When you have the business online and want to see its revenue, you need to set up ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics 4. As Peter Drucker said, “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.” It suits our case too. If you can’t see the revenue in GA4, you won’t be able to increase it. However, before increasing it, let’s figure out what e-commerce tracking means and why you should consider enabling it. 

What’s ecommerce tracking, and why do you need it?

Ecommerce tracking is a feature in Google Analytics 4 that allows you to measure the purchase behaviour of your clients. Such as purchases, refunds, items viewed, etc. 

The data from e-commerce tracking is crucial to answering the following questions:

1. What products do clients buy more often?
2. How much revenue does the specific promotion generate?
3. How many clients does your affiliate bring weekly?
4. How many clients do make a refund after making a purchase, and why do they make it?
5. What clients do have a higher-order value?
6. How many clients do make the second, third, etc. order on your website?

and many more.

Answering these questions helps companies to boost revenue and improve the number of clients. However, it is up to you to decide if you want to answer all or only questions related to purchases. Therefore, GA offers two solutions: basic and enhanced ecommerce tracking. 

What does enhanced ecommerce tracking mean?

The basic ecommerce tracking allows you to see only the purchase data. The enhanced ecommerce tracking enables you to track a few additional steps, such as:

1. product listing views
2. product selection
3. product views
4. adding the product to the cart
5. adding the product to the wishlist
6. viewing the cart
7. removing from the cart
8. making a purchase
9. making a refund
10. all checkout process steps
11. promotions views and clicks on them

Although enhanced ecommerce tracking can look complicated and heavy to implement, it brings additional benefits when you analyse your promotion or marketing campaigns deeply. In this guide, I will explain how to implement each separately. However, remember that you should be upgraded from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 before moving with the following steps. The first step of the implementation is to understand how different GA4 e-commerce tracking from Universal Analytics. You can miss the next section if you don’t have a Universal Analytics account. 

What are the differences between UA ecommerce tracking and GA4 ecommerce tracking?

Although there are not so many changes in Google Analytics 4 compared to Universal Analytics regarding ecommerce tracking, if you don’t write your code right, the data won’t be sent into GA4. I summarised the main differences between ecommerce events in the table below. Ecommerce events trigger the specific action a user makes on your website, such as purchase, add to cart or make a refund. 

Apart from the ecommerce events, Google also changed the ecommerce events parameters. Below I will show you the difference in the main event “Purchase”, if you want to activate Enhanced Ecommerce,  I highly recommend you to visit the official google documentation. Moreover, if you want to keep both analytics (UA and GA) active, you will need to trigger two data layers. 

Purchase Information

Product Information associated with Purchase

From the data above, you can see that the names of the parameters changed. Besides that, Google also added new product parameters that you can use to investigate sales more carefully. For instance, location_id and discount.  

Now when we discussed the differences between UA and GA4 ecommerce tracking, let’s delve deeper into the implementation. 

How to set up ecommerce tracking on your website? 

The above steps are used for basic and enhanced ecommerce tracking. Let’s discuss how to implement basic ecommerce tracking implementation in detail. 

How to set up ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics 4 using Google Tag Manager?

Imagine that your devs added the code below (purchase event) to your website. Now you want to set up GTM to transfer this data into Google Analytics 4 to use basic ecommerce tracking (only purchase data). 

dataLayer.push({ ecommerce: null });  // Clear the previous ecommerce object.
dataLayer.push({
  event: "purchase",
  ecommerce: {
      transaction_id: "T_12345",
      affiliation: "Google Merchandise Store",
      value: 25.42,
      tax: 4.90,
      shipping: 5.99,
      currency: "USD",
      coupon: "SUMMER_SALE",
      items: [
       {
        item_id: "SKU_12345",
        item_name: "Stan and Friends Tee",
        affiliation: "Google Merchandise Store",
        coupon: "SUMMER_FUN",
        currency: "USD",
        discount: 2.22,
        index: 0,
        item_brand: "Google",
        item_category: "Apparel",
        item_category2: "Adult",
        item_category3: "Shirts",
        item_category4: "Crew",
        item_category5: "Short sleeve",
        item_list_id: "related_products",
        item_list_name: "Related Products",
        item_variant: "green",
        location_id: "ChIJIQBpAG2ahYAR_6128GcTUEo",
        price: 9.99,
        quantity: 1
      }]
  }
});

Here are the steps you should take to implement it right.

Step #1: Open GTM and create a new trigger. Let’s name it “custom event – purchase”.

Step #2: Write “purchase” in the “Event name” field and save the tag. 

Step #3: Open the Create the data layer variables to track purchase and product information. For instance, I created “Ecommerce – Transaction ID” data layer variable with “order_id” as the Data Layer Variable Name. I made the same for items, transaction_id, affiliation, value, tax, shipping, currency, coupon.

For “Ecommerce – Items” variable, I used “ecommerce.items”. It helps you to track the product information that a user bought without proving every product parameter. 

After you have created all variables, save them.

Step #4: Go to the “Tags” section in GTM and create a new tag. Name it “GA4 – eCommerce Purchase Tracking”.

Select the GA4 configuration tag and write “purchase” to the “Event Name” field.

Step #5: Open the “Event Parameters” section and provide the ecommerce parameters using the data layer variables you created in Step #3. All in all, you should get close to what you see in my screenshot below. Save the tag. 

Step #6: Complete a test purchase to check if ecommerce tracking is working well.  Open GTM Preview Mode, go through the checkout process and check if you see in GTM Tag Assistant Tab your tag. After that, open GA4 Realtime report and check if GA4 received “purchase” event. 

Step #7: Publish GTM container.

How to set up enhanced ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics 4 using Google Tag Manager?

The process of setting up enhanced ecommerce tracking in GA4 through GTM looks almost the same as what we did in the previous section with the purchase event. The main difference is that you should set up more events to track (add to cart, refund, impressions, view_item, view_cart and so on). More events mean more data layer variables in GTM to get the necessary ecommerce parameters. Let me show you an example of the “begin_checkout” event.

Imagine that the devs added the following code to your website. 

dataLayer.push({ ecommerce: null });  // Clear the previous ecommerce object.
dataLayer.push({
  event: "begin_checkout",
  ecommerce: {
    items: [
    {
      item_id: "SKU_12345",
      item_name: "Stan and Friends Tee",
      affiliation: "Google Merchandise Store",
      coupon: "SUMMER_FUN",
      currency: "USD",
      discount: 2.22,
      index: 0,
      item_brand: "Google",
      item_category: "Apparel",
      item_category2: "Adult",
      item_category3: "Shirts",
      item_category4: "Crew",
      item_category5: "Short sleeve",
      item_list_id: "related_products",
      item_list_name: "Related Products",
      item_variant: "green",
      location_id: "ChIJIQBpAG2ahYAR_6128GcTUEo",
      price: 9.99,
      quantity: 1
    }
    ]
  }
});

If you compare the code above with the purchase code in the previous section, you will see that the line with the event is different. 

While the purchase event has “purchase”, the checkout event has “begin_checkout”. Taking into account this difference, the process of begin_checkout implementation will have the following steps:

Step #1: Open GTM and create a new trigger. Let’s name it “custom event – begin_checkout”.

Step #2: Write “begin_checkout” in the “Event name” field and save the tag. 

Step #3: Open the variables tag and create the new data layer variables to track purchase and product information. In our case, there are no new variables. We can miss it. 

Step #4: Go to the “Tags” section in GTM and create a new tag. Name it “GA4 – eCommerce Enhanced – Begin Checkout”.

Select the GA4 configuration tag and write “begin_checkout” to the “Event Name” field. 

Step #5: Open the “Event Parameters” section and provide the ecommerce parameters using the data layer variables you created in Step #3. All in all, you should get close to what you see in my screenshot below. Save the tag. 

Step #6: Complete a test purchase to check if ecommerce tracking is working well. 

Step #7: Publish GTM container.

How to set up ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics 4 using GTAG.js?

If you used GTAG.js for Universal Analytics, you can use it for GA4 as well. You can read more on how to upgrade from UA to GA4 using GTAG.js in my other article. Here I will show you a few examples of how to set up basic and enhanced ecommerce tracking for GA4 using GTAG.js code. 

