eStore+Analytics – One sale is tracked multiple times in Google Analytics

[markmanson]

Ecommerce tracks 90% of sales correctly now. But every now and then it behaves strangely.

One sale, that occured on May 25, has since been tracked 7 times. When I look in Google Analytics in Ecommerce -> Transactions, then the Quantity behind this specific Transaction ID is 7.

What can be the cause of this?

Additional question: Is there an easy way to manually add and delete transactions to Ecommerce?

[admin]

The transaction IDs are unique so that should prevent any duplicate tracking. However, the Google analytic eCommerce tracking is done via JavaScript so it is never 100% correct due to some of the following factors:

– The user closed the browser right after the payment so it never gets a chance to do the tracking.

– The user’s browser crashed at the same time when he was being redirected to the “Thank You” page.

– Your webpage may fail to render due to a server hiccup at the same time a customer was landing on the “Thank You” page.

Chances of something like the above happening are rare but they do happen. Its hard to predict exactly what happened right at that very moment with your server or the user’s computer, so just like any JavaScript remote stat tracking you have to allow some room for stat error.

I don’t know if you can manually modify Google analytic stats. Try asking this question on their forum to see if its possible.

[markmanson]

So it sounds like it was a freak accident?

For those interested, it is possible to manually add and remove transactions from ecommerce, although it is not very straightforward. See this link: http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=72290

You can go into eStore to see the ID’s and other necessary info for your transactions and use that to create a file that will add or remove a transaction from Ecommerce.

[Author]

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