Hi, At the moment, when someone purchases something, they need to see the thanks.php page, in order to run the google javascript to account for a sale. Only half of my customers ever see the thanks.php page, because after they puchase from Paypal, it doesn't redirect them to that page automatically (they have to manually click a link). Does anyone have any ideas how to get around this? Is there a better place to put the code besides the thanks.php?? Ronnie
Yeah, was gonna suggest that too: Auto Return: On Return URL: http://www.yoursite.com/amember/thanks.php David
You can find that option in PayPal under: Profile -> Website Payment Preference -or- https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_profile-website-payments
yes but... Ah, so I played around with this a few years ago. I have Auto Return on, but the problem with Auto Return, is that it only works sometimes, in the words of Paypal: So if a customer does not wish to sign up for a Paypal account, they will NOT be returned automatically to your thank you page. The only way to guarantee that they are returned (and therefore that your analytics will record the conversion) is to force all customers to create a Paypal account by switching "PayPal Account Optional" to Off. This of course means though that every customer would be required to create a Paypal account in order to finish their transaction (or use an existing Paypal account). I played around with this, and it did effect my conversions, so I turned it off. None of you guys have experienced this problem??? Cheers, Ronnie
Just to be clear, your saying that 50% of all of your customers are new PayPal customers that are not clicking through to return to your site? This is a known issue across all carts/scripts that use PayPal. For 100%, the only way to deal with it would be something to keep track of whether the user has been shown the thanks page for a transaction on each page load (or load to member.php?).. which opens a whole other set of issues up and as it turns out doesn't work for sites like a few of mine where users buy, are emailed content and never return to the site. What we do is to analyze our funnel and create a variance percentage for PayPal based on known time and value. This allows you to extrapolate an estimate of abandoned versus tracked abandoned for PayPal. This is certainly not 100%, but close enough for us.
How It really is about 50%! I would be very much interested in implementing something like that. Does anyone have a solution they can share?
Has their been a resolution to this yet? What I am doing is asking people to click the "return to merchant" button right next to the order button.
I know the following is not a solution but merely a fix. How about instead of 'asking' why not 'telling' them with a firm good reason why they have to click the link and return to your site? Think in terms of reasons to avoid pain / gain pleasure. Something like: they better click the link because then they get a valuable bonus. Or if they don't click they miss out on a receipt that they need for tax purposes. I'm making these examples up as I write, but you caught my drift, right? Spend some time to come up with a couple of reasons and then test them to see which one works best. Post a couple of those reasons here, so we can expand on it like a creative brainstorm Erwin
Are you supposed to put the google code into the "Thanks.php" page, or one of the template (HTML) pages? Thanks! Randy
Hi Erwinvdb, Thanks...But I think I may have asked the wrong question (in the wrong area?). I think that area in aMember CP is just for tracking Analytics. I'm looking to add the code for Google's "Conversion" tracking... Thanks! Randy
In the footer is the standard Google Analytics code. The thanks.html template contains the Google code to register a sale (that's also Google Analytics). Or do you mean Google Conversion Optimizer? That's not implemented as it requires a different approach and not just plain conversion tracking.
Yup, I mean the Google Conversion Optimizer...Which I have the JS code that Google produces, but I'm not sure if I should put it on the thanks.php page, or one of the template pages (HTML).