Today’s question comes from Tim who is looking to implement ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics.

“Hi Doctors!

My question is about analytics tracking in ecommerce.

We’re looking to set up ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics on a custom-built ecommerce website.

What are the pitfalls or issues that we should look out for when implementing the tracking?  I’m looking for any issues that people have run into that we should best avoid.

One issue that we’ve already come across is duplicate entries if the order success page (the one that contains the ecommerce tracking code) is refreshed by the customer.

Anything else we should watch out for?

Cheers!

Tim”

Dan

Hi, Tim, how are you?

To be honest, it’s not too difficult & you can’t go far wrong. Here are a few tips that may be useful:

1. Decide whether or not to include tax. You’re supposed to put it in there, but you don’t have to. If you wanted to you could even just put your margin numbers in there to help you figure out ROI more easily.

2. Think about what categories you want to track before you install the code. Often sites have categories like “Kitchen > Knives”. Decide what level of granularity you’re interested in.

3. There are some extra fields in there like ‘affiliation’. If you want you can put anything you want from your internal system into there, which you can then use later on using ‘advanced segments’. For example you could put voucher code names in there.

4. Spend a little bit of time over the first few weeks comparing the numbers & order IDs against your internal system. The numbers in google analytics will never be 100% accurate, but as long as the inaccuracy doesn’t go up/down too much you’re fine.

Hope that helps!