I work on a site where the visitors can first place a request to receive a shipping package, where they place items, and after this they send the package with the items and receive compensation based on the items value. The first request leads to a thank you page. On the thank you page I send an ecommerce tracking hit (from javascript) with revenue 0. After the items are received from the visitor and a revenue is determined, there comes a second ecommerce hit (made from php by using the measurement protocol) with the same ecommerce tracking transaction id. I am storing the client id from the _ga cookie in the database when reaching the thank you page and send it with the second hit. The source/medium and most of the other dimensions register correctly in analytics but for some reason the initial transaction (with revenue 0) is kept, instead of being updated, and a new transaction with the same id but with a new date is created in analytics. Because of this there are a lot of duplicate transactions and mess up the reports. Is there no way of updating an existing transaction? The reason for having two hits is because the transaction must have the date when the visitor reached the thank you page and the revenue sent after a period of time (1-2 weeks).
1 Answers
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as far as I know you cannot update historical data in google analytics. Even if the thing that you were trying to do was successful you would still have to deal with doubled metrics such as 'Transactions'. My thought of going about it would be to store the timestamp that the user went to the thank you page in your database and then send it as a hit scope custom dimension along with the transaction hit at the time you want. This way you don't have double counted metrics, you have to solve less 'cryptic' GA issues and it allows you to analyze your data more easily.
