Tracking Revenues & Transactions with Google Analytics

Hello World — Arsham here with a recent conversation that I’m turning into a blog post which hopefully helps you with tracking revenue & transaction data from your website with Google Analytics.

If you don’t already know, I <3 Google Analytics so much so that I write post after post about it 🙂

Down to Business —

Alright so we get a contact through our website from a guy who has a website which allows people with extra space in their house, apartment, or hotel to list their extra rooms for rent — and subsequently, people in need of a temporary place to stay will use the website to search and book these rooms.

Make sense, right?

Here is what he said to me (yeah, he spelled my name wrong, not very cool) ::

Hey Arsgam,

I actually wanted a little help with analytics.

Yes analytics code is installed on the site and working fine. Now If
you’ve seen our website, it has hotel booking button, which on click
opens an ajax pop-up and the all the steps are done in that popup
itself. Now I’m also enable to track them through event tracking, got
it implemented.  Now the problem is I’m not sure how to know which
visitor actually converted into events (Bookings) events does not show
these details.  and can we set the final event (booking) into goals
anyways?

Please let me know your thoughts.

OK, I think I know what he’s asking — it looks like he wants to be able to track conversions as goals as well as have some details of the transaction pulled into Google Analytics, right?

!!! WARNING :: Just an FYI – it is against Google’s terms to collect any personalized data and store it with Analytics.  That means name, email, IP, and obviously SSN or credit card info… ya heard? !!!

Sounds like a job for eCommerce & event tracking!

This was my response to him ::

I Didn’t Spell His Name Wrong,

Glad to hear you’re up and running & also glad to hear you want to get more tracking in place.. I think that’s a great idea!

I see that when you go to make the payment, it brings you to a different website :: https://www.SomeExternalBillingWebsite.com/Billing.jsp

I did not go all the way through the booking process, but let me ask you :

Once someone actually books a room and pays on the external website, are they redirected back to your site?

If so, what information is passed through to that page? — Does the room they booked and how much it costs get displayed on that confirmation (or thank you) page?

I am thinking to use eCommerce tracking as well as an event on the thank you confirmation page. Then we can tie a goal to the event, and you can use the eCommerce section in analytics to see which traffic sources or geographic areas led to the most transactions and to the most revenue per transaction (and many other statistics).

Let me know what happens after submitting the payment form so we can figure out if it’s possible.

I’m always willing to help those who want to track!

So you see, with eCommerce tracking set up and working properly, you can get so much more data out of Analytics, for instance ::

• Which traffic source converts into the most revenue
• Which traffic source has a highest eCommerce conversion rate (knowing this, you can pump up the visitors from that source and win big $$$)
• Which geographies spend the most money on my site (maybe you run a geo-specific PPC advertising campaign)
• Is my Adwords producing ROI?! (If you have Adwords data linked to your analytics && eCommerce tracking set up, you can see your actual Adwords ROI, very cool).
• and soooo much more…

Check this out ::

OK, I have some tracking to set up…

Have questions? :: Drop us a line.