Creating dynamic funnels in Google Analytics to track your e-commerce conversions

One of the most important things when talking about monitor eCommerce conversions, is the conversion path, analyzing all points of contact with users, segmenting the audience and verifying the main channels that generate sales is essential to direct both online advertising investments and optimization strategies for organic search.

Building goals and conversion funnels is one of the most important steps in setting up your Google Analytics account. Contrary to what some people think, setting up Google Analytics within e-commerce can become a painful and problematic task.

Over the years of building online stores or even providing digital marketing consultancy, I've noticed that most of the difficulties lie in the fact that:

1) There is no standard platform or technology for eCommerce

As there is no single e-commerce platform or technology, each environment has its own characteristics and as most of the time the people responsible for both managing customer expectations (service) and performance indicators (consultant/analyst) do not speak the same language as those responsible for technical implementation (programmers), what we end up with are incomplete funnels that do not consider user behavior from the moment of access, until completion throughout the entire purchasing process.

2) Most eCommerces do not correctly implement Google Analytics e-commerce specifications

Google Analytics allows the implementation of transaction control tags specific to e-commerce. It is not enough to simply define in the Google Analytics account settings that the website is an e-commerce site.

Through this monitoring, we can track the user's purchase flow, which products are rejected in the cart, which are responsible for the majority of sales, and we can measure the effective ROI of our business.

Let's look at the practical case of the funnel flow below already implemented with Google Analytics eCommerce transactions:

As the analysis of this funnel starts from the shopping cart, it disregards all user interactions before adding the product at this important stage of the purchase flow, making any analysis of user behavior, even in the multi-channel funnel becomes incoherent or imprecise.

The main problem is that one of the most important steps in the purchase flow, product details, is likely too complex to implement. Let's imagine we have an eCommerce store with over 5 products, each with 5 completely different URLs that represent different conversion paths. Imagine yourself in this situation and tell me which of the two options you would choose:

a) I would create 5 variations of conversion goals with a lot of energy and no social life

b) I would turn off the computer immediately in the middle of a panic attack because someone would certainly be furious for not getting this data for the customer (Customer Service).

At this point in the conversation the power of simplicity comes in, thanks to the resource of arbitrary google analytics calls we can disregard the specific url we are tracking and create a fixed url for the conversion path, see the example below of the arbitrary call:

pageTracker._trackPageview(“/product-detail”);

If instead of using the standard pageTracker._trackPageview() call, we add any parameter, analytics will consider this as a valid URL. This feature has long been used to track interactions on flash pages, and now it will help you build the success of your e-commerce.

The same feature can be applied to track pages that do not have friendly URLs or to segment registration steps that use the same URL.

pageTracker._trackPageview(“/passo1.html); // Real page cadastro.php

pageTracker._trackPageview(“/passo2.html); // Real page cadastro.php

The next step now is to create a conversion goal with a funnel called /product-detail, this way, with just one goal, we will be able to analyze all accesses coming from “product details”, allowing us to evaluate whether our dynamic page is generating any type of unexpected exit or break in the purchase flow.

I hope this tip is useful for your e-commerce!