Dear GA forum visitors, Today I have been very busy for one of our clients resolving a major delta between transactions being registered within Google Analytics vs. transaction within the SAP back office system. Although they don't use Google Analytics as their primary reporting tool for e-commerce a difference of approx. 20% is always unwanted as long as you cannot explain it. After checking the most ordinary and basic elements of the implementation as for example a proper implementation of the tracking code on every confirmation page. I moved on to a more in dept analysis of all transactions that were successfully logged in SAP but not into Google. As this (big) client has over 4500 e-commerce orders on a daily base it was really a heck of job. After clustering all sales, product categories, amount, SKU I still didn't found the case that was causing this big amount of delta between the two environments, just some little strange payment issues. So I printed a subset of all transactions we were missing in Google Analytics and took this with me for lunch.... after staring to this dataset I finally saw in one column a corresponding occurrence which could cause the delta. Some transactions contained products names with a Quotation mark in it but not all of them. For example a product name occurs as Montepulciano d'Abruzzo on the site and within the Product Information Management system. After lunch we did some more research in GA and came to the (logic and obvious) conclusion that GA cannot handle any quotation marks within the product names or other e-commerce variable content. All transactions which contain 1 or more product(s) with an symbol like this, failed and were completely missing within GA, so not just the product/sku but the complete order as the GA tracking script failed executing. Although I am happy we finally found the issue I was exactly wondering which other known symbols cannot be handle by the e-commerce tracking code? Or just simply avoid this one and all REGEX codes? But how will it handle specific character sets for example? Tomorrow I will nosedive deeper in these specific cases but already wanted to share this with you all so you can avoid this mistake but also I can use some help in addition on this. Thanks in advance. Rwin PS. Delta/difference Google vs SAP is back from 20% to 3,2%. YEAHAA! With over 4% Javascript disabled browsers.
Thanks but I am still wondering which other known symbols cannot be handle by the e-commerce tracking code of Google Analytics. Please let me know if you have insights on this.