When should the Ecommerce tracking take place?

I am implementing Google analytics onto a ecommerce site. We are already tracking events like adding to cart, removing etc using the event tracking. I would like to know what is the ideal time to use the ecommerce tracking apis (addTrans & addItem). Here are my questi开发者_如何学Goons:

1. Should I call these functions for each product being added to cart?

2. Should I call these functions only when the payment is complete and them while displaying receipt screen?

What is the ideal way of implementation? please provide best practices if possible.

Thanks in advance

I would track few things,

1.How many got into payment form and failed to buy, which can indicate to you that something wrong with payments or page itself. Count number of visitors in checkout - number of orders.

2.How many users got into site and haven't added at least one product, which will indicate that something wrong with advertisement, landing page or website layout in general. Number of unique visitors - those who added at least one item.

Adding statistics for each product added to cart shows you what? If users buy certain product you can get that this product is most wanted but in cart means noting imho. As for your second question, i would implement my solutions written above.

I wonder if your customers should go to an externally hosted page to make a payment. If they do, then GA tracking will not show you the real source of your profitable traffic - it will show you the payment processor page as the source.

It is recommended, or at least suggested, that you place the eCommerce tracking that includes the _trackTrans call on the "Thank You" or "Confirmation" stage of your checkout process.

Also, it's worth noting that if the user refreshes that page that the tracking is on then the code will be fired again and you may see skewed figures in Google Analytics.

I was like you, I also implemented the event tracking first but I wanted to get a chance to implement the ecommerce tracking to get some $ data in there to browse. So, on the developers page. One of the examples is on the reciept page, but on my implementation that wasn't going to work since I am use a payment API. So, On my checkout page I setup the parent transaction. using :

_gaq.push(['_addTrans',
'1234',           // transaction ID - required
'Acme Clothing',  // affiliation or store name
'11.99',          // total - required
'1.29',           // tax
'5',              // shipping
'San Jose',       // city
'California',     // state or province
'USA'             // country
 ]);

Then when I am listing my items in the cart, I use PHP and a foreach to dump each item, sku, price per item and quantity into the parent level transaction like this :

  _gaq.push(['_addItem',
'1234',           // transaction ID - required
'DD44',           // SKU/code - required
'T-Shirt',        // product name
'Green Medium',   // category or variation
'11.99',          // unit price - required
'1'               // quantity - required
 ]);

For the last step in the process, I send transaction data to my merchant processing (paypal) via the SOAP api and get numerous responses back. I do different stuff based on the response I get back. If there is no error from the JSON response I get an COMPLETED response, at that point is when I fire the :

_gaq.push(['_trackTrans']);

I'm not really sure if this is the true way to go about it, but it makes sense to me.