How to Establish an Advanced e-Commerce Tracking System: A Guide for Marketers <and Developers>
At Sourcing International, we have seen numerous cases over the past years of marketers stating that they lacked a proper reporting system to evaluate their ad campaigns and investments, or more generally that they needed to track a specific event on a website without precisely understanding the underlying process. Along similar lines, we have come across many instances where developers listened to abstract requirements and implemented what they thought was the right approach to tracking user events, but failed to test it sufficiently. In the majority of such cases, marketers most likely ended up frustrated from the inability to achieve their vision, and developers wound up impeded in their work due to a lack of customer acceptance. And of course, businesses were prevented from achieving their full potential.
This document is a simple yet comprehensive guide to understanding how the gap between marketers and developers can be bridged while working towards a strategy for advanced user tracking, ad performance, and experience monitoring in e-commerce projects.
Let us begin with the basics:
What does a marketer need?
Most of the time, marketers require the ability to monitor the results of their advertising campaigns & decisions. Nice round numbers can help keep top management happy and validate the efforts a team invests into marketing activities. An absence of such numbers frequently confounds the daily work of marketers with opacity as they are unable to rate, assess, and improve the performance of their decisions.
Just like with any other project, investing a sizeable budget into a set of activities that cannot be evaluated and may thus quickly generate the impression of being unprofitable is far from desirable. This is why marketers are usually very averse to advertising without tracking.
What does a developer want?
The answer is generally quite simple: A developer wants detailed & exhaustively defined requirements that ideally introduce as few variations as possible into their work and allow them to start a new task after completing the current one. Situations where a customer or project manager returns repeatedly with feedback for an implementation that was incorrectly defined – or with changed requirements – are not appreciated and eventually may even make developers wish to switch projects.
In software development, not being able to conclude tasks or projects due to constantly changing requirements or delays in approval for the deployment of planned system versions is a state of affairs every tech team wants to avoid. The two described roles thus differ significantly in many aspects, and developers are rarely able to achieve the results desired by marketers without proper specifications.
Observe the difference between “need” and “want”.
Marketers need to reach specific objectives to be able to validate their work – although in many cases, the path leading to this goal is not necessarily the shortest. Developers on the other hand, want a clearly defined path to follow in their work. This is where we most often observe a substantial gap: Marketers are frequently unable to state exhaustively what it is they need, and developers are unable to build code that can easily be adapted to changing needs.
Enter the third role: The consultant
At Sourcing International, we are consultants in the first place – but beyond that, we are whichever role a specific project requires us to be. This has taught us that even when everyone owns their specific roles for a project, you sometimes need to take a step back and venture a little ways beyond your own station: Someone has to fill the gaps between the individual roles, in this case between marketers and developers.
The following paragraphs may engender the assumption that the third role has to be played by a separate individual or team, but in reality it can be fulfilled by either of the other two as well.
What does a consultant aim for?
A consultant’s goal is to guide, coordinate, and facilitate the implementation of a project or activity in terms of:
- time,
- budget and
- scope
When an obvious gap appears, consultants should not play around with unverified specifications or limit themselves to potentially defined boundaries, but instead should attempt to take a broader view and resolve the issue through any available professional means.
One of the aspects of the aforementioned simplexity of this article is the fact that these three roles needed to be fully introduced to properly understand how the original topic of an advanced e-commerce tracking strategy can be defined most efficiently. Let us now return to this title matter.
The brief
As an example, let us assume a situation where we need to be able to monitor the performance of our ad campaigns in different networks with a view to a purchase conversion goal defined for our e-commerce store.
The strategy
The first critical step for achieving this objective is to begin documenting the entire activity – from the initial request (the brief) through the research performed for the purpose and the know-how accumulated throughout the process, all the way to the post-implementation phase. This would become what can be called an advanced e-commerce strategy, and the following guidelines may serve as pointers for compiling such a documentation.
1. Grasping the e-commerce experience
Efforts should begin with the most relevant asset in the project: the web platform on which the e-commerce store resides. The sitemap can be assessed, the entire set of pages or the product categories browsed, and user interactions replicated in an attempt to understand how potential customers use the store.
2. Defining a tracking roadmap
Correctly defining the end goal is the most crucial aspect in the second step, although this top-level objective can usually also be found presented directly in the brief. In our example, we need to track when and how what types of orders are placed by customers through the store, and we can use a purchase event as our end goal for this purpose.
Besides pure achievement of the end goal, however, it is also necessary to assess whether any other data points leading to the purchase are relevant for the tracking process. An example would be product views, product category views, or “add to cart” actions.
The tracking strategy should clearly list and define all of the interim and final tracking objectives, which should be as close as possible to actual user activities occurring online in the store.
3. Structuring data points
User actions occurring live in the store need to be mapped to digital resources so as to begin collecting relevant data points that can later be interpreted by ad monitoring networks. By the time this step is initiated, we should have a thorough understanding of how the e-commerce platform is organised as well as which events we plan to track.
Note down all of the relevant events for tracking, regardless whether they are custom or standard, and describe for each of them when, how, under which conditions, and by what user actions they should be triggered.
4. Document the technical implementation
Now that we know which events we are interested in and for which platform, the next step is to merge the business concept with the technical specifications. This can be done by studying the documentation of the implemented ad network and determining how each of the desired data points (whether standard or custom) can be collected.
