Google Analytics eCommerce Tracking Issue

To anyone out there who uses Google Analytics (GA) with ecommerce enabled, you may want to read this post, it could save you some time. I use GA with a large number of my clients shopping carts and the other week came across an issue that practically sent me insane. Let me tell you about it.

I noticed that when pulling ecommerce reports for some time periods, the data was way off. Sometimes it would be real accurate, say within 95% - however other times it would be at 50% which didn't make sense at all to me. I spent some time trying to figure out where and what was going wrong, and then found something. One day I pulled a transaction for report for a couple of days in the past, and noticed that numerous transactions were being recorded with a $0 total, while some of the other transactions had the correct total but had a quantity of 0 which again made no sense what so ever. No wonder some of my reports were so off.

With some help we eventually figured out what it was - some sort of time delay issue. These transactions that had bogus values auto corrected themselves days later, most of them anyway. There still was the odd transaction that didn't fix itself up - even weeks later.

I would be really interested to find out why this happens and if its because GA is just struglling to process so much data. That would be my guess. If you have faced the same issue or have any input would love to hear from you.

Comments

[Jon Ostler (First Rate)]

The time lag on analytics is its main weak point, i would not recommend using it to review yesterdays (or even the days before yesterday) stats especially if you are using custom segments or Ecommerce.

The Ecommerce issue i like best happens if you are using ga.js and don't escape any double quotes in the Ecommerce arguments. If the SKU, Product Name or other field contains an un-escaped double quote ("), the whole transaction will be lost. As you can imagine inches (") come up in product names a lot.

That said it is a very impressive package and we use it extensively. Just requires an experienced hand to get the most out of it.