Overview

We spend considerable time focusing on external touchpoints in the user journey (e.g., ad touchpoints such as Google Ads, Facebook, etc.). However, most modern e-commerce sites also feature several internal promotional touchpoints. These touchpoints form their own promotion funnel that merits analysis. One of the most common internal promotions is typically a hero banner linking to a featured collection or product.

Internal promotions can also appear in various other areas on the site. For instance, a pop-up promoting a related product after adding an item to the cart or displaying a related collection on a product page are common examples. These touchpoints in the user journey can be likened to ad click touchpoints in a multi-channel funnel context. You can inquire about which promotional touchpoints are most effective in driving desired actions on our site.

GA4 includes built-in events (though not detected automatically) for these interactions: view_promotion and select_promotion. view_promotion triggers when a user sees a promotion (visibility), while select_promotion triggers when a user clicks on a promotion.

Sendable Dimensions:

When sending events related to promotions, you can include the following dimensions:

• creative_name - e.g., Summer Sale Promotion - Banner Version 2
• location_id - e.g., Landing Page Hero Banner
• promotion_name - e.g., Summer Sale Promotion
• promotion_id - e.g., A unique ID for internal reference

Utilizing these dimensions, you can construct funnels that reveal insights such as click-through rates and conversion rates for promotions. By segmenting these funnels based on factors like promotion location, creative name, etc., you can identify which promotions or creatives contribute most effectively to the key actions in your user journey. This analysis can be extended through the funnel to examine which promotions appear most frequently in the conversion path. This approach mirrors how you evaluate ad touch points in the conversion path, allowing you to optimize based on the performance of these promotions.

Implementation

Add html to Data Attributes:

There is just one requirement to get these events tracking. On every promotion on the site you'll need to add the following html data attributes to your <a> tags, replacing the quoted text for each attribute with the relevant text for your ads.

<a data-promotion 
data-creative-name="red t shirts" 
data-creative-slot="hero banner" 
data-location-id="home page" 
data-promotion-id="P_12345" 
data-promotion-name="summer sale">

This process can be done in several ways:

• It can be hardcoded on the site.
• You can create a custom section in Shopify for your promotions that includes these fields, and populate them in the customization module in Shopify.
• You can use a script to add this information on page load.

Once this data is added to the promotions on your site, view_promotion and select_promotion along with their relevant dimensions, will be auto detected and available for analysis in GA4.

To get started download this container and import it into your GTM web container.