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Identifying and mitigating cart abandonment is a crucial use case for businesses in the e-commerce and retail industries. This use case involves tracking when a customer adds products to their cart but has not shown activity in a while and then targeting that customer with personalized communication to encourage them to complete a purchase.

To execute this use case in BlueConic, there are a few components involved:

1. Installing your plugins (the Google Analytics 4 cart event listener and Abandoned Cart Tracker Connection)
2. Configuring an Abandoned Cart Tracker Connection
3. Sending abandonment data to an email service provider (such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud)

This article will go into detail on the second step, configuring an Abandoned Cart Tracker Connection.

Overview of the Abandoned Cart Tracker Connection

The general functionality of the Abandoned Cart Tracker Connection is as follows:

• Users navigate your channels, which create BlueConic profiles.
• The out-of-the-box global listener stores the last activity timestamp for every page view.
• Users add products to their cart. Using the Google Analytics 4 events listener, each product is stored in a BlueConic profile by creating a JSON string that captures the cart. Important notes about this listener:
  • It detects the add_to_cart, remove_from_cart, and begin_checkout events.
  • When a purchase is made, the listener looks for a “checkout” event with the “ecommerce.checkout” attribute and the open cart is cleared.
• The Abandoned Cart Tracker Connection runs on a set cadence to scan profiles with an open cart for abandonment. If the last cart activity timestamp is older than the configured set of minutes, the profile is flagged as abandoned and that timestamp is stored in a profile property.
• The connection creates an abandoned cart timeline event on those flagged profiles' timelines. This event is used to send the data to an email service provider and can be used for analytical purposes.
• Now, you have a list of customers with abandoned carts and can activate this data by sending them personalized reminder emails or notifications.

Installing BlueConic plugins

As mentioned above, the first step in using this connection for cart abandonment use cases is to install both the Google Analytics 4 cart event listener and the Abandoned Cart Tracker Connection plugins to your BlueConic tenant. By default, these plugins are not installed in BlueConic.

To install them, navigate to BlueConic settings > Plugins, click the Add plugin button at the top right, and register the external URLs below.

Google Analytics 4 cart event listener:

https://plugins.blueconic.net/global_listener_ga_cart_events/index.xml

Abandoned Cart Tracker Connection:

https://plugins.blueconic.net/connection_cart_abandonment_tracker/index.xml

For more detailed instructions, review the article Overview: What are BlueConic plugins? If you need further assistance, reach out to BlueConic Support.

Creating an Abandoned Cart Tracker Connection

1. Once the Abandoned Cart Tracker Connection is added to your tenant, you can create one by navigating to the Connections tab and clicking Add Connection. When the pop-up window appears, enter "Cart abandonment" in the search bar and click the Cart abandonment connection.
2. The Abandoned Cart Tracker Connection page will open. You can expand or collapse metadata fields (favorite, labels, and description) by clicking the gray chevron at the top of the page. Enter a name for the connection and Save your settings.
3. On the Set up and run page, you can:
   • Select channels to collect data from. By default, the connection will run on all pages on all of your channels. If you would like to restrict this, for instance, by brand, you can do so here.
     
   • Schedule runs in the Run history section. This is a connection that should be scheduled to run frequently in the background. By clicking the cogwheel icon, you can specify this cadence. When this connection runs, the run history table will show you the number of profiles that were checked (profiles that were potential cart abandoners) and the number of profiles that were updated (profiles for which a timeline event was created).
     

Configuring inactivity measurement goals

To configure the functionality of this connection, click Inactivity measurement underneath the "Update profiles" header in the right menu.

1. Select a BlueConic segment.
   By default, the "All visitors" segment will be selected. If you would like to restrict this, you can choose a BlueConic segment, and only the profiles within that segment will be taken into account.
   
2. Select a time frame.
   Enter the number of minutes that would qualify a cart to be abandoned. This will be compared to the last timestamp of visitor activity.
   
3. Select profile properties.
   Select the profile properties where the following data will be stored:
   • Cart data - Information about the products that have been added to a profile's cart
   • Cart change timestamp - The timestamp of a profile's last cart activity (additions, removals, clears, etc.)
   • Abandonment timestamp - The timestamp of when a profile's cart is considered abandoned
     
4. Optional: Select connection
   Here you can optionally select an existing connection within your BlueConic tenant that connects to your email service or messaging activation provider. If you skip this step, activation can be handled separately.
   
5. Run the connection.

Privacy management

Connections can be added to Objectives, allowing for privacy management of the information that is being picked up. A connection will only process the profiles of visitors who have consented to at least one of the objectives that the connection is linked to.