Common ecommerce issues you can solve with google analytics

Garbled data in e-commerce reports

If the data in the product performance reports (particularly the Product Overview and Product Categories report) is garbled or contains extra characters, there may be an issue with the data in your hidden form. Verify that the transaction line and product lines contain only alphanumeric characters. Monetary data should not include a dollar sign or commas.

All transaction sources are your website

This is a common problem for websites using a third-party shopping cart. The problem is normally not the implementation of the e-commerce tracking code. It is more likely that the cross-domain tracking is incorrect.

A simple way to identify the source of this problem is to examine the data in the All Traffic Sources report. Use the E-Commerce tab to identify which traffic sources are driving revenue. If your websites hostname is listed in the report, there is probably an issue with the cross-domain tracking.

Missing transactions

It is not uncommon for some transactions to be missing from Google Analytics. This usually occurs when visitors navigate away from the receipt page before the data is transmitted. If the number of transactions in Google Analytics is off by more than 10% when compared to your accounting software, there may be a bigger problem.

In general, Google Analytics should be tracking most transactions. If there are a significant number of transactions missing, double-check the implementation. You may want to move the e-commerce code to the top of the receipt page so the data is sent to Google Analytics immediately as the page loads in the visitors browser.

Tracking third-party e-commerce platforms

E-commerce tracking may not be feasible for all third-party shopping carts. If the shopping cart provider does not permit modifications to the receipt page, the standard implementation of e-commerce tracking will not work, and you should try a workaround.

Each shopping cart is different, so there is no single workaround that will solve every problem. A quick search of your shopping cart providers support documents should point you to the integration instructions.

Inflated e-commerce revenue

There can be two causes for inflated revenue numbers in Google Analytics. The first cause is usually people bookmarking the receipt page and visiting multiple times. The only way to resolve this issue is to add some type of logic to stop the e-commerce code from executing when the receipt page is accessed directly rather than as part of a transaction.

Another cause of inflated revenue data is canceled transactions. Google Analytics collects e-commerce data when the receipt page renders in the visitors browser. If the transaction is declined or modified at some point later, these changes will not be represented in Google Analytics.

The only way to modify transactions in Google Analytics is to erase the transaction by submitting a duplicate transaction with a negative value. While this will eliminate the revenue from the transaction, it will not eliminate the other information associated with the transaction. This is the only way to remove a transaction from Google Analytics.

ARTICLE SOURCE: This factual content has not been modified from the source. This content is syndicated news that can be used for your research, and we hope that it can help your productivity. This content is strictly for educational purposes and is not made for any kind of commercial purposes of this blog.