[2021 Update] Setting Up Ecommerce in Google Analytics 4

howdy howdy and welcome back it's yet another workshop wednesday this time it's a beyond basics edition we're going to go ahead and start to set up e-commerce in google analytics for before we go too far into this of course my name is chris mercer i do go by mercer and welcome i'm the co-founder here of measurementmarketing.io and whether you've found us through a lot of the podcasts or talks that we're giving maybe through some of the platforms that we share some of our content with like cxl institute digital marketer social media examiner even measure summit or maybe you're already either a free toolbox member or you're already a member of the measurement marketing academy however you found us we are glad that you are here it's our job to help people just like you figure out how to use all these cool tools like analytics tag manager data studio and more of course today we're going to focus on kind of google analytics for with a little bit of tag manager and that brings us to our one thing so this idea when you're watching any of our trainings it is easy to get overwhelmed especially with ga4 and universal analytics and you know they yet again change things on us and so we got to figure this out as measurement marketers so in today's one thing we want you to just find that one new idea that one new concept and i'm going to show you some pretty cool tricks today that you can put into use so that you can actually get your e-commerce up and running practice those things then come back rewatch this workshop and you'll pick up something else that's the idea of one thing it'll help you from being overwhelmed and frustrated at times all right so let's go ahead and get started shall we beyond basics setting up e-commerce in google analytics forum all right we're just going to go ahead and dive right into this why not right we're both here we're both ready to get started but let's talk about what we're trying to do in google analytics 4 and i'm in the google analytics 4 demo account we are trying to get this number to light up we want total revenue to light up now uh if you look at ours right this is what ours is not a little production we've got our total revenue lit up here right so far so good what we really want to do is start to fill out monetization reports so in monetization i'm in the google merchandise store again i'm gonna go to e-commerce purchases and this is where uh in universal analytics you have your e-commerce reports kind of the same thing a little different quite a bit different but the basic idea where you have all your different products and then it's kind of steps how many times they were viewed added to cart cart to view ratios purchases all the way down to revenue over here right so we have that now in hours i'm doing a much simpler setup i don't need all these other things at least currently because we use data studio to find a lot of these answers so we haven't set that part up you can see ours looks a little emptier here but we do have products and we do have purchases way down here so we can see our revenue coming in so that's what we're going to talk about today is how to actually set that up and of course we're going to use google tag manager as you should as well at this point in the measurement universe if you're not using tag manager seriously consider this tool it's very quickly becoming somewhat of a required tool for measurement so we're going to make the assumption that you are already using google tag manager again this is a beyond basics edition of workshop wednesday so we're going to assume you've got some skills with this now i've already set up the google analytics for configuration and pageview i'm assuming you have that set up as well for those of you who are academy members you can go to win google analytics for basics it'll talk about all the stuff you need to do it actually set up google analytics for we're going to make the assumption at this point that's already set up now we need to enhance that setup right in our journeys you always do the good enough to get going version now we need to make it better in this case better would be not just a page view we want to have e-commerce as well so let's talk about what that's going to look like what i'm going to do is we're going to use our demo store so i'm going to go into measurement marketing.io forward slash demo little playful demo site we have set up with my incredible design skills now we're going to go into shop and we're going to do a little shop we're going to basically measure a specific behavior at this point and it's not going to be all of these because the tactics and the tips that we're going to talk about today you can apply to all of these different steps what we're really going to start with what i recommend you start with is the official purchase which is what you're about to see here so the i'm just going through the behaviors of a purchase and we're going to set up this purchase event together so so far it's still spinning here because it's taking a little while for this test purchase to go through there we go so now we've got purchase we're on order received at this point we essentially want to report that we made you know 20 bucks in revenue essentially is what we're going to do at this particular stage so this is the behavior that we're going to set up the techniques that you're going to see for me to do this right that you and i are going to work on together here you will be able to apply to all the other steps that come before this so let's talk about kind of the steps that are involved as we go through now i have set up some short links for you that will hopefully uh be pretty useful so the first one i'm going to do is just measure dot tips slash ga4 e-commerce so ga for e-commerce is what we're going to do now the reason that we're coming here and again for those of you not developers don't freak out i know it's a developer guide just use it for reference what we're doing here is this is just e-commerce stuff just the events that are associated to ge4 e-commerce now there's another short link we have you may have saw pop-up as i was typing this one measure.tip slash ga4 events so if you type in measure.tips.ga4 