Tracking Funnels With Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking

🚨 Note: All standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on July 1, 2023. 360 Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on October 1, 2023. That’s why it is recommended to do the GA4 migration.

Did you know that you can track any funnels with Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Analytics?

Unless you specifically have an eCommerce shop, it may have never occurred to you to use Enhanced Ecommerce tracking as part of your regular tracking configuration. If that’s the case, it’s time to step up your analytics game.

Whether you have an online shop or a lifestyle blog, you want your users to interact with your website in specific ways. The funnel of steps toward your ultimate user goal (usually a conversion) can be illustrated with Enhanced Ecommerce tracking in Google’s Universal Analytics.

In this post, I’m going to show you how you can build your customized funnel into Google Analytics with the help of the Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking Functionality of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. I’ll also show you how to do all this, even if you don’t have Google Analytics running on an eCommerce website.

An overview of what we’ll cover in this guide: 

• How to Set Up a Goal Funnel
• The Problem with Goal Funnels
• Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking Functionalities
• Creating Funnel Event Tag For Step 1 (Page View)
• Creating Funnel Event Tag For Step 2 (Button Click)
• Creating Funnel Event Tag For Step 3 (Form Submission)
• Going from Raw Event Data to Checkout Behavior Report
• Is Enhanced Ecommerce Useful to Non-eCommerce Websites?

How to Set Up a Goal Funnel

Most people think of Funnel Visualizations as the Goal Funnel that you can define in your Google Analytics and see how many people have gone through each step of the funnel.

I don’t have one set up right here, but normally, you could define them within your Goals settings. For this go to Admin→Goals and select a Goal. 

Then define each Funnel step, under Goal details, that you want to register in your Google Analytics. You can see it in this Funnel Visualization Report.

The Problem with Goal Funnels

Unfortunately, funnels only work with pageviews. So, you would need to have very distinct pages to lead your user through. At the same time, they’re not very flexible when it comes to the analysis of these funnels.

For example, you can’t segment them to draw further insights from the different users that go through this funnel. But, Google Analytics has now introduced the enhanced functionality of eCommerce Tracking. This functionality gives you a lot of different reports that are new to Google Analytics if you are running an eCommerce website.

Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking Functionalities

Now, this feature puts some labels on specific eCommerce functionalities, such as product, check out, or purchases. We want to bend the rules a little bit and build such a funnel visualization for our purposes even if we don’t run an eCommerce website. This gives us the benefit of seeing how many people went through this funnel. 

We will also be able to Create an Ecommerce segment of the people who dropped out. 

We can also use our custom segments in this view. To show you all this, I’ve created a little example.

So, we have an offer page, which will be our first page that the user will see, and this represents our first funnel step. 

Then the second funnel step would be the click of the apply now button.

The third funnel step would be to fill out this form and then submit this form. 

We will get an accurate representation of how many people have viewed an offer, how many clicked that button, and how many people submitted our form. 

Now, let’s set this up with the help of Google Tag Manager.

In our Google Tag Manager account, we have a normal pageview Tag, and we want to send these interactions over to Google Analytics.

Creating Funnel Event Tag For Step 1 (Page View)

So, the first thing that we want to track is if somebody viewed this offer. We will do this through Event Tracking.

Now, let’s send over an Event when somebody viewed this page. Let’s go into Google Tag Manager → Tags → New. 

This will be our Tag for Step 1, which will fire when the offer is viewed. 

Choose a Universal Analytics Tag type, then enter your Tracking ID. 

For Track Type, let’s choose Event. Then, describe your funnel under Category, number the step under Action, and describe the event under Label.

I will set this Non Interaction Hit to True because it will fire upon our pageview, and we don’t want it to affect our bounce rate. Set this to True and click on Continue.

Next, we’ll make a new trigger. For this select More under Fire On, then click New trigger, which will be our Offer Viewed.

This trigger will fire only on Some Page Views, where the Page Path equals /offer/. Click on Create Trigger.

