The timeline for Google Universal Analytics (UA) is fast approaching. Last 6 months as UA will no longer track website traffic after July 1, 2023. GA4 is a new iteration of Google Analytics. If you haven’t upgraded your UA account yet, please be patient. Your biggest problem will be the year-over-year comparison. If you haven’t implemented GA4 yet, there’s no way to compare July 2022 to July 2023, etc. until it’s done.
My colleague Jeremy wrote a blog detailing how to upgrade your UA account to GA4 and start tracking your site visitors in a short period of time using Google Tag Manager. But if you’re an e-commerce client, your job isn’t done yet. To track orders and earnings to your site, you’ll need to follow a different procedure. That is to bring back purchase events, order sizes, and other data to report when someone completes an order in GA4. Overall website status. (There are other events you can track, such as adding to cart or starting checkout, but those are entirely up to you. At the moment, the most pressing event is a purchase).
We’ve put together a list of how to set up purchase event tracking on the most popular website platforms. Some have built-in integrations, others require extensions (or extensive development skills). When extensions are required, we do not recommend one extension over another. We have no confirmation of how well each of these works, so we can’t offer setup assistance.
One thing to note, if you’ve previously set up GA4 site tracking using Google Tag Manager, check if you need to turn off that tag in GTM to avoid duplicating your website. need to do it.
Setting up purchase event tracking on popular platforms
Big commerce: Impressively, BigCommerce has native GA4 integration for two events.
- someone initiates the checkout process
- someone completes a purchase
Based on our list here, this is the most advanced of the ecommerce platforms as it offers multiple event settings.
Magento: The most complex of the ecommerce platforms on our list is Magento due to the customization and nature of the platform. Set it up yourself or use extensions from free to $249+. (I couldn’t find any documentation on how to do it myself.)
Miva Merchant: A code sample in the Miva developer documentation shows how to install purchase events. (I recommend fixing the typo in the mvt comment on the second line to correct the spelling of purchase). There was only one app at launch.
NetSuite: From what the documentation looks like it’s fairly easy to add the code yourself, but you’ll need to add the code in a few different places.
Open cart: This website platform seems to require an extension. Extensions available in the OpenCart Extension Store cost over $30 at time of publication.
Shopify: There is currently no built-in integration, but Shopify says it’s coming in March 2023. This has shocked me for quite some time as Google announced in his March 2022 that UA will be depreciated from 1st July 2023. It takes Shopify a year to develop the integration.
- JumpFly recommends installing the site tracking portion via GTM, at least until Shopify incorporates it.
- I found a blog where one of my clients shared how to set up GTM for GA4 e-commerce, but couldn’t get the tags to start reporting revenue.
Woo Commerce: This ecommerce plugin offers free extensions to track. The included support documentation covers both UA and GA4 setups, so be sure to setup using option 1 (GA4).
X-cart: The first step is to integrate GA4 into your site. You can then set up purchase events using the Google Analytics add-on.
Yahoo Store!/Turbify: I’ve searched the help.turbify.com site and google and haven’t found any instructions on how to set up GA4 Ecommerce Tracking or GA4 Tracking.
Good luck setting up your buying event at GA4! Also, if you have a Google Ads representative assigned by Google, you should be able to reach out to the Google implementation team for assistance.
