WooCommerce Google Tag Manager integration

WooCommerce is by far the most popular ecommerce plugin for WordPress and integrating it with Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics is easy.

Click the activation switch then click save and you are well on your way.

What the free plugin tracks

When the WooCommerce integration is enabled, GTM Kit pushes these standard GA4 e-commerce events to the data layer:

view_item_list — visitor sees a list of products (shop, category, related products).
select_item — visitor clicks a product in a list.
view_item — visitor opens a product detail page.
add_to_cart — visitor adds a product.
view_cart — visitor opens the cart page.
remove_from_cart — visitor removes a product.
begin_checkout — visitor starts checkout.
add_shipping_info — visitor selects a shipping method (toggleable).
add_payment_info — visitor selects a payment method (toggleable).
purchase — order is placed and the thank-you page renders.

The Woo Add-On adds add_to_wishlist, refund, and order_paid, plus reliability features and per-strategy purchase tracking. See What you get with the Woo Add-On.

Steps

1. Confirm WooCommerce is active

Go to Plugins and check that WooCommerce is installed and active. The WooCommerce integration toggle in GTM Kit only appears when WooCommerce is active.

2. Open Integrations

Go to GTM Kit, Integrations. The WooCommerce section is at the top.

3. Enable the integration

Toggle WooCommerce integration on.

4. Pick optional event behavior

Track shipping info — fires add_shipping_info when the shipping method is selected. Default on. Turn off if your theme calls the shipping select handler in a non-standard way and produces noisy or duplicate events.
Track payment info — fires add_payment_info when a payment method is selected. Default on.
Variable product tracking — when enabled, the data layer is updated to reflect the selected variation as the visitor changes options.
View-item-list limit — for very long category pages, you can cap the number of items reported in view_item_list. Default 0 means no limit. Set to 25 to mirror Google’s recommended limit and avoid silently dropped events. The Woo Add-On includes a more sophisticated split-large-lists middleware that splits large lists into multiple events instead of truncating; the free plugin has the simple limit only.

5. Save

The events fire from the next page view onward.

Verify it worked

In a normal browser tab, open a category page. In DevTools console:

window.dataLayer.filter(e => e.event === 'view_item_list')

You should see one entry per view_item_list push, with an ecommerce.items array.

Click a product. After landing on the product page:

window.dataLayer.filter(e => e.event === 'view_item')

Add to cart, then check add_to_cart. Complete a test checkout and on the thank-you page check:

window.dataLayer.filter(e => e.event === 'purchase')

The purchase event includes transaction_id, value, currency, tax, shipping, and an items array.

The most reliable end-to-end check is GTM’s Tag Assistant, see Verify GTM is firing on your site.

WooCommerce Blocks support

GTM Kit supports the modern WooCommerce Blocks Cart and Checkout. If your store uses block-based pages, events fire from the block component lifecycle instead of the classic shortcode templates. No extra configuration is needed.

If you mix classic templates (shop archive) with block-based cart and checkout, both work side by side.

WooCommerce integration options

Product brand

If you wish to include the product brand in the data layer you must select the product attribute which conatins the brand value.

By default this attribute does not exist in WooCommerce so you must first create a new brand attribute and once you have done that you can select it in the brand option.

Google Ads Remarketing

I you wish to use Google Ads Remarketing you must select your business type from one on Google’s predefined business verticals:

If your product feed generator is adding a prefix to the product IDs, you can add the prefix to be included it in the Data Layer.

Tax and shipping

WooCommerce stores have several tax settings that interact with each other: whether prices are entered with or without tax, whether the cart shows prices with or without tax, and the underlying tax rate. The data layer GTM Kit emits to Google Tag Manager can mirror any of these, but mixing conventions makes GA4 revenue reports stop reconciling against WooCommerce orders.

The “Exclude tax” toggle controls how GTM Kit reports tax in the e-commerce data layer:

Off (default): every event reports values including tax. ecommerce.value, per-item price, and the per-item discount field are all inc-tax. The purchase event’s tax field separately reports the tax amount.
On: every event reports values excluding tax. Same fields, all ex-tax. The tax field still reports the tax amount separately.

The toggle is the single switch governing tax handling across the full WooCommerce data layer. It applies to view_cart, begin_checkout, purchase, variation prices on variable product pages, and the per-item coupon discount field. With the GTM Kit Woo Add-On or GTM Kit Premium installed, it also applies to refund and order_paid events.

The toggle is independent of WooCommerce’s “Prices entered with tax” and “Display prices in cart and checkout” settings. You can run any combination of those WooCommerce settings; the data layer’s tax convention is determined by the GTM Kit toggle alone.

The “Exclude shipping” toggle next to it controls whether shipping is included in the ecommerce.value figure on purchase and refund events. Default off.

Events in checkout

Google Analytics 4 has 2 new events in the checkout and they are called add_shipping_info and add_payment_info. These events may be usefull for tracking progress in the funnel but it depends entirely on you setup.

Ideally you only want to fire these events once and the options are:

When the ‘Place order’ button is clicked
When a shipping/payment method is selected with fallback to the ‘Place order’ button.
Disable the event.

Ideally you should fire the event when a method is selected but what happens if the user changes the method? In this case only event will be fired but the name of method will be the first chosen method. So the usefullness of these events depends on how you checkout page is structured.

View_item on variable products

A variable product like a shirt has different sizes. Each size has it’s unique product number / SKU. All product variations has a master product where the user can select size. This is a problem with the view_item event.

If you fire the event on both the master product and when a variation has been selected you will get a higher number of views than expected. If you only fire the event on the master product the will be a gap or missing link when the variation with a different product ID is addeed to the cart.

Theere is no right or wrog here but you have to choose.

Dequeue default JavaScript

If you have customized you WooCommerce store to an extend where it is no longer compatible with the JavaScript included in GTM Kit you may dequeue the JavaScript and include your own.

Common issues

purchase does not fire. The customer never returns from the payment gateway. PayPal Standard, some bank gateways, and a small fraction of mobile users close the browser before redirecting back to the thank-you page. The free plugin only fires purchase on the thank-you page. The Woo Add-On’s “Multiple Purchase Tracking Strategies” feature solves this by allowing pre-redirect tracking and server-side delivery. See What you get with the Woo Add-On.

view_item_list is missing on the shop page. Some themes render the product loop with non-standard markup that bypasses WooCommerce’s woocommerce_loop_* hooks. GTM Kit relies on those hooks. Switch to a theme or theme setting that uses the standard loop, or add a hook bridge in your theme.

Variations do not change the data layer. Variable product tracking is off by default. Turn it on in Integrations.

You see ecommerce events but no purchase, only on certain orders. The Woo Add-On adds the order_paid event for orders that are paid asynchronously (BACS, COD with manual confirmation, etc.). On the free plugin, purchase only fires on the thank-you-page render of the order, so async-paid orders may not produce a tracking event.