Now, click on Create Tag and try this all out. 

Let’s go into Preview mode under Publish.

Then go to our offer page and reload the page. Under Pageview we see that our offer event has fired.

We should also be able to see this in our Real-Time reporting under Events. If your Real-Time report shows EE Funnel under Event Category and Step 1 under Event Action, then the Tag is configured properly.

Creating Funnel Event Tag For Step 2 (Button Click)

Now the next step that we want to track is Step 2, which is a click on our apply now button. I have already prepared a trigger for this, which you can learn about in our guide to Button Click Tracking with Google Tag Manager.

We’ll connect this trigger to our Tag, which will be a modified copy of our first Tag. Click on your pageview Tag.

Next, click Copy.

Then, rename your Tag to describe the second step of your funnel.

We’ll also reconfigure the Action and Label fields. You can set Non Interaction Hit to False because this is a hit that would affect the bounce rate.

Click Continue, then go to More options in Fire On. Choose your button click trigger.

Click Create Tag.

Then, make sure to Enable Built-in Variables under Variables.

Refresh your preview mode, then reload your page. Click on the trigger button.

We see our event is the gtm.linkClick, which fired our Funnel Step 2.

We should also be able to see this in the Active Users report under Events of the Real-Time reporting. Step 2 successfully fired. 

Creating Funnel Event Tag For Step 3 (Form Submission)

Now all we need to do is track the third step, which is the form submission. I have a trigger prepared for this already, which you can learn to do in our guide to Auto-Event Tracking with Google Tag Manager.

Again, copy on of your other funnel Tags.

 Rename the Tag as GA – EE Funnel Step 3 – Form Submit.

To configure the tag, change the Action to Step 3 and Label to Form Submit.

Now, choose the conversion trigger under Fire On and create the Tag.

Then, refresh your preview mode.

We’ll go to our Contact Us page and fill out the form with some test data. Click the Send button.

We have gtm.formSubmit with our Funnel Step 3 Tag fired. 

This goes over to Google Analytics. You see that Step 3 of the funnel was registered.

Going from Raw Event Data to Checkout Behaviour Report 

So, now we have all the interactions gathered in Google Analytics, and we can figure out a funnel with all the data that we have in the event report now. But what would be the step to go from the raw event data to a checkout behavior report that we could use?

Enable Enhanced Ecommerce Reporting

Well, first of all, we need to prepare our Google Analytics account. So, in the Admin section, you can go to your Ecommerce Settings, and even if you don’t have an eCommerce site, you can go ahead and build your funnel steps.

Labeling Checkout Funnel Steps

All you need to do is Enable Ecommerce Tracking, enable Enhanced Ecommerce Settings then add your funnel steps right there. These are just labels. So, you can name them whatever you want. Just be sure that they are in the right sequence so Step 1 would be your first funnel step. In our example, this is the Offer. Step 2 would be Apply Now.

You wouldn’t enter funnel Step 3 because this is a special transaction that would be sent over to Google Analytics. So, you don’t need to define the final step of the goal funnel, but only the steps that lead up to the actual conversion. 

Once you have done that, click Submit.

Install Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking Variables in GTM

This will prepare your Google Tag Manager account to send in the right data. All we need to do is install Enhanced Ecommerce tracking variables. We just need to model the eCommerce object as it is explained in the developer resources for Enhanced Ecommerce specifications.

So for example, here we have a data layer that pushes an eCommerce object into the data layer, which then can be picked up by Google Tag Manager and forwarded onto Google Analytics. 

Now, there’s a lot of data here that is unnecessary for our purposes.

All we need is the eCommerce product and to tell Google Analytics that this is our first funnel step. I’ve prepared a few variables that you would need in a Tag template which you can download as Enhanced Ecommerce Funnel Tracking Template.

