Volusion’s Mysterious Google Analytics Tracker UA-7453698

Today, I’ve spent some hours trying to figure out our clients’ Volusion e-commerce websites having a mysterious Google Analytics tracker ID, UA-7453698.Just recently, Google Analytics started migrating most of our accounts from the classic asynchronous Google Analytics trackers to Universal Analytics. This prompted us to look into the tracking codes of some E-commerce websites we handle. When Volusion sites were already up for tracking code customization, here’s what we’ve noticed.

1. Our Google Tag Manager implementation had some Javascript conflicts as per Chrome browser based Tag Assistant by Google plugin.

2. Two (2) Google Analytics trackers were detected. One of which is the mysterious UA-7453698!

We looked at the templates and html files to delete the said script. However; we could not remove it from the files. The script is hidden.  Here’s the code:

<script type=”text/javascript”>

var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push([‘vTrack._setAccount’, ‘UA-7453698-1’]); _gaq.push([‘vTrack._trackPageview’]); (function () { var ga = document.createElement(‘script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true; ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’; var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); var vURI = window.location.pathname; if (vURI === ‘/’) { vURI = ‘default.asp’; }

</script>

After some hours, we already started Google-ing for clues and answers. Here’s what we’ve found out below.  We’ve looked at a number of websites on the list and true enough, the UA-7453698 is present to a lot of the Volusion websites! It turned out that Volusion has been adding the said Google Analytics tracking code for their own usage based on an article we’ve read here. I just don’t know if other Volusion e-commerce website owners are really aware of this practice. From the list we saw, there are at least 50 sites with the mentioned Analytics code.

Take note though that the pesky UA-7453698 tracker only appears whenever you are logged in into your account that is, if you’ve already applied the mobile analytics implementation that was recently released by Volusion to your site. If not yet, it remains on your website even if you are not logged-in.

Is this something of a big issue or not? What do you think?