Google Analytics Campaign Tracking overriding each other

[DmitriiK]

Howdy, fellow mozzers.

So, here is the situation:

Let's say someone comes to the website through Organic Google Search, and first thing they see is the banner on the website, on a click of which it takes you to a promotional landing page. I have this banner being tracked with GA campaigns. Now, here are my questions:

1. If that user makes a purchase, which source / medium it will be assigned to? Organic/google or website/banner? (as far as i understand it assigns it to website/banner)
2. If that's the case, is there way to find out afterwords where the website/banner sessions came initially from?
3. If there is no such way, how shall i setup the tracking to be able to see wherre the initial visit to the website came from, yet also track how many people clicked on the banner and made a purchase?

Thanks

[ThompsonPaul]

Essentially, ecommcerce tracking is a more deluxe, in-depth version of event tracking, Dmitrii.

You'll set both up, then use dashboards and reporting to integrate them. For example, you can start by using the Events report to look at all the visits that included a click on the banner, then review the purchase behaviour of those visits. For starters, that will give you the conversion rate of those who clicked on the banner, for example. You'll also be able to compare the sales behaviour of those who clicked on the banners vs those who didn't.

If you configure the label of the banner event to include the URL of the page it was clicked from, you'll even be able to assess which pages' banners provide the best sales, as another example.

Think of ecommerce tracking and event tracking working in concert with each other to show you both what happened before the sale (event tracking) and what happened during the sale (ecommcerce tracking.)

Make sense?

Paul

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

You are right, it can't be used for e-commerce tracking. So what you should do is make sure they can both be set up regardless of each other. Like Paul mentioned, it's incredibly dangerous to start using UTM campaign tracking for internal purposes. 99/100 it's not a good idea to do it like that and event tracking is able to help you out.

[DmitriiK]

I see.

Now, as far as i know, the event tracking could be used for goal tracking, but not for ecommerce tracking, or am i wrong?

[ThompsonPaul]

You're making a critical tracking error in this scenario, Dmitrii. You must NEVER use campaign tracking variables on internal links within your site. There aren't many absolutes in Analytics, but this is one of them.

When the visitor clicks on that banner under your current scenario, they are being registered as a completely new session with the new campaign-based referrer info. This does damage at two levels:

• It is artificially increasing your session count by a significant margin
• it is stripping the real source

Once this damage has been done, there's no way to recover the original referrer info for the purchaser.

Fortunately, there is a built-in system in Analytics to do what you want. For tracking actions that happen within your website, you need to use Event Tracking instead of campaign parameters. You will add an event tracking trigger to the banner clicks so that their clicks can be recorded within Analytics without polluting your other data. This tracking can be added in a number of ways including manually (using an onclick event) or the highly recommended method of integration though Google Tag Manager. This keeps the original source/medium of your visitors untouched, while adding the info about their banner click to the cllickstream.

This same event-tracking process should be added to all other major and minor conversion events on the site - form submissions, file downloads, page scroll depth, video views etc - so that you can truly track and understand the valuable actions visitors take within the site that aren't tracked with pageviews.

Hope that helps?

Paul