How To Track Abandoned Carts in Google Analytics

Welcome to our step by step instructions on how to measure abandoned carts and more importantly, the abandon rates in Google Analytics. It’s entirely free to set up tracking through Google Analytics.

Let’s get started!

Why track abandoned carts?

The statistics on cart abandonment are pretty shocking; the average ecommerce website loses over 77% of orders before checkout.

If you’re selling products online, you need to be monitoring this very important process of your business so you can get full visibility on how to best improve!

How Do I Recover Sales?

When you set up tracking of your sales funnel in Google Analytics, you can find out precisely where customers are dropping off.

From there, you can figure out what on that page might be losing your customers – whether it’s lack of payment plans like Afterpay, shipping costs or even worse, a broken checkout process – and get it fixed.

How To Set Up Your Sale Funnel

A “Sales Funnel” is essentially just the steps leading to a purchase on your store.

Using Google Analytics, we can use “goals” to track each step. When you set up a goal, you can track the number of conversions (times the “goal” has occurred), conversion rate (% of visitors who converted), and lastly you can even segment your customers based on what goal they completed. Pretty neat, right?

​Guide To Setting Up Your Sales Funnel In Google Analytics

There are five general steps in setting up a funnel to track your sales funnel in GA.

We will be using a standard checkout funnel, where there’s a cart / checkout / order confirmation configuration.

The first step is to start at the very end of your funnel – in this case, the order confirmation page is going to be our “goal”.

Then we will add in the steps a customer will take to track our customer journey through the sales funnel.

First, Go to the Goals Section

In Google Analytics, click on admin, select your website and click on the “Goals” option.

Create Your Goal

Enter a name for your Goal. I’m going to use the name the goal “Purchases”.

Choose Goal Type

For the Goal Type, select URL Destination. Enter the URL of your order confirmation page.

Add Steps to your Funnel

​Next, we need to set up your customer journey through our sales funnel! Select the “use funnel” checkbox to add the pages included in your ecommerce website that your customers will go through.

Our goal is a completed purchase. Before a customer is able to complete an order they must add a product to their cart, then go through checkout. As you can see in the screenshot below, I have added these two steps!

We’re Done – Save your Goal!

That’s it! Super easy, right? It’s worth saying that it may take a little while for data to appear, so be patient if it’s not showing up right away. In our experience, the more traffic you have to your site the quicker it appears.

Visualising Your New Funnel

Google Analytics runs some automatic calculations for us, so we can check on the goals conversion rates and more.

Our favourite visualisation is the Funnel Visualization page.

From the Funnel Visualisation page we can see the successful conversion rates and amount of drop off’s from each section of our page.

Measure Cart Abandonment & Recover Revenue: See how Barilliance helps hundreds of eCommerce stores recover revenue here. 

Summary

That’s it folks, how you can visualise and track your sales funnel using Google Analytics! If you haven’t created a funnel, do it now.

The next step is to put together strategy to reduce shopping cart abandonment and recover sales. We offer a bunch of services that help you convert more of your customsers using a combination of email marketing, social media retargeting and more.

Book your own free strategy session with our team today to get started – we can’t wait to speak with you!