The documentation provided by the ad network should normally provide snippets of code applying to each of the defined events, along with associated descriptions. Note or reference the chapters in the official documentation corresponding to every event selected for tracking in the e commerce tracking strategy.
5. Review the advanced e-commerce strategy
Perform a cold review of the entire resulting documentation up to this point and attempt to determine whether it can be easily understood by both marketers and developers right from the first read. Implement any changes required for clarification or simplification of the included information.
Example
Let us now expand our brief and use the example of defining advanced e-commerce tracking using Google Analytics (GA4).
Implementation: Google Analytics (GA4)
After assessing the e-commerce platform and deciding that the entire general sales funnel is to be tracked, the following events can be identified as a minimum:
View page
This event should automatically be triggered whenever any page is opened by a user. It is an event that requires no parameters and can simply be triggered whenever the Google Analytics script is loaded.
What: Standard event
Where: To be triggered on any web page
When: Upon loading the page
How: Triggered automatically by GA4 when implemented via Google Tag Manager (GTM); no specific parameters
Configuration: Via GTM, in line with the recommendations listed in the link below
Reference: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9322688?hl=en
View item
This event should be triggered only on individual product pages whenever such a page is opened by a user. It is a standard e-commerce event in Google Analytics 4 and requires custom parameters to correctly associate the event with a specific product.
What: Standard event
Where: To be triggered on any individual product page
When: Upon loading the page
How: Triggered via a data layer push and including the parameters specified in Google’s most recent documentation as referenced below
Configuration: Via GTM, in line with the recommendations listed in the link below
Reference: https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/ecommerce-ga4#measure_viewsimpressions_of_productitem_details
View item list
This event should be triggered only on product category pages whenever such a page is opened by a user. It is a standard e-commerce event in Google Analytics 4 and requires custom parameters to correctly associate the event with a specific product category.
What: Standard event
Where: To be triggered on any product category page
When: Upon loading the page
How: Triggered via a data layer push and including the parameters specified in Google’s most recent documentation as referenced below
Configuration: Via GTM, in line with the recommendations listed in the link below
Reference: https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/ecommerce-ga4#measure_productitem_list_viewsimpressions
Add to cart
This event should be triggered on any store page whenever any product is added to the cart by a user. It is a standard e-commerce event in Google Analytics 4 and requires custom parameters to correctly associate the event with a set of specific products.
What: Standard event
Where: To be triggered on any page on which an “add to cart” functionality is implemented
When: Whenever a product is added to the cart or whenever the cart is updated with a positive and greater than current number of items
How: Triggered via a data layer push and including the parameters specified in Google’s most recent documentation as referenced below
Configuration: Via GTM, in line with the recommendations listed in the link below
Reference: https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/ecommerce-ga4#add_a_product_to_a_shopping_cart
Remove from cart
This event should be triggered on any store page whenever a product is removed from the cart by a user. It is a standard e-commerce event in Google Analytics 4 and requires custom parameters to correctly associate the event with a set of specific products.
What: Standard event
Where: To be triggered on any page on which a “remove from cart” functionality is implemented
When: Whenever a product is removed from the cart or whenever the cart is updated with a positive but smaller than current number of items
How: Triggered via a data layer push and including the parameters specified in Google’s most recent documentation as referenced below
Configuration: Via GTM, in line with the recommendations listed in the link below
Reference: https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/ecommerce-ga4#remove_a_product_from_a_shopping_cart
Begin checkout
This event should be triggered only during the checkout process whenever a user reaches the corresponding page. It is a standard e-commerce event in Google Analytics 4 that requires custom parameters to correctly associate the event with a set of specific products.
What: Standard event
Where: To be triggered on the checkout page
When: Upon loading the page
How: Triggered via a data layer push and including the parameters specified in Google’s most recent documentation as referenced below
Configuration: via GTM, in line with the recommendations from Google listed in the link below
Reference: https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/ecommerce-ga4#measure_a_checkout
Purchase
This event should be triggered following a successful purchase process, i.e. whenever a user reaches the order confirmation page. It is a standard e-commerce event in Google Analytics 4 and requires custom parameters to correctly associate the event with a set of specific products.
What: Standard event
Where: To be triggered on the order confirmation page
When: Upon loading the page
How: Triggered via a data layer push and including the parameters specified in Google’s most recent documentation as referenced below
Configuration: Via GTM, in line with the recommendations listed in the link below
Reference: https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/ecommerce-ga4#measure_purchases
Closing thoughts
At this point we have achieved a clear strategy for implementing user tracking & ad monitoring in our fictitious e-commerce store. Naturally, the example presented above is oversimplified for the purpose of this article; when adapted to any individual project, regardless of how complex, the aim should always be that the results satisfy both the marketer and the developer by means of clear requirements and expectations. This should allow business to continue fluidly and perhaps even increase following the successful implementation of ad performance monitoring.
But what about ads on Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat, or TikTok? They cannot be covered in detail here and must therefore remain topics for separate discussion.
If you struggle with the implementation of your own advanced e-commerce tracking and would like to benefit from Sourcing International’s digital consulting expertise, or if you wish to learn more about using multiple web beacons on a website, splitting events between web beacons, or defining custom beacons, do not hesitate to contact us.