A little bit techy today. I know. But really useful stuff.

With Google Analytics, you have the ability to track how many products are bought on your website, with it’s ecommerce tracking. You can also use this for your website, even if you don’t actually sell products but to categorise your lead generation, pdf downloads or whatever the call to actions are on your website.

On your product bought / lead confirmation page, you will need your programmers to add some code to the page, after the main google analytics tracking tag.

For example, I can track what type of property, the country, the postcode, the specific ID, the number of bedrooms in the property, a fictional value of £10/$10 for each lead, the price that each property is on the market for, – all by getting the programmers to use a “get” for each bit of information I am retrieving from the website. But it could any important information about either your product sales or leads.

Category is really useful because that’s how you sort your products / leads into different buckets.
Product name and Product Sku are where two different fields where you can specify what details about your product or lead you want to be able to see in google analytics as your product details type information.
The others, like price etc, are pretty self-explanatory.

In this instance, I don’t use shipping and tax – because I am using the ecommerce tracking for tracking leads generated.
This is my sample code which goes on the product bought/lead confirmation webpage code:

pageTracker._addTrans(
“$property.getCountryCode() $property.getBranch().getID()”, //Order Id
“10″, //Total
“”, //Tax
“”, //Shipping
);
pageTracker._addItem(
“$property.getCountryCode() $property.getBranch().getID()”, // Order Id
“$property.getPostcode().getArea() $property.getPropertySubTypeName()”, //’SKU’
“$property.getPropertySubTypeName() $property.getBedrooms() beds”, // Product Name
“$selectedTab”, // Category
“$property.getPrice()”, // Price
“1″ // Quantity
);
pageTracker._trackTrans();

And this is what ecommerce categories ends up looking like within the google analytics interface, eg renting:

And here are product details eg 3 bed house.

This is extremely easy to set up, 20 minutes of a programmer's time, and once done, gives a huge benefit and understanding of either ecommerce usage or leads generated in exactly the way that makes sense to you.

Have you tried it out yet?