events it'll take you to all of the events that are available in google analytics for but a lot of these are not really ecommerce only events there are other types of events right things like post score or search right select contents that sort of stuff maybe not an e-commerce event so this first one i did again measure dot tips slash ga4 events will give you the events that are in google analytics for right the different stages we're gonna do we're gonna focus on purchases everything you learn here in this workshop you can apply then to everything else you just need to change out what the event is but in this case purchases so we're going to come down here we're going to go to purchases now this is the data layer that's there unfortunately you know it's a good and bad thing ga4 has expanded out remember ga4 is the platform of tomorrow it's not necessarily the platform we're all using today because it's just still rolling out changes and updates and everything else but it is certainly built for the being the analytics tool that we will all be using you know in the in the very near future one of the things they did was they enhanced its ability to record certain e-commerce details that universal analytics just couldn't easily do things like multiple categories et cetera in in part of the problem was in order for them to do that they had to change the format of the data layer so you have a universal analytics data layer which is a completely different format and then you've got the ga4 data layer right completely different from universal analytics so we're going to take a look at the universal analytics and that's what we're going to talk about today is well because we're supposed to at least as of this recording this is march 17 2021 when we are recording this as of this point in time you should be running both of these platforms universal analytics and google analytics 4 in parallel you are probably using universal analytics as and you probably should be still universal analytics as kind of that main source of useful truth when you're trying to actually figure out what to do next but you still got to get stuff in the ga4 and practice like e-commerce and things like this so we're going to take advantage and what i'm going to do is i'm going to flip tag manager into preview mode here i'm going to close out our little demo store and we're going to go through that exact same thing that we just did go into tag assistant and we're going to go through a quick little demo to show okay what do we have back there so let's see measurement marketing dot io slash demo so we're gonna go into our demo store again i expect the tab is gonna pop up it should say down here that it's connected and then over here it says connected yay we've got connection so now i'm going to go into exact same thing i'm going to go to shop and i'm going to do this fairly quickly just to go through the steps we're going to go view our cart and we're going to proceed to checkout and then of course we're going to run through and place our order give that a few minutes to process and then what we should see here is i minimize some of these you can see all over different stages we should see another step pop up here momentarily that'll say order received right that's after this page in the background is loading there it goes loads there it is there's our checkout with our official order received url right in there so at this point in time the only reason i went through and did this is because i want to see what the data layer looks like what's already in the data layer so we already have universal analytics set up and this is the assumption that you already have that working as well we need to figure out what to do universal analytics again e-commerce it's a purchase that's great we have this action field stuff which is in there we've got products which is in there and if you look it back at google analytics 4 you don't see products anywhere everything's now called item so it's a combination of like okay all the information i need is in the data layer it is sitting there in our data layer right if i go back to tag assistant it's sitting in there it's just in the wrong spot and it's called the wrong thing and this is feels like it's gonna be kind of a pain and if you're thinking that that's what i thought too for months and i have avoided setting up e-commerce for a very long time because i just didn't want to mess with this whole thing and i was really hoping google would figure out like hey can't you just like take this and change it on your own and not make me do it but alas that's not gonna happen however there are lots of cool things that you can now do that will make this substantially easier so that's what we're going to do today together and that's what i wanted to focus on this purchase thing because the purchase is the most important step of e-commerce to get in and when you learn how to do a purchase by default you can do all these other things they become so much easier because they don't require as much as a purchase does that's why we're going to focus on the purchase itself and then you can do the rest of them on your own okay so this particular purchase event we want to get this purchase event into google analytics 4. so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go back in the tag manager first i'm going to go ahead and close out our previews so we can i like closing it out entirely just so i'm never confused and there's never multiple previews going on so back out of that entirely now i'm going to go back into tag manager and then what i'm going to do is we're going to create a new ga4 event so i'm just going to kind of put the basics in play here first configuration tag of course got to have that for ga4 then the event name what do i call this event name refer to the documents measure purchases see that lowercase purchases coming across it's a purchase event lowercase if you go into the ga4 events you'll see over here on the right hand side it's a purchase right purchase it has to be exactly like this do not do not do something like this purchase because if you do that that is a completely different event because ga4 is a case-sensitive platform so we have to do purchase like this has to