Getting eCommerce tracking code to work on 3rd party sites

[Holly Fawcett]

Hey everyone - I'm sure this question may be a bit advanced for this Fundamentals class, but here goes...

I use a 3rd party payment platform (Realex) to process payment transactions on my site, but I can't figure out the correct fields for the tracking code that I need on it. Is it simply the standard tracking code I have on all of my website pages already, or is a special one? Does anyone know of a template or tracking-code builder I could use?

Thanks in advance!

H

[analyticsacademystaff]

Hello Holly,

It really depends what is the user experience in terms of page flow of your check-out process. Does the user navigates from your domain to your payment processing service's domain during the checkout? On what domain is the confirmation page located exactly.

The question here is not so much about which eCommerce tracking code you should execute (there's only one form of eCommerce tracking available) but whether you might need to implement cross domain tracking to ensure that the transactions you record get tied back to the correct visit. This page has detailed information about the eCommerce tracking code. And in your case, since it seems that you use a 3rd party shopping cart, you can review this guide to implement cross domain tracking.

We don't really have a tag builder for eCommerce transactions because the values you need to pass are dynamic, and depend on which products the user has bought. You refer to the code sample provided in our development guides and ask your wed developer to dynamically pull in the appropriate values. 

-The Analytics Academy Course Staff

[Holly Fawcett]

Thanks for getting back to me - our purchasing process flows from our site to 3rd party and back to our site again for final receipt. So, in my case, I should implement a tracking code that looks like this on both my 3rd party payments site, AND the pages leading up to and directly after (ex. the receipt page) the payment page?

<script>

var _gaq = _gaq || [];

_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXX-X']);

_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);

_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'mywebsitename.com']);

_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

</script>

...

<a href="https://www.mypaymentspage.com/epage"

   onclick="_gaq.push(['_link', 'https://www.mypaymentspage.com/epage']); return false;">

</a>

...

<form name="f" method="post" onsubmit="_gaq.push(['_linkByPost', this]);">

Or, do I just implement the script part, not the anchor link? Looking at the link part, do I insert the gaq.push tag into the <a href> link?

:-/