Master Google Analytics cart abandonment tracking with these steps

If you’re an digital commerce merchant, you must be familiar with shopping cart abandonment and its adverse impact on your business. Before exploring the reasons for online shopping cart abandonment solutions and ways to reduce it, it is essential to track it accurately for your business. In this article, we explore how you can measure this rate using Google Analytics cart abandonment solutions without depending upon any third-party tools. 

So, without further ado, let’s dig in. 

How can I use Google Analytics cart abandonment solutions?

There are two ways of tracking online shopping cart abandonment rate Google Analytics – by setting up a goal manually or installing ‘Enhanced eCommerce’. Don’t worry, we’ll be briefing you about both of these and to effectively use but let’s go over the steps of manual goal setting first. Here is how you can set up a Google Analytics shopping cart tracking goal.

#1: Create a goal

Log into your Google Analytics account and scroll down to the bottom of the page where you will find the Admin tab. 

After clicking the admin tab, you will have to choose the Account, Property, and View tabs before you reach the Goal tab on the far right where you will find the “New Goal” button. 

In Google Analytics, Goals help in measuring whether customers are performing certain actions or not. And if yes, then how often? To track Google Analytics cart abandonment rate, choose Checkout Complete as a Goal. 

#2: Set the details of the Goal

It’s time now to name the goal for Google Analytics shopping cart tracking and enter the right URL for the Destination tab under Type. Ideally, the URL should belong to the page that indicates that the transaction is completed, i.e., the ‘transaction is successful’ or ‘payment completed’ page. For example – www.onlinestore.com/success/checkout/12345.

Now when you enter the URL, make sure that you only enter the constant part. For instance, if you’re going to enter the above URL in shopping cart abandonment Google Analytics, you will only track the checkout numbers related to a particular product number as the numbers keep changing with each transaction. 

#3: Setting up a funnel for Google Analytics cart abandonment tracking

A funnel helps you find out the exact step where your customers usually reach. A simple checkout funnel Google Analytics shopping cart abandonment rate would include a payment page, a checkout page, and a successful transaction page

Every online store has a unique funnel and you can easily add URLs as per your commerce requirements. 

#4: Get reports

After setting up a funnel, you can start getting the reports within 24 hours. All you need to do is go to the homepage of Google Analytics, head to Conversion and then click on Goals. Under Goals, you will find Funnel Visualization where you will get all your reports.  

With these Google Analytics cart abandonment reports, you can find out how many visitors added items on their carts and how many actually purchased them. In fact, you can also track if the abandoned carts are more on mobile devices or otherwise.

Installing enhanced eCommerce plug-in

The second way of tracking shopping cart abandonment Google Analytics is by enabling the ‘Enhanced eCommerce’ plugin in your console. With ‘Enhanced eCommerce’ in Google Analytics, you can dive deeper into consumer behavior with a combination of detailed reports and smart insights covering impressions at every stage of the sales funnel, average number of orders in a cart, buy-to-detail ratio etc. 

In fact, you can even track the performance of individual products and promotional strategies as well as engagement on each product page with Google Analytics shopping cart tracking option, Enhanced eCommerce!

However, installing this plug-in is a little trickier than the usual eCommerce setting. You will need basic coding knowledge and it would be better to delegate this Google Analytics cart abandonment assignment to an experienced digital consulting firm. 

Alternatively, you could also either choose or migrate your online store to platforms like Adobe Commerce or Shopify Plus as they now include a built-in integration for ‘Enhanced eCommerce’. But if you don’t want to go for either option, we can help you install the plug-in manually. 

Let us take you through the steps of installing it:

1. Don’t use the ‘Enhanced eCommerce’ plug-in with standard eCommerce tracker. If you’re already working on it, either create a new property or migrate your existing property to the Enhanced eCommerce plug-in.
2. Please ensure that you have updated universal analytics to classic analytics as ec.js or Enhanced eCommerce plug-in would only work with that. 
3. Install the ec.js tracking code on every single page you intend to monitor.
4. Once everything is done, enable Enhanced eCommerce setting by following this sequence – Admin-> View -> Enhanced eCommerce.

Conclusion

Shopping cart abandonment is a bigger metric than you think! As per statistics, eCommerce brands lost $18 billion annually due to abandoned carts. Contrary to popular belief, customers often end up changing their decisions even after finding their favorite product and the need of the hour is to get to the root cause of this problem. With Google Analytics cart abandonment feature, you can not only track this parameter but find ways to tackle it well!