Google Analytics 4 e-commerce tracking

If you have a new GA4 property activated on your website, you will see that by default in the navigation under reports, ‘Generate Revenue’ is activated. Still, Google Analytics 4 cannot activate e-commerce tracking by default if there is no information in the dataLayer for your webshop. Fortunately, several plugins can already be found on the Internet, but unfortunately they often take extra scripts and information that you don’t need and can slow down the website a lot. Another advantage of this is that the standard reports for e-commerce, such as the checkout flow and purchase flow contain much more data on which you can optimize. This gives you instant insight into the bottlenecks of these flows in Google Analytics.

Therefore, we recommend adding e-commerce tracking manually to the website. This is done by including so-called recommended e-commerce events in the website and in Google Tag Manager. Consider add_to_cart, view_item, view_item list and the like. The complete recommended list of e-commerce events can be found on Google Analytics’ Measurement page. Then, in Google Tag Manager, you can forward the appropriate values to analytics.

Where should you start with e-commerce tracking?

If you have access to your own website code, you can at least include the Purchase event on the thank you page, which you then capture in Google Tag Manager. Requirements do include that purchases contain unique transaction_id and items, reflecting product names and values. Also make sure you set the currency properly and use for revenue value Value. Below you can see an example of this in Google Tag Manager

purchase event google tag manager

As you can see, there are quite a few Event Parameters that must be present per transaction. Preferably, you get this information directly from the dataLayer event on the thank you page so you can work with varying variables for price, product, value and tax/shipping. If this value is always the same, you can enter it manually at value per parameter.

E-commerce data layer

So, as mentioned, you need to include different information in the dataLayer to pass on for different e-commerce events. Much of this information can be captured automatically through the website in Google Tag Manager. Then you make sure you have the correct parameters populated for each event. To find out all the mandatory variables per e-commerce event, look here.

Once you have added all the e-commerce events on the website and all the parameters are populated, you can also create all the events separately in Google Tag Manager so you can pass them to your own Google Analytics 4 account. Then it may take up to 24 hours for all the information to be visible, but you will soon finally have data visible in the Revenue Generating Report in Google Analytics 4.

Shopify E-commerce measurements

For Shopify, there are slightly different conditions for setting up e-commerce. If you don’t have a Shopify Plus webshop, you can set up limited e-commerce events. We are experienced in setting up Shopify E-commerce measurements in GA4. That way, we can make sure you can still embed important data in Google Analytics.

Lace points implementation e-commerce tracking

If you have no idea, what to do, or have not done this before, we recommend leaving this to a Google Analytics specialist. Setting up the right e-commerce data properly has a lot of impact on your performance and results, and it’s a waste to start steering on the wrong information in your campaigns. With our GA4 Professional Implementation service, e-commerce tracking is included by default and you can be sure that you are collecting the right information. Consider also excluding payment providers, add_to_cart, shipping_info and payment_info events. In this way, we ensure that you have insight into the entire e-commerce journey in your webshop.

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Author: Paul Gudde

Function: Founder

Active since: 2007

Number of items: 25

LinkedIn profile

Specializations: Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Ads, Google bigquery, Server Side Tagging

google analytics 4 e-commerce tracking

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