Introduction
Our client is a large e-commerce project that sells innovative products around the world. Their website consists of a series of sites from subdomains and the main domain, so when the user browsers goods on a specific subdomain, he ends up making a purchase on the main domain of the site.
Despite the fact that, according to customer data from CRM, the business performed successfully and moved forward, a significant problem was observed in the client’s customized web analytics.
For some unknown reason, the main counter of Google Analytics statistics collection, which analyzes the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, incorrectly determined the source and the user’s channel in real-time and, as a result, incorrectly distributed transactions and conversions through advertising channels.
This led to the fact that the client ceased to trust the data that was collected with the counter, and contacted us in order to solve the problem and eliminate the error in defining the advertising source during the user’s visit.
Challenge
Finding a solution to a specific issue is always a challenge for highly specialized professionals. Often, whether it will be possible to find a solution to a problem depends not only on the specific knowledge of the contractor, but also on the team’s outlook, the ability to build communications, to find an answer from the third-party support services and, of course, the ability to keep your head up even when things don’t quite work out the way you’ve planned.
Solution
We’ve started with analyzing the installation of the Google Analytics counter, conducting tests on the process of sending hits from the website to Google Analytics. Further, we’ve proceeded with examining the structure of the Shopify platform, on which the site was hosted. It was noted that the presence of UTM-tags in the user’s link is not the only cause behind the incorrect recording of an advertisement source. We found that incorrect detection of the traffic source occurs due to the mashing of the user’s hostname at the entrance to the site only under certain conditions, and because of this hit PageView is assigned to the source “Not set”.
Google Analytics Screenshot
Then we identified the reason behind the hostname getting removed from the /collect hit request sent to the GA. This error occurred due to the application “Langifi”, which became triggered as soon as the user entered the website. We’ve contacted application’s support service and prepared a doc with a technical task for fixing the error, cooperating with website developers on the client side during the sent requests debugging. This comprehensive and thorough approach allowed us to achieve correct data collection in Google Analytics without violating any data integrity.
Results
We helped the client to solve their highly specialized problem, which did not allow them to competently invest in profitable traffic sources and obtain a positive return on investment. Open communication with the client and the proper attitude management within the team, the desire to obtain results, despite a large number of people not interested in solving the problem, – are the key points that helped achieve positive results in this difficult task.
