How to answer the question: “Does anyone even use that?”
You probably have a dropdown on your PDP.
If you’re like 99% of stores, you can’t even tell if anyone uses it.
If that dropdown just contains a lengthy product description, maybe it doesn’t matter.
If that dropdown is the only place you mention your free shipping and free returns, it probably matters a lot.
And dropdown are just the beginning. Websites are filled with things to do — buttons to click, videos to watch and forms to fill.
In this post I’ll walk you through how to start collecting data on how customers use the various features on your store.
Let’s get into it.
An Example to get started
Before getting into how to set this up, let’s talk about what you can do. I’m running a test right now with a client that adds a ‘watch video’ button to their PDP for a number of different products.
My main question was, does having this video available increase CR? Secondary to that I wanted to know, does anyone even watch the video? One step further I wanted to know, on which product page do people click to see the video the most?
The primary question would be answered via the AB test. To answer the other questions I set up an event that sends data to Google Analytics any time someone clicks to play the video. Here’s the data I’m now tracking in GA:
This data appears in GA → Behavior → Events → Top Events → select the action and add a secondary dimension of the ‘event label’.
I can check how many people saw the button in the experiment and divide that by the number of ‘total events’ to see how many people actually click on it. Right now it’s looking like only ~5%, which is interesting to note.
I can also pull the number of people that saw the button on the /mini-collection PDP and divide it by the number of plays on that PDP to see if this product gets more or less video-plays than the average (it gets more).
That additional layer of insight wouldn’t have been possible if we didn’t choose to track it.
But it doesn’t end there. I can also create a segment containing only the people who clicked on the video.
And another containing only people who didn’t click on the video:
This allows me to compare these two segments on all the other metrics GA already tracks:
Tracking just one additional event gives me access to all of these different layers of insights.
Now, how do we actually set this tracking up?
How do events work in Google Analytics?
For this guide we’re going to be using the ‘did someone click on our dropdown?’ example
Google Analytics (GA) has a handy feature called events. Using an event, we can send GA custom data we want to track. I like to think of it like this:
Someone clicks on the dropdown so we want to say “hey GA, something just happened on our PDP that I’d like you to record. Whoever is currently browsing the site opened a dropdown to get more information about our shipping policies. Can you note that down?”
But we can’t just say that. Instead, we have to follow the standard format for an event. That is:
category
action
label (optional)
value (optional)
Our event took place on the PDP so we’ll use the “category” field to track that. The action they took was to open the dropdown, so that’ll be our “action”. The dropdown they opened is the shipping policy one so we’ll use that as our “label”.
In that case, the event we want to send to GA looks like this:
category: “PDP”
action: “Opened Dropdown”
label: “Shipping Policy”
How to trigger these events
Okay so we know what data to send to GA and the format to send it in. Now how do we actually send it when someone clicks on our dropdown?
This part requires some very basic technical skills. You can find anyone with basic JavaScript skills on Fiverr, UpWork, or StoreTasker to implement this for you. The important thing you need to know is how it all works so you can tell them what you want. They’ll know how to do it.
The code for sending an event looks like this:
ga(‘send’, ‘event’, ‘category’, ‘action’, ‘label’)
Filling in the data we want to send it will be:
ga(‘send’, ‘event’, ‘PDP’, ‘Opened Dropdown’, ‘Shipping Policy’)
Running that code sends the data to Google Analytics.
Now what we need to do is make sure we run that code every time someone clicks on the dropdown. So we need to select the dropdown, listen for clicks, and when someone clicks, execute our event code.
That code looks like this:
let shippingDropdown = document.querySelector(‘.dropdown-class’)
shippingDropdown.addEventListener(“click”, function() {
ga(‘send’, ‘event’, ‘PDP’, ‘Opened Dropdown’, ‘Shipping Policy’)
});
The first line is where we select the dropdown. Then, we tell the browser we want to listen for a “click” on that dropdown and do something when it happens. The thing we want to do when someone clicks is send our event data to GA.
Where to go from here
If you’re not technical this probably reads a bit like gibberish. That’s okay.
The goal isn’t for you to set all of this up for yourself. Instead, you just need to know what’s possible and how it works.
Now that you know what’s possible, you can think of different things you want to track. Now that you know how it works, you can easily explain to a developer what you’re looking to do.
The best part is, it’ll only take them a couple hours to set up the code to track dozens of events.
That’s all for this issue. Please, when you get some event tracking set up I’d love to know what you’re tracking and what you’ve learned.
At the same time, if you have any questions or want to chat about this, I’d love to talk on Twitter: