Hi there everyone,
I’m having some trouble with the Analytics Goal Conversion statistics since the 18th of August '07. It has just stopped working then.
However we are still getting Traffic statistics and E-commerce statistics from analytics. So it seems to us that analytics is working alright… We had a massive traffic last week and lots of sales, but our Goal Conversion remained flat. As for why it has stopped working completely on the 18th of August is still a mystery to us. I have searched in the forums to see if someone else is having the same problem, but so far I haven’t seen any complaint here.
So I’m wondering if this is something caused by a change of that particular section of Analytics or if cs-cart development has done something funny to it. Basically the URLs in the checkout process haven’t been changed, so I really wonder why it has stopped working.
For those wondering about what I’m talking about, it’s the funnel that measures the traffic from a certain page and from there records every step in the checkout page until the end of the checkout process (the “thank you” page). The changes I applied are below (and worked just fine for a couple of weeks):
[URL=“http://forum.cs-cart.com/showpost.php?p=15408&postcount=19”]http://forum.cs-cart.com/showpost.php?p=15408&postcount=19[/URL]
I hope someone here has applied the same, and if yes, can tell if their mod is still working… really appreciate some help with it. 
Cheers!
Glad to hear its not just us.
It must have been some change made on Google’s side. Our goals stopped working on that day as well. Very frustrating.
[quote name=‘bpaulette’]Glad to hear its not just us.
It must have been some change made on Google’s side. Our goals stopped working on that day as well. Very frustrating.[/QUOTE]
Well, even though this problem really sucks, it is very nice indeed to hear it’s not just us!!
I have already posted a support ticket to cs-cart, and they haven’t been able to help, even though they tried harder this time, since we had huge problems with them overwriting some of our modified tpl files with default ones. We thought the problem originated from there…
I’ll be submitting a support ticket to Google today, and will come back with their feedback.
Cheers!
Yes, it seems to be an issue with Google’s latest version of Analytics. You can read more about it here:
[url]http://groups.google.com/group/analytics-help-tracking/browse_thread/thread/3ea4a4e50e1423e/a51683ef576c4870?lnk=gst&q=goal+conversion+problem&rnum=6#[/url]
Though the post mentioned above does show that many are experiencing the same issue, I haven’t found an official statement from Google on the subject.
I haven’t got a reply myself, but someone that posted in that thread quoted:
[QUOTE]I sent a mail to Google and this is the answer I received: “The
problem here most likely is a bug that rewrites the variables in
Request URI’s to alphabetical order. This means that the URLs don’t
match the ones defined in the goals anymore and customer sees no
conversions. Problem arose with last product push and we’re working on
a quick resolution. I will let you know as soon as I know more.”
So far I have not yet received a response when this will be fixed.[/QUOTE]
Hope it clarifies the problem some more… 
Hey Illusion - I just got our first recorded goal in over a month on 9/16.
Will be curious to see if they keep coming.
Hi bpaulette!
Same here, Google got it working again. I’m impressed we are the only ones commenting on it, thought it was something many here would be using.
My funnel is not working properly thought, it never did. We have three steps between our first page and the goal. We are using “/” as the very first step in the funnel, instead of the one you suggested.
We get the number of people who came to the shop, and then the funnel goes to the second step with, lets say, 100 people. We don’t get a report of how many people abandoned the steps in between the very first step and the goal. All abandonments happen in the very first step. Visually speaking:
3000 > 3000 > 2920
||
0 > 80 > 0
||
0 > 80 > 0
||
0 > 80 > 0
||
0 > 80
I wonder what is wrong…
that is very weird - our funnel started working great along with the goal.
having the home page as the first step of the funnel is an interesting idea - and technically, people should be able to jump into the funnel from anywhere (unless you’ve got a required step somewhere in there). Since I’ve got the main cart page as the first step, I also get a lot of people who skip that page, and start with the Customer Info page (by hitting the checkout button, rather than cart button), and that doesn’t cause any problems.
Are you using regular expression, and verified that they’re all in there correctly? (dumb question, I know - probably the first thing you checked)
I wonder if the “/” as first step is becoming a sort of catch-all - and just treating all abandonments as if they went back to the first step of the funnel (regardless of where they actually went).
You know - after thinking about this a little more, I definitely think “/” is becoming a catch-all.
See this explanation about “Regular expression” from within GA’s help files -
[QUOTE]Regular expression: uses regular expressions to match your URLs. This is useful when the stem, trailing parameters, or both can vary between users. For example, if a user could be coming from one of many subdomains, and your URLs use session identifiers, use regular expressions to define the constant element of your URL. For example, page=1 will match sports.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&id=002 as well as fishing.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&language=fr&id=119[/QUOTE]
The “/” is being treated as if it were “/”. ANY page they go to after hitting your home page (including the subsequent cart pages within the funnel) match the regular expression requirements of the “/” page - it just lumps them all into that first step.
I’ll bet if you removed that as the first step of your funnel, it would all start working properly.
Good point bpaulette, I’ve always wondered about that one…
But we still want to find a way to have the home page as the first step in the funnel. I’ll dig it a bit more and find out what can be done there. If I find a good answer, I’ll come back here and let you know
Thanks for the advice!
Really late reply, but yes, it’s not possible to add “/” in the first step, it becomes a wildcard to any page at all…
But now I’m wondering about something else, still related though.
Has anyone applied a funnel to a 1.3.5. store? The checkout page is only one now, and the URL doesn’t change, even dynamically. There are only two URLs there now, one that takes in all checkout steps and another that’s the “successful” URL.
I remember reading in Analytics help that’s still possible to track steps within a single page, but I’m not sure it’s still possible in this case, because the URL does not change at all…
Any ideas?