Recently I was reviewing some issues with missing order data after a deployment. We were receiving orders in our operational platform, but we weren’t seeing the corresponding data in our analytics platform. In order to stay in compliance, we don’t collect any PII in our analytics platforms, and only collect PII in the operational platform.
The initial approach was straightforward, if we’re receiving orders the users must be submitting the forms, but if we’re not seeing the purchase event, what events are the users generating?
First thing is to create a segment that meets these conditions. The idea is to isolate a smaller group of users to more easily see any trends. Here I built out a segment where during the current visit they clicked on the submit order button, combined with users who did not generate a Purchase event in the same visit.
To dig into pathing, Adobe Analytics has a good set of prebuilt reports, ‘Next Page’ and ‘Previous Page’, for our use case I needed the next page. Using my segment as the primary filter, I selected our Checkout page as the input.
From here, we saw a surge in users who were being redirected to the cart page. The next step included breaking down by the usual suspects of browser type, device type, and finally we noticed the drop in tracking for a specific payment type.
The lesson learned was to add Purchases by Payment Type to the team’s KPI dashboard to monitor with releases!
