Google Analytics Tracking Conversions with vendor data and custom campaigns - google-analytics

Please help me understand this. I have a client for whom we created a sweepstakes "mini site". Traffic was generated through banner ads, eBlasts, and newsletters. For the banner ads, I created custom urls, i.e. www.somewhere.com?utm_source=yahoo?utm_campaign=abc to track the traffic to the landing page per vendor/banner. this works just fine.
The entrant visits the page, signs up for the sweepstakes, has as double opt in email process for verification. All of my entering traffic to the landing page is tracking fine, and is properly broken down by utm_source and utm_campaign.
Some of the vendors had me place tracking pixels on the confirmation page for conversion statistics. The only info I have placed for internal tracking on the confirmation page is the GA tracking code.
I have been told to create tracking pixels to track the individual vendor conversions. Is this possible without the originating pixel data from the vendor? I am new to tracking pixels, but my understanding is that I need some information from the vendor in order to write the code for the pixel. Am I wrong?
I can't understand how we can place a tracking pixel on our end without at least campaign name or data from the vendor's tracking pixel that they placed on the page containing our banner ads.
What am I missing here? How can I actually separate the conversion traffic from the different sources when everyone receives the same double-opt-in email?
Please ask me to clarify if I am not being clear. Thanks in advance for reading my question.

There are two things you are trying to track here. One is Campaigns: Campaigns are how you measure the effectiveness of techniques to bring users to your site.
The other thing you are tracking is Events - this is what users are doing once they arrive at your site. If you want to track individual vendor conversions, you should add an onclick handler to either the submit button, or link that you are calling a "conversion"
For example:
Your link here
If you are adding the push to a form submit, you might want to have that push happen on the pageload of the success page, rather than the onClick of the submit (otherwise it will track the event, and it might not have actually happened due to form validation errors for example)

Related

How do I stop these self-referrals and get accurate referrals from our cross-domain eCommerce data?

Basically, I work for a theater and we send patrons to our primary website (we'll call this theater.org) to look at events and choose what tickets to buy and when they go to purchase tickets, we have put links in our primary webpages to our ticketing platform (we'll call this tickets.com).
Now, I have set up cross-domain tracking so that I can see people once they get onto tickets.com and see if they purchase a ticket. Great! But I can't really see where those people are specifically coming from because the referral source is always theater.org. I would like to see the original referral to theater.org that led to the purchase on tickets.com.
Here's what I've tried:
I've added the allowLinker (true) and the cookieDomain (auto) to my cross-domain Google TagManager
I have added both domains to the Referral Inclusion List (now I just get "direct" as the source for my eCommerce transactions instead of theater.org )
Additional info:
I have used the Analytics debugger console to see that the user-id changes as I move from one of my domains to the other, so that's definitely the primary issue
I see correct referrals on my Page Views for the theater.org , but not tickets.com
You need to make sure both tickets.com and theater.org both use the same Google Analytics property ID (UA-XXXXXXX-X) and have cross-domain tracking configured in the GTM container for BOTH domains.
Then you can look at the acquisition report tp get a sense of how people are arriving at your site OR dimensions like "previous page" or segment your goals by sessions that have visited a specific page.

Google Tag Manager. Tracking link click through a funnel

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.

Google Virtual Pageview Setup

I need some help with the setup of tracking virtual clicks on a submit button. What I need to do is get the referring site, which Google already tracks, and then track if they click on the button. I have setup an onclick for the submit button and setup a goal in Analytics but it is not tracking. I do have the code in place for Analytics in my header to track pageviews.
So what I am trying to do right now with my goal is to track a referring website and then track who clicks on the button. The virtual view I am using for the click is:
onclick="pageTracker._trackPageview('/Orders/Subscription');"
Thank you for any help in getting this setup working. I am still working on learning analytics.
If you want to ...get the referring site, which Google already tracks at the time the user clicks the submit button, you will have to read the cookies (the _utmz in this case) that GA sets and extract it from there.
Referral data can be obtained from the reports in GA, but if you want it at the time of submit, you'll have to get it from the cookies. Plain vanilla javascript can do this for you, just google it. Or, use whatever language your pages are written in to extract the data from the cookie (PHP and many others have this capability).
Regarding tracking the virtual page view, if the user can submit your form by hitting the enter key, then onclick is not desirable. onsubmit in the form tag would be better.
If it is still not recording for you, make sure your goal steps are entered into GA correctly (it's quite common to mess this up and GA is not forgiving to even the slightest error) and that you are using the traditional tracking snippet in the head of your document because your example is in the traditional tracking format. You should not mix async and traditional snippets.
To check if GA is even tracking your virtual page, go to the Content, Top Content report and filter by your virtual page. If it's in there, then it's your goal tracking set up. If it's not in there, it's your virtual page tracking on the form itself.
HTH.

Google analytics to track impressions/views?

I have a site that lists business listings from a database. On each page you can do different things such as forward it to a friend, print the page etc. My question is could I use google analytics to track impressions and views for each listing? So if I showed the top 10 listings on the home page I want to track each listing as an impression since its being showed, then if they click one of the links to view the business listing it tracks it as a view. Then on the business listing details page if they do any of the actions such as forward to a friend or print the page I want to track that as well.
For tracking views/clicks Im assuming I would need to use setPageView passing something like setPageView('/listing/12345') correct? I dont know how to track it for impressions though. Then on the listing details page to track if they printed it etc Im assuming I would track it as an event? Such as trackEvent('listing', 'Print') if that is what I need to do for event how does it associate with the page tracking so that I could see how many times someone printed the listing page for /listings/12345?
No need to create fake page views. Google Analytics has a feature called Event Tracking, which is described in the Event Tracking Guide. The guide has an illustrative example;
A simple example illustrates how you might use the Event Tracking method
to record user interaction with a video Play link on your page. It
assumes that pageTracker is the name used for your tracking object.
Play
In this scenario, the reports for Events would display Videos as the Category,
Play as the Action, and Baby's First Birthday as the Label.
In your case, you would track Views and Clicks using the Event Tracking feature. You'd have to decide on how you'd want Actions, Categories and Labels set up to match your data. You might want package types (Gold, Silver etc) as Categories or Labels, for example.
This question and its answers are similar to your scenario.

tracking users with google analytics after they leave my domain to make a purchase and come back

I would like to track where users originally came from when they make a purchase on my site so I know which keywords are more profitable and which websites are best for advertising.
an example is a user is on my site with my google analytics tracking code which has details of where they came from, and then decides to upgrade. they leave my domain to go to my biller (2checkout) complete the purchase and return to my thank you page.
I have transaction code and analytics code on my thank you page and the transactions are showing up with the correct product/amounts in GA however there is no other data and in my reports the referring url is always my biller or a credit card companies authorisation page.
i can manually connect which customer is which by saving their referring data when they first come to the site and then matching it up after they make a sale, but I would like it to show up in my google adwords / analytics account where it is easier to manipulate the data and see trends.
if anyone can help me with this annoying issue I would be vbery greatful, but I fear I may end up living off reports I create and then matching them up with adwords manually :/
One thing you can do is have a click event trigger a custom variable. When the user clicks on whatever link that takes them to your biller, have the custom variable trigger with the information you want to carry over (like the current page URL, some campaign name, whatever). Specify the custom variable's scope as Session or Visit so that it get associated with the thank you page.
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingCustomVariables.html
An alternative is to do campaign tracking:
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55540
That is more or less the same principle as the first suggestion, but with using specified URL parameters. Depending on how your pages are actually coded, you may need to push a virtual page view with the campaign code(s):
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55521

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