Duplicate transactions when visit success page again

Hello,

I’ve used this plugin with dozens of WooCommerce client to migrate Google Analytics implementation to Tag Manager and set up Enhanced Ecommerce tracking.

Currently having this issue with 2 of my clients, and not sure how to tackle it.

The first client the issue started as soon as the client updated to a custom WooCommerce theme that doesn’t maintain the same standard WooCommerce HTML structure this plugin relies upon. That actually caused a bunch of other problems (that I overcame by adapting my GTM infrastructure), but now for some reason:

— Each transaction is being counted twice, despite the dataLayer showing correct actionField and products objects.
— Transactions are counted again if a visitor returns to the Order-Received page.

so with that client, I see for a single transaction ID – 2/4/6/8/etc transactions.

The second client used DIVI theme to create a WooCommerce store selling a single product with Stripe and PayPal being payment processors.

With DIVI I also had an issue that the standard WooCommerce HTML structure wasn’t maintained, and adapted the scripts. The transaction data is being tracked correctly. However, I’ve noticed a few transactions where the visitor returned to the Order-Received page, and again, 2 transactions were counted for the same transaction ID.

I guess what I’m asking is, how exactly does your plugin attempt to prevent transaction double-counting? Timestamp? Cookie?

I need to understand how it works in order to diagnose the problem.

Thanks!
Tim.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by timaltman.

Hi Tim,

My plugin flags every transaction so that they do not get duplicated at all.
Similar behavior is usually caused by a theme or another plugin that also executes the transaction tracking next to my plugin.

Are you sure there aren’t and other Google Analytics related plugins active on those sites? Sometimes plugins that seems to offer a dashboard also activate the tracking which can cause such issues.

Hi @duracelltomi

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.

I’m positive that there isn’t a second plugin that’s causing this. On one of the sites (carrymeaway.com), the issue appeared after we’ve migrated to a custom WordPress theme, that doesn’t follow WooCommerce HTML structures (just hooks).

I’ve been optimizing the conversions of that site for over a year. First thing I did when coming on board was set up EE with your plugin, and the double transaction issue appeared on May 1st, while we were in the process of migrating to the new site.

More so, it’s appears that there are 2 issues at the moment:
— Every transaction is recorded twice, though in dataLayer I see correct data, and GTM is only configured to push EE event once.
— a double transaction is recorded every time a customer returns to TY page.

The second website (dygma.com), is set up using DIVI theme. There I had to get a bit creative with my GTM tags, because some dataLayer events were missing because I think the plugin couldn’t scrape them properly from DOM. But there was no issue with the Purchase event as far as I can tell.

There are 2 issues with this site:
— Some Transactions are missing while others are working. Not sure how this could be.
— I see 2 transactions under one transaction ID (happened once during the last month since I’ve set up this infrastructure).

Can you please elaborate on how your plugin “Flags Transactions” do I can ask my developer to take a look at the site’s HTML and make sure the issue isn’t coming from there?

I’m not experiencing these issues with 10 other sites where I have your plugin set up

Thanks,
Tim

Hi Tim,

Sorry for this longer radio silence!

I was checking your site:
https://www.carrymeaway.com/shop/

Here I can see that my plugin is active.
I can also see that product impressions are being added by my plugin into the data layer.
But I can also see that a gtag.js code is also active which adds the Google Ads remarketing code. This should be replaced with the Google Ads tag template on the GTM UI (you should not mix gtag.js and GTM on the same page)

I can also see that there are some custom JS codes inside your GTM container that also adds product data into the data layer, why is that?

I’ve placed a test order on the site and I can see that my plugin adds the proper transaction data into the site code but I can also see that you custom JS codes inside your GTM container is adding it again.

Generally I am curious what those custom JS codes inside your GTM container are? I mean why do you add every ecommerce data on your own next to what my plugin adds to track ecommerce data?

Hi @duracelltomi

Sorry for taking so long to respond. I’ve combed through our implementation and found the main issue. One of my implementation experts has set both the Google Analytics Page View and Purchase Events to pass Ecommerce data from dataLayer into Google Analytics. As a result, the EE data was being passed twice for every transaction.

For the most part, those custom JS codes were used to create an event that would trigger both the EE Custom Event (Checkout, Purchase, etc) to be sent to Google Analytics, AND the Facebook Pixel Purchase standard event push using the same trigger.

In this case, however, I agree with you that this wasn’t necessary, and so I have altered the GA infrastructure to your recommendations. Now that we pass all None-interaction EE events data into GA with the Page View tag, 80% of all double transactions issues have been resolved.

However, not all issues have been resolved, and I’ve been breaking my head to figure out the source of the remaining 20%. I believe that I’ve just found it!

You’ve mentioned that your plugin comes with built-in functionality to prevent EE Purchase data from being pushed into the dataLayer upon repeat visits of the TY page. Unfortunately, this functionality only works correctly on desktop devices.

I can share screenshots from my client’s Google Analytics that show that even before we’ve switched to the new website, we were double-counting transactions on mobile devices.

This problem was so much harder to find because:
————————————————
1. I assumed that the issue was caused by the move to the new website, which was built on a non-standard WooCommerce theme.

2. I can’t use Google Tag Manager Debug Mode on a mobile device. On a desktop, this feature of your plugin works perfectly.

Any advice on the best way to overcome this issue? Did anyone else report it?

• This reply was modified 6 years, 6 months ago by timaltman.

Thanks for this very deep testing of your issue.
I tested this plugin on mobile devices on my test webshop and did not find any such malfunction. This does not mean there is nothing to correct here but it must be related something more specific.

The next plugin version (hopefully released this week) will include an option to prevent any order being flagged as being tracked. This might help you as well.

But with Chrome, you also have remote debugger which might help you see the network requests made in your mobile Chrome:
https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/remote-debugging/