The reality of Universal Analytics Tracking Offline Conversions:

By Beacon News | Published April 22, 2014 | Categories: Google Analytics

By now you've heard the hype that Universal Analytics was designed to track users and all their interaction including offline conversions. While Universal Analytics does provide additional measurement capabilities, it is important to understand what those are and what the challenges are with implementing these.

Universal Analytics essentially assigns a visitor with a unique ID that you can use with the API to push additional hits to the GA servers that will be assigned to that user. So if you know John Smith at your retail location bought a pair of shoes, as long as you know John Smith was on the website and his unique visitor ID is 123456779, then you can push a virtual hit that represents that transaction into GA.

So the big question is how do you know John Smith at the store is the same John Smith that was on the website 2 weeks ago and even more curious is how do you know what his unique GA visitor ID is? And once you know that, how do you go about pushing a virtual transaction hit into GA associated with John Smith’s unique identifier. And on top of that, how do you go about creating meaningful reports of the data?

The short answer to making Universal Analytics provide this is a really complex series of matching algorithms that have to be executed outside of Google Analytics, new database creations and systems integration, highly customized tracking scripts, highly customized post transaction jobs that process data autonomously, and a fully customized setup and configuration implementation. So while the idea on the surface sounds very attractive, being able to actually use Universal Analytics in this method can be a very costly and time consuming activity. For a fully custom implantation, back-end system integration, and system automation, you are likely easily looking at a six figure plus project which pushes this functionality out of the price range of the majority of businesses.

This is exactly why we built GAFusion. We've built the entire system described above that you can easily plug into. And because we built this as a SAS model, the cost of building, maintaining, updating, and improving the system and functionality is distributed across all of our clients. This means you can have this highly sophisticated system and take full advantage of the new functionality of Universal Analytics for a fraction of the cost. Implementation is super easy because all you have to do is add a single tracking script site wide to your site and provide us a with an XML feed of your offline conversions to track.

The coolest part is that it functions with both async and universal analytics so even if you aren't ready to upgrade to Universal Analytics, you can still get the full benefit of the hyped functionality. When you are ready to migrate, we can take care of that for you and keep your data flowing. If this sounds too good to be true, give our free trial a test. If you aren't a believer once you try GAFusion, there’s no commitment. That’s how confident we are in our system that allows you to take full advantage of Universal Analytics tracking offline conversions and transactions.

For more information, read up on how it works here or contact us to step through a demo and get started today.