Track admin orders

[refueledinc]

Is it possible to track orders in GA that are placed using the magento admin backend? If not, could this be a future enhancement? Many orders are placed by our customer service team using the backend and it would be great to track these orders in GA.

[studio2f]

This would be awesome. Especially if you could report to GA which admin generated the conversion.

[refueledinc]

@studio2f agreed, this would be awesome. At the very least it would be nice to somehow to differentiate backend orders from frontend in GA. That would allow us to run reports on how many orders were placed via our customer service team as opposed to the customer placing it themselves on the frontend.

[refueledinc]

Not sure if this would work, but maybe using "affiliation" under transaction data and passing "admin" or "frontend" depending how order was placed

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/ecommerce

[studio2f]

I just stumbled on a Magento Connect extension that does this-- it passes admin orders to GA. I'm not going to post the link here, because I'm a Fooman fanboy. I also don't want to add any untrusted extensions to my store. I'll wait and hope it gets added to Kristof's roadmap for a future version. It's worth waiting for it to be built the right way.

[refueledinc]

At 35:45 they talk about possible uses for the affiliation parameter: http://online-behavior.com/googleanalytics/tracking-ecommerce

[refueledinc]

@studio2f agreed. I'd rather stay with Fooman if possible. Otherwise, it's a reasonable option.

[fooman]

Thanks for the resources. This is currently not top of the list to be implemented - however thinking about the mechanics of this, would this not completely distort your numbers? For example conversion rate would be a lot higher than what your store front actually achieves.

If you just want to know who placed orders and how many through the back-end a custom report just for that purpose might be a better solution. Or I guess at a minimum track them to a different profile.

One further complication is around Magento's multistore capability. If you have multiple store fronts on separate domains there might be issues with getting the javascript to track from the correct domain.

[studio2f]

It's a lot like how AdWords now lets you track offline conversions:

http://searchengineland.com/adwords-debuts-offline-conversion-tracking-full-sales-cycle-optimization-171281

Our telephone orders almost 90% of the time are generated from Mobile Google Adwords ads that have the Call Extension enabled. The customer googles the product, see our Ad and clicks the "Call Now" button displayed on their phone next to our ad. That conversion happens offline. It's not tracked anywhere.

I'd love to be able to generate reports in GA that show me data like "on this day we had more admin orders then online orders" or "there was a spike in Admin orders when XX happened."

It would also be nice to have one place to go to that accurately displays a complete picture of total sales and products sold for any one day. The Magento Reports > Sales > Orders report is the only place that shows that info-- but it's missing where the customers came from or what they bought. All of our sales data in GA would be ideal.

To solve the conversion rate being too high-- we'd just segment out the Admin orders to get the view without offline sales.

[refueledinc]

I agree @studio2f . If using the affiliation parameter for admin orders I believe it's possible to segment out all admin orders if you don't want them in your GA reports or if you want to generate reports specifically for admin orders.

I don't feel admin orders will distort the data. It's possible for you to set up a separate profile. We typically set up one profile for orders with our office IP filtered out and another profile for no IP filtering. This helps us to prevent any distortion of metrics such as time on site, page views, etc.

Regarding the multistore setup and separate domains. This is exactly our setup, so indeed this is a concern for us. I have two ideas for this but haven't made any decision whether either will work well long term.

1. Setup a "fake" store just for admin orders. In our case, we have 5 stores, but all products are made available to every store. So for us, when the customer service rep places the order through the admin, they would simply select the "admin" store and place the order. This would allow us to generate reports for this "store" in magento and we could setup a profile with filters/segments just for this store in GA. That said, this is not my favorite idea. It's more of a hack and could be problematic.
2. If it's possible to use the affiliation parameter, each magento store could have it's own affiliation. For example: "Admin - Store 1", "Admin - Store 2", etc. Then in GA you would simply use advanced segments to slice and dice the data however you want.

[stevensagaar]

Here is the module which allows you send your Magento admin orders to Google Analytics along with custom source and medium which can set in system configuration.

http://www.scommerce-mage.co.uk/magento-google-enhanced-ecommerce-tracking.html

Hope it helps, thanks