Problems with analytics, conversation data and assisted conversions

[isaac663]

Hi guys.  Having issues with analytics.

Firstly, it doesn't record all our sales accurately.   My boss downloaded a sales report directly from our site, and it doesn't match up to the analytics, our actual sales were significantly higher than Google analytics was reporting (by about a 1/3).   Any idea why Google is missing so many of the conversions?

Also, I'm trying to work our how many assisted conversion we are getting from our ad words campaigns.  I've been looking through our top conversion path data to try find conversions that started with a paid click.

However, I seem to have some inconsistencies.  We have only one ad words group that is on the display network (Re-marketing V1 Ad group 1) , and according to analytics we have a conversion from it (See Screen shot 1).  However, there is no record of this in our ad words data. (See screen shot 2).

This is over the same time period.

I don't know what to take from this.  Can anyone help?

Isaac.

Screen%20shot%201.png Screen%20shot%202.png

[AlanBleiweiss]

Jasmine is correct in that GA is not a proper data source for 100% accurate information.

Unfortunately there are many reasons for this.

The free version of GA often basing data on a sampling of visits.  If you go to the Conversions/ECommerce/Overview/ report, in the upper right corner you can see whether it's a sampling and if so, what the percentage sampled is.

Another issue is that if the Google Analytics code didn't fire properly during a session or part of a session, that information will not be tracked properly in its entirety or partially.  Sometimes that's because site visitors have browser types or browser plugins that block scripts, and other times its because of a breakdown in data transmitted between the visitors browser, your site and Google's analytics servers.

She's also spot on with recommending that you dig into the multi-funnel channel report.

bottom line - it's important to understand that only your actual internal site server system can provide you with accurate sales data, though that might lack certain deeper insights regarding origination and demographics.  Any other analytics program can help provide insights, however should only be seen for trend analysis purposes.

[JasmineA]

Hi Issac,

From my experience with GA, it is never 100% accurate to real sales data. Every company I've worked with has had similar issues. Google Analytics is no replacement for BI or CRM data. Also, depending on how much data you have running through the free version of GA, you may only be seeing a sampling of your total traffic.

I would suggest looking at the multi-channel funnels report instead of the assisted conversions report. It will summarize where your conversions are coming from based on where the click was in the total conversion referral path.

AdWords is a first click attribution platform, whereas GA is a last click attribution platform. It is likely that you will have referred that user by a search ad then they came back via retargeting within a 30 day window. Maybe you can look into the conversion path for this one goal and see where most of your clicks are originating?

Let me know if that was helpful!
Jasmine