Once you have downloaded the file, all you need to do is go to Admin → Import Container → CHOOSE CONTAINER FILE. From here, choose our file which is named eefunneltracking.json. We can Merge that with our existing container and click Continue. 

This will generate four new variables. Click Confirm to import the Container.

This will also add three funnel steps as User-Defined Variables. You could add more variables as well. 

The first one would just return our eCommerce product with the actionField as Step 1.

function(){
      Return { ‘ecommerce’: {
          ‘Checkout’: {
                ‘actionField’: {‘step’: 1}
           }}};
}

The second one is the same, just with Step 2. And the third one is a special eCommerce data layer that signals the purchase or the conversion to the Enhanced Ecommerce tracking feature.

Next, we need is an id for this purchase. I’ve used the built-in variable Random Number to generate an id for the conversion.

function(){
    return {‘ecommerce’: { 
        ‘purchase’: { 
             ‘actionField’: { 
                   ‘id’: ‘{{Random Number}}’
                    }
               }
         }};
}

Building Tags for EE Tracking Variables

So once you have that all setup, You just need to build in these variables to the correct Tags. We go into our Tags and for the first funnel step, we’ll choose the enhanced settings.

Let’s go under More settings and we have here Ecommerce Features. We can enable Ecommerce Features but we will not enable the Use data layer option. For the Read data from variable, we will select Funnel Step 1 and then save this by clicking Save Tag.

We then  go to our second step. 

We do the same for the second step but this time choose our Step 2 variable. 

Similarly, we create a Tag for the third step where we choose our special purchase variable.

Testing

So let’s refresh the page in Google Tag Manager and try this all out.

We see that our event gets sent over. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to see that in our Real-time reporting in Google Analytics or in our Google Tag Assistant.

But I have another plugin called GA Debugger, which will show us the data that has been sent over in the developer tools.

First, go into the JavaScript Console under View.

We see all the data that gets sent into Google Analytics. For the first step here, it would send a pageview. 

The second one would be our event. So we have here our eventAction with a value of Step 1. You can also note the Enhanced Ecommerce tracking action and eCommerce Step 1.

Thus, this data has been sent over correctly. Now let us see what happens when we click the apply now button. I do this with ⌘+click or Ctrl+click. We get more data that has been sent in this time. Our ec:action is checkout and ec:step is 2.

Now, let us go to the contact us page and fill out some demo data. Open the Developer tools and then the JavaScript Console. 

We have a pageview registered. We then click the send button on the contact us page. You can see the third funnel step being sent over with ec:action as purchase and ec:id as a randomly generated id.

Now, if everything is sent correctly, you will be able to check your Enhanced Ecommerce tracking reports in Google Analytics under Reporting → Conversions → Ecommerce → Shopping Analysis → Checkout Behavior. It will feature the three steps that a user needs to take in order to get to the last step: conversion.

Is Enhanced Ecommerce Useful to Non-eCommerce Websites?

Now all the other reports won’t be filled correctly. At this point, we have bent Google Analytics as per our requirement of making it work with our Non-eCommerce website. 

This is a great proof of concept of how you can take the functionality that is now built into Universal Analytics with the Enhanced Ecommerce tracking reports, and customize it to your needs.

Although you are not running this specifically on an eCommerce website, you can segment your funnel with this report. You could also build a segment from people who don’t reach the last step. This can be effectively actionable because you can then choose to remarket to these people through Adwords as well.

Summary

In this guide, we learned about the new built-in functionality of Enhanced Ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics.  This feature defines specific eCommerce functionalities, such as product, check out, or purchases and provides detailed insights into the user journey through the funnel.

We also learned that we can create similar funnels even if we don’t have an eCommerce website. You can download our Enhanced Ecommerce Funnel Tracking Template to create this easily and quickly.

Feel free to comment below if you use the Enhanced Ecommerce tracking functionality of Google Analytics for your eCommerce as well as non-eCommerce websites. Also let us know if you use our funnel tracking template and your experience using it!