Not Using Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce? What are you missing :

Many ecommerce owners are asking what the difference is between enhanced analytics and regular ecommerce analytics. They’re also asking whether they should set up enhanced ecommerce in their websites.
These questions led me to write this post to explain what you can do with enhanced ecommerce analytics and the benefits of using these tools.
Google summarizes the additonal capabilities enhanced analytics in their analytics blog: http://analytics.blogspot.co.il/2014/05/better-data-better-decisions-enhanced.html

Here are the main advantages that are really worth knowing:

● Analyze how far shoppers get in the shopping funnel and where they drop off
● Understand which products are viewed most
● Understand which products are frequently abandoned in the shopping cart and which products have the best rate of converting to real sales
● See which lists and products are best at driving customer engagement and which products pull the user into the store products page
● Analyze how internal promotions impact sales and act immediately on the results
● Import user segments, based on ecommerce activity, for targeting in marketing campaigns

Is enhanced analytics worth your time and money?

If you sell less than 15 products in your website, you can use regular ecommerce analytics on your website. If you plan to optimize a bigger ecommerce website and want to find every small advantage against your competitors, you should DEFINITELY use enhanced analytics!
Finding which products convert to sales best and adding one optimization layer on another will generate higher conversion rates, and data is the base to fine-tune your website sales and user experience.

I recommend using enhanced ecommerce in every ecommerce website as early as possible. The CRO & marketing teams should look at the data as part of the marketing and optimization routines. They can and must understand the trends and be familiar with the data and products by name, price, and conversion rate in every stage.

Enhanced analytics will also allow you to find the bad apples that ruin the conversion rate and lose customers, so you can replace them with high-converting products (or images, or price, or promotion); this can make a huge difference!
With enhanced ecommerce, you can measure the home page user experience and understand which products pull users deeper into the website and make sales, which is a big difference.

For big companies with high LTV (customer Life Time Value), it is highly recommended to send GA additional data that identify the returning buyer from the new buyer, using userid and custom parameters.

The advantages: you can measure whether new marketing efforts generate purchases by returning customers or generate new customers, which are much more valuable, as new customers typically generate more than one sale.

Do you have high lifetime value customers? How much are your customers worth?

The answer to this question is found in your CRM and in Google Analytics Data, but only if you also implement the user ID Feature. The big advantage of the GA data, compared to your CRM, is that you can also tell were the big whales are coming from. For that, you can use the highly-recommended UserID Feature, which will give your website the option to analyze lifetime value for every customer.

Do you have ‘big whale’ customers that generate most of the sales on the website? How can you get more of them?

Big casinos are known for giving free flights and free hotel rooms to their big whales—the big spender who will likely spend a huge amount of money in the casino (plus food, drinks, and entertainment) on each visit. Do you have big whale customers on your website? Would you like to know them? To offer another version of the website, specifically for them? To offer profitable products? Do you want to make them come back more often? What about finding more customers like them?

All of these options are possible using your Google Analytics UserID feature, which will generate identified userid for every sign-in from every user. Every purchase will be assigned to the right user. You will be able to know where the big whales are coming from, how they arrived at your website, and also offer them a special user experience, special pricing, or new marketing ads.

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The Advantages of theoogle analytics user id feature and reports:

– Generate data about every user login and purchase behavior
– Identify the big whales – the customers who spend the big $$
– Identify the connection between promotions and additional sales that come later in the customer life cycle
– Generate data about returning customers: identify whether we should sell small products to boost sales on related products in the future
– Ability to send promotional emails to specific users, based on their behaviors

Main optimization targets: to create user segments, depending on interests, demographics, characteristics, location—any info that will help optimize the products offered on the website, email list, or targeted, promotional emails.

It is highly recommended to set up additional dimensions and goals for first-time buyers in comparison to returning customers, in order to optimize traffic, generate the first purchase, and create upsales based on it, plus additional sales later on.

Optimizations that can be achieved by using Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce in partnership with user id features:

Generate more sales
Generate higher value purchases (higher average sales)
Generate higher LTV (Lifetime Value for customers)
Generate higher conversion rates on each subsequent visit
Optimize product pages to convert visits to sales at a higher rate
Analyze upsales, promotions, product variations, finding best sellers, worst sellers, funnel issues, and optimize the internal traffic within the website
Generate data to get the highest ROI per visit and per user