5 GA4 Ecommerce Mistakes Google Won’t Warn You About.

🚨 The following are the 5 GA4 Ecommerce Tracking Mistakes Google Won’t Warn You About: 🛒💡

Mistake-1: You don't track state changes but rather send duplicate ecommerce events to your GA4 property.

Consider a scenario in which a user adjusts the quantity of an item in their shopping cart, and you don't track state changes.

You might send an 'add_to_cart' event whenever the user changes the quantity.

If the user increases the quantity from 1 to 5, one unit at a time, this might result in 5 separate 'add_to_cart' events, leading to duplicate ecommerce events.

You should send a single custom event, like 'cart_quantity_updated', along with parameters that reflect the old and new quantities.

This provides a more accurate view of the user's actions without creating duplicate ecommerce events.

Mistake-2: You don't use a throttling function to prevent sending duplicate ecommerce events to GA4.

For example, a throttling function ensures that the 'purchase' event is not fired more than once when the order confirmation page reloads by a user.

This would prevent duplicate 'purchase' events.

A quick way to check for duplicate ecommerce events in GA4 is to look at the 'Event Count Per user' metric.

A high event count per user can be a sign of duplicate events.

Mistake-3: You do not clear the ecommerce data in the data layer before pushing a new transaction event in GA4.

dataLayer.push({ ‘ecommerce’: null }); // Clear previous data

Suppose a customer adds a laptop-x1 and then later removes it, only to add a different model (laptop-y2) to their cart.

If the ecommerce data isn't cleared before the new transaction data is pushed, both laptops might incorrectly appear in the transaction details, leading to errors in ecommerce tracking.

Mistake-4: You do not include all relevant event parameters with each ecommerce event, which often results in (not set) appearing in your ecommerce reports.

Each e-commerce event in GA4 requires specific event parameters to be included.

If these event parameters are missing or incorrectly configured, GA4 will display "(not set)" as a placeholder value.

For example, if the 'item_name' parameter is not included in the 'add_to_cart' event, the item name will appear as "(not set)" in the e-commerce reports.

Mistake-5: Failing to customize your GA4 ecommerce tracking setup and reports to accurately reflect and capture your customer journey.

The standard purchase journey and other monetization reports available in GA4 do not always align with your unique customer journey or sales funnel.

Customized tracking allows you to include specific interactions that are important to your business but may not be part of the default GA4 ecommerce events.

You can gain more accurate and actionable insights into user behaviour by customizing your GA4 ecommerce tracking setup and reports to match your specific customer journey.