The checkout funnel is collected a bit differently with Google Analytics 4. There are no steps anymore – rather, GA4 offers you the (presumably) most popular checkout steps of adding shipping and payment info to the purchase.
- How are we going to deal with Click&Collect?
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Some parameters such as affiliation and currency are brought from the action-level in Enhanced Ecommerce to product-level in Google Analytics 4. It’s an interesting choice, as it might not reflect reality to specify these on a product-by-product basis, but it’s never a bad thing to have as many parameters as possible available.
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Product List Attribution
Product list attribution is a staple of Enhanced Ecommerce. It’s extremely useful, as it lets you build the dataLayer so that product list information does not need to be persisted from action to action.
There’s no evidence that a similar attribution setup works with GA4 right now. Granted, attribution is part of a data model that might simply not be exposed in GA4 Ecommerce reports yet, so this is something that is likely to be fixed in the near future. It would be odd to have product lists as a data type without them actually having any functionality.
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Product-scoped Custom Dimensions and Metrics
Universal Analytics lets us add additional metadata to each product using product-scoped custom dimensions and metrics. This is a vital part of dimension widening that any modern online store desperately needs.
In GA4, you can add any parameters you wish into the items array, and they will be transported to GA4, but even if you register these as custom definitions it doesn’t seem like they’re available in the Ecommerce reports themselves.
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Checkout measurement
As mentioned above, checkout tracking has certainly changed between Enhanced Ecommerce and GA4.
Where Enhanced Ecommerce introduces a combination of funnel steps (e.g. view cart, shipping, payment) and checkout options (e.g. shipping method, payment method), GA4 only has the begin_checkout event for establishing entrance into the checkout flow.
There are no additional steps. Rather, you can use actions such as view_cart, add_shipping_info, and add_payment_info to flesh out the funnel.
It would be cool to be able to specify a more complete funnel in whatever way I want, and it would also be amazing if we could have multiple different checkout funnels in the data schema.
But on the other hand, I don’t think this is a very big omission currently. I wouldn’t be too surprised if this isn’t expanded to have full parity with Enhanced Ecommerce.
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Before you start rewriting your dataLayer objects, do note that Google Analytics 4 Ecommerce does support the Enhanced Ecommerce data model – at least to some extent.
The main path of migration is that you do not have to provide an items object in GA4 syntax. Instead, you can set the value of the items parameter in the tag to an impressions or promotions or products variable in your Enhanced Ecommerce object. GA4 will be able to map the parameter names in the Enhanced Ecommerce products object to their corresponding parameters in the Google Analytics 4 schema.
Note! You do not have to follow the migration path. Considering all the new things that GA4 data model enables, it might make sense to upgrade from Enhanced Ecommerce to GA4 and not resort to using the “old” data schema in your setup.
I’ve built a custom variable template that you can also use to map an Enhanced Ecommerce products (or impressions or promotions) object to its GA4 counterpart. It has some additional bells and whistles, such as automatic parsing of a multi-level product category into the five separate item_category parameters, and a table that lets you map Enhanced Ecommerce’s product-scoped custom dimensions to custom item parameters in the GA4 items objects.
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