We're using Google Analytics to track transactions, products, browser data, etc on our shopping cart. I am interested in pushing some data to GA prior to completing the transaction. Normally I push data to GA on the success/order confirmation page.
My Question: If I push custom variables to Google Analytics prior to completing an order, will GA be able to associate that session with my completed transaction - allowing me to cross reference my custom variables with the transaction IDs?
Background: We use an address validation service and sometimes the address that the validation service submits to us isn't correct. It can "over correct" and completely strip vital details from certain addresses. Happens less than 1% of the time but when that is multiplied against 1000 - 2000 orders a day it can really become a problem for our fulfillment department. Yes, we have reported this to the address validation service and they tell us they are investigating it. I plan to use jQuery to grab the form data in the billing and shipping fields and when the user fills out all necessary fields, do a push to GA.
Yeah, you should be able to set a session-level custom variable (a unique id or any other value that isn't PII) prior to the transaction, and then create a custom report in GA that looks at that custom variable against the transaction Id. Because it's a session-level variable, it will associate anything that happens for that session.
More info on session-level variables here - Custom Variables - Web Tracking (ga.js)
Related
Does the time get stored with the date OOTB with the Google Analytics 4 (GA4) on eCommerce events?
On my company’s implementation when I look at the data stored to e-commerce events, like the purchase dimension, everything is showing as occurring at 12am. Do you know why this is? Is it a config issue or the way I am connecting?
I’ve seen posts where people create JavaScript variables to track time in GA4 and save to a dimension but this makes no sense given the high cardinality of time. I would have thought it would be more efficient to store as a datetime data type and track as part of the GA4 application.
Does anyone here see the time an event occurred on GA4 eCommerce events?
I am having an issue tracking my transactions via Tag Manager.
I have a GA Universal Analytics Transaction tag which fires on transaction completes. All cool until here.
So I have added another tag to be able to record Checkout behaviour but suddenly I am getting double transactions for a single transaction ID.
Can an event populate the actual transactions in the Acquisition > Source/Medium data table? This second tag is an Event tag actually, so it confuses me a bit.
Sure (actually for some scenarios sending e-commerce events is even considered best practice, e.g. for product list tracking).
However this would send a transaction only when a purchase action is specified in your e-commerce variable (the one you specify in the E-commerce section in "Read data from Variable"). Unless this contains a purchase event your problem is probably elsewhere.
GA does not deduplicate transactions, so even a reload can potentially cause double transactions.
Is the screenshot you included of the second tag? If so, you'll likely want to remove or modify the ecommerce setting from that tag as GTM will populate the ecommerce reports with whatever data is in the EE Funnel Step 4 variable, even if it's the same data that has already been sent in a previous ecommerce beacon. So if EE Funnel Step 4 is sending an ecommerce purchase action and the same transaction id as your previous ecommerce beacon it would be counted twice in GA.
I'm using Close.io as a CRM, I want to be able to create an event on Google Analytics and record the conversion value. The purpose of this is so that I can tie a certain Google Ad to its performance. On Close.io this would be a new Opportunity created. I'm using Zapier to integrate the two platforms and it has a new Beta integration with Google Analytics. I set it up so that when a new Opportunity is created, it creates a measurement on GA with the measurement type "Event Tracking", and the category, action and label similar to the goal I created on GA. However, when I send tests to GA, it's not appearing in my acquisitions report on GA.
There are fields for Customer Client ID and User ID.For customer ID there's a description that says: "This anonymously identifies a particular user, device, or browser instance. Google may ignore repeated identical measurements. The value of this field should be a random UUID (version 4) which you could generate using a Code Step. Defaults to a UUID shared by all Zapier users"
I'm thinking of capturing unique session ID on the form using javascript and filling these fields in to see if it works. Please help with thoughts and feedback. Thanks!
Question about goal tracking.
I have an application that I can track from Step 1 to Step 10, and the user submits data on step 11.
Pretty standard form.
We then intake the application, evaluate, then send the user and email to log back in and accept our terms and purchase the product, which are steps 12-15.
If I set up a goal funnel, will analytics know the users has come back and completed steps 12-15?
Or do I basically lose all tracking after step 11?
There are some limitations in GA that could be a bit troublesome:
30-min session window: if user comes back later, new session is initiated.
multiple browsers/devices: if finishing the last 3 steps after receiving your email is done on different laptop/mobile device, the user will have different ClientID and so you won't be able to stitch the data together (in GA reporting interface).
There are many more aspects to it - but if the two limitations listed above doesn't seem like relevant, then the implementation shouldn't be tat difficult. For more technical details, I'd consider using MeasurementProtocol (fancy name for server-side tracking).
I track eCommerce transactions with GA and GTM, and trying to create a custom metric which will count how many people are involved in each transaction.
So I created a hit-scoped custom metric and try to pass its value along with the transaction tag in GTM:
Please see screenshot here:
As we know, a transaction in GA is a series of hits: one "transaction" hit and one or more "item" hits. The problem is that GTM sends the custom metric value with ALL of the hits, not just with one. So when I use my hit-scoped metric to measure something, it's measured more than once.
For ex., in a transaction where 2 people are involved, this value (2) is send twice (once with "transaction" hit, once with "item" hit) and in the GA reports I see figure 4 (instead of 2) associated with this transaction.
I didn't find a way to ask GTM to send the custom metric just once.
Am I missing something here? Any suggestions?
Thanks!
You can use a separate tag with the custom metric information, which is triggered on the same event as the transactions. This will create another request to GA, which isn't the best solution in terms of performance.
Maybe you can combine this information with a tag, which is already triggered on the same page? An "all pages" Universal Analytics tag is maybe present and has the information {{QuantityOfInsured}} available at the time the "all pages analytics tag" is triggered.