One of the great things about Google Analytics is the ability to view overall trends for your website. You can, for example, see how well all visitors who come from AdWords are reaching one of your goals. You can see how valuable the average visit from an email campaign is to your ecommerce business. You can see total transactions and revenue, and see what percentage of transactions are coming from a specific marketing source.
But what if you want to see where a specific transaction came from? What if you get a very large order and you want to see what the marketing source for that specific order is? Well, now you can, with a set of three custom filters that work together.
Here are the details:
The first filter in the set, which I’ll call Trans List Mod 1, grabs the campaign source and medium of a visit, and sticks in a custom field.
The second filter adds the keyword (bid term only) to the custom field. For those of you keeping score, the custom field now contains the source, medium, and keyword.
The final filter takes that custom field we created and appends it to the transaction order id. This matches up sources with specific transactions.
After you’ve created these filters, your filter list should look like this:
Click on the image for a larger viewMake sure the three filters appear in the order shown above.
The cumulative result of these filters will look something like this:
Click on the image for a larger viewAs you can see, the traffic source responsible for the transaction will now show up in the transaction list. Easy as pie!
A warning for the wise: I strongly advise you to create a new profile when using this filter set. Keep your other profiles neat and clean, and if you make a mistake with one of the filters, nothing will be hurt. Remember, once you mess up data in Google Analytics, there’s no way to get it back!
For those of you that decide to employ these filters, I’d love to hear your feedback. Feel free to post a comment, as we always love to hear what you have to say!
