Installing Google Analytics on an eCommerce store

DavidHart :

This is officially a part of the Grizzly Peak release that goes out in February. The code is actually already out there in production, but has to be activated by turning on an SDP. Basically what the new code does is 2 things:

1. It generates a "pseudo" URL to be tracked for each page in the flow so that you can track abandonment.

2. It generates the appropriate javascript as described in the page you reference for the cart contents or dollar value of a transaction.

The first piece of this can be leveraged with other web analytics tools pretty easily. The second piece is more GA-specific.

Hi Dave,

We're thrilled that this new functionality was released in late February, but have run into a big question....

During the first week of March, we added the new ability to create funnels for shopping carts and donation forms with google analytics. Since we were already using GA on a number of our sites (with different google accounts for the Adoption center and Action Fund sites than for the main defenders.org site) and had different GA code in different wrappers, we set the following settings:

Google analytics account: blank

Google analytics enabled: false

Google analytics funnel directory: funnel

Google analytics funnel enabled: true

In the weekly analytics reports we've run since we enabled this, we've seen a huge spike in traffic to advocacy pages, donation pages, and eCommerce pages. We think that Google may now be counting any pages that are in those modules in duplicate. the reason we think this is that in a recent report that we ran, we saw the following counts for pages:

For the time period of 3/12 - 3/18

Ecommerce - Current Adoption Center/home (funnel version of the url): 8,674 pageviews

Ecommerce?store_id=5381&VIEW_HOMEPAGE=true (what displays to the user):

8,269 pageviews

When we look at our total counts of pages, it appears that the above two items are double-counting pageviews of the same page -- one with the funnel version of the url and the other without.

Is this the way that it's supposed to work? It seems like it may be a bug in the product because setting it up to be able to track goals and measure shopping cart abandonment is throwing off our overall google analytics numbers.

Any insight you can provide would be incredibly useful. If you've got time to take a look at our analytics reports, I can set you up with access.

Thanks!

Michelle

DavidHart :

Sorry I didn't see this right away.

What you want to do is to exclude the "funnel" directory from the GA web site that you are using for the raw page view counts. That's the motivation behind having a distinct directory. I can probably help you with doing that or I think the folks in support would even know better.

Hi Dave,

We've set up two different profiles in GA, one which doesn't filter out the funnel directory -- for tracking the funnels -- and the other which does filter out the funnel directory -- for tracking everything else. But, we're still having a really hard time getting it to work right and Convio support is not able to help us out with how to understand the data in Google Analytics (they can only help us with setting up the site configuration in the Convio platform, which we know we've done correctly).

Any chance we can book 1/2 hour of your time to walk through our Google Analytics data with you?

Thanks!

Michelle