How to Add & Configure Google Analytics for BigCommerce?

In the present age, it is a struggle for online merchants to grasp customers’ attention as there are so many other competitors are selling the same products at the same price as yours. If you are in this situation, Google Analytics might play a key role. You can get access to an enormous amount of information about your visitors. Who does not want to know more about their customers, right?

BigCommerce has now updated their Google Analytics integration to help their users gain profits. If you are interested in getting to know more about BigCommerce Google Analytics integration, this article will help you add and configure this specific tool into your BigCommerce business. Keep reading to find out more!

What is Google Analytics?

Officially established in 2005, Google released their own version of website analytics called Google Analytics. To make it easier to understand, this tool allows people to track and collect data reports on the website traffic.

What makes Google Analytics different from other website analytics tools is that the amount of data and metrics you can access is more than you think. With the help of Google Analytics, online merchants are offered the ability to gather information about session duration, bounce rate, number of visitors, or website traffic, etc.

At the moment, both free and paid versions are available to anyone who already has a Google account. If you are using other Google-related services, Google Analytics is compatible with all of them.

Why should BigCommerce store owners use Google Analytics?

1. Get to know more about your customers

In addition to seeing and collecting customer reviews, BigCommerce store owners can observe the visitor’s online habits and even speak with them with Google Analytics’ assistance. Alternatively, in an online shop, you can use Google Analytics to follow customers’ behaviors so that you can make better decisions.

BigCommerce retailers can find other features in Google Analytics: the page views, number of both visitors and unique visitors, the average amount of time customers wandering through your website, or even their geographic location will also be identified. All of these will gain you an insight into your consumers.

Besides, if you use the segments or persona-specific dimensions, you can understand the difference in behavior among various types of customers.

2. Keep track of the data over time

When using Google Analytics, it will offer a graphical representation of data. This isn’t just an ordinary graph; store owners will have the ability to know how frequently their users access their website in a period of time or total. For instance, online retailers will observe an increasing trend in their conversion rate and website traffic if they release a promotion code or running discount events.

Moreover, acknowledging larger sets of data will help you have a more accurate understanding of your online business and easily compare the performance in diverse time periods. Annotations in Google Analytics are particularly helpful. At some point, your business will have to deal with unexpected problems, and annotation may give you the possible cause at a later time.

3. Easily establish goals for your business

Currently, most online firms will use Google Analytics to set a target, measure how close they are to achieving the aim, and stay focused on their work. There are four types of key goals that BigCommerce businesses should set for their own:

• Pages/Visit: this goal is calculated based on the number of sites your users have visited before leaving. It works the best for customer service websites.
• Events: You should specifically set up this whenever your online business organizes an event. Although it takes a little bit more time to make use of it, Events goals will help you to keep track of these events’ performance.
• URLs: With every specific URL, you can assign them with a goal so that you can easily know whenever your users entered the URL. If your business is working on confirmation sites, PDFs or thank you pages, pay special attention to the URLs goals.
• Session Duration: This item will be used to monitor the number of users who visit your platform over a certain period of time. Even people who accessed your website under an average amount of time will also be recorded.

Suppose you are attempting to use BigCommerce Google Analytics. In that case, goals should be clearly defined so that Google Analytics will automatically keep a watchful eye on vital elements of your online websites.

6 Steps to add Google Analytics for BigCommerce

1. Review the requirements

Before adding or making any change to your business, you need to carefully read the requirements and limitations related to the new tool. There are two important things you need to prepare before adding and configuring BigCommerce Google Analytics integration:

• It is a must that your store has already made use of Optimized One-page checkout - a default confirmation page for BigCommerce checkout and orders.
• Google Analytics checkout should fit with your store’s checkout.

In addition to that, your BigCommerce theme should also use data tags. BigCommerce Google Analytics has a feature called “Product List Performance Report”, whereas data tags need to be available so that it can gather important information.

If your BigCommerce store has fulfilled all mentioned requirements, you can now move on with the next step.

2. Create your Google Analytics account

Just like in its name - BigCommerce Google Analytics integration, store owners must have both BigCommerce and Google Analytics accounts. If you have not registered for a Google Analytics account, this is how you create one.

First thing first, you need to enter the website of Google Analytics and click on the “create an account” button located on the top right of your screen.

After that, Google Analytics will require you to log in your Google account. If you are done with this, it is time to move to the next step!

3. Collect your Tracking ID

Now, with your Google Analytics account set up, click on “Admin”. Here, there will be a list of information needed to be filled in. In the first box, Google Analytics will require you to enter your Account Name; please use your BigCommerce store’s name.

Then, adjust the Account Data Sharing Settings to your BigCommerce store’s preference and click “Next” to set up your Property.

Choose “Website” instead of “Mobile App” and then fill in the Website name with your BigCommerce store’s name and your store’s URL link for the Website URL box. After that choose your industry as well as time zone and currency.

