Tracking Conversions

JMR

My website uses PayPal buy now buttons, so when the customer clicks the button they are directed to www.paypal.com.
Following purchase they are redirected back to the Success page on my website.

Here they are asked to select from a dropdown list to provide info on where they heard about us.

I am finding that not everybody completes this form and the fact is that not everybody arrives back to my site following a purchase.
When I tested myself, on completion of purchase a message appears along the lines of "you are now being redirected back to www.drypro.ie, if you are not redirected within 10 seconds please hit the refresh button"
So I figure a large percentage just click away, safe in the knowledge that purchase is complete and they have no need to return to my site.

This causes me 2 problems...
1. I don't collect the vital info from the form
2, My analytics is setup based on a visit to the success page = a conversion, which is obviously not working

Any ideas how to accomplish both of the above requirements while using Buy Now buttons?

blue4ever

You can have you paypal button trigger an "event" is it being depressed. The you can marry this up to data for you actual paypal account - purchases and 'success page' (which with a 10 second redirect will probably give you much reduced numbers).

The bit i'd concentrate on is between the event and the purchase, the bit after the purchase is really redundant at that point.

ed: sorry a link would be handy, you have to amend the analytics code to track, then add some small code to every or indeed each different paypal button)

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/asyncMigrationExamples#EventTracking

Pablo

This is an old example but probably still works http://www.analyticsresults.com/2010/02/tracking-paypal-with-google-analytics.html

JMR

Wanted to update on this....

The problem I have is that not all customers are redirected to my 'Success Page' following a transaction.

This is a problem for 2 reasons

1. My eCommerce tracking data relies on the user returning to this page and without the return, I have no record of a conversion in Analytics
2. I would like the customer to provide some info on where they heard about us (this point is much less important than point 1)

Auto return is setup in my PayPal account and all is working but I have now discovered the problem is that only customers who purchase with a PayPal account are automatically redirected, those who purchase with a credit card are brought to a page with the option of signing up for a PayPal account and a button to "Return to Merchant Site"

So obviously nobody clicks the "Return to Merchant Site" button.

PayPal have said that there is no way around this and at least for the tech person I was speaking to, it was the first time they had heard of this being a problem!

I cannot believe that this is not a problem for lots of websites like mine, that only acceptPayPal payments...?

Surely there must be a simple solution to this and I can get a complete picture of my conversion data?

Anybody overcome this before?

Thanks

TsuDhoNimh

JMR wrote: »

PayPal have said that there is no way around this and at least for the tech person I was speaking to, it was the first time they had heard of this being a problem!

I'm assuming that they're relatively new and have no knowledge of what issues have been raised numerous times, as this is a very common complaint.

JMR wrote: »

I cannot believe that this is not a problem for lots of websites like mine, that only acceptPayPal payments...?

You'd be correct. It is a problem for every site in that position, a (relatively) small proportion of those are even aware of it being a problem.

JMR wrote: »

Surely there must be a simple solution to this and I can get a complete picture of my conversion data?

Your options are relatively limited.

PayPal have other account options that would provide a suitable solution, but to date they're not available to Irish accounts.

You could look at other payment options that would allow for more accurate tracking (though the vast majority of payment options have quirks like this, I've been pushing Realex for a long time to improve their offerings to provide better conversion tracking... sadly to no avail), but personally I'd still advise to retain PayPal as the conversion is more important than tracking the conversion... so give the user the option.

Without completely removing the option to use PayPal or going to great lengths to change account type, the only real option you're left with is to make the most of the data you do have available.

Using blue4ever's suggestion of event tracking the outbound clicks to PayPal you can then go a little further and add average values to the sales (incorporating the average completion rate from click to purchase on PayPal and the average sales value), which will give you some additional data that you may or may not find helpful (though obviously it isn't the exact data on each conversion you'd hope to obtain).

The figures will vary a lot depending on your specific market, but from personal experience you'll probably be looking at +80% (probably closer to +90%) of users having a PayPal account which they'll use and a similar proportion of users completing the purchase following the initial PayPal link. So while you're aware that the figures won't be perfect, they never are with any form of analytics, they are meaningful when it comes to identifying trends.

JMR

Thanks very much for the detailed info.

So most small Irish eCommerce businesses that accept PayPal only have no real data on keyword performance and what search terms convert to sales...?

I am seeing a gap of approx 25% to 30% between Google Analytics sales figures and actual sales figures.
It is only now that I know that this 25% to 30% of customers are those purchasing directly via credit card, without a PayPal account.

Maybe it's just me over estimating the importance of this but I would have thought this would be a huge problem for online businesses...?
How else can one tell which search terms are converting?

TsuDhoNimh

JMR wrote: »

So most small Irish eCommerce businesses that accept PayPal only have no real data on keyword performance and what search terms convert to sales...?

It depends on what you mean by 'real data'.

If you mean exact down to individual sales, then no business will have that and no analytics package can provide that. So if you're working with a small site with a small number of visitors where a single conversion is extremely relevant, then no they won't have 'real data' or at least not enough to truly give meaningful results (as a single outlier would skew the results too much).

If you mean real data in terms of the trends and actions being taken on a site, it really depends on the level of traffic. Even with a 30% drop in the accuracy of specific conversions, you can still make meaningful and data driven informed decisions in terms of your most valuable acquisition channels and your conversion rate optimisation efforts if your traffic is high enough.

JMR wrote: »

I am seeing a gap of approx 25% to 30% between Google Analytics sales figures and actual sales figures.
It is only now that I know that this 25% to 30% of customers are those purchasing directly via credit card, without a PayPal account.

I assume this means that for every 100 real customers you're getting on avg. 70 converting in your analytics data?

That's slightly higher than I'd normally expect to see on a standard Irish site, but depending on your target market/demographics it may make perfect sense in your case (if you take the extremely rough figures I gave of 80-90% completing the conversion and a similar level having an actual PayPal account, my figures would suggest a 30% drop between the initial PayPal click and the final conversion tracking figure... not a 30% drop between actual conversion and final conversion tracking figure - for that alone I'd suggest doing a quick sanity check on the segmentation of your analytics data and seeing if the drop off is especially high in a specific area and see if there may be a technical issue at play along with the issues outside of your control).

Out of interest, do you know your goal abandonment rate between the initial click to PayPal vs. your PayPal conversions?

I'd suggest (or in fact I'd be full sure) that only a portion of that drop off is due to the specific PayPal issue mentioned. Other factors will play a part in this too (skewing the numbers in both directions), as users have the option to block cookies and/or javascript and opt out of analytics tracking or a variety of other issues that can/will/do skew stats (again, in either direction), but at 30% drop off it is a worryingly high drop in data for a site that won't have a huge number of conversions.

JMR wrote: »

Maybe it's just me over estimating the importance of this but I would have thought this would be a huge problem for online businesses...?
How else can one tell which search terms are converting?

You're not over estimating the problem.

It's a real problem and one that ever business is faced with, but due to lack of information they simply aren't aware of it (most businesses still lack any form of event or goal tracking, have no idea what KPIs are meaningful for their business or what their analytics data actually represents).