Below you can see an example of a purchase event with a global tag. You can see that it doesn’t differ from what we used with GTM at all. 

gtag("event", "purchase", {
    transaction_id: "T_12345",
    affiliation: "Google Merchandise Store",
    value: 25.42,
    tax: 4.90,
    shipping: 5.99,
    currency: "USD",
    coupon: "SUMMER_SALE",
    items: [
     {
      item_id: "SKU_12345",
      item_name: "Stan and Friends Tee",
      affiliation: "Google Merchandise Store",
      coupon: "SUMMER_FUN",
      currency: "USD",
      discount: 2.22,
      index: 0,
      item_brand: "Google",
      item_category: "Apparel",
      item_category2: "Adult",
      item_category3: "Shirts",
      item_category4: "Crew",
      item_category5: "Short sleeve",
      item_list_id: "related_products",
      item_list_name: "Related Products",
      item_variant: "green",
      location_id: "ChIJIQBpAG2ahYAR_6128GcTUEo",
      price: 9.99,
      quantity: 1
    }]
});

If you use gtag.js for Universal Analytics at the moment and want to send data into GA4. You should adjust it slightly to follow the new schema.

From this schema.

gtag('event', 'purchase', {
  "transaction_id": "24.031608523954162",
  "affiliation": "Google online store",
  "currency": "USD",
  "shipping": 7.50,
  "tax": 1.80,
  "value": 33.30,
  "items": [
    {
      "id": "P12345",
      "name": "Android Warhol T-Shirt",
      "brand": "Google",
      "category": "Apparel/T-Shirts",
      "variant": "Black",
      "list_name": "Search Results",
      "list_position": 1,
      "quantity": 2,
      "price": 12.00
    }
  ]
});

To this new schema.

gtag('event', 'purchase', {
  "send_to": "GA4",
  "transaction_id": "24.031608523954162",
  "affiliation": "Google online store",
  "currency": "USD",
  "shipping": 7.50,
  "tax": 1.80,
  "value": 33.30,
  "items": [
    {
      "item_id": "P12345",
      "item_name": "Android Warhol T-Shirt",
      "item_brand": "Google",
      "item_category": "Apparel/T-Shirts",
      "item_variant": "Black",
      "quantity": 2,
      "price": 12.00
    }
  ],
});

You can see that the main differences are the new type of product parameters we discussed in the section “What are the differences between UA ecommerce tracking and GA4 ecommerce tracking?” of this article and one more line of the code “”send_to”: “GA4””.

If you want to upgrade your enhanced UA ecommerce codes to GA4 ecommerce codes. You will need to review the google official documentation to read more about it.

For instance, if you had this schema to send “view_item_list” data into Universal Analytics.

gtag('event', 'view_item_list', {
  "items": [
    {
      "id": "P12345",
      "name": "Android Warhol T-Shirt",
      "list_name": "Search Results",
      "brand": "Google",
      "category": "Apparel/T-Shirts",
      "variant": "Black",
      "list_position": 1,
      "quantity": 2,
      "price": 2
    },
    {
      "id": "P67890",
      "name": "Flame challenge TShirt",
      "list_name": "Search Results",
      "brand": "MyBrand",
      "category": "Apparel/T-Shirts",
      "variant": "Red",
      "list_position": 2,
      "quantity": 1,
      "price": 3
    }
  ]
});

You will need to update that schema to this one.

gtag("event", "view_item_list", {
  "send_to": "GA4",
  item_list_id: "related_products",
  item_list_name: "Related products",
  items: [
    {
      item_id: "SKU_12345",
      item_name: "Stan and Friends Tee",
      affiliation: "Google Merchandise Store",
      coupon: "SUMMER_FUN",
      currency: "USD",
      discount: 2.22,
      index: 0,
      item_brand: "Google",
      item_category: "Apparel",
      item_category2: "Adult",
      item_category3: "Shirts",
      item_category4: "Crew",
      item_category5: "Short sleeve",
      item_list_id: "related_products",
      item_list_name: "Related Products",
      item_variant: "green",
      location_id: "ChIJIQBpAG2ahYAR_6128GcTUEo",
      price: 9.99,
      quantity: 1
    }
  ]
});

You see that the idea is the same. You can have more parameters, and you should follow their new schema.

Final Words

GA4 ecommerce tracking is a precious feature for many companies. There are two ecommerce trackings: basic and enhanced. You can select the most suitable variant and implement it using the guide mentioned in this article. If you got stuck in the process, let me know in the comment section below, and I will be happy to assist you. You can also message me using the contact form on my website.