Setting Up Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking with Snipcart

Ever since we launched Snipcart, analytics requests have been mentioned on a steady, recurring basis to us. This has never been surprising: we know data is a crucial factor in running an effective e-commerce business.

So a few weeks after our launch, we discussed analytics in a post titled Integrating Snipcart with Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking. In it, our co-founder Charles basically showed you how to push Snipcart data to Google Analytics using our JavaScript API (I might refer to Google Analytics as GA a few times in the following post).

Now we’ve decided it was time to simplify things a bit analytics-wise. We’ve integrated our shopping cart application directly to GA, creating a useful shortcut to e-commerce insights for our users. In this post, I’m going to show you how to easily set up your Google Analytics e-commerce tracking with Snipcart, and discuss the related benefits a little.

Steps for setting up the e-commerce tracking

Step 1: Enabling e-commerce in your Google Analytics account

All right, first things first: head to the Google Analytics home page and log in. If you don’t have an account yet, it’s time to step your analytics game up and follow these steps.

Hit the Admin button in the head navigation, go to View (the third column) and click on Ecommerce Settings. You should be looking at this screen by now:

Switch ON the Enable Ecommerce toggle button, hit Next step, and submit your changes. It might take up to 24 hours before you start seeing actual e-commerce data in your reports. And that’s all we have to do inside your GA account, really. Easy, right?

Step 2: Activating Google Analytics E-Commerce in your Snipcart account

Now it’s time to dive back into our dashboard app. First, log in to your Snipcart account. Go to Store configurations > Checkout & cart and mark the Activate Google E-Commerce Analytics checkbox.

We’re already done, friend. Snipcart takes care of everything else.

Now let’s see what kind of useful data you’ll have access to in GA.

Tracking your Snipcart e-commerce data in Google Analytics

You should let at least 24 hours pass before trying to read e-commerce reports in your GA account. When you’re ready, head to your account, hit Reporting > Conversions > Ecommerce > Overview. Unless you totally missed a step, you should be staring at this dashboard:

As you may know, your Snipcart products are all injected directly in your website using simple HTML markup. What we did, then, is to make sure GA could interpret various important fields and show you relevant data in their e-commerce module. Here are the exact fields we generate for Google Analytics (and you!):

Transactions

• Unique ID

• Affiliation

• Revenue

• Shipping fees

• Taxes

Products

• Name & custom fields

• SKU

• Price

• Quantity

In other words, you can now track all of your transactions and products directly in Google Analytics’ comprehensive app. Awesome, right?

Why you should track e-commerce data in Google Analytics

While there are many analytics third party solutions out there, Google Analytics remains one of the most popular, user-friendly and versatile. It’s a powerful, high-end analytics tool that’ll help you run your business better. In other words, you shouldn’t discard it from your management workflow.

With the new e-commerce analytics integration we’re offering, you’ll be able to obtain more actionable insights. We’re not here to give you a marketing course. But still, we recognize that variables such as time to purchase, product performance, sales performance and transactions can serve as a solid basis when it comes to e-commerce decision-making. Evaluating the impact and results of marketing efforts becomes easier when you have cold-hard numbers to analyze. Same goes for product and conversion optimization. In the Acquisition tab, for instance, you’ll now be able to see which acquisition channel drives more business and sales.

Conclusion

We’d like to thank the few users who kept telling us to integrate with Google Analytics (you can thank them too, in fact). Consider this post, and this integration, a start. We have other plans and ideas as far as analytics go. For instance, we’d like to generate Google Analytics goals automatically for our users. But, true to our ways, we’ll start by collecting feedback on this integration first. We’ll keep you updated as we improve analytics with Snipcart.

In the meantime, if you want to dig deeper into GA analytics, here’s a recent, huge a*s list of resources put together by the good folks at KISSmetrics:

It includes many e-commerce related content and platform-specific content. You might find some pretty valuable stuff in there.

Please, at all times, feel free to provide us with some feedback on our Google Analytics E-Commerce tracking integration. You can do this in the comments or by email. And if you have other cool analytics ideas, send them our way!