I manage a website that sells business cards: Oubly.com
I believe the previous developer did not install the Google e-commerce tracking correctly.
Every single transaction since 2014 has been attributed to
Direct.
Coming from previous experience working with another e-commerce site I know that this is impossible. The previous e-commerce site I worked with had various transactions from various sources.
conversions
The amount of transactions is correct, I just know that they all cant be coming from Direct.
How can the current developer tell if the tracking code was installed correctly?
Right now there's not enough information to tell you 100% what is your problem. But likely you are losing the cookie when tracking the transaction.
The most common cause is that the hostname of the page that tracks the transaction is different than the hostname on your website. Google Analytics stores a unique and random clientId in a cookie when a user visits your website. If your site suddenly changes to a new domain such as a payment partner domain the cookie won't be accessible anymore, so GA thinks this is a new user and recreates a cookie. That starts a new User and a new Session in GA often with the trafficSource of (direct).
The solution is to implement cross-domain tracking for GA. Cross-Domain tracking helps you pass cookies from one domain to another so GA knows that it's the same user.
Related
When using the SagePay Form integration, the referrer in Google Analytics always shows as live.sagepay.com rather than the original referrer. This is because, when using this integration method, the user gets redirected to live.sagepay.com to complete the payment process before getting redirected back to the original website.
Since the payment templates on SagePay don't allow external scripts, we can't add the analytics tracking script here, which means cross-domain tracking is out of the question.
Is there a workaround for this problem? As many payment gateways are external and behave in a similar way I'm guessing this must be a fairly common issue?
You can add a referral exclusion in the Google Analytics account itself. This should prevent new sessions being created as per the docs:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2795830?hl=en
I've been looking into offline tracking of google analytics goals. I want to implement this in a similar way to how call tracking companies do and I'm guessing the GCLID is the answer.
If I store the GCLID of every visitor that comes to our website in the database alongside some info about their session and then identify their session at a later date as one that produced an offline goal, can I then generate a goal from that?
My thinking is that if I had a button in our CRM system that when I click it opens up an invisible iframe that links to mysite.com/goalurl.html?gclid=xxx then analytics on that page would track a goal on that page but attribute it to the original click that the other user made on our PPC advert. Theoretically I could do this 10 times in a row for 10 different sessions and they would all be tracked as if the 10 original owners of those GCLIDs has visited the goal page, right?
Am i missing something here? Would this not work because Google would spot that they all came from the same IP address, or because I would have the same GA cookie on my machine? Or does Gogole not care about any of that?
Any help would really be appreciated.
I am not sure if it works with the gclid but would also be interested in the answer.
Besides that, a possible solution is to store the Analytics client ID in your own database and, whenever there is a conversion, sending that conversion data (referencing the recorded client ID) directly from your server to Analytics by using the Measurement Protocol.
Exactly this topic is a case study in the book "Google Analytics Breakthrough: From Zero to Business Impact".
I use Google Adwowrds and Analytics for my website, when I check, as the main source of sessions, is shown paid searches (adwords), but Google Analytics shows that most of the referrals for transactions (Purchases) from my own website.
There are two possible reasons for this in my situation. Cross Domain Tracking and Page Dropping Cookie.
Regarding Cross Domain Tracking, I use single domain, but after the customer checks out, the Thank You page comes with Shopify domain, can it be considered that I use multiple domain?
Regarding the Cookie Drop out, how can I find it out? and fix it.
When a user moves from one domain (your domain) to another domain (the Shopify domain) then a new Google Analytics cookie is generated and this cookie has a difference client ID stored in it for Google Analytics. So even if the Shopify domain is sending data to the same Google Analytics property, since the client ID is different, Google Analtyics will treat this as a new user and a new session and in the eyes of Google Analytics, this session will be a referral from the first domain (your website).
If you want to prevent this from happening, you must implement cross-domain tracking which you can read about here.
On a website with affiliate links, where there is no programmatic access to the conversion logs, I treat it as offline conversions.
My Setup
Online
A user visit my website, see the affiliated ad and a promotion view hit is being sent.
When the user clicks the ad, a promotion click hit is being sent and the user is redirected to another page on my site.
On the "redirection page", an product view hit is being sent, and the user is being redirected to the affiliation link, passing his Google Analytics clientId.
Offline
Once a week I download the stats from the affiliate program, which looks something like:
clientId visits conversions revenue
4444444444.3333333333 1 0 $0
1234567890.1234567890 1 1 $16.40
Then I use the Measurement Protocol to send offline events:
For each line of visit, I send a product click hit.
For each line of conversion, I send a product purchase hit.
My Problem
The conversion shows up on the eCommerce report:
Because the offline hits are being sent after the original session is already closed, a new session is opened which doesn't contain the info about the user.
So I can't see the conversion on the demographic report, for example:
Optional Solution?
I'm thinking of using the user-id feature of Google Analytics.
Even though the users are not identified, I can identify them by their clientId.
Sure, this is not what Google intended when they introduced that feature, but I believe it will solve my issue. I'm just not sure about the negatives.
My Questions
Any feedback on my setup?
Why is it even necessary to pass the clientId after the session is closed? what kind of information is being shared between the real session and the offline hit?
Is it a bad idea to pass the clientId as a userId to Google Analytics? Why?
Relevant Articles
A Comprehensive Guide to Tracking Offline Interactions in Google Analytics using the Measurement Protocol
Google Universal Analytics isn’t Linking Offline and Online User Properly
We were able to link offline action through as you did with measurement protocol but the problem is that those sessions are not included in demographic and age report.
Rather looking those report I used them to do segmented analysis E.g. pages they have look at, sources they used to come also I used it with attribution model to understand best channels to drive more conversions.
Yes you can use CID as a user ID but I haven't tried it with offline tracking. Share the result with us.
I posted this on Google's help forums, but I still haven't gotten a response, so I thought I'd try it here;
I work for a web development company with 200+ active clients. We are in the process of setting up Google Analytics tracking for each of their websites. We have already created a Google account for each of our clients, and we are attempting to manually sign each one up for GA. We haven't gotten very far in creating new GA accounts, after creating a few accounts, we are required to use text-message verification to create the accounts, and after a few more, we are unable to create any new accounts at all.
We are following the recommendation of Google's Help Article found here:
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55601
We are a legitimate business trying to set up analytics for legitimate customers. At this point we can't create a single new GA account, but we still have 182 clients that we have promised to set up with GA, plus any new customers, all of which we intend to set up with GA. We've clearly been flagged as a robot by Google's system, which is totally understandable given the volume of accounts we are creating, but we are not using any robots, we have a person sitting at a computer manually entering all of the information for each of our clients.
Does anyone have any ideas or a solution?
Are you logging in as a different client each time in order to open the new account?
If so, try logging in as yourself and creating each new accounts in your profile. Once created, add your client as a user (report or admin level).