One of the biggest features of Enhanced Ecommerce tracking is support for checkout steps - the navigation path which you expect your website users to follow after they initiate the checkout up to the purchase.
Littledata sends checkout steps to Google Analytics automatically, to ensure you can report on checkout conversions out of the box.
Littledata supports checkout funnel event tracking for:
This includes the latest customizable checkout being rolled out by Shopify.
The Shopify checkout also includes checkout apps handling subscriptions and upsells. i.e. The checkout steps are the same for these customer journeys, but the resulting order is differentiated.
If you have a headless Shopify site (a headless ecommerce site with a Shopify checkout), please follow the headless setup guide first.
When the customer starts and progresses through the checkout on your ecommerce site, Littledata sends a Checkout Step event to your tracking destination for the following three checkout steps.
For all destinations, the checkout journey starts when a user clicks the checkout button.
Let's take a closer look at the structure of these events, what we call them when they're triggered, and how they work.
We send the following checkout step events.
With the Google Analytics connection, all checkout step events are sent upon landing on the respective step.
Check out a detailed list of all events supported in Littledata's GTM and Google Analytics data layer.
We send the following checkout step events.
* Thank you Page Viewed is sent from the browser, and won't exactly match the situations where Order Completed. See why
Check out a detailed list of all events tracked by our Segment connection.
Littledata works seamlessly with one-click checkouts (like Shop Pay), tracking the purchase and sending it over to the desired destination, as well as attributing it to the original source.
The only limitation might be the lack of Checkout Steps - because the nature of the one-click checkout is to bypass the steps entirely.
After you install Littledata, you will start seeing data populating in your Checkout Journey report with the checkout steps like this:
The Checkout Journey report is not editable, but you can easily rebuild it using the checkout events sent by Littledata in a Funnel Exploration report.
Here's how to build a checkout funnel in Google Analytics 4.
For security reasons, third-party apps such as Littledata don’t have direct access to the checkout pages on Shopify. We have to depend on Shopify's webhooks to infer the checkout pages viewed by a particular user.
When a user zips through the checkout pages in quick succession (specifically under 10 seconds), Shopify only informs us of the last page viewed by the user. This leads to misleading spikes in some of the steps and makes the funnel nonsensical. See the example below:
For every checkout step, Littledata checks back if it has sent events for all previous steps for the same user ID and checkout ID in the last 3 days.
In cases where previous step events were NOT sent in the last 3 days, Littledata retroactively adds checkout steps to make sure the user’s journey looks complete in the checkout funnel.
For example, let’s say a user is already logged in and gets through to the payment page within 10 seconds. For this user, even if Shopify only communicated the final end-state (i.e. payment page), Littledata will assume that they went through all steps of the funnel as expected and send 3 separate step hits to GA:
Although retroactively adding steps makes the funnel a lot more meaningful, there are a couple of trade-offs that should be kept in mind while analyzing the data: