Recently, I’ve started engaging in work related to online education platforms. During this period, I’m very grateful for having the opportunity to compare and thoroughly examine various services.
Overall, the processes I’ve been involved in have primarily focused on sales and upsell. You can access some of the relevant posts via the LMS tag. Let’s now discuss the tracking processes related to payment methods.
Payment Transactions
When a product or service is purchased or a subscription is acquired in an online environment, customers carry out payment transactions directly or indirectly through protocols between banks. For a given order to be completed, the transaction must be verified by the parties involved through the payment method. Of course, alternatives such as in-person payments are also available, but I will focus primarily on online payment methods. As mentioned earlier, the parties involved can be direct banks or third-party service providers such as PayPal, PayU, Stripe, Apple Pay, or Google Pay. In most cases, banks directly execute payment transactions through the relevant service. Payment is made via the designated card and transferred to the counterparty. However, payment systems may also approach the process in a slightly different way. For instance, PayPal may hold a balance, which you can use for your transactions. In some cases, payments can even be collected by linking them to mobile and similar services.
Direct Payment Gateways
: The user can complete the payment process without leaving the website or application. Examples include Authorize.net, PayPal PayFlow Pro, SagePay, Stripe.
External Payment Gateways
: The user completes the payment process through an external page belonging to the payment system. Upon successful payment, the user is redirected back to the relevant web page or application. Examples include 2Checkout, Citrus Payments, PayPal Express Checkout, ePay, Skrill.
Payment Result Processing
After a payment system confirms a successful transaction, it sends a success message or parameter regardless of whether the payment was direct or external. This enables the website or application to recognize that the payment has been completed and to proceed with the corresponding action. However, in external payment gateway systems, redirection occurs through a different source, which causes monitoring services such as Google Analytics to detect a new session initiation. Some payment systems support the use of the linker parameter by providing integration with Google Analytics. In such cases, session sharing across domains can be achieved through domain name configuration, as described in session sharing between domains.
In other cases, since the user originates from a different source and the existing session cannot be matched with a Client ID, a new session is initiated. This situation not only affects the number of sessions but also impacts other metrics such as conversion rates, bounce rates, and average session duration. If you are tracking ecommerce activities, you will observe that the domain name used during the payment process is reported as a referral. Consequently, the performance metrics of your advertising campaigns will lose consistency1 2.
Although the solution to this issue is related to the integrations provided by the payment method, some basic steps may also prove beneficial.
Referral Exclusion
We can exclude domain names appearing as referrals through the Property level “Referral Exclusion” feature provided by Google Analytics. Simply follow the Admin > Property > Tracking Info > Referral Exclusion List steps to achieve this. After adding the relevant domain, referrals generated after payment authorization will not be included in the list and will correctly reflect the user’s source traffic (CPC, Email, Organic, etc.).
*[upsell]: Upsell. Persuading the customer to purchase a more expensive product and/or service than the one they originally selected.