This is why it doesn't work

I’ve spent several days troubleshooting this plugin. It does work, kind of and mostly, if you remember it won’t record analytics data when you’re logged in as admin.

What doesn’t work well is the enhanced ecommerce data. Initially it showed that all my products had 0 product list views and 0 add to cart events, yet somehow I still had sales transactions. After looking at the code, I discovered this is because the plugin uses 4 or 5 different methods of identifying the same products to Google when it sends analytics data, and Google apparently views them all as different, leading to hopelessly confused analytics. For a product named “Widget” with ID 10 and SKU 1234, the plugin will identify the product to Google in different ways like these:

ID: “10”
ID: “10”, Name: “Widget”
ID: “1234”, Name: “Widget”
ID: “#10”, Name: “Widget”
ID: “SKU: 1234”, Name: “Widget”

I’ve tried to fix this in the plugin code with some success, but it’s not as simple as I’d hoped. In some of the places where the analytics data is generated, the product name isn’t known, which is why sometimes it just sends a naked ID or SKU.

The other problem I’ve found is that less than half of my sales transactions are showing up in the Google analytics reports. I’m using Paypal Express for 100% of my transactions, so everyone is directed back to my site before confirming the transaction, where the plugin code should definitely be able to “see” the transaction and send the appropriate analytics event to Google. So far I haven’t found anything obviously different between the sales transactions that do get recorded in Google analytics, and those that don’t. I’m not sure if it’s a problem with this plugin, or a more general problem.

Another gotcha: If you use Paypal Express for everything, and so you’re suppressing the redundant WooCommerce checkout page in favor of the “Checkout with PayPal” button directly on the Cart page, this plugin will not record any checkout events. Google analytics will show that 100% of your shopping carts were abandoned. I tried to fix this by adding some extra code to the Paypal checkout button.

Overall this plugin seems like a good start, but appears to have a lot of little bugs and gotchas that will bite you if you’re doing anything non-standard. Maybe better to spend the time to do your own analytics integration manually, or hire someone to do it for you.