Tracking offline conversions with Google Analytics

3
votes

On a website with affiliate links, where there is no programmatic access to the conversion logs, I treat it as offline conversions.

My Setup

Online

  1. A user visit my website, see the affiliated ad and a promotion view hit is being sent.
  2. When the user clicks the ad, a promotion click hit is being sent and the user is redirected to another page on my site.
  3. On the "redirection page", an product view hit is being sent, and the user is being redirected to the affiliation link, passing his Google Analytics clientId.

Offline

  1. Once a week I download the stats from the affiliate program, which looks something like: 
clientId                 visits    conversions    revenue  
4444444444.3333333333    1         0              $0
1234567890.1234567890    1         1              $16.40

Then I use the Measurement Protocol to send offline events:

  1. For each line of visit, I send a product click hit.
  2. For each line of conversion, I send a product purchase hit.

My Problem

The conversion shows up on the eCommerce report:

Because the offline hits are being sent after the original session is already closed, a new session is opened which doesn't contain the info about the user. So I can't see the conversion on the demographic report, for example:

Optional Solution?

I'm thinking of using the user-id feature of Google Analytics.
Even though the users are not identified, I can identify them by their clientId.
Sure, this is not what Google intended when they introduced that feature, but I believe it will solve my issue. I'm just not sure about the negatives.

My Questions

  1. Any feedback on my setup?
  2. Why is it even necessary to pass the clientId after the session is closed? what kind of information is being shared between the real session and the offline hit?
  3. Is it a bad idea to pass the clientId as a userId to Google Analytics? Why?

Relevant Articles

1
google-analyticsuniversal-analyticsenhanced-ecommerce
Thanks for your quesiton. I have exactly the same problem and I am very curious what worked for you? Please let me know! - Robbert
Wow! Your question itself eliminates a set of mine! - Eugene

1 Answers

0
votes

We were able to link offline action through as you did with measurement protocol but the problem is that those sessions are not included in demographic and age report.

Rather looking those report I used them to do segmented analysis E.g. pages they have look at, sources they used to come also I used it with attribution model to understand best channels to drive more conversions.

Yes you can use CID as a user ID but I haven't tried it with offline tracking. Share the result with us.