be lowercase very important do not try to be uh you know creative at all because it'll get you in trouble i know from experience this is why i'm passing it on to you so purchase lower case is what goes in there that's what it is then i want to know okay when should it do this purchase well the trigger i'm going to create in this case is just when it created that order received so i'm just going to and i saw that was in the url so i'm just going to go and create that very quickly we're going to say some page views when the page url contains slash order received again those of you that are in uh you know google tag manager get a little more skills you know there's there's other ways to uh to set this up and tighten it up and everything else i'm just gonna do it just for sake of example to get this thing to fire so we're gonna say page this is order received okay all right so now we're gonna go ahead and click on save that should fire um now i've got my tag order received i've got my purchase if i just do this that is okay and if this is all you do i think it's great because at least you get a purchase event but the problem is and this is what you might think you might think well how do i tell it to use the data layer how do i tell it to access the data there like we do with universal analytics the answer is unfortunately there isn't that option right now doesn't mean it won't be in the future but it's definitely not there right now the way you do this is with an event you have to define the event which is a purchase event and then we have to define because this is a generic event tag right it's a generic event it doesn't know it's a purchase you're telling it it's a purchase and then you have to tell it well i know a purchase needs certain details to help it to make sure it has what it needs so we have to tell we have to push through we have to manually put in these different details so a purchase has what it needs to show up in your reports that's going to include things like the order id it's going to include things like the amount right what the revenue amount is it's going to include things like what did they buy right those actual items that they're buying so those are the things we have to include this brings me to uh my next short link now there's been three that i've shared with you measure.tips are our little short link system we have here so measure.tips slash ga ecommerce was the first one so i'm just going to type that so you can see so it's ecommerce was the first one that brought us to all about the e-commerce then we talked about ga4 events pushing through so we have events this third one i'm going to give you and you need to keep these handy ga4 this one will really help you ga4 required now this particular link took us forever to find and i say us but i'm gonna have to give credit where credit's due it's julie from our team one of our primary account instructors back there so uh in the academy so she's spent a ton of time finding this and uh and here's why because you see and and i just want to point out the frustration when you try to do this on your own and if you if you're frustrated because you've tried and just it hasn't worked out i get it i feel your pain here's some of the reason you come through this and you say okay well i'm gonna do a purchase event okay cool i get it here's the format awesome i'll put it all in and you don't see things like this transaction id required right but in the refund section it tells you it is required for purchases in the purchases section it doesn't say anything's required everything else has a little thing that tells you if it's required not purchases which of course is one of the most important things that they missed that on so you don't know if anything's required here it looks like none of it's required however that is not true so what do you do okay we'll just go to the analytics we'll go to the events cause the purchase the directory of course they're gonna say everything's required nothing is required here okay so i guess nothing is required however that is technically true let's let's just i'll push brass tacks here it's technically true however it will just fire a purchase and you won't fill any of your reports so if you just want to have the purchase event that hey they bought you don't know what they bought you don't know how much they bought it for you don't know any of the details around the actual journey then fine this works and technically they're not wrong it's not required but in the reality of things if you need to push through an event parameter you need to there are certain ones that are required so enter this link that again julie from our team found so she came through here and made this really hard to find i'm gonna scroll down here there actually is required parameters for google analytics for e-commerce then it tells you and this is the best list that we have for this this is why i'm kind of linking directly to this with our short link in case it changes uh hopefully it'll be kept up to date but this is a huge time saver unfortunately they made it really hard it's items in bold so hopefully you can tell from this video this is not bold items is bold the word items here is bold so the parameter of items is required for the view item event then there's the view item list select item add to wish list add to cart you can see items is required every single time for the event to actually fulfill what it needs to fulfill so if we come down to the purchase event again lowercase purchase i see there are actually three items is required because that's bold transaction id is required because that's bold and value is required because that is bold we also can do these other things as optional values we're not going to do that in this example i'm just going to do the bold so we can show you kind of this good enough to get going version but now we know finally that a purchase event in google analytics 4 has three required parameters items transaction id and value even though they didn't tell you that here and they certainly didn't tell you that here so this is the one you want to hold on to again ga4 this was ga4 required right measure.tips slash ga4 required will bring you to this page okay so now we know we