What is the Google Analytics Product List Performance Report?

The Product List Performance Report is one of the Enhanced Ecommerce offerings from Google Analytics. It allows you to track how clusters of products are performing in your online store. By analyzing customer engagement metrics for product lists, online retailers can better tailor product placement and suggested offerings to maximize click-thru rates and conversions.

What the report shows

Within Google Analytics, a product list is a logical grouping that can be created using different dimensions. The three main ways to group product lists are:

• Categories: The simplest of the product lists, categories allow you to compare, for instance, how shoes in your online store compare with handbags. This is the most intuitive means of grouping products and also the most static.

• Search Results: When you create product lists based on search query results, it moves all of the products that are returned to the user from a particular search into one product list. For example, all of the products that are shown when someone searches for "handbag" could be made into one product list. This is a dynamic list, as the served results could change over time.

• Related Products: This is another dynamically-generated list, which groups all products that appear under the heading "customers who purchased this product also liked…" into one product list. The product list could then be evaluated to determine which suggested offering performs best. Similarly, you can group cross-sell and up-sell blocks into product lists.

The Product List Performance Report is configured as a data-driven chart. It isn't intended to compare product performance within a set period of time, but instead to compare products to one another. The report displays the number and percentage of clicks, views and the click-through rates for each product list being tracked in your online store.

Analyzing customer engagement metrics for product lists can help retailers maximize click-thru rates.

Why it matters

Most online retailers probably have a good sense of which categories are the best sellers in their online stores. The real value of the Product List Performance Report is its ability to group products together dynamically based on search results or suggested products. That lets you analyze not just how well specific products are doing, but how they're performing in conjunction with other products.

By looking at the data in this report, you can gain insights into how to position products to maximize search result and suggest offerings visibility. You can:

• Run experiments to find the optimal number of search results that are shown per page to spark conversions

• Fine-tune which cross-selling and up-selling offerings are suggested to customers based on what's already in their shopping carts

• Determine which suggested products generate the most engagement

Rather than basing intra-site marketing on intuition, the Product List Performance Report lets you group, track and analyze the performance of products that would otherwise be hard to compare. These insights can also fuel smarter spending on external marketing activity, because you'll know exactly which of your pages are the most successful and which up-selling and cross-selling offerings are most likely to generate a higher sale.

How to create the report

To access the Product List Report, you must enable Enhanced Ecommerce from the Admin tab of the Google Analytics page. In the View column, click on Ecommerce Settings. Under Step 1, turn the Enable Ecommerce status to on. Click Next Step and then under Step 2 turn the Enhanced Ecommerce Settings to on. Finally, head to the Conversions section to generate the Product List Performance Report.