Is Google Tag Manager(DataLayer) the only way to track detailed product ecommerce conversions?

0
votes

I have an old ecommerce platform that tracks what products are sold (names, price, transaction), gives us a return on Adwords spend etc. This is performed well by an old Urchin code in Google Analytics without any additional configuration.

Very surprised to see that by default in Universal Analytics when couple with OpenCart etc - even with Ecommerce switched on in Google Analytics, there is no Google Analytics ecommerce product data tracking.

Can this only be provided through Google Tag Manager by finding your product variables add then adding a datalayer with GTM?

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google-analyticse-commercegoogle-tag-managergoogle-datalayerdata-layer

2 Answers

1
votes

Since Urchin was oldest version of google analytics, after that google had introduced synchronous, asynchronous and currently running version is universal.So it is recommended to upgrade google analytics code. After upgrading analytics code it is mandatory to upgrade your google analytics ecommerce tracking code.

and if you are using google tag manager then you have to push all ecommerce details in dataLayer. And it is quite simple in case of opencart.

I worked on opencart multiple time, if you are looking to google analytics ecommerce tracking solution then follow this blog http://www.notesonclick.com/blog/ecommerce-tracking-in-opencart-2-3/ for enhance ecommerce tracking , search on google for extension

0
votes

More or less. You could implement your GA code via a custom HTML tag without a proper datalayer, but even so you would have to create variables within GTM that you can pass to the GA tag. But if you want to use the Tag Template you got to have a datalayer in the format specified by Google.

Searching for "Open Cart Enhanced E-Commerce-Tracking Google" brings up several affordable extensions that promise to create an appropriate dataLayer for GTM (yoi do not usually "add a dataLayer with GTM - if at all possible you create the dataLayer on the server and pass it to GTM. You can write to the dataLayer from within GTM, but that's a bit of a hack).