Google introduces Checkout journey report for ecommerce sites

Posted by Edith MacLeod on 9 Oct, 2023
View comments Marketing
New report in Google Analytics 4 helps you identify bottlenecks and problems in your checkout process.

Checkout journey report.

Google’s new Checkout journey report is designed to highlight issues with your checkout process, enabling you to address any problems or bottlenecks slowing sales.

It shows the number and percentage of users who began checkout, and completed each of the subsequent steps through the funnel.

This allows you to see any bottlenecks. For example, if there’s a high abandonment rate between the Add Shipping stage and Add Payment stages, you’d take a look at your shipping policies to try and identify anything putting users off, such as high shipping costs or not being able to check out as a guest.

Access the report

  1. In Analytics, select Reports from the menu on the left.
  2. The Checkout journey report is on the left, in the Monetization topic of the Life cycle collection or the Drive online sales topic of the Business objectives collection.

To see data in the report you need to implement ecommerce events in your store including:

  • begin_checkout (populates the Begin checkout step)
  • add_shipping_info (populates the Add shipping step)
  • add_payment_info (populates the Add payment step)
  • purchase (populates the Purchase step)

Google has instructions for how to do this for a website and a mobile app.

The report funnel is closed, meaning it only includes users who started at the first step (begin checkout), not at any other step.

The report shows Abandonment and Retention rates between each step.

You’ll also be able to select from the following dimensions (populated automatically), to update the dimension values in the table:

  • Browser
  • City
  • Country
  • Device Category
  • Language
  • Region

If you’re not seeing the report it can be added by someone with administrator or editor status for the GA4 property. See Google’s blog post for further details.

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