If you run a retail or ecommerce website things like product information reports, revenue reports, and sales reports are essential for benchmarking how your site is performing. All of this advanced data isn’t always easily tabulated or accessed.

That is, unless you are currently using the enhanced ecommerce features that are available for Google Analytics. You really should be because these advanced features can help your bottom line.

Here are some tips for getting more out of these enhanced ecommerce features.

Getting Consistent Field Values

When running the enhanced ecommerce with your ecommerce site, getting consistent field values is extremely important. It is important to make sure that you have the right values for analyzing those consumers who are just browsing and those who are making purchases.

You will need to enter an ID for each product and set fields for all of the user actions while on your site. Make sure that the ID matches in all of the fields or Google Analytics will not analyze the product for each step the consumer takes.

Data Import

Using the data import feature of Google Analytics, a product name and the product SKU can be matched automatically.

This is a great for implementations where the product name is not available for ecommerce steps or actions.

If you have product names that are not coming through your reports in the way that you want to see them you can use this data import feature to make sure that they come in properly. This will help you read your reports much more easily, which is necessary when you are trying to make improvements.

Category Hierarchy

Category hierarchy offers a way to broaden your data fields. When first implementing enhanced ecommerce for Google Analytics you will find there is a category field.

This field provides 5 dimensions in one. This means that you can add up to 5 levels that are separated using slashes. These will separate the string of information into dimensions that can be used by Google Analytics.

When running your ecommerce website having data that comes from consistent field values is extremely important.

Using data import and product hierarchy as well custom dimensions for the products on your site will help you achieve reporting that is more cohesive, which will allow you to catch more trends and insights of your consumers.