Google Analytics E-Commerce Tracking Using Paypal PDT

02 March 2008

I’ve changed my mind. In a previous post I was a little critical about Google Analytics. After using it for a while, I believe the good outweighs the bad. “Oh Google Analytics…How have I lived so long without you”?

One of the best features of Analytics is the E-Commerce tracking. With this feature enabled, you can literally track which visitors make a purchase, how much they spent, where they came from, how many times they visited your site, and what actions led up to making that purchase. The feature is great! Getting it setup and working……not so great.

I was surprised to find very little information on setting up E-Commerce tracking for sites that use Paypal. After beating my head against the wall for a few weeks and spending a few hundred dollars, I finally came up with a script that worked. Rather than package and sell my solution, I’ve decided to give it away in an ebook I wrote.

Grammar and spellun ain’t my thang, so if you notice some typos in the book, please spare me the embarrassment and let me know. You can download a copy of the ebook from this link.

http://www.brentcrouch.com/pdt/Ecommerce_Tracking_Setup.pdf

You can give the e-book away if you like as long as the content remains unchanged.

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7 comments

Voice Your Thoughts

  1. Frank Bruno:

    Hey thanks Brent I’ll take a look. Thanks for posting this!

    Frank Bruno

  2. Judith Tramayne:

    Thanks Brent! I’ve downloaded your PDF and look forward to reading it.

    Judith

  3. Iain:

    Nice PDF, lays it all out step by step.

    If you’ve just got PDT working on your thankyou page then you’ll soon run into the problem where you find that Analytics is not recording all your sales, because all your visitors are not guaranteed to hit the thank you page.

    I’ve managed to make some headway with this problem and have successfully got server side code to send conversion data to analytics. My next step is to integrate this into a IPN script.

    Extensive ramblings and info can be found on these blog posts.

    http://www.teknohippy.net/2008/01/04/paypal-e-commerce-tracking-with-google-analytics/
    http://www.teknohippy.net/2008/03/04/paypal-ipn-pdt-analytics-tracking-getting-there/

  4. Rostyslav:

    Thanks. Good info.
    I have been searching already how to track Google Analytics with other eCart provider.

  5. Luc @ Pure Web Analytics:

    Thanks for posting your article on my website. Gotta love Google Analytics

  6. Poster Maniac:

    This is indeed a helpful e-book as it is indeed hard for me to track google analytics before but your share of information is indeed great. I am planning of sharing this information with some friends and they would surely be glad about it.

  7. Janni:

    thanks Brend for the exellent step by step analysis of your pdf.