Fixing missing eCommerce conversion of a Campaign URL

Campaign URL parameters like campaign source, campaign medium, campaign name are added to the URL in order to track how a particular URL or a campaign is performing.

There’s 2 types of payments gateways:

1. Direct Payment Gateways – User’s don’t leave the site to make the payment. Ex – Authorize.net, PayPal PayFlow Pro, SagePay, Stripe.
2. External Payment Gateways – User’s are taken to an external page and redirected back to your website post payment success. Ex – 2Checkout, Citrus Payments, PayPal Express Checkout, ePay, Skrill.

Most of the OpenCart users use the external payment gateway system. In such cases google analytics fails to map the conversion to the particular campaign source.

When an external payment gateway redirects you back after payment success, Google Analytics start a new session since the user landed from a source different from the previous one, which not only messes up your conversions data but other metrics such as bounce rate and avg session duration as well. Google analytics attributes the sale to the last source before landing on the order confirmation page which in your case would be paypal, 2checkout etc.

To overcome this problem we’ve to add the payment gateway to the referral exclusion list in google analytics so that when it redirects back from the payment confirmation page, it will skip the last referral i.e, payment gateway and instead capture the previous source – CPC, Email, Organic etc.

To fix this issue, login to your google analytics and go to your admin section

1. Under your property, click on Tracking Info
2. Click on Referral Exclusion List
3. Click on Add Referral Exclusion button
4. Enter the payment gateway domain name to exclude, for example (paypal.com)