Want to provide a personalized shopping experience on your WooCommerce store? Then, you need to set up individual WooCommerce customer tracking to understand the shopping behavior of your logged in customers. In this article, we’ll show you how to set up individual WooCommerce customer tracking.
Why Set Up Individual Customer Tracking?
If you require customers to log in to your WooCommerce site to purchase products, you need to enable customer tracking on your site. Some of the benefits of individual WooCommerce customer tracking are:
Personalize Shopping Experience
As shoppers become more tech savvy, they expect merchants to provide a personalized shopping experience just for them.
To create a personalized shopping experience, you need to set up logged in customer tracking on your site that enables you to learn the shopping and checkout behavior of each individual customer. For example, when you know individual shopping behavior and preferences, you’ll be able to offer product recommendations that conform to the shopper’s specific taste.
When customers are shown products that match their individual taste, they’re more likely to purchase products from your store.
Compare Guest Checkout Versus Logged in Checkout
WooCommerce allows you to offer guest checkout on your store that enables your customers who are in a hurry to purchase products without having to register an account with your site.
When you offer guest checkout on your store, you might want to compare the performances of both your registered customers versus guest customers. Understanding the performance of your guest users allows you to optimize your site for the general audience based on what resonates best on your site.
Enabling Individual Customer Tracking on WooCommerce
Using MonsterInsights is the easiest way to enable individual customer tracking on your WooCommerce store.
By default, Google Analytics identifies every customer of your WooCommerce store by assigning them a unique ID known as Client ID. The downside to this approach is that Client ID doesn’t allow you to accurately track individual customers since it represents the unique device from which users shop on your site.
For instance, if a shopper engages with your store using two different devices, it will be counted as two different users, not a single user.
To better track logged in users, MonsterInsights uses the unique WordPress user ID assigned to each individual user instead of Client ID.
Finding User ID of Each Individual User
To find the WordPress user id of your users, just go to your WordPress dashboard and click on Users » All Users.
Then, hover your cursor over the user you want to find the ID for. You’ll see a URL appear at the bottom of your browser. In the middle of the URL, it will say “user_id=”. The number after that is the user’s ID number.
You can click the Edit link under the username to make sure. You’ll see the user ID in the web address on the edit page.
MonsterInsights replaces the anonymous Client ID with this WordPress user id with just a few clicks.
Setting Up WooCommerce Customer Tracking
Step 1: Install MonsterInsights on Your Site
The first thing you need to do is to install MonsterInsights on your site and connect it with Google Analytics. For more help on this step, you can learn how to properly connect Google Analytics with MonsterInsights.
Step 2: Enable User Tracking in MonsterInsights
Then, go to Insights » Settings in your WordPress dashboard. Click on the Tracking tab at the top of the page, and then click Demographics in the left taskbar. From here, you can check the Enable User ID tracking checkbox. Be sure to click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.
Step 3: Enable User Tracking in Google Analytics
Now that you’ve enabled user ID tracking on MonsterInsights, you’ll now need to create a new UserID view in Google Analytics and enable it.
To do this, log in to your Google Analytics account and select the website you’d like to enable user tracking for.
Then, click Admin.
Now click the Tracking Info link in the center column to expand the submenu, and click the User-ID link that appears below.
On the next page, you’ll have to click the Off switch to On and click the Next Step button to agree to the User-ID policy.
In step 2, you don’t need to do anything but click Next Step again.
In step 3, just click the Create button to create the UserID view.
Next, you will be taken to this screen where you will have to enter a Reporting View Name (we recommend including UserID in the name so it’s easy to remember which view has UserID tracking enabled).
Finally, you can scroll down and click the Create View button.
You’ll now see a brief success message. Then, click the Google Analytics logo at the top of the page.
You can now access your new User-ID view.
Then, just click on Audience » User Explorer in the left menu to see your user data. You’ll see that each user is now listed by their user ID in WordPress.
You can click on the User ID to see more detailed info on each user.
Compare Your Logged in Users vs. Guest Users
MonsterInsights even allows you to compare the performance of your logged in users with your guest users. To compare between them, you need to enable Logged in custom dimensions tracking on your site.
In Google Analytics, custom dimensions are just like default dimensions such as gender, region, all pages, traffic sources, etc., except you create them yourself. Custom dimensions are greatly helpful to collect and analyze data that matter to your website, which Analytics doesn’t automatically track.
By enabling Logged in custom dimensions, you can compare the engagement of your logged in users with non-logged in users (guest users).
For more about custom dimensions, you can refer to the beginners’ guide to custom dimensions in Google Analytics.
Follow the below steps to enable Logged in custom dimensions on both your site and your Google Analytics account.
Step 1: Install the MonsterInsights Custom Dimensions Addon
To install the addon, visit the Insights » Addons page in your WordPress dashboard. Then, click Install under the MonsterInsights Custom Dimensions addon.
After installation is complete, the button will change to say Activate. Go ahead and click the Activate button to make sure the addon is active and ready to use.
Step 2: Add Custom Dimensions in MonsterInsights
Navigate to Insights » Settings. Now click on the Tracking tab on the upper tab row, and then to the Custom Dimensions tab on the left tab row.
Now click on Add new custom dimension and select Logged in from the dropdown menu. Once you are done selecting, click the Save Changes button.
How to Compare Logged in Users With Guest Users in Google Analytics
To compare logged in users with guest users, you’ll need to create a custom report in your Google Analytics account.
Log in to your Google Analytics account, and select the right website from the list.
Then, click the Customization / Customisation tab in the left panel.
You can now click the + New Custom Report button.
Now you’ll need to tell Google Analytics what to include in your report.
Let’s create a report to show us whether your visitors are logged in to your site (“true”) or not (“false”). Let’s name our report Logged in Custom Dimensions. Under Metric Groups, click the + add metric button. Type pageview” in the search field. Then click on the Pageviews metric under the Users heading.
After that, you can click the + add dimension button and then, under Custom Dimensions, click Logged in.
When you’re done, click the Save button at the bottom. Now you’ll be redirected to your new report.
That’s it!
We hope this guide helped you to learn how to set up individual WooCommerce customer tracking.
For the longterm success of your WooCommerce shop, you might want to keep an eye on the customer lifetime value report in Google Analytics. And check out our list of the best WooCommerce plugins to grow your traffic and sales.
You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook for more free tutorials.