One of our recent projects was a WebSphere Commerce deployment for a new company who, although just starting out, were affiliated with an established manufacturer. In order to start with an accurate baseline, the company wanted to set up analytics so they could accurately measure their growth and success.
For this task, they turned again to our talented WebSphere Commerce team to integrate Google Analytics Tag Manager with their WCS site.
In order to capture the most accurate and relevant data, our team implemented the Google Analytics data layer, Google Tag Manager, and Enhanced eCommerce Tracking.
Google Analytics was installed to capture the initial information that our client was interested in such as page views and interactions, but Google Tag Manager and Enhanced eCommerce Tracking were required in order to track what customers were buying, what they were abandoning, revenue growth, and more.
In Google Tag Manager, our team wrote a new, custom tag library to generate all of the Google Analytics data layer information from WebSphere Commerce. The data layer information was primarily generated from the WCS search index and using the WCS Business Object Data layer, which is the most advanced way of getting information that isn’t in the search index.
Doing the generation on the server side as opposed to in the browser helps ensure a quicker load time of both the required information and the page in the browser.
Enhanced eCommerce Tracking is a more advanced way of gathering more in depth information and getting it to Google for analysis. It is a way of pushing data out to Google Analytics in order to get more accurate results. A web developer or development team is needed to create the data layer, and, in this case, integrate the tracking with WebSphere Commerce.
With this integration between Google’s accurate analytics applications and the powerful WebSphere Commerce platform, our client now has access to data that will help them track their growth as a new business.
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