have three things that were required again going back to this list we're going to purchase right in here and i'm going to take items transaction underscore id and value all of those are required that's what i'm going to do so first we're going to say transaction underscore id i have to do it case sensitive has to be exactly like it's expecting it you cannot get cute with these names you can't get creative with them just transaction underscore id just keep it just like that then value is what i'm gonna put in next there's no rhyme or reason to the order it's whatever you want as long as all three get there so transaction id will be the order id the value is gonna be our revenue amount and then items what they bought so then i'm gonna put in value and then i'm going to put in items all right so transaction id where do i get the transaction id well this is where we have to go to our universal analytics data layer that's sitting back there that we have and we need to be able to to play around with that a little bit we need to be able to pull that information out from where it is so what i'm going to do is i'm going to quickly save this i'm just going to call this a little work in progress i'm going we'll come back to this in a second so ga4 and this will be purchase and then work in progress okay so we're gonna save this for later okay i'm going to enter preview and this is just so that i can open up go through our purchase and see what our data layer looks like to see where everything is right that's all we're going to do here so i'm going to go into our shop and i'm just going to go through we're going to click on our carts do the exact same thing i'm just trying to get what the data layer looks like now again knowing what you know now you might have copied it into a text document or something like that but if you don't right it's fine just go through it again have a test purchase when it loads up you'll see it show up into your preview window which is what we're going to do here so i'm going to go back into tag assistant we're going to get all these minimized here oops and there's our final checkout right in here now i'm going to go into my data layer make sure i'm on the right page which is order received perfect that's also why i just fired accidentally my purchase pixel but that's okay so now i'm gonna come down here and we're gonna go to e-commerce right in here this is our existing data layer now i just sent it through with nothing okay i just sent it through with like no details in those parameters right that i have so what we're gonna do is we're gonna get some parameters in the first one i need i'm gonna go back into edit this tag the first one i need transaction id there's my value i need to put a value in there so what we're going to do is we're going to go back into our existing data layer see where it was so what i'm going to do is i'm going to pull uh id 254 so this is our order id in this example of where the data layer is this is our order id the the invoice id would be 254 so we're going to set up a data layer variable again it's going to go ecommerce then we're going to have to go into the next level which is purchase then into the next level which is action field to get to id and return that value so it's going to be ecommerce dot purchase dot action field dot id to get into pulling the value of 254 that's what should happen okay so that's what we're going to do so we're going back into tag manager i'm gonna create a new data layer variable and we're gonna go right in there of course again remember the the level so first we go to the e-commerce dot oops can e-commerce not spell today let's try this e-commerce dot and then we're gonna go into purchase dot action field dot id okay so we have e-commerce purchase action field dot id that should match ecommerce purchase action field capital f title case remember case sensitive and then id lowercase id 254 that's what should show there so that's what we're expecting and i'm going to go ahead and save this i like to copy these out paste it in there and this is going to be called dlv because it's a data layer variable and then where specifically we're telling it to go so let's take that out so there we go so data layer variable ecommerce.purchase.actionfield.id pull the value of that next up so far so good transaction id value okay so let's go through and we're going to go and pull the value what's the actual value in our case it'll be revenue now again you could split out shipping and everything else we're just not going to worry about that in this case it's the same stuff i'm going to show you you know that you can use to eventually do that as well in this case value is going to be revenue so that's what i'm going to pull revenue of 20 bucks so in this case we're going to say value now where is this it's under e-commerce purchase action field this time revenue instead of id so that's all i'm going to do go to data layer variable and we're going to create brand new one here i'm just going to paste in what i just had except instead of id this time just revenue return back with revenue okay so now it's the daily variable and we've got the revenue coming back so there's that so far so good there's my order id there's my value with revenue now items how do we do items i know what you're thinking you're thinking boy i really hope there's an easy way to do this maybe i can just go to e-commerce and then purchase and then products and then all the details will be there which they are id name sku category price etc however when we go back to the developer docs look at that there is no id it is now called item id there is no name it's now called item name there are no products they're now called items so that means we have to flip out this and we have to change it so it's this that seems like a total pain however our buddy simo ahava has saved the day with this one i'm going to show you a really cool way to do this remember we do not want to break this we need to keep this in there because universal analytics is still working it's still reporting e-commerce it still uses this data layer so you can't change this data layer it has to stay in there so what we're going to do is we're going to create a brand new variable and this one when we go into our variables it's going to be under community templates we're going to do a community template variable and this particular one you're going to come up here we're just going to search and it's going to be right in here from simo eec products to ga4 items so what do you read this enhanced e-commerce products to ga4 items that is because ga4 is essentially enhanced e-commerce now there is no standard e-commerce it's just the one type of e-commerce and ga4 that at least is good so we're changing the enhanced e-commerce products array into a ga4 items array that's it so we're going to add this to our workspace we're going to click on add and watch how easy this is here's our variable okay so we just installed this variable ec products the ga4 map it automatically this is what i would expect that you would do map the ecommerce object automatically that way you can use it for other things besides the purchase event so we're just going to say map it automatically try this first if you need to there you can you can you know try some of these other options but for now keep it like this we'll keep it nice and simple for this workshop map ecommerce object automatically that's it nothing else to do now if you have product level scopes everything else you can customize this we're not going to go in those details it's a bit beyond the scope of this training but no if you are doing that you can still use this variable for this so that's all we're going to do so i'm literally just going to call this oops back out here i'm just going to save this and i'm going to call it exactly what its name is that's it because that's what it's doing it's taking enhanced ecommerce products array changing it to the ga4 items array i'm just going to click on save that's my variable that's all you need to do and i was so happy when i found this because it made it so much simpler than me having to take a variable or take the data there and try to rewrite it on my own because i just don't have that sort of those technical javascript chops to do that i could i could it could probably do in a very inefficient way and i could get it done with data pushes everything else i know that much but i'm not an expert at this i'm a javascript developer and i could work with a developer to get them to do it but this custom variable template has already been worked on by a lot of developers so that it does this so we're taking advantage of him standing on the shoulders of giants uh in this case simo hava thank you again simo for getting this stuff done so now we have this right and i know what it's doing this is important you have to know what it's doing right that you have to understand that that concept at least so we don't want to to mess with anything um so now we're going to save this i'm going to take this back out because in progress should be done now so we're going to click on save so now at this point we should have a fully functioning purchase conversion event that will now use our existing data layer which is already there and it's however that's gotten there already you're going to keep that coming through and all we're doing is taking advantage of what's in place and we're going to switch it around so that also ga4 gets e-commerce when universal analytics gets e-commerce hopefully fingers crossed let's test and find out so i'm going to back out of the debug again i like backing out entirely out of debug and then starting it over again i'm going to close out these analytics platforms because we're not going to use this currently and what i'm going to do is i'm going to go into preview here and we're going to restart preview again again what we expect is the tab is going to open up it should say connected down here and then it should say here connected cool now we've got our connection that's step one now i'm going to go ahead and do quickly a test purchase again however you do your test purchase would do the same thing in my case of course it's demo store so i've made it a little bit simpler so i'm just going to go through and i always like experiencing it as a user right go through the process of purchasing stuff so that it comes in now what i'm going to do is i'm going to minimize this just a little bit and i'm going to bring up another window that i've had sitting in the background which is google analytics 4 in our demo store now you can see here i'm in the debug mode okay so i'm just going to expand this out a little bit so you can see it so in in your debug mode down here right it looks like this wait at the bottom debug view when we have that turned on you've got all these analytics hits coming through look there purchase that just fire through so here's all the events coming through this is how you tbv what we call trust but verify right that's how we tbv are setups so if i click on purchase did purchase have everything that it needed right coming through so we want to make sure that all those different details are in there hopefully they are there's our transaction id 255 this time because that was the next transaction remember 255 so that makes sense the value probably was 20 bucks let's make sure 20 bucks there's our value right there um so we have that as well um let's see what else are we looking for uh so we said source transaction id what i do not see is items right so i don't know there we go items bam ten dollar donation yay that's what it was perfect and here's our item quantity item name perfect we have everything in there so items all set out everything's coming through as best we can tell as a purchase event and now we officially have e-commerce setup now this was pretty exciting for me to be able to get this up and running take advantage of an existing infrastructure which was in this case right if i come through here and this is what i like testing the stuff when i'm going through i'll have one on one side and this on the other side so i can see what's going on right 20 bucks and you know the price and everything else coming through i can see all these different details make sure it matches what i needed to do but what was nice for me is that i did not have to change i'm going to expand this back out i did not have to change anything i was already doing all this stuff was