonment before checking out can dent your confidence as a seller, but there can be plenty of reasons why it’s happened and it might not be because of anything you’ve done wrong. Tracking the data around an abandoned cart, such as whereabouts your customers are leaving your site before checking out, can give you the best insight into which areas you need to fix or improve.

How To Set Up Google Analytics eCommerce Tracking

Before you get started on setting up your Google Analytics eCommerce tracking, we’ll assume you already have Google Analytics correctly installed and set up on your website. But if you’re new to Google Analytics, reading our post Understanding Google Analytics For Beginners beforehand will give you a great head start.

It’s also good to have a good understanding of both event and goal tracking before you dive into Google Analytics eCommerce tracking. To help you with this, you can also read about it in our post How To Setup Google Analytics Event Tracking.

When you’re ready to start, what was once quite complicated is now a much easier and straightforward setup process. The following will give you a step-by-step overview to help you.

1. To set up Google Analytics eCommerce Tracking to work with WooCommerce, open up your Google Analytics profile and click on ‘Admin’ at the bottom of the left column. Under ‘View’, click ‘E-commerce Settings’ then configure the following:

• Under ‘Enable Ecommerce’, select ‘On’ and click the ‘Next Step’ button
• Under ‘Enable Enhanced E-commerce Reporting’, select ‘On’ and click the ‘Submit’ button
• Now, under ‘View’ click ‘View Settings’
• Set the ‘Currency displayed as’ setting to match your WooCommerce currency
• Click ‘Save’ to save your changes

How To Set Up WooCommerce Google Analytics Tracking

Once you’ve set up eCommerce tracking in Google Analytics, go to your WordPress dashboard and install the WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration plugin. This plugin will send the transaction data from WooCommerce across to Google Analytics.

Once the plugin is installed and activated, go to ‘WooCommerce > Settings > Integration > Google Analytics’ and configure the following:

• Enter your Google Analytics Universal Analytics ID
• As you’ll already have the basic tracking code installed, leave the standard tracking setting disabled
• Tick ‘Enable Universal Analytics’
• Tick ‘Purchase Transactions’
• Tick ‘Add to Cart Events’
• Tick ‘Enable Enhanced eCommerce’
• Save the plugin settings

If you’re using PayPal as a payment method within WooCommerce, you’ll also want to configure the PayPal account’s auto-return settings. To do this, follow the steps below:

1. Log into your PayPal account and go to ‘Profile > Profile & Settings > My Selling Tools > Website Preferences > Update’
2. On the Website Payment Preferences page, turn on ‘Auto Return’ and configure your Return URL as follows: http://yourdomain.com/checkout/order-received/?utm_nooverride=1
3. Click ‘Save’

By adding the ?utm_nooverride=1 code at the end of the URL, you’re making sure that transactions appear under the correct traffic source in Google Analytics, otherwise they will show as just coming from PayPal.

Checking Your WooCommerce Conversion Tracking

Once you’ve completed the steps above, we’d advise logging out of your website and placing a test purchase through the system, including payment, to check the WooCommerce conversion tracking is working. You’ll then need to wait up to 24 hours for the data to show up in Google Analytics.

To view the new WooCommerce conversion tracking data, log in to your Google Analytics profile and click on ‘Conversions > E-Commerce > Overview’ to get an overview of the sales data collected.

And that’s it, you’ve now successfully set up Google Analytics eCommerce tracking for WooCommerce. Do let us know in the comments below how you get on with WooCommerce Google Analytics, or whether you have any questions on WooCommerce conversion tracking.

Let Improve Position Help Drive Your Sales

If you’re looking for effective and proven ways to drive more eCommerce traffic to your site and increase your online sales through WooCommerce tracking, then book a free 30-minute consultation call with us today. We can look into your online sales goals and targets and see if we’re a good fit to start helping you achieve them.