Track “add to cart” as Transaction for affiliate website

  • Hi!

    I’m using Google Tag Manager for WordPress and loving the plugin, so thank you!

    I’m playing around with developing an affiliate website using Woocommerce and Wzone. It all works great and I’ve got all the tracking working as expected via GTM and Enhanced Ecommerce in GA.

    Given that it’s an affiliate site though, using external woocommerce products, there is no successful transaction as such. Instead the woocommerce “buy” button redirects the user to the vendor’s site. This correctly fires the gtm4wp.addProductToCartEEC event when clicked so I can see “successful” transactions (shown as products added to cart). I also passing through the value of the item at that stage so I can create “Cart Value” reports etc.

    I was considering though whether it’d be better to track a click on the buy button as a transaction so I can make the most of the GA reports. I’m not sure on the best way to do this though? Should I:

    1. Replace the gtm4wp.addProductToCartEEC with gtm4wp.orderCompletedEEC (I notice this is depreacted)
    2. Use the gtm4wp.addProductToCartEEC event to fire a Transaction Tag in GTM (not even sure this works with Advanced Ecommerce)
    3. Do something else that’s cleverer than the above!

    Any help would be hugely appreciated.

    Thanks!

    • This topic was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by lukeyboy247.
    • This topic was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by lukeyboy247.
Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • Plugin Author Thomas Geiger

    (@duracelltomi)

    Hi,

    I am not sure what advantage you will have if you track add to cart events as transactions? Actually you can not be confident that the user really placed an order on the external site so all you could measure is the opportunity you transferred to the affiliated sites.

    What if you just pass the cart value as the event value with the add to cart event and you create an event based goal where you use the event value as the goal value. With that, you could have almost the same data as with transaction tracking.

    There are two cases however where transaction tracking could be more beneficial:
    – lifetime value and conversion probability reports usually need ecommerce transaction tracking to happen
    – goals are measured as one / goal / session where ecommerce transactions are of course measured each time they happen

    In that case, you could use a custom javascript variable to generate the purchase data layer code using the data in the data layer for the add to cart event:
    https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/enhanced-ecommerce#purchases

    You will need to somehow generate a unique transaction ID. The current date/time and a random number could be enough for that.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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