Google Analytics double count conversions when there are two goal paths to the same final destination

Question

I'm in charge of a website that puts people in touch with financial experts according to your need.

You explain what kind of questions you have, specify some criteria and the algorithm proposes you 3 experts. At this point, you can either choose one directly and you're taken to the next step, where you choose a time for him to call you. Or you can first read the profile of one of the experts and go to the next step from there, where again you choose a time for him to call you.

So I created a different goal for each possible path. The destination is the same but the funnel is different, depending on whether the user checks the expert's profile before he says when he'd like to be contacted by him or not.

The problem is that Google Analytics seems to be double counting conversions: every time a user reaches the destination page (or perhaps only when he takes a certain path, I'm not sure), the counter for both goals is increased by one, even though presumably only one of the path was followed.

Answer 1

Google Analytics doesn't ensure that every step in a goal path is hit. Rather is automatically assumes that all previous steps were hit if it finds that somebody skipped a step or steps.

So when you have two paths with the same destination, it will count both of them when somebody reaches the destination and it will backfill all the steps of the path not taken.

You can't have two goal paths with the same destination and expect counting to work properly.

To make it work you need different destinations. You could even make it work by appending a parameter to the URL based on which path was taking and make the goal depend on that parameter.