already coming through i just needed to also make sure i told google analytics for in this case ga4 what was going on with e-commerce as of course universal was doing its thing so it's a yes and i'm still running both only now google analytics 4 will have its proper information now i'm going to flip into google analytics 4 very quickly here where are you going to see this here is debug you must use debug to to sort of trust but verify stuff as they're coming through now you can see it in the platform here in ga4 you can see here you have to click on the purchase event then you can see all your different parameters user properties anything that you're sending over specific parameters and scopes everything else you've got all in here right it's a good sign so far in your tag manager when you're doing your preview in tag manager go back to tag assistant here in our tag assistant right we have our data layer which is great but i also want to make sure in our tags that the tags fired properly is my purchase pixel firing or my purchase event i should say firing if i click into this i of course see this which doesn't really tell me anything so i can flip it i'm going to go into the actual container loaded event when it happened that'll opens this up into values it's typically going to be names like this and you can flip it to values then it tells you oh here's what i sent transaction id was 255 value was 20 items were here are the item amounts with my price and quantity and everything else perfect right it's got everything in there that i needed to have in there it looks like it's coming through properly i tbv'd it i saw that it was received in google analytics 4 in our debug mode so far so good now the ultimate tbv of course the ultimate trust but verify is when you would come into your monetization reports and you can go into the e-commerce purchases you would see it show up there you know hopefully in a perfect world remember i'm going to flip it to today i do not expect it to actually be here yet at all because with ga4 there is quite a bit of a delay for information that you see and debug and then when it finally shows up in your reports it can take as long as 24 hours sometimes it can take a while um so it's really not good for day of events here where sometimes in universal analytics maybe it's 20 to 30 minutes maybe a couple three hours something like that for the historic reports to start populating these ones take quite a bit longer uh at times and i think they will for for a little while right remember ga4 is still kind of rolling out coming out with cool new things so it won't be here i would check tomorrow if i was doing this for real i would come in here and check and make sure that everything came through the way that i really expected it was supposed to come through and then if it didn't maybe make some adjustments but so far so good it looks like things are working the way i wanted to what i would expect again would be the product name and the purchase information uh would be here in the the item revenue then what i could do or even if the rest of the afternoon if i wanted to to play with it for a few more hours i could come back and i could set up the rest of these events i could say okay well let's do a purchase event now let's work our way back what was before the purchase event a checkout event well my trigger might be the checkout page if that's what i want to do right whatever that is and then i would have e-commerce and then the items coming through now i could use that same variable to use the items there to be okay enhanced ecommerce items to now be items for the checkout and i would see all of that and i could report the checkout then i can go back another step promotion clicks in this case probably not going to be useful for us uh this one wouldn't be either removing won't be adding two certainly let's do add and remove right here's the add to cart only now the event is add to cart or remove from cart and you add those in and then tbv them do your preview tbv then of course publish your tag manager account make sure the changes go live and then always make sure in google analytics for you come back the next day just to make sure the reports are really filling in the way you thought they were going to but that's it now you know how to actually set up ecommerce and you've got a few hopefully very very useful uh short links the measure.tips slash ga for e-commerce again so measure.tips ga4 e-commerce will take you exactly where page we're currently on so you see the developer's guide for that and that is useful because you see all of the different events that you can hook up with ga4 ecommerce that's useful for that there is measure.tips slash ga4 events that takes you here where you have this list of every event sort of the the recommended events and the built-in events that are available in ga4 so you can kind of get an idea of okay here's a built-in event for purchase here's the stuff that's coming through but remember it's kind of misleading it says it's not required but it's required okay at least some of these are so you have that and then you find that link that julie from our team found for us which was measure.tips slash ga4 required this is the most important one of all of those because this one and this is the most important part about all this shows you the bolds and the bolds are required so you can see oh this is the view item i can do as an event i can click on items i can do the view item list i gotta make sure it has items i can do select item gotta make sure it has items add to wishlist has to make sure it has items if i do add to cart has to make sure it has items and all of these have items as required with the exception of purchase which needs items transaction id and value and refund which needs transaction id only so pretty cool things that you have the ability to do and of course you can keep going further this actually has the different items and what's required there so this is a really useful guide um to go through and now you know the technique of how to set up a purchase for ga4 it is very simple i say that i realize what i just did we just showed you all this stuff for the last 20 minutes you're like what it is really simple