If you’re selling something on your website then measuring the different steps in the ecommerce funnel will be very important. The first thing to do would be to check if the data is coming through, which you can do in the GA4 interface in the standard reports’ ecommerce section.

How can I implement this if I don’t see the data?

If you have a custom ecommerce flow or checkout then you will probably need to contact your developers to do an integration to feed the data directly to Google Tag Manager. But most of the time you will probably be on a standard ecommerce platform, in which case you can see if they have an integration.

• For Shopify, there are a few options
• For Woocommerce, we recommend this plugin
• For Squarespace, there’s a native integration

What are the ecommerce events?

You can see the full list here but below are the main events in order that an enthusiastic buyer will typically experience them:

• view_item_list and view_promotion: Sees products on your website in a list or a promotion.
• view_item: Seeing an individual product page on your website.
• add_to_cart: Adds to the card.
• begin_checkout: Starts to check out.
• add_shipping_info: Adds their shipping info during checkout.
• add_payment_info: Adds their payment info during checkout.
• purchase: Completes the purchase.

There are also some events that represent going backwards in the funnel:

• remove_from_cart: User removes an item.
• refund: When a purchase is refunded. Since normally this happens offline you may need to send this event through a different method than the other events, eg. using the Measurement Protocol. You’ll need to know the original GA4 client ID of the purchaser so that GA4 will be able to tie the refund to the original GA4 user and session.

Note that if you’re implementing this manually, you need to use these exact event names and populate the product/item data for each of them (see the next post) for the reports to work.

Using the ecommerce reports

The main thing you’d want to see is where most people are dropping off in the funnel as this represents where you should focus your efforts. If people are adding to cart and checking out from the product page but most people never see the product page then you have one problem. If on the other hand people are adding to cart but most aren’t proceeding to checkout, you have another.

Once you have a feel for these questions for your website as a whole, you should start to break the data down by other dimensions, for more detailed insights. For example:

• By marketing campaign
• By traffic source
• By geographic area
• By device category
• By product/item data (see the next post)

There are lots of other dimensions you can break the funnel down by. Be careful about trying to filter or segment by URL dimensions like “page location”, as this will usually lead to incorrect data: since your funnel is normally spread over multiple URLs, only some of the events will be present on a particular URL. For example, if you filter by a specific product URL, you might only see view_item and add_to_cart events because the checkout is on its own URL. Viewing reports by item data will preserve the correct values over all your user shopping sessions across multiple URLs.