Google Analytics Personally Identifiable Information Compliance for Infusionsoft

KB2014110

If you're using our AnalyticsConnect.io software that automatically posts sales data from Infusionsoft into Google Analytics Ecommerce, you may have noticed what Google calls "personally identifiable information" showing up inside your Google Analytics data, which is in violation of the Google Analytics Terms of Service. This document will show you how to get in compliance.

First, we need to understand what's acceptable. Sending things like IP address, city, state, zip code, etc. aren't a problem because that type of data represents groups of people, rather than a specific individual. Additionally, it's okay to send things like a user id because without a list of your users, no one looking at your Google Analytics account could ever figure out that "User 12345" is "Bob Smith".

Writing a phone number into Google Analytics is however "personally identifiable information" because if someone called that number, Bob Smith would answer. Again the point being, a phone number by itself can identify a single person. So a phone number, first name, last name, social security number, and the street part of an address (such as 1234 Gunha Dr. Apt. 345) cannot be written into Google Analytics.

The solution to this is fairly simple. Start by doing a search through your Google Analytics data to see if you even have a problem with this. Sign in to your Google Analytics account, and click "Reporting" on the top menu bar. Then click on "Behavior" on the left sidebar. Under that, click on "Site Content" and then on "All Pages". Find the search field towards the middle of the page under the graph and search for "inf_field_FirstName" which corresponds to the Infusionsoft variable inf_field_FirstName. If you don't see any results, you're okay and there is nothing further that you need to do. If you get results, each result will look something like this:

/thank-you/?inf_field_PostalCode=20901&inf_field_FirstName=Jeffrey&