Last Updated: September 5, 2023

Google Analytics Enhanced ecommerce segments are hidden gems of enhanced ecommerce reports.

If you have set up enhanced ecommerce tracking on your website then you can create and use these ecommerce segments by following the steps below:

Step-1: Go to Conversions > Ecommerce > Shopping Analysis > Shopping Behavior report in your GA view:

Step-2: There are a lot of hidden buttons on the ‘Shopping Behavior Analysis’ report which can be used to create different types of enhanced ecommerce segments:

Click on the ‘No Shopping Activity’ button as shown below:

Once you clicked on the “No Shopping Activity” button, you will see a dialog box like the one below:

Step-3: Name your ecommerce segment if you want to or keep the default name (no Shopping Activity) intact.

Select the view (Any View or Current View) in which you want your ecommerce segment to be available and then click on the ‘Create Segment’ button.

You can then see the new ecommerce segment applied to your report:

As the name suggests, this ecommerce segment includes only those web sessions in which no shopping activity took place.

The shopping activity could be defined as any/all of the following user engagements on your website:

1. Viewing your internal promotion campaign.
2. Clicking on an internal promotion campaign.
3. Viewing your products on a product list.
4. Clicking one of the product links in the product list.
5. Viewing product detail page.
6. Adding/removing products from your shopping cart.
7. Starting, completing and/or abandoning the checkout process.
8. Asking for a refund.

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Step-4: Now go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels report

From the report above we can conclude that traffic from social media converts the least in comparison to all other marketing channels. You can get similar insight by using this ecommerce segment.

Note: Ecommerce segments behave just like advanced segments and can be applied to any GA report to which you can apply an advanced segment.

Step-5: Go back to the ‘Shopping Behavior Analysis’ report and click on the ‘Edit’ link to see what ‘No Shopping Activity’ ecommerce segment is made up of and how it can be fine-tuned:

The ‘Shopping Stage’ dimension describes the various stages of users’ shopping activity like viewing an internal promotion campaign, adding products to a shopping cart etc.

You can also use the ‘Shopping Stage’ dimension in your custom reports:

Step-6: Fine-tune your ecommerce segment by using the various segment settings:

Of all these settings, the one setting which is worth mentioning is the ‘Enhanced Ecommerce’ setting through which you can further segment your ecommerce segment by users’ shopping behavior: any shopping action, add to cart or purchased an item:

Step-7: Go back to the ‘Shopping Behavior Analysis’ report and click on the ‘Build Audience’ button to create a remarketing audience:

I have named my ‘remarketing audience’ as ‘Users with no shopping activity’.

A quick overview of Remarketing Audiences in Google Analytics

#1 Remarketing audience is a list of users (technically list of cookies) to which you want to show one or more targeted ads via Google Adwords.

#2 Remarketing audiences are generally created based on users’ behavior (like users who abandoned the shopping cart, users who purchased item X etc). The objective here is to re-target those users who showed interest in buying your products but for some reason abandoned your shopping cart/website.

#3 Once you have created remarketing audiences in Google Analytics, these audiences will be available in your Google Adwords account for retargeting.

#4 Your Google Adwords account must be linked to your Google Analytics account and you have enabled advertising on the display ad network. This requirement must be met if you want to use remarketing audiences in Google Adwords.

#5  You need to run remarketing campaigns in Google Adwords in order to benefit from the remarketing audiences you created in Google Analytics.

#6 Re-marketing campaigns have proved to increase the ROI for many businesses and are almost always profitable.

Step-8: Go back to the ‘Shopping Behavior Analysis’ report and click on the ‘remove’ button to remove the ‘No Shopping Activity’ ‘ecommerce segment’ from your report:

Step-9: Now if later you want to apply the ‘No Shopping Activity’ ecommerce segment again to your ‘Shopping Behavior Analysis’ report, then one easy way to do that is by clicking on the ‘No shopping Activity’ button again as shown below:

You will then see a message box like the one below:

Click on the ‘Use Existing Segment’ button to apply the ‘No Shopping Activity’ ecommerce segment again to your ‘Shopping Behavior Analysis’ report.

If you want to apply the ‘No Shopping Activity’ ecommerce segment from some other GA report say ‘Referral Traffic’ report then click on the ‘Advanced Segment’ button, click on the ‘Custom’ link from the segment list and then select and apply your segment:

Step-10: If you want to target only those users (through your remarketing campaigns) who abandoned your shopping cart then you can create a new ecommerce segment by clicking on the ‘cart abandonment’ button in the ‘Shopping Behavior Analysis report as shown below and then build a new remarketing audience using the process described earlier in this article:

This time I have named my ‘remarketing audience’ as ‘Users who abandoned the shopping cart’. This is probably the best ‘remarketing audience’ you can ever create in Google Analytics.

Instead of re-targeting all the users of your website, you are now targeting only those users who showed great interest in making a purchase on your website.

Step-11: Go to ‘Checkout behavior analysis‘ report (under Ecommerce > Shopping Analysis) to create ecommerce segments related to users’ checkout behavior.

There are a lot of hidden buttons on the ‘Checkout Behavior Analysis’ report which can be used to create different types of enhanced ecommerce segments:

The whole process of creating checkout behavior enhanced ecommerce segments and then the marketing audience is similar to the process of creating shopping behavior enhanced ecommerce segments as explained before.

Other Articles on Remarketing in Google Analytics

• Guide to Dynamic remarketing in Google Analytics & Adwords
• 100+ Google Analytics Remarketing audiences for Retargeting

Other articles on Google Analytics Ecommerce

1. Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking Tutorial
2. Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking in Google Analytics – Tutorial
3. Set up Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking in Google Analytics
4. Using Cohort Analysis & Enhanced Ecommerce to Understand User Behavior
5. Duplicate Transactions (orders) in Google Analytics
6. Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking via Google Tag Manager
7. Ecommerce Tracking Google Tag Manager (GTM) – Tutorial
8. Shopify Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking in Google Analytics – Tutorial
9. GA4 (Google Analytics 4) Ecommerce Tracking via GTM – Tutorial
10. Why Google Analytics and Shopping Cart Sales data don’t match and how to fix it
11. How to remove / modify Google Analytics ecommerce transaction in one click
12. Tracking Google Analytics Paypal Referral and other payment gateways
13. Subscription & Recurring Revenue Analytics in Google Analytics
14. Understanding Google Analytics Product Data Import
15. Shopping Cart Analytics Tutorial
16. Learn To Read E-Commerce Reports In Google Analytics
17. Dealing with Google Analytics Refund – Reverse Transaction
18. How to reverse transaction in Google Analytics for gtag.js and analytics.js
19. How to Fix Missing Ecommerce Data in Google Analytics