In the following article we want to describe the conversion tracking via Google Analytics to you, when using a payment service provider.

PCI 3.1 requires that the fields to enter the credit card data are provided by the payment service provider. For the integration of the credit card data is therefor a redirection to the payment service provider necessary. This leads to biases in the tracking of Google Analytics.

E-Commerce Tracking via Google Analytics

By using Google Analytics shop owners can control and analyse the turnovers of their shop. With Google Analytics you can check how many visits the website has and how long they last, how high the payment cancellation rate is and how the turnovers of the web shop evolve.

After the implementation of the e-commerce tracking code for the web shop, you can access the statistics of Google Analytics about the shop visits, conversion, sold products etc. By examining the referral overview you can track the domains from which the transaction was made.

If you are using a payment service provider to process credit cards, it can happen that the statistic is distorted because the URL of the payment service provider is in the referral statistic included.

Distortion of Referrals

The distortion of the referrals creates a biased impression of the actual sources of the shop visits. It is very important to ascribe the link to the actual transaction, when you want to track the transaction links. You can solve this issue by excluding the respective URLs from the referrals.

Manual to Track Distorted Referrals

With one simple step you can track the unsolicited referrals:

Add the payment service provider to your referral exclusion list. To do so, log in to your Google Analytics account.

1. Click “Admin” and then “Property”
2. Click “Tracking Info”
3. Click “Referral Exclusion List”
4. Add a domain with “+ADD REFERRAL EXCLUSION“

Attention: This step doesn’t solve your referral problem in Google Analytics. It just helps you to track the actual referrer. If you exclude a payment service provider, it won’t start a new web session when a customer returns to your shop after the payment. If you don’t add the payment service provider to the referral exclusion list, it will start every time a new web that leads to the distortion of your traffic data.
Please note that this step to exclude the domain of the provider only works for future gathered data. The preceded visits will persist.