When all the fields are filled, click on “Get Tracking ID”, there will be a code appearing on your screen, don’t forget to copy it for the next step. Your ID will look like this:

4. Enable eCommerce setup for your Google Analytics account

Save your Tracking ID, we will use that later. It is now time for online merchants to adjust their setting before adding Google Analytics first.

You can see there is an arrow under your Tracking ID, click on that and choose the “Admin” button like the first step. Then View Settings > Ecommerce Settings and change your settings like the following picture:

With the Checkout Labeling, store owners can either put the steps like the picture or fill in additional steps to suit their store’s checkout procedure. When you are finished, remember to Save your changes, or you will have to do it again.

5. Add Google Analytics in BigCommerce store

It’s time to visit the BigCommerce website and log into your account. With your dashboard, you will see a button called “Advanced Settings” on the left side of the site. Click on it:

Then choose the Web Analytics:

Tick on the Google Analytics checkbox, then there will be a box for you to insert your Tracking ID that you have collected from the previous step. All you have to do now is to paste that code into the box:

Click Save, and now your store is upgraded with BigCommerce Google Analytics integration!

If you have not updated your BigCommerce into the latest version, the steps might vary a little bit. Here are what you should do in that case:

• On the Top Menu, you will find the “Setup” section; click on it
• Then go to Google Analytics Box
• Finally, there will also be a part for you to add your Tracking ID

These are the steps recommended by BigCommerce if you want to make use of Google Analytics for your online business. Conversely, we still introduce a manual way for setting up Google Analytics into your store. If you want to know more about it, keep reading!

6. Configure eCommerce in your Google Analytics

Apart from tracking your customers’ activity towards your BigCommerce website, monitoring your transactions should also be taken into account. Configuring eCommerce for your BigCommerce Google Analytics integration gives you the ability to keep track of total amount of income, the value of your website as well as product success and ROI. As I have mentioned the combination of this helps to assess success and make strategic decisions.

However, the steps are different from adding Google Analytics into your BigCommerce, and you might need to aware of several things such as:

• You need to turn off the Enhanced Ecommerce mode that we have switched on in step number 3.
• If you are using a Blueprint theme, DataTags should also be unable.
• A dedicated SSL should be available since the shared.mybigcommerce.com SSL credential would not comply with this function.

Let’s go back to the Admin > View > Ecommerce Settings to turn off your “Enable Enhanced Ecommerce Reporting” if you have turned on it.

Next, please copy the tracking code below:

<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-xxxxxxxx-x"></script>
<script>
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag('js', new Date());
gtag('config', 'UA-xxxxxxxx-x');

function trackEcommerce() {
    function gaAddTrans(orderID, store, total, tax, shipping, city, state, country, currency, channelInfo) {
        var transaction = {
            id: orderID,
            affiliation: store,
            revenue: total,
            tax: tax,
            shipping: shipping,
            city: city,
            state: state,
            country: country
        };

        if (currency) {
            transaction.currency = currency;
        }

        ga('ecommerce:addTransaction', transaction);
    }
    
    function gaAddItems(orderID, sku, product, variation, price, qty) {
        ga('ecommerce:addItem', {
            id: orderID,
            sku: sku,
            name: product,
            category: variation,
            price: price,
            quantity: qty
        });
    }

    function gaTrackTrans() {
        ga('ecommerce:send');
    }

    function gtagAddTrans(orderID, store, total, tax, shipping, city, state, country, currency, channelInfo) {
        this.transaction = {
            transaction_id: orderID,
            affiliation: store,
            value: total,
            tax: tax,
            shipping: shipping,
            items: []
        };

        if (currency) {
            this.transaction.currency = currency;
        }
    }

    function gtagAddItem(orderID, sku, product, variation, price, qty) {
        this.transaction.items.push({
            id: sku,
            name: product,
            category: variation,
            price: price,
            quantity: qty
        });
    }

    function gtagTrackTrans() {
        gtag('event', 'purchase', this.transaction);        
        this.transaction = null;
    }

    if (typeof gtag === 'function') {
        this._addTrans = gtagAddTrans;
        this._addItem = gtagAddItem;
        this._trackTrans = gtagTrackTrans;
    } else if (typeof ga === 'function') {
        this._addTrans = gaAddTrans;
        this._addItem = gaAddItems;
        this._trackTrans = gaTrackTrans;
    }
}

var pageTracker = new trackEcommerce();

</script>  

The next step would be adding this entire code into your BigCommerce online business. Online merchants need to click on Advanced Settings, then Web Analytics and check on the checkbox for Google Analytics. Save that one and choose Google Analytics instead of General Settings.

You will see there is a box under the line “Manually add Google Analytics tracking code”. Insert the copied set of code into the box and Save your changes.

Now your BigCommerce Google Analytics integration is good to go!

Final thought

The article has shown you how to add and configure BigCommerce Google Analytics integration and what you should know about it. We hope that with the help of Google Analytics, BigCommerce merchants will be able to collect information related to their visitors and website such as the bounce rate, the performance, or even ROI so that they gain higher profits from online business.