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On the home page of our online store we have a banner promoting particular product. Clicking that banner takes to the product details page (does not add to the cart). We would like to track how many banner clicks lead to actual sale of that product. If that's not possible, is it possible to track how many banner clicks lead to a sale (regardless if that product is in the cart).

We are using Google Analytics.

In our situation, we cannot modify the store sources (it is a hosted solution). Only custom javascript can be added to template files.

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it looks like you would like to use some cookies with proper living time – mkk Sep 1 '11 at 8:44
unfortunately, we use hosted solution and don't have access to the code. – DennisP Sep 1 '11 at 8:47
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it would suggest you reading about google analytics goals and paths – mkk Sep 1 '11 at 9:14
The problem is, setting up a funnel is not practical. The user may add this particular product but then go shopping for other goods, so the funnel will fail. – DennisP Sep 1 '11 at 9:22

1 Answer

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Google calls this "campaign tracking" and their Analytics help site explains how to set it up. It's a two-step process:

  1. Tag the links on your ads so that Analytics knows a visitor was sent from that ad.

  2. Define a goal using your purchase confirmation or receipt page as the 'URL Destination', so that Analytics knows how many visitors hit the receipt page.

You can now discover what percentage of visitors sent by that ad ended up at your purchase confirmation page by:

  1. Navigating to the Traffic Sources > Campaigns page
  2. Clicking the appropriate campaign.
  3. Clicking the 'Goal Conversion' tab.

You can set up multiple goals to determine, for example, how many visitors sent from that campaign added the product to their cart or landed on the product page (Goal 1), and how many actually purchased it by landing on the receipt page (Goal 2):

Goal conversion in Google Analytics

Screenshot from this Campaign Monitor help page.

The above requires no modification of your website's source code, provided that your hosted platform already includes Google Analytics tracking code, that it offers a payment receipt page, and that you can modify the links on your ads to use tagged tracking links as described above.

More detailed Ecommerce tracking requires modification of your source code (or shopping cart software that supports tracking), which you say you can't do, but I include the link in case it proves useful for others.

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But still, the user clicks the banner and lands on the product details page. Then the user navigates to another product and adds it to the cart, and then check out. This scenario will track a purchase that resulted from the banner click, but the user has not actually bought that particular product? – DennisP Sep 1 '11 at 10:33
@DennisP Yes, that's correct. To track sales of that specific product back to a particular campaign, you'd have to 1. Use Ecommerce Tracking or 2. Set up your goal with the receipt page as an end point and the /addToCart.php?id=productid page as a point in the funnel before it or 3. Use a different receipt page for that particular product only and set that as the goal or 4. Append the purchased product IDs to the receipt page URL and set that as the goal. – Nick Sep 1 '11 at 10:54
I don't quite find how ecommerce tracking can solve this issue. Moreover, we can only edit site's templates, so we can add some custom scripting (but not override default scripts). For the moment, we bound a click event handler to the Add to Cart button on the advertised product page which sets a cookie, and then on the order confirmation page a script checks that cookie (and clears it). If the cookie has been detected, a virtual pageview is tracked, and a goal is set based on the virtual page. – DennisP Sep 1 '11 at 12:13
@DennisP Ecommerce tracking lets you register which products were sold on the receipt page. This data is made available in the 'Ecommerce' tab (see screenshot above, to the right of the active 'Goal Conversion' tab) on the Campaigns page. I believe that this gives you a breakdown of product SKUs, sold as a result of that particular campaign (can't confirm because I don't currently have access to a campaign that uses Ecommerce tracking). If you can modify your page templates as you say, using Ecommerce tracking is worth doing. – Nick Sep 1 '11 at 15:32

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