Leveraging Global Data Objects for Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking

Many organizations experience large project backlogs and limited development resources. When you have the opportunity to do well-planned, robust data work once and then have the opportunity to leverage this data for multiple purposes and on multiple platforms, this can be a meaningful win for your organization.

By carefully exposing key data in a platform-agnostic manner, you can make data related to content, prospects, customers, products, and transactions available across your organization as readily available variables that tag management systems (TMS) can easily ingest.

At E-Nor, our consulting and engineering teams have had the opportunity to plan and implement some very complex Enhanced Ecommerce implementation (across a range of verticals). While most of these Enhanced Ecommerce implementations have directly leveraged the GTM data layer, we have in some cases taken advantage of an existing global data object, mapping the global variables to the specially reserved Enhanced Ecommerce and custom dimension names that the Google Analytics tags in Google Tag Manager are waiting to see.

Cross-Tool, User-Focused Benefits

A global data object allows you to use the same ecommerce data across multiple tools and platforms:

• additional analytics tools – if you’re running other analytics tools, you can map all your global data object ecommerce variables – such as product name, SKU, and total revenue – to the Ecommerce variables that those tools require.
• CDP – you can push transaction details from the global data object to a Customer Data Platform (CDP), such as Tealium AudienceStream, as the basis of targeted audiences and messaging for email campaigns, as one example.
• remarketing – you can use product information from the global data object for cross-selling opportunities with highly targeted creatives.

Implementation: Mapping the Ecommerce Variables and Custom Dimensions

With a global data object variables already populated on the page, it’s a fairly straightforward process to recreate a new object formatted for recognition by Google Analytics tags in Google Tag Manager.

Using GTM Data Layer Globally

As an alternative approach to a shared data layer, you can map your ecommerce variables and custom dimension in GTM data layer to the format required by other marketing and analytics tools.

Whether you’re mapping from a global object into a format that tags in Google Tag Manager can use, or you’re staring with the GTM data layer for your global objects, you can benefit from taking data that has been configured for one purpose and translating it for additional marketing and analytics purposes – no need to reinvent the wheel for each context in which you want to use product and visitor attributes.