If you are selling products online, want to improve the checkout journey, understand how promotions are driving sales, or track non-standard product attributes as custom dimensions or metrics, Google Analytics’ Enhanced ECommerce (EEC) is a great tool for you.

This is NOT a guide to implement Enhanced Ecommerce. This article only covers how to configure the check-out funnel steps on the Google Analytics view settings. We thought of writing this guide as we’ve seen many instances where the check-out steps are misconfigured & this feature is not being utilized for its full potential.

Implementing Enhanced Ecommerce requires some effort & a certain level of expertise on Data Layer, Google Tag Manager, etc. If you’re a WordPress/WooCommerce user, you may find many plugins to implement EEC. However, we highly recommend using a robust solution such as Google Tag Manager (GTM) to implement Enhanced Ecommerce tracking. If you are looking for someone for your EEC or GTM implementation, please contact us here. 😍

Why Enhanced Ecommerce Check-out Funnel Steps important?

When you’re activating the Enhanced Ecommerce feature on your Google Analytics (Universal Analytics) view settings, optionally you can set the check-out funnel steps as well.

To activate ecommerce features go to Admin > Select your Property > Ecommerce Settings > Toggle Enable Ecommerce & Enable Enhanced Ecommerce Reporting > Save

As we mentioned earlier, this is an optional step when enabling ecommerce features in Google Analytics. Let’s see how your report looks like if steps are NOT defined here;

Go to Conversions > Ecommerce > Checkout Behavior

As you can see in the below screenshot, the labels are shown as Step 1, Step 2 & so on.

Now let’s define the steps & see the same report and see how it looks like;

Now the reports are showing the exact values we defined in the check-out funnel instead of Step 1, 2 & so on.

What are the benefits of defining check-out steps?

By defining the steps, you would be able to see how exactly your users are interacting with your checkout page/journey. For example, out of many purchases, how many are using a certain payment method. You may create segments & use it for retargeting purposes later.

Let’s imagine your set-up is also similar to the one shown in the below screenshot. Let’s click on the tiny arrow under Change Payment Method > Click on Payment: stripe

Give a name to your new segment & choose the view(s) the segment should be enabled & press Create Segment.

What are the steps should you define in the Checkout Funnel?

This is where the misconception is. It’s based on your website’s checkout journey and how it’s been designed. However, you should not define your entire purchase journey here. Below is an example of an incorrect setup;

The non-checkout related user actions should not be updated here. In this example, Add to Cart & Purchase shouldn’t be added as check-out steps. Instead you should include the steps that are performed only in your check-out page(s) such as entering billing address, shipping address, payment method, shipping method etc.

What are the recommended steps?

Again, it’s based on your website’s checkout journey. If you’re using WooCommerce, below are the most seen common check-out steps (based on Woocommerce default check-out journey);

1. Enter Billing Information
2. Enter Shipping Information
3. Select Shipping method
4. Select Payment method

Important note: Defining the steps in the check-out funnel alone won’t display the stats on your EEC reports. Your e-commerce implementation should send relevant data to Google Analytics. If you’re using a plugin for EEC implementation, the plugin should send this information to GA when a particular step has been performed. Or if you’re using GTM, your Data Layer must be configured properly in order to pass these data when the steps are performed by your end-user.

Check-out steps for GTM4WP plugin users

If you are a GTM4WP plugin user (popular WordPress plugin to generate Data Layers for GTM) & you have enabled Cart as 1st checkout step, then you may add Review cart as the first step of your checkout funnel. If not go with the above mentioned 4 steps.

1. Review Cart
2. Enter Billing Information
3. Enter Shipping Information
4. Select Shipping method
5. Select Payment method

That’s all for now. Feel free to contact us or comment below with your queries. Would love to hear from you 🤗.