Don Rodriguez, Director of Analytics at NetElixir, presented a webinar on {How Enhanced Ecommerce Identifies Potential Customer Loss} where he filled us in on the power of Enhanced Ecommerce in analytics, especially during this upcoming holiday season.
What is Enhanced Ecommerce?
Enhanced Ecommerce is an optional feature of Google Analytics. It allows you to quickly and easily identify lost conversion opportunities on your site by reviewing Shopping Behavior, Product Performance, Product List Performance, On-Site Promotion and Coupon Redemption Tracking, and more.
Enhanced Ecommerce Adds New Reports and Metrics to Your Analytics Account
Several new reports and a plethora of new dimensions and metrics are a part of the Enhanced Ecommerce capability.
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Shopping Behavior: Quickly compare Shopping Behavior from entry to viewing products to completing checkout across audience and acquisition dimensions like user type, campaign, keyword, and source/medium.
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Product Performance: With new metrics like cart-to-detail and buy-to-detail rates, you can quickly identify pockets of problem products, categories and brands (like those with a high view rate or high add to cart rate but a low conversion rate).
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Product List Performance: With new dimensions like Product List Name and Product List Position, you can improve your product catalog merchandising by understanding which product pages/content blocks are underperforming or where specific products perform best and worst.
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Marketing: Generate more effective merchandising by tracking any clickable piece of on-site marketing content by page and position on the page. Track your coupon code redemption right in Google Analytics so you can look for behavior differences by acquisition channel, user segment, etc..
Why you should pay attention to Enhanced Ecommerce
Very few ecommerce retailers are happy with their conversion rates. Even fewer have enough time in the day to take advantage of the mounds of data in their analytics. Enhanced Ecommerce gives you the opportunity to address both of those challenges. In some ways, it shines a light on opportunities you couldn’t see before. In other ways, it makes it much easier and faster to shine that light.
Here are just a few examples of how this feature can help you grow your business.
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Easily identify any kind of paid campaigns that aren’t driving the right level of product engagement.
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Easily identify underperforming pockets of products, brands, categories with high engagement.
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Know how effective your product content blocks are at driving users further down the conversion funnel. Understand the importance of position in those content blocks for driving sales.
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Measure your on-site marketing efforts. Know which page and which location on a page drives the most attention to your calls to action.
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Track performance of your coupon codes. Understand what user types prefer,
How Enhanced Ecommerce relates to you right now
This holiday season is going to be rough for some retailers. Right now, Enhanced Ecommerce is all about you making the most of this season.
So the $64,000 question is: Is it worth it to try and get Enhanced Ecommerce implemented in time for the holidays?
You have to weigh the costs of doing it (with a sense of the expected benefits of doing so) versus the opportunity cost of using those funds elsewhere.
Let’s try to frame this by using examples from our webinar:
First, there is no cost from Google to use Enhanced Ecommerce. That being said, it requires you to push additional data from your users’ experience on your site into Google Analytics. Depending on the platform you use, there may be a coding impact.
For example, a NetElixir client that uses Magento as its ecommerce platform spent ~15 hours of developer time to implement almost all the Enhanced Ecommerce features. Implementation is much easier if you’re using Google Tag Manager.
During our webinar, we highlighted a Dynamic Search (DSA) Campaign that was underperforming from a product level engagement perspective. A 10% increase in that engagement would have netted a 32% increase in orders. Let’s also assume that the investment required to implement Enhanced Ecommerce is similar to the 15 hours another client experienced. At $200 per order, that’s a $3k investment. Let’s also assume that your ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) from paid media is a 10. So, the opportunity cost for that investment is $3k x 10 = $30k. If we assume an AOV (Average Order Value) of $100, that means the 32% lift from the DSA campaign would have had to net 300 orders.
Here is another example from our webinar. We highlighted a pocket of items that had high engagement rates but no conversions. Finding a way to get those items converting at the site average meant a 3.5% increase in total orders. Using the same assumptions from the prior example, that means the 3.5% increase would have to equal 300 orders. If 3.5% = 300, then the baseline before the increase would have been 8,571 orders. How long does it take your site to generate 8,571 orders? Is that a reasonable payback period for this kind of investment?
We encourage you to take the next step and seriously consider how Enhanced Ecommerce analytics could benefit your team and your business this holiday season.
If you need help scoping the effort, contact your trusted NetElixir account manager.
