Improving Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking using server side tracking

Usually when we need to implement google analytics for a site using 3rd party hosting shopping cart its simple enough. The general method to achieve this is to do cross domain tracking. This requires a little code change to tell google analytics to send cookie information of the visitor to the checkout domain.

Because Paypal does not allow you to add analytics tracking to its pages we can’t use cross domain tracking, instead we have to wait for a user to come back to the site and then trigger a sale.

To get around this, we built an alternate 100% accurate tool using Paypal IPN api, we can use it to trigger a sale regardless of whether a customer comes back to the site or not. The solution can be used with any payment provider that sends payment notifications.

To make this work we started with identifying a user when they leave for paypal to make a purchase. This is essential because we need to be able to connect a user’s initial behavior [where they came from, what they clicked etc] with the final purchase. Continue Reading..