Strategies for using revenue and profit data in ecommerce reporting, and Google Ads optimisations.
You might recall an earlier post where I demonstrated a potential automation for populating Firestore with data from BigQuery. That demo used the data in Value Based Bidding in a Google Ads Conversion tag.
As we can see in the video demonstration today, using a modified version of the same variable template means it’s not difficult to perform the same integration for analytics and ecommerce data sets.
Now that we can incorporate profit data in our analytics and Google Ads optimisations, the question is how is this useful?
With Google Ads, the choice to send the profit metric as a conversion value is straightforward but with analytics, there are options.
#1 Full Replacement
You can fully replace revenue with profit, and item values with cost of goods data Replace shipping with margin and adjust your tax field accordingly. Your analytics and Google Ads conversion value data is now profit-centric. Goals with values feeding Google Ads optimisations are consistent with ecommerce metrics.
#2 Custom Metrics
Choosing to ingest profit data as custom event parameters is more challenging. Custom metrics are event scoped. This means item level profit data isn’t possible at this time. You could cast the profit as a string and add a custom dimension with item level scope:
In the reporting interface it’s icky:
But there is value in a BigQuery export where the value can be recast as a double:
#3 Parallel measurement
Consider the use of two properties. Choose option 1, and create a separate revenue based property in addition. Retaining revenue data to feed lifetime value metrics is a valid reason to have both profit, and revenue based instrumentation.
#4 Partner measurement
The ecom/analytics integration is done server side in a variable that’s easily consumed by other tags beyond GA4. We’ve seen how other analytics vendors such as Piwik Pro have tag templates that support straightforward modification.
Consider using another vendor for pure revenue based data collection - use the Piwik Pro CDP for audience generation based on lifetime value metrics. Use the GMP services for campaign optimisation, and combine the two for refine audience targeting. Each platform has clear data uses and activation workloads
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