Google Analytics is a powerful tool for tracking your website’s key performance indicators, as well as your marketing return on investment (ROI).
When it comes to your website, it’s critical to have data around online transactions. That’s why Xola’s Google Analytics Ecommerce integration pushes online booking data to your Google Analytics account automatically. This allows you to see precisely how effective your site is at converting visitors into customers and review transactional information all in one place.
This article details all the steps necessary to viewing your online booking data in Google Analytics (Universal Analytics).
Note: If you are looking to use Google Analytics 4, in tandem with Universal Analytics or alone, click here.
What's covered in this article:
- Add Google’s Universal Analytics Tracking Code to your website
- Enabling Ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics
- Add your site’s domain to the Referral Exclusion List
- Track Ecommerce conversions using Google Analytics reporting
- Implementing Google Ads Conversion Tracking
- Troubleshooting your Xola- Google Analytics Integration
Add Google’s Universal Analytics Tracking Code to your website
The Universal Analytics Tracking Code lets you view the customer journey and measure how visitors interact with your website.
Google recommends adding the code to your site's templates, placing it near the top of the <head> tag and before any other script or CSS tags.
Read more about implementing Google’s Universal Analytics Tracking Code here
Xola’s Google Analytics Ecommerce integration pushes booking information automatically into your Google Analytics account, so you can view online bookings taking place on your website directly on Google Analytics.
Xola sets up the integration to push online booking information to your Google Analytics during the launch process. All you need to do is follow the steps below to setup your Analytics account to receive and present booking data from Xola. Simple as that!
If you believe that the Google Analytics Ecommerce integration is not turned on for your Xola account, or if you want to add this service, please contact us at support@xola.com
Enabling Ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics
Xola’s Google Analytics Ecommerce integrations automatically collects and sends online booking data to your Analytics account, saving you the hassle of adding extra code to your site.
All you need to do to Enable Ecommerce, and start seeing online booking data in your Analytics reports, is to follow these three simple steps:
- Go to your account’s Admin panel and click on Ecommerce Settings for the view that you’d like to track booking data.
- Select Enable Ecommerce and set the toggle to On.
- Click Next Step and then select Done
Add your site’s domain to the Referral Exclusion List
Xola’s Google Analytics Ecommerce integration pushed data from one party to another (Xola to your Analytics account). So, to ensure you don’t see your own website as a referring site for online transaction:
- Go to your account’s Admin panel and click on Tracking Info in the property column.
- Select Referral Exclusion List from the drop down menu.
- Click the Add Referral Exclusion button.
- Enter your website domain name in the text box, and click Create.
How to Add Your Domain to Google's Referral Exclusion List from Xola on Vimeo.
That’s it! Your Google Analytics account will now receive and display online booking ecommerce data, including SKU-level transaction amounts, add-on revenue and taxes and fees.
Track Ecommerce conversions using Google Analytics reporting.
Now that you have Enabled Ecommerce in all of the views you want to track and added your website domain to the Referral Exclusion List you can start to analyze online purchases, as well as consumer behavior leading up to a purchase.
This information lets you understand which channels contribute (directly or indirectly) to your online sales. You will also be able to identify where your site excels at moving consumers down the path-to-purchase, and where it falls behind.
Important: Google Analytics only starts to record transactional information when you enable ecommerce tracking and takes up to 48 hours to process the data. Once you set up Xola’s Google Analytics integration and Enable Ecommerce tracking, we recommend waiting at least 2 days before verifying that you are receiving Xola transaction data in Google Analytics.
Implementing Google Ads Conversion Tracking
- Integrate Xola with your Google Analytics account.
- If you have not already, follow the instructions to set up Xola's Google Analytics Ecommerceintegration.
- Link Your Google Analytics and Google Ads Accounts.
- Follow these Google Ads instructions to link the Google Analytics property to your Google Ads account. Make sure that the Google Analytics property you link is the same one that you have set up with Xola's Google Analytics Ecommerce integration.
- Import Transactions as Google Ads Conversions.
- In your Google Ads account, select Tools > Conversions.
- Click the blue + icon to add a new conversion action.
- Select Import.
- Select Google Analytics and click Continue.
- Select the Transactions conversion action and click Import and Continue.
- If you do not see a Transactions event to import, confirm that you have successfully linked your Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts (see Step 2).
- You will see a confirmation message confirming that your transactions are successfully being imported as conversion actions. You can now use transactions as a conversion event when setting up your Google Ads campaigns!
Note: It may take up to 24 hours from from when you integrate Xola with your Google Analytics account for transactions to appear. Similarly, it may take up to 24 hours to the Transaction conversion event to appear in Google Ads after you successfully link with your Google Analytics account.
For more information, review the Google Ads Help article on how to Link Google Analytics and Google Ads.