After several months of successful GA conversion tracking using the View Cart tracking code modification outlined here (http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/help.tracking.htm), all of a sudden the conversions stopped registering at the beginning of February.



This coincides roughly with a site update we made, so I am sure we did something that broke it. However, and this has been confirmed with code diffs, none of the update touched any Analytics or e-junkie code anywhere on the site. It's all still identical to what was working before Feb 1. Additionally, all our other Analytics data appears to be correct. So I am wondering if there is some other dependency that the conversion tracking code has, and how we might try to isolate it.



I can roll back parts of the site update selectively, but I don't know how to test conversion tracking without someone happening to buy something at the time. And there are often random false negatives in the reporting anyway which make me hesitant to rely on the evidence of just one or a few purchases.



Does anyone have any recommendations for how to test the conversion tracking process without making loads of purchases from ourselves? Is there a way to watch the transactions in real-time to see if Analytics is getting hit?



Thanks!

Thanks, I didn't think to check the Thank-you page URL. However, it has not been changed, nor has the landing page it points to.



However, I'm wondering now if I was misunderstanding something about conversion tracking previously, because we never set up a specific Goal for our ecommerce conversions. We just set the profile to "Ecommerce" site, followed your instructions, and a new section appeared in Analytics called "Ecommerce" under the Conversions men. That is where transactions had been showing up, not under "Goals." We never altered out Goals setup in any way to enable to transaction tracking. Were we supposed to have done so?



Our main products page is here: http://pronuncian.com/products.aspx. I have verified that it is using the View Cart code with the overlay display.



Thanks for the testing tip, I should have thought of that! I will roll back some of our other, apparently unrelated, alterations and see if that makes a difference.

Thanks for the detailed reply, lots of good detail there to mull over... very interesting.



We hadn't realized that we should be relying on your thank-you page in order for the Ecommerce tracking to work. It's not explicitly mentioned in your Tracking help page. But that might explain a lot about what is happening, possibly including why we had, in the past, even using our own on-site thank-you page, registered some conversions.



As I go back through the logs, I realize that all the conversions we have ever registered have been for DOWNLOADABLE PRODUCTS. So, that implies that, at some point, those purchasers, even after having been re-directed to our thank-you page, would have visited the e-junkie file download page to get their product. Other purchasers, who bought physical items, would ONLY have seen our thank-you page and never ended up on the e-junkie site.



So that leads to my next question: was the ecommerce tracking code at some point included on the download page that purchasers receive in their purchase e-mail link? And was that removed, or is it still there? Or is that download link page in fact the same as the e-junkie default thank-you page?



I'm not entirely discounting the possibility that the AdSense modification might be causing the problem, but we hadn't changed that recently, and we saw plenty of conversions appear even after we inserted it. I'll revisit that code snippet if I don't get anywhere with the thank-you page experiments.



For now, I've removed the redirect to our on-site thank-you page and left the e-junkie default, and made some test purchases to see if they will register. I imagine it will take a couple days to see if they show up. I feel like we're making some headway on the problem now, thank you!

Well, this is getting even weirder.



Neither of my tests from yesterday showed up in conversions, either with the Common Thank-you page, or without it. However, a purchase by someone else, entirely unrelated to my testing, did show up.



These purchases were for three separate products, so I went digging in a bit to see if there were any differences between the products that could explain the problem. What I found was that, for both of the products I tested--which were not tracked--we have text entered in the Custom HTML - OPTIONAL box on the product "Customize your product Thank-you/Download page." For the product which was purchased separately, which DID appear in conversions, no text had been entered in the customization box.



Is there something about the HTML we have entered in the customization box that could be preventing the ecommerce tracking data from appearing, even on the E-junkie-generated thank-you page? And is it possible that could have happened recently? Both the products I tested were ones that have, in the past, successfully shown conversions. We haven't changed that customized text since the products were originally created.



I'm going to remove it from one of them and re-run my tests today to see if I can narrow it down further. However, is there any markup in particular we should avoid there that might cause a problem for the tracking data?