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'Tagging' Checkout Pages - 2006/06/21 17:25 As you may have noticed, the checkout pages have big, ugly URLs. In Google Analytics, they are cumbersome, and usually truncated to the point where you can't distinguish between pages anymore. Here's a little trick to tag your checkout pages so they show up nicely in Google Analytics.

Google's "urchinTracker" function is responsible for sending the data to GA - including the page on which the hit (or page view) occured. Out of the box, it sends the URL to the current page, but you can tell it to send any page URL you want - even non-existant ones, using the "page" parameter. (See this post on how to do that using Monitus.net code)

So using that special ability, you can then "rename" each of your checkout pages for GA's benefit only... The javascript code you would put on your cart page, for instance, could be

    <script type="text/javascript">
        var monitus_urchinPage = "/cart_page.html";
        monitus_init(...);
    </script>

You can do that for every checkout page in the new Checkout Manager", changing the "/cart_page.html" value to whatever you want to call each page. That way, instead of big and ugly "/ymix..." URLs in GA, you'll get clean and simple, albeit fake, page names.

(Note, however, that people who have set goals and funnels based on the normal URLs will need to revise their criterias.)

Post edited by: MacPrawn, at: 2006/06/21 17:31
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Re:'Tagging' Checkout Pages - 2007/11/14 15:07 Just a thought, would it be possible for Monitus' script to do this behind-the-scenes in such a way that we check a box on our settings page. (i.e. When it recognizes a Yahoo! store checkout page it rewrites the URL to this simple form before sending to GA).
It's just a minor thing but it would make this easier for many of us. While the flexibility to come up with our own naming schemes is nice, there is probably a basic format that would be intuitive enough to work the vast majority of store owners.
Maybe something like:

/Checkout/Cart
/Checkout/Shipping
/Checkout/Billing
/Checkout/Shipping_Billing
/Checkout/Review
/Checkout/Paypal
/Checkout/Confirm/485
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Re:'Tagging' Checkout Pages - 2007/11/14 18:47 Actually, we already do something similar to this... Your URLs on the checkout page, will all look like:

/yahoo_checkout.html?ysco_key_store_id=you store ID§ionId=section ID

Where the sectionID can be ysco.cart, ysco.ship-bill, ysco.shipping, ysco.billing, ysco.review or ysco.confirm... Note that we can't get you the PayPal page, as our code doesn't run on PayPal pages... (no way to put custom cod eon there)

Does that fit your needs or am I missing something?

Thanks!
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Re:'Tagging' Checkout Pages - 2007/11/14 23:02 I noticed a paypal-dummy page in my list of cart pages so that's what I was referring to there. For me, I've excluded extraneous parameters so on any give day I might see things like this in my Top Content report

/yahoo_checkout.html?sectionId=ysco.cart
/yahoo_checkout.html?sectionId=ysco.shipping
/yahoo_checkout.html?sectionId=ysco.billing
/yahoo_checkout.html?sectionId=ysco.paypal-dummy

The paypal-dummy page is usually followed by a confirm in the event of a sale.

Now these are nice but they're separate entries in both my content drilldown report and my top content reports. By rewriting them as directories instead, they'd be grouped together in content drilldown but still separate in top content which I think is generally more helpful (or else, why have both views). I miss the dynamic content report from the old GA interface.
Is there a way to change these to directories with advanced filters by any chance?
Thanks,
-Brian
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Re:'Tagging' Checkout Pages - 2007/11/15 14:58 Good morning!

Hmmm - will have to check on the PayPal page thing, first I heard of this...

About the URL rewrites, you are right, I think your subdirectory approach is a very valid request... We'll adjust our tools accordingly - bear in min dthis will probably be a setting you turn "on" in your account, as we'll need to keep the old way for people already set-up in GA with the old rewritings (affects Funnels, goals, etc...)

Thanks!
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