I see lots of garbled data in my e-commerce reports. Why? (posted: 8/8/2008)

Rating: +0

If you're seeing lots of garbled data in your e-commerce reports, it's probably due to extraneous characters in your transaction and item records in the hidden form field on your e-commerce page. A tell tale sign of this problem will be lots of percent signs (%) followed by a two digit alpha-numeric.

The cause of this problem is the way that Google encodes your e-commerce data for transmission to the server. Google uses the JavaScript escape function to convert all non-alphanumeric characters. More on this process can be read in this knowlegebase article.

To solve this problem, take the following steps:

1. Complete a purchase transaction for your website.
2. When you arrive at the page that contains the hidden form field that Google Analytics uses to track your e-commerce data view the HTML source for that page.
3. Look at the transaction and item lines in the hidden field. All non-alphanumeric characters, except for white spaces and periods, will be converted to a percent sign followed by the characters two digit hexadecimal equivalent (i.e. gibberish).
4. Change your code to remove these special characters from the transaction and item records.

Once the modifications are made, your e-commerce data should begin to make more sense. This change only affects your future data. If you would like your historical transactions corrected please contact us to re-process your Google Analytics data.