GA4 for Ecommerce: how to enhance your business!

Google Analytics 4 or GA4 came out of Beta more than a year ago and not a week goes by without a new feature being developed or an update related to the platform released.

Precisely for this reason, and given that the Universal Analytics platform is slowly heading towards “retirement” (deserved), it is increasingly important to start collecting data, but above all to know how to interpret them, via the implementation and analysis of GA4.

Obviously the main difference between GA4 and Universal analytics lies in the data model: everything becomes event-centric. With GA4 there is in fact we can track both the site and the app using a single tool and “repository” via the events … but you already knew this.

What is often bypassed by users is the possibility that GA4 offers of creating much more detailed analysis than the Universal version. In particular, if you manage an Ecommerce you must absolutely install GA4 (in parallel with Universal Analytics) and start taking advantage of all its main features.

Below I summarize the main points in favor of GA4 relating to Ecommerce.

1. GA4 Custom Funnel

Funnels have always been one of the most interesting features in the Google Analytics world, but with GA4 you level up. Now it is possible to choose a series of events to be analyzed in sequence and not simply limited to individual pages viewed.

In GA4 you can easily create a custom funnel by combining events and filtered page views for any event parameter. Then it is possible to analyze the progress of each single step for a specific timescale and above all the time elapsed between the different steps of the funnel!

Furthermore, you no longer need to create the funnel “in advance” to view the data. Now you can set it up on the fly by selecting the events of interest and you can segment it to obtain the actionable insights you need.

2. GA4 Path Exploration

Thanks to the event based data model it is now possible to see all the actions that users have performed within the navigation flow. We can therefore understand if and when they add a product to the cart or if they add it to the wishlist, perhaps because it is out of stock and much, much more. As an example think about the opportunity of mixing pages and events. And above all being able to do it both forward (from the beginning of the session forward) and backward, i.e. starting from a conversion and going back to find out which are the most performing paths in terms achievement of a specific goal.

3. GA4 Segment Overlap

The function reserved for GA 360 accounts is now available to everyone. We can therefore link multiple segments such as devices, products, categories, etc. to find out how to manage onboarding and retention strategies, create product bundles to offer to our customers, etc. This is one of the GA4’s features that I consider disruptive!

4. GA4 Audiences “on steroids”

In GA4 audiences can be configured with any combination of events, channels, demographic data, data imported from offline and then synchronized with Google Ads.

For example, it will now be possible to create a retargeting segment for users who in the last 30 days have:

• added a product from the “Men’s Shirts” category to the cart
• removed from the cart a product of the sub-category “Men’s Shoes – Lace-ups”
• exceeded the value of 550 € per cart
• however, they did not purchase or stopped at a certain step of the funnel

You will be able to optimize the budget at your disposal in the best way possible and focus only on the audience that allows you to obtain a better probability of conversion!

5. Predictive Insights

GA4 adds a number of features for predictive analysis. For example, in the analysis and construction of the audience you can add predictive metrics: probability of purchase and probability of abandonment. We can use these functions to determine the segment of users who purchase in the next 7 days or who have the highest probability of abandoning in the next 28 days.

Now the question arises: How much would you be willing to invest to re-engage customers who were in the 10% of the target high spenders most likely to buy?

6. Raw Data

In other words, goodbye to sampling within the individual GA4 reports!

The feature is so crucial for high traffic sites, that often had a high percentage of data sampling in Universal Analytics. Sampling does not allow you to generate in-depth analyzes (if you don’t have the 360 ​​version)

7. Collegamento diretto con BigQuery

In GA4 you can set up an export to Google BigQuery, sending events within minutes of their registration from your website / app.

BigQuery can therefore become the common datalake for corporate data, coming from the offline world, such as physical stores, CRM and much more. The goal is to obtain a full customer journey and to undertake corrective and improving actions to enhance your business.

As you can understand, the integration makes GA4 + BigQuery a valid data warehouse solution for E-commerce, especially in terms of advanced analysis and data repositories.

Other improvements of GA4 for your ecommerce

I must say that there are many, from the type of data that can be created in the data collection phase to the analysis and interpolations with the offline world .. one post is not enough to describe them all.

However, if you want to learn more about the world of GA4 for ecommerce you can drop us a line using the contact form!