though when you practice it a few times with a little bit of experience it's just an event tag a ga4 event tag the particular event you're identifying is called a purchase it's a built-in tag a built-in event i should say called purchase so it needs some specific parameters that it's required to have and you just push through the value of those parameters wherever they are and then all the only thing we did here was a little bit different was the fact that we added that custom variable template which just took universal style and changed it into ga4 style so that ga4 could read it because if you just use the universal format it's not going to work ga4 can't can't read that so this this variable just automatically does that for you it is fantastic i love it it is a huge thanks again to cmojava uh and the community at large that's helping out with custom variables for the rest of us making this a little bit easier to use so there we go that is how to set up a ga4 purchase now of course you can just keep doing it with other ecommerce events as you need them for other specific stages of microconversions along your own e-commerce journey and you're off to the races so with that what was your one thing hopefully this made a little more sense in terms of okay there's a purchase event i know it needs certain details to feed that specific event now it's just a matter of where are those details currently being used by universal analytics and how can i get them from universal in the data layer hopefully is where they are into google analytics for so and specifically in the format that google analytics 4 really needs it to be then there's all these other events that you can do that are ecommerce events that maybe you could add on to it so this is really what it comes down to it's practicing this do not worry about getting it perfect the first time that's what ga4 is about now's the time to mess that thing up i am certainly messing up our own google analytics 4 account all the time because i'm playing with it that's what it's for right now right now is the time you start learning this product google analytics 4 and playing around with it because it doesn't really matter you're not going to use it for any production decisions at least certainly not now you shouldn't be it's not ready yet there's they just recently rolled out referral exclusions like some of this basic stuff that universal analytics has had for years google analytics doesn't google analytics for it does not yet have it will it will so you got to get ready for it but this is why you practice with stuff like this so get a purchase event in there then eventually get details of the purchase event in there and get even better at e-commerce and adding in all of your steps so you are further ahead in this game now next week we've got another workshop coming up we're going to talk about this will be a strategy session edition and we're going to talk about the perfect utm strategy to use in google analytics it's a question we often get like what should my utms be and when i'm trying to tag my traffic sources how can i make them work the way i need them to work so we're going to put all of that in play for you and give you the perfect utm strategy so that you can either take it to your team if you're the strategy person and work with your implementers to make sure that you're able to get questions like which traffic sources are causing which results all right if you want that just subscribe to the youtube channel that's all you need to do i'll give you a second to do that now and of course thank you we are we are uh coming up on almost 1500 subscribers i think it's around a little less than 1400 at the moment uh but we're growing by leaps and bounds every day so i appreciate all of you for continuing uh to spread the word and to let your friends know to let your peers know that this is out there that this channel is there and that hopefully we're making it a little more fun um than than what this topic generally can be uh so play around with it and thanks again for spreading the word about the youtube channel itself if you are not yet a part of the magic marketing academy i do want to introduce you to that for just a second here it's measure.tips getacademy will take you to that page however very quickly what it looks like when you come in you have access to everything that you see right here these six little blocks the first block is the win courses so these are all of these different courses that we have that are covered you can see organized by date in this particular example we have google analytics where it's the how to set it up and the basics of using google analytics a little bit beyond basics more advanced stuff for google analytics that's coming through and then we also have google analytics for basics for those of you getting started with google analytics 4 as well as ecommerce so in fact this one will be coming due for an update now that we have google analytics 4 in the house we've got google tag manager so for those wanting to learn google tag manager the basics are here we have beyond basics and then retargeting setup specifically for working with different ad platforms with tag manager a little bit of javascript basics if you need to brush up on your skills there for dashboards and reporting of course google data studio but also other things like sheets using that to figure out how to track your funnels what numbers are important to know how you work with traffic attribution things along those lines then of course measurement strategy so there's courses around building out your strategy or plan figuring out how to optimize things learning how to forecast and learning how to work with sort of the miscellaneous tools you might work with like google optimize search console um shopify even expressions like regular expressions and learning those things so we put a lot of stuff back here these courses are updated or there's either a new course or it's updated every month something is updated every month uh or a new one so uh and you can see by date that's where those all are so we just recently did google sheets basics in march google analytics setup was updated in february tag manager basics was updated in january just a couple