Update – 3/5/2009 – I’ve been demo’ing the 1SC/Google Analytics integration quite a bit lately (to staff and others) and put together a little document to try and show the results of a successful implementation.  You can take a look at the document here!

**

It has been brought to my attention that I completely glossed over a fairly significant aspect of 1ShoppingCart’s Google Analytics integration in last weeks post.

Sorry, I included a link down at the bottom of that post to cover the topic, but didn’t say much about it.

But now, thanks to the wonders of social media and the smart people who follow me, I will correct that!

Ecommerce tracking through 1ShoppingCart’s Google Analytics integration…

Basically the end result of this is that Google Analytics will track and display transaction related stats right from your Analytics account dashboard.

This is a great feature and I highly recommend using it, unfortunately 1ShoppingCart didn’t integrate this portion of the tracking script.

The reasons are two-fold:

1. I had the opportunity to squeeze through a SMALL project and get it released quickly.
2. You can still set it up and use it (/track it) manually!

I won’t go over ALL the details here, because Googles help is actually pretty good for this topic; which you can find here.

What’s Required?

This is going to be a ‘little’ sketchy, because I haven’t set this up before, so keep that in mind:

The Google Analytics script has the ability to capture transaction details from the Transaction Thank You page.  All you have to do is install the Google script on one of your own pages, tell your analytics account to start tracking and tell your 1ShoppingCart account to use your new page as your default order thank you page.

Then, after every successful transaction on the 1ShoppingCart system we’ll automatically post the details of the transaction to your thank you page (no sensitive information is sent of course!) and your google script will capture the information.

Once you have your Thank You page setup and ready, update the ‘Thank You URL:‘ field on the ‘Setup >> Orders‘ page with your new URL.  * Remember, this is your account default setting, there is an over-ride on every products details page!

That’s about it!  It’ll take a little while to get your Thank You page setup just right I imagine, but the rest is pretty straightforward.

Information that the google script will capture:

Order ID
Affiliation
Total
Tax
Shipping
City
State
Country
Order ID
SKU
Product Name
Category
Price
Quantity

You’ll have to remove the Category option from the Google Script, since this is not information that we currently pass to the thank you page!

I don’t usually make posts like this, but:

As both a practitioner of ‘the arts of SEO’ and a regular user of Twitter I completely agree with Rae Hoffman – And whether blame lies with Twitter, or Google, or both, this boils down to a kick in teeth to all legitimate ‘customers’.

(& yes, I know I’m a couple days behind the times on this, but I’ve been on vacation…)