Google Analytics: Missing most of our sales

**brian.mark** · #1 (**permalink**) 02-22-2006, 01:51 PM

I recently enabled the e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics for one of our sites. I was really curious to see what type of interesting information I could see specifically related to revenue sources.

The problem I'm having is this: I see sales, but it appears to miss almost 90% of our transactions. Has anyone else had any luck getting Google Analytics to see all of their transactions? Any ideas where I need to look to locate the problem?

Brian.

wsmeyer · #2 (**permalink**) 02-22-2006, 04:12 PM

I just double checked and it catches all of our 10-15 sales per day.

I assume you are using the advanced method utilizing the UTM:T and UTM:I variables?

I would manually enter a sale duplicating the products in a sale that it didn't catch, maybe one malformed UTM:I will derail the whole thing.

Also, is your receipt page on https? Your customers might be seeing the message asking if they want to show secure and unsecure items, clicking no would keep the stats from working in this scenario.

William.

**brian.mark** · #3 (**permalink**) 02-22-2006, 04:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by wsmeyer

I just double checked and it catches all of our 10-15 sales per day.

I assume you are using the advanced method utilizing the UTM:T and UTM:I variables?

I would manually enter a sale duplicating the products in a sale that it didn't catch, maybe one malformed UTM:I will derail the whole thing.

Also, is your receipt page on https? Your customers might be seeing the message asking if they want to show secure and unsecure items, clicking no would keep the stats from working in this scenario.

William.

All good thoughts. I've double checked the last 30 or so (created a log of sorts) and all of the different variables had filled in properly. Yes, I'm using the advanced UTM methods, so that had been a question in my mind.

Receipt page is https, but so are the analytics, so that shouldn't be an issue either. I've run through some test transactions over the past few days and only some of them show up - even from the same PC. This is really odd.

Surely it doesn't limit to only so many per timeperiod or something. I remember some older stats programs having limits like that in the free version, but Google Analytics isn't really free with the money we're putting into AdWords.

Brian.

wsmeyer · #4 (**permalink**) 03-07-2006, 01:20 AM

I'd like to have my receipt page on https but am getting errors from the analytics code.

It's this part:

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>

That when I try to change to https returns an error that the certificate is to google.com and not google-analytics.com.

Did you run into this?

William.

**brian.mark** · #5 (**permalink**) 03-07-2006, 02:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by wsmeyer

I'd like to have my receipt page on https but am getting errors from the analytics code.

It's this part:

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>

That when I try to change to https returns an error that the certificate is to google.com and not google-analytics.com.

Did you run into this?

William.

Yes. If you read in their FAQ, you have to change it to

<script src="https://ssl.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Basically, just add in ssl in place of www when switching to https. It's sort of hidden in their FAQ's, but it does work.

Brian.

wsmeyer · #6 (**permalink**) 03-20-2006, 04:21 PM

Thanks Brian, I finally got around to switching my thanks page back to https with that little tidbit.

I knew there had to be a way but I missed it in their FAQ's

William.

dvdtvshows1 · #7 (**permalink**) 04-07-2006, 03:18 PM

Dear Brain,

You are using the receipt page as one of your goals,
and not all the visits to that page are showing up in your goals reports.
How does your goal routing / abandonment report look?

Or do you see accurate person on the page counts and are just not seeing the revenue accurately?

**brian.mark** · #8 (**permalink**) 04-10-2006, 01:16 PM

dvdtvshows1,

Actually, we've been questioning the Google Analytics Data for a while now. On our blogs, for example, it shows 1/2 or less as many visits as what our logfile analysis shows, even after filtering bots. Due to performance issues (being addressed with 1/2 dozen new servers), I have had our log files turned off on our e-commerce sites for a bit, but it seems like the numbers are low there as well. I'm guessing that 1/2 of the visitors are missed along with 90% of the goal tracking.

Anyone else experiencing something similar, or does everyone else feel that Google Analytics is catching most of the people on their sites?

Brian.