Basket Case: what are customers up to inside the cart?

Toby Wells looks at intelligent ways to use Basket Data via Google’s new tracking functionality

Different products on your website may have wildly different price points. And that brings different conversion rates, and divergent up or cross sell opportunities. This is why understanding what items bring customers to the site versus what they end up going on to buy is key to developing an efficient marketing strategy.

Google Ads now makes it easier than ever to track these paths directly in the Google Ads interface with their new product called Conversions with Basket Data. This can be easily set up on your Google Ads or Google Analytics conversion actions, pulling in data about the contents of users baskets once they check out, and having that data fed back into the Google Ads interface along with your overall conversion value.

Once set up, you can start analysing the data including the new metrics now available. These include Orders, Revenue, Average Basket Size, Cross Sell Revenue, Average Order Value and if you additionally pass through other business data, you can also access Cost of Goods Sold (COGS), Gross Profit and Gross Profit Margin. You can break down these metrics at the campaign, ad group and product level.

So what does this look like in practice? For Kinase clients we have create a new dashboard from this data, allowing a new visualisation of the cross product buying experience. From here we can break down the products using attributes in Merchant Centre including Brand and Condition, allowing us to utilise our custom labels for more client specific attributes.

We use these breakdowns to answer questions such as what products to users add on to their order? Do certain brands or campaigns result in a larger basket size? If we want to drive sales of product X, can we do this more effectively by also investing in other products that have a high click to purchase crossover with product X? Is it worth investing in a product with a high click-through rate but low sales, because it leads to cross sell revenue?

It can all be taken further if you also add first party margin and COGS data, helping you make decisions that move your marketing closer to your bottom line and meet your profit objectives.

There are currently some limitations, such as not being able to automatically export all the new metrics and dimensions via the Google Ads API, however as uptake of the feature increases we hope to see greater API support rolled out.

It also currently only shows data for the product clicked on and the final products sold, which still leaves some unknowns for the messy middle of a customer's buying journey. We would love to see this product expanded to full path to conversion tracking, with a more granular breakdown of time to conversion between touchpoints.

Google’s Conversions with Basket Data has provided great insight so far, and we are excited to see how it develops as a tool, and what insights we can gain from it to help our clients grow.