months back so there you go you can kind of see that the next section of the academy that you would have access to would of course you have workshop wednesday that's the free part you would have access to this no matter what even on youtube but these edited past workshops they're all edited down we have student editions of these so they've been all of this stuff that you and i are talking about now the academy's chopped out we have zoom effects that are put in there and and visual effects to make it a little easier to figure out kind of how to navigate through stuff they're quite a bit shorter for example this little regex one here looks like this so if you want to learn regex you can go through the regex thing and it'll walk you through give you some resources time to complete you can ask questions if you need to so that you have all of that so that's kind of what those on-demand workshops are like again all of these unlock as part of the measure marketing academy you also have the toolbox which has all the different tools this is new get it done guys currently doesn't show anything in there because we are literally you are seeing this kind of happen in real time we are literally putting in a new one and what we're going to do here is going to be a premium section just for academy members where it'll have kind of like assembly kits of oh take a little of this and do a little this and then you pop in this brand new report template and here's how you now have like what we call the eyes on the journey report as an example that's gonna be the first one we're doing for those of you who are fans already of measure marketing to i o maybe you saw our eyes on the journey workshop we had a lot of requests for like okay is there a template or something for this that's what they get it done guides are gonna be built for things like that so you'll see those back here as well in addition to all the other tools that we've collected over the years that we think are pretty useful that you can use back here as well and then finally this is my favorite feature by far i hope it will be yours as well the ask instructor support system this support is way beyond i lost my password kind of support so what happens is when you're going through these workshops and you're going through the courses you will have questions it makes sense you're going to because your tech stack might be different or your unique situation might need a little bit of customization maybe it just wasn't as easy as you thought it was and it's not working out the way that you thought it was going to you need some help so you click on ask a question enter in your question pop in whatever the details of the question are here we love screenshots and videos so if you can do a quick screencast and kind of give us an over-the-shoulder view of what your setup looks like or what your dashboard looks like or what your funnel looks like your customer journey looks like we get all sorts of questions anything from hey i'm trying to figure out how to get this goal working to what is my dashboard how can i improve it to i'm not even sure what a goal should be here's what my customers my website looks like where do you think i should start and everything in between our instructors will then send you videos and screenshots back and it's completely customized for you so they're not generic answers they are there to help you out it is literally like having a consultant on call and typically we'll get you answers within hours so that we don't have to wait days and days at least during normal business hours uh we tend to get answers within hours to you so that is the idea um with ask instructor support and i think this is really the biggest benefit of the academy yes you have all courses yes you've got all the workshops sure you can do a lot of learning on your own but you and i both know it's important have somebody to bounce some ideas off of whether it's strategy or technical tactics ask instructor does that so that is the academy again if you are interested in that program just go to measure tips get academy it'll talk about how to get uh kind of review some of the parts that we just talked about and of course uh next steps so you can move forward that said if for whatever reason now is not the time to invest in something like the academy we do have the measure marketing toolbox so for those of you who are not yet members of that is our free level so you get access to workshop wednesday you get access to the toolbox that's back there the only thing you don't get in the toolbox is to get it done guides but you get everything else that the toolbox had and it is completely free so again if the academy is just not a good fit for you at the moment not a problem measure.tips www will take you to get your free toolbox membership just our way of giving back just to name an email it's all requires then you'll get a login to the members area you won't see everything the academy has but you'll definitely see the workshop wednesday section and and the the toolbox so you can get a bunch of the tools like the utm traffic tracking toolkit that we have or the dashboard builder the marketing behavior toolkit the optimization pipeline planner there's all sorts of stuff back there that you will be able to use as a measurement marketer again our way of giving back measure.tip slash ww will take you there and with that we'll bring this one to a close this has been beyond basics setting up e-commerce in google analytics forum thanks again for watching this workshop and we'll see you on the next one take care

Channel: MeasurementMarketing,io

Views: 7,457

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: beyond basics, measurement marketing, measurementmarketing.io, workshop wednesday, ga4 help, ga4 events, using ga4, ga4 tutorial, ga4 training, ga4, google analytics 4, google analytics 4 tutorial, google analytics 4 help, google analytics 4 events, google analytics 4 training, ga4 tutorials, ga4 lessons, google analytics 4 tutorials, google analytics 4 lessons, ga4 ecommerce, google analytics 4 ecommerce, ecommerce setup, ga4 ecommerce setup, mercer analytics

Id: dwH4IoSklV8

Length: 43min 10sec (2590 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021