DOS attack against Rackspace

Posted on December 6, 2014

At around 5pm PST on 12/5/14 we noticed a degradation of our service. We called in the issue to our hosting provider Rackspace who confirmed that the network section that our load balancer is located on was under a Denial of Service (DOS) attack. Rackspace was able to fix the issue at 6.30pm PST. The unfortunate result is that our tracking would not have worked during that time frame, including sending data to Google Analytics. Since our code is loaded asynchronously, users should have been able to continue using and placing orders on stores.

I should also mention that if you have noticed a higher than usual percentage of missing transactions (>5%) in Google Analytics in the past two weeks, this is a separate issue. Yahoo! tech support has confirmed that under some circumstances the order status instead of the order confirmation page would load when an order has been placed. In that case no order information would be sent to Google Analytics.

I am really sorry about this issue.

Michael Whitaker

Enhanced Ecommerce

Posted on July 23, 2014

Enhanced Ecommerce is a set of new Google Analytics features and reports that are, as the name suggests, geared towards online retailers. It allows for analysis and reporting that was simply not possible before. Up to now, the only time you actually send ecommerce and product data to Google Analytics was on the order confirmation page. You’d have no idea how many times those products were actually viewed, added or removed from the cart. With enhanced ecommerce you can now get true product conversion rates. You can even track refund data from canceled orders.

Naturally, the ability to capture and send this data to Google Analytics requires new tagging and significant programming. Luckily, we have done all the hard work so you don’t have to! Out of the box, we capture:

Product SKU views.
Product add-to-carts.
Product removes from cart.
Product checkouts.
Coupon tracking.
Product refunds of canceled orders.

In order to add this to your account you’ll have to:

Upgrade to Universal Analytics. Many accounts have already been auto-migrated.
Update monitus tracking code on your site.
Enable enhanced ecommerce in Google Analytics.
Optionally, enable API access to your Yahoo! Store order data and Google Analytics API if you want to track canceled orders

Data access to Google Analytics and Yahoo Store for refund data

Posted on July 23, 2014

In order to send refund data of canceled orders, our app needs to have access to the Google Analytics API and the Yahoo! Store Order API. Note that if you do not want or need to track refund data, you can still get Enhanced Ecommerce. Also note that refunds are checked once daily.

Here is how to enable this:

Log in to your .monitus.net account and click on Analyze > Web Analytics Connector in the Tools Settings menu: