Behavior Funnels with Google Analytics

One of the easiest features of Enhanced Ecommerce with Google Analytics to use is the ability to view behavior funnels. These funnels are intended to give you insight into the shopping and purchasing experience in your eCommerce store, showing you were customers enter and leave the shopping or purchasing processes.

We’ve drastically improved support for these funnels in WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro version 1.3.0+, ensuring that Shopping Behavior and Checkout Behavior reports will populate without any additional effort as soon as you’ve connected your site to Google Analytics.

Let’s take a look at what each of these reports can give you once you upgrade the plugin.

Shopping Behavior Analysis

The shopping behavior analysis is pre-populated by Google based on eCommerce events your store sends. This report is intended to give you a birds-eye view of the browsing experience in your store:

You can evaluate your users’ shopping experience from product impression to transaction.
GA docs

As such, you’ll see it filter down from browsing to purchasing:

1. All Sessions
2. Sessions with Product views
3. Sessions with Add to cart
4. Sessions with Check-Out
5. Sessions with Transactions

You’ll be able to see where visitors enter and leave this funnel, giving you insight into abandonment and where drop-offs occur in your purchasing lifecycle.

You can view this report by going to Conversions > eCommerce > Shopping Behavior to see data on all browsing sessions in your store.

You can drill down even further to create segments based on these behaviors. For example, if you click the “Cart Abandonment” footer, you’ll see that you can create a segment, or “view” of only users who have left your shopping funnel. This lets you gain further insight into the behavior of customers who leave your site vs customers who purchase.

Checkout Behavior Analysis

Now what about that final touch point in purchasing — your checkout process? The Checkout Behavior report gives you more detailed insight into what happens during the actual checkout.

The Checkout Behavior Analysis report lets you see how successfully your users moved through your checkout process.
GA docs

As such, it’s not really its own report, but can instead be thought of as a “zoomed in” view of the 4th Shopping Behavior step – checkout:

1. All Sessions
2. Sessions with Product views
3. Sessions with Add to cart
4. Sessions with Check-Out
   4.1 Checkout Step 1 (Loaded checkout)
   4.2 Checkout Step 2 (Provide billing email)
   4.3 Checkout Step 3 (Select payment method)
   4.4 Checkout Step 4 (Placed order)
5. Sessions with Transactions

This report is typically most useful for stores with a multi-step checkout process. However, WooCommerce favors a single-step checkout for simplicity, so this report may not be as relevant to merchants.

It can still be useful for stores to see what stages of checkout have been completed by customers despite this, and what options have been selected. The caveat is that you must send a defined set of steps for the checkout to populate this report. As such, Google Analytics Pro will put together a defined list of up to 4 events that will make up your checkout behavior analysis:

(You can stop tracking an event by deleting its name to remove it from this analysis.)

These 4 events will happen for most any WooCommerce checkout, regardless of whether selling physical goods, shippable goods, or other products.

While you can’t control the steps in this funnel, you can control names of the steps and how they appear in your Google Analytics account.

Once configured, you’ll see this report populate with where customers get to in your checkout process, along with seeing which events are done first (where they enter the funnel).

This lets you see where potentially drop-offs are in your checkout, allowing you to determine if some parts of checkout need to be more prominent or easier to complete.

The Checkout Behavior analysis also allows for “checkout options” to be sent, which are sent for 3 of the 4 events in this funnel. These options can be used to create segments to track users based on choices they may have made.

For example, let’s say you want to filter by the first checkout option: whether registered or a guest user. You could click on this checkout option to create a segment.

You’ll then be able to use this segment to filter the users who have passed through your funnels or browse your site, looking deeper at their behaviors.

Notes & Further Reading

Each of these funnels will begin to populate as soon as you connect the plugin to your Google Analytics account, letting you see more detail about customer behaviors on your site, and giving you an initial look into cart and checkout abandonment.

We also recommend checking out these guides if you’d like to learn more about behavior analyses with Google Analytics:

• Google Analytics Shopping Stages Explained
• Beginners Guide to Enhanced Ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics