In the previous post, we look at ecommerce events. These must all feed in the relevant item data with each event so that you can see your ecommerce reports at the item level, as opposed to the event level.

Every time an action is performed, your tracking implementation should include data for all the items that are included in that action, in the standard GA4 item schema. For example, if I’m sending a remove_from_cart event, I should only include the item(s) that were just removed with that event. Whereas if I’m sending the begin_checkout event, I should send all the items that are currently in the checkout.

If this is correctly integrated, you can then report on your product and funnel performance by all of these dimensions. These will be usually be tied to your product inventory system so the cleaner it is, the better your reports will be. For our example, we will use a [fictional] online bookstore selling the [real] book “The Fall (Tales From The Gulp #2)” by Alan Baxter.

• Item Name: This is the name of your product so we might use The Fall (Tales From The Gulp #2).
• Item ID: This is the SKU of your product so for books it might make sense to use the ISBN.
• Item Category: You can have up to 5 independent categories. For this bookstore, we might use just these 3:
  • Genre, in this case Horror.
  • Series Name, in this case Tales From The Gulp.
  • Which number is the book in the series? In this case, 2.
• Brand: This is the brand of the product, for books you might have the author name, or if it’s multiple publishers, the publisher name.
• Variant: This refers to different options for an item (which can have their own pricing). For books, it might be ebook, hardcover, paperback, signed, limited edition etc.

As you can see, there’s a lot of room for customisation so you’d want to think this through carefully especially if you have lots of products. The more products you have, the more time you’d generally need to spend looking at your reports in aggregate. (eg. Which genres are performing? Are series more popular than one-off titles?) For a large inventory, individual products aren’t likely to cover a lot of what’s actually happening on your website unless it’s one of the absolute top sellers.