Paypal Button / Conversion Tracking / Abandonned Carts / Analytics

[cw1865]

The problem that I am having is simple. On one particular platform I am using paypal to process payments for a relatively cheap item. I am expecting a larger conversion rate. Perhaps I am wrong to but I want to do some analysis of this.

Presently I use google analytics on the website.
Paypal's Buy it Now Button (Form/Post)

Of course I know how much traffic I get and I know what my sales are, but I want a piece of data which I seem unable to isolate. The number of times people are actually clicking on the paypal button itself.

if 100 people are cliking on it and only 10 are checking out, I know I have a problem and the problem can be addressed...

Any ideas?

I can't seem to add analytics code to a custom paypal page.....so it seems that whatever I do needs to be on my website end....

[SteveGerencser]

Cheat. Make the paypal button a fake that goes to an intermediate page with your analytics code and a meta refresh of 0. This will get you the counts you are looking for and should be seemless for your visitors.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL='long paypal url button code without the button'">

[murphypj]

Cheat. Make the paypal button a fake that goes to an intermediate page with your analytics code and a meta refresh of 0. This will get you the counts you are looking for and should be seemless for your visitors.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL='long paypal url button code without the button'">

That's a really neat idea Steve, and I'm sure it would provide the required analytics. I would recommend that this be done for a very short period though. I've had occasion to use Meta Refresh in the past, and it worked really well for what I was trying to achieve. But during testing, even on a fast connection, I often could see the refresh being carried out, i.e. a quick glimpse of the "you are being re-directed" message.

I think that for customers about to commit their cash to a transaction, this could be a trigger to hit the Back button. Paypal in particular has had many phishing problems over the years - they have user guide information on their site warning people to be aware of attempts to fake the Paypal process. It would be a shame if the OP adopted this option only to find their analytics showing an increase in the user disengagement due to concerns over the visual effects of the meta refresh redirection.

[weegillis]

What about a redirect on your site in the URL:

http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/lib/red.pl?http://www.domain.com/

You could then log that, and it wouldn't be followable.

[SteveGerencser]

But I don't think that would put it in his analytics Weegillis. He would need to dig through his actual server logs.

Murphy, we put a - we are now directing you to xzzzz - on the page in case it takes a little longer to load.

[yorkshirewoman]

Hi

Could you add Google Analytics Event tracking code to the URL in the Paypal button code? I use Analytics Events to record which links users click on my site.

Cheers.

[cw1865]

This code here:

<form action="HTTPS PAYPAL LINK" method="post" onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'One', 'Two', 'Three']);">

This actually does work, for my situation, the two and the three are superfluous, but it does count the number of 'events' and then you can see how many people have at least gone to paypal in that day. In the snippet I showed, the 'One', 'Two' and 'Three' are actually the names of the events. And when you see the results, they are all equal of course.

In any event that brings us to the results for the week and I do think I have a leak:

Paypal Custom Page?	Events	Buys
Monday	11	5
Tuesday	9	2
Wednesday	30	10
Thursday	17	4
Friday	13	5

80 Events and 26 buys, its a little less than 1/3 - I figure that is a little bit too high.

My thinking on this is that the paypal account is just my personal account. For example, say its website.com and you want to buy something, you click on the paypal button and you see my personal email: {first initial_full last name@optonline.net}

I think maybe people are being dissuaded by that. First thing I am going to try is just a simple secondary paypal email address. webmaster@website.com

We'll see if that works....if it does, I'll kick myself in the pants because that leak has been leaking for a year now!