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We have a product signup process that takes the user from our website to a signup form on a separate tld and then, following successful signup, they are directed to the payment and product selection stage which is on a subdomain of the starting domain.

website1.com -> signup.website2.com -> controlpanel.website1.com

We have installed the the new analytics.js tracking code on each of the sites and we are loading the auto linking module for multiple /cross domain tracking. We are getting real time data from users browsing controlpanel.website1.com so the tracking is definitely working.

To see drop off rates in our checkout process we have set up two goals to track different behaviour. Unfortunately absolutely no data is being collected in these goals. This is very odd as we have been testing the processes using dummy user accounts to simulate a signup in order to test the tracking so there should have been some data collected.

So here are my questions..

  1. When setting up a goal do we need to have every single step in order, or can we skip a step and still have the goal tracked?
  2. We have a feeling that each link in the process needs to be tracked individually. Is this correct?
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  • Is this using google analytics tracking?
    – Liam Sorsby
    Jan 22, 2014 at 17:58
  • Do the goals use the full URL (i.e. including domain)? If so, have you used a filter to prepend the hostname to your URLs?
    – Kasper Pedersen
    Jan 23, 2014 at 8:01
  • @LiamSorsby This is using the analytics.js tracking code.
    – Joe Gardiner
    Jan 23, 2014 at 9:23
  • @kasperpedersen We were using this but found that this is wrong in the documentation. We've removed the domain from the page to track in each step of the funnel. I created a single landing page for account creation and it has been recorded in Analytics. I guess the next thing is to make sure that every single step in the funnel is entered into the Goal setup section.
    – Joe Gardiner
    Jan 23, 2014 at 9:25
  • An quick and easy way to verify the URLs you're using the the goal config is by doing a search in your "Top Content" report. Also, make sure the match type is the right one (e.g. use head match, if your URLs have changin query param values).
    – Kasper Pedersen
    Jan 24, 2014 at 22:25

1 Answer 1

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  1. For a goal to work, you only need the last step in the process. However, preceding steps may be added for the funnel visualization feature, which is the feature that nicely visualizes the drop-off between steps.

  2. This depends on how you want to process the data, but for drop-offs I would recommend setting up the funnel, so you don't end up with goal conversions, that aren't really conversions.

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