Enhanced Ecommerce

Enhanced Ecommerce is a set of new Google Analytics features and reports that are, as the name suggests, geared towards online retailers. It allows for analysis and reporting that was simply not possible before. Up to now, the only time you actually send ecommerce and product data to Google Analytics was on the order confirmation page. You’d have no idea how many times those products were actually viewed, added or removed from the cart. With enhanced ecommerce you can now get true product conversion rates. You can even track refund data from canceled orders.

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Naturally, the ability to capture and send this data to Google Analytics requires new tagging and significant programming. Luckily, we have done all the hard work so you don’t have to! Out of the box, we capture:

  • Product SKU views.
  • Product add-to-carts.
  • Product removes from cart.
  • Product checkouts.
  • Coupon tracking.
  • Product refunds of canceled orders.

In order to add this to your account you’ll have to:

Data access to Google Analytics and Yahoo Store for refund data

In order to send refund data of canceled orders, our app needs to have access to the Google Analytics API and the Yahoo! Store Order API. Note that if you do not want or need to track refund data, you can still get Enhanced Ecommerce. Also note that refunds are checked once daily.

Here is how to enable this:

Log in to your .monitus.net account and click on Analyze > Web Analytics Connector in the Tools Settings menu:

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Click on the button to grant our app access to your Google Analytics data and follow the prompts.

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Load the same page again and make sure you select the right view in case you have more than one view for the same profile:

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In the Store Manager, click Real-Time Links.

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Add New Partner:

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Enter: ypa-005238765647

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Check the Order API option. Click Next to accept the terms and you’re done!

Complete infrastructure overhaul

As you unfortunately likely noticed over the past few weeks, our service has been a bit choppy at times. We wanted to clarify what happened, and why we had to go through this.

We’ve been providing our tools to Yahoo! merchants for a little over 8 years now and over that period of time, our tools have grown and morphed, meaning our technological needs have also grown – and morphed. Plus, technology in general has also evolved. So after all these years, it was time for us to undertake a complete infrastructure review, which we did late last year. It quickly became apparent that there was some better hardware out there that we could use to improve our service, and so we embarked on the long journey of migrating all our existing hardware to new equipment. We held off on doing that last fall, to avoid any disruption during your very busy holiday season, and only got around to it in late february.

The process didn’t go as smoothly as we had hoped and expected. We apologize again for the bumps and issues you were subjected to over these few weeks of migration. We want to assure you that we did everything that we could to make the transition as smooth as possible, but have learned quite a few tricks and gotchas that will make the next migration – in another 8 years, hopefully! – much smoother than this one.

That being said, we are very happy to announce that the move, although bumpy, was worth it: our service’s speed has gone up 40-50%.

app-response

The new hardware will also allow reports to be generated a bit faster, as well as offer better capacity for the big holiday season and other traffic spikes.

We thank you very much for your support and patience, and hope that you feel the difference and benefit from better serving times. As for us, we are now moving on to improving our tools and offering you even more goodies. We are always working with you guys in mind, trying to find new ways to make things better and easier for you and your business.

Thank you,

Michael and Jean.

Service Downtime

Last night our new web servers suddenly went silent, around 7PM Pacific Time. To make matters worst, our monitoring service failed to warn us of the downtime.

When the issue was discovered this morning at 4AM Pacific Time, it was immediately fixed. But that unfortunately means that Google Analytics data will be missing for that time period.

Any store using our latest code installation would still have loaded their pages unimpeded; however, any store still using our older code installation might have seen their pages slower to load. We urge anyone of you that has “monitus_init” installed on their store pages to contact us so we can schedule a code upgrade and avoid slow downs in the future.

We are now actively seeking the cause of the two problems (the web server fault and the monitor’s failure to warn us) to better prevent, and react to such incidents in the future.

Please accept our most sincere apologies,

Michael and Jean at Monitus.net.