I have a Google Analytics universal analytics goal with 5 steps:
Home
Shopping Cart
Contact Information
Shipping Information
Payment Information
The destination is the "thank you" page and the goal conversion works properly. But at each step, I see drops pointing to the same page and can't see how it's possible. The dropouts are in almost all the steps, but the one that annoys me the most is the shopping cart, as it shows a user leaving the cart to the "/cart" page (the cart URL doesn't have variations).
I saw this tutorial online where they discuss the drops of each step of the example funnel https://www.megalytic.com/blog/understanding-the-funnel-visualization-in-google-analytics, but if have a closer look in the image below, it's possible to see that the same issue happens:
https://www.megalytic.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/funnel-visualization-report.png?width=1284&height=797&name=funnel-visualization-report.png (sorry I don't have reputation to post the in-text image)
Is it possible to fix this? Right now I'm using a simple regex "/cart" to match my shopping cart page.
Thanks for your help.
Super annoying, right?
Disclaimer: I Operate a Google Analytics Consulting firm... but I'm gonna whine about GA anyway
There is no way to "fix" this in GA. Here is GA's documentation on how funnel steps, entrances, and exits are counted.
Assuming you have read the GA doc, you'll know that the exit is assigned to the deepest point in the funnel (regardless of order). And the page of the exit is the first page that doesn't match the next expected step in the funnel.
In your funnel this sequence of page views would generate an exit from the /cart to /cart:
Home > Shopping Cart > Shopping Cart
Crazy, but this counts as an exit b/c the expected next step in the funnel from "Shopping Cart" is "Contact Information".
Hypothesizing a bit, this could be a super common user experience if adjusting quantities in the cart causes a refresh of the cart page.
Mostly, don't use goal funnels for tracking ecommerce actions. Use the enhanced ecommerce and shopping behavior report:
Related
I am doing some UX research and while looking at the funnel visualization in GA each step has a list of exit page URLs. For most of the steps, the actual URL of the step is the top URL in the exit page list.
Is the page being reloaded? What is happening here? Any ideas would be appreciated.
Sample screen shot
image screen shot
Funnel Visualization report has its own logic.
If the user went back to the previous step or refreshed the page, the Funnel Visualization report will show it as an exit.
Find more information on how this funnel woks here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2976313?hl=en
It's a high chance your cart page includes several other screeens (address, shipping, payment) probably loads the page again and again. You may want to virtually track them.
I had a question about Google Tag Manager. (I also felt bad for having the IT guy fix my mistakes on my simple click tag)
I wanted to track when a user enters a specific url when they click a link button on the homepage.
This is what it looks like
Image
This is my idea on what the Tag and Trigger should look like
Image
But I'm worried about having the trigger be fired when there is another page in the funnel
Also if the only way to do this is in the goal feature of GA that is good to know also. (I currently don't have the permissions here)
Thanks for responses
While it is difficult to achieve exactly what you're describing (it would involve storing data in cookies and then using these cookies to conditionally fire tags), there is a better way to achieve what I assume is your ultimate objective: an analysis of the shopping funnel.
Specifically, the Google Analytics enhanced ecommerce module has a dedicated report (the Conversions > Ecommerce > Shopping Behavior report) that shows you exactly this. It shows you the number of sessions for each stage of your shopping experience (product view -> add to cart -> checkout -> purchase) along with drop-off rates and volumes between each of these steps.
It is a little bit more involved to implement enhanced ecommerce but the final result is definitely worth it for an ecommerce business. Instructions for implementation of enhanced ecommerce (using Google Tag Manager) can be found here.
GTM is hit based without any notion of persistence. So by default this will not work.
You would need a custom HTML tag with a javascript function that sets a cookie, or writes a value to localstorage, when the button is clicked.
Then on your destination page you can check if the cookie exists and fire the tag accordingly.
I don't think the goal feature in GA can do that, either. A goal is registered when you hit a destination URL or event, you cannot specify conditions other than the destination.
So,
I have a blog with a "demo button" with leads the user to a sign up page.
On sign up page, the user fill the general entries. Then he is brought to a payment page to enter his card details. and then from there he is taken to a confirmation page.
Now, I want to track every page. Basically, whether any user coming from a blog becomes a user or atleast how far he goes before closing the tab
Use Enhanced E-Commerce Tracking.
The EEC in Google Analytics lets you assign step numbers to the various steps in a checkout. It then creates a custom funnel report (remember that EEC must be enabled and configured not just in your code, but also in your view settings) that show how many users completed the checkout and how many dropped of at each step.
I am in the process of setting up enhanced Ecommerce for GA and have had a few requests of additional of what else the client would like to see in their reports. Once of which is;
"We no longer have paginated pages,instead, the pages automatically
load more products when a user gets to the bottom of the page. How can I track how many times the does this?"
Is there a way (using event tracking maybe?), that we can track every time a the page reloads new products as the URL is no longer changing. In order to compare with data from before this functionality change, it would be useful to see what the equivalent number of pages a user is seeing, ie, how many times the page adds new products to the page. Any code examples would be really helpful too.
Thanks,
Roxi
Aside from the obvious checkout goal - what would be good candidates for Google Analytics goals on an e-commerce site.
I am struggling of think of any.
Of course it would depend a lot on your ecommerce site features. But here comes a couple that pop from my mind:
Newsletter subscriptions
New signups
Product review written
Product comment added
Contact Form Submitted
Product Rated
Product added to Shopping Cart
Using a sharing tool (tweetthis, sharethis, etc)
Using a Compare Tool
Arriving a certain step on the checkout process
This last one is intersting. Of course if you setup a goal on the checkout and have a nice funnel viz, you can get that for free. But assigning a goal to a particular step that you know a lot of users leave the funnel, can help you segment and analyze this guys. Just segment by users who completed that goal, and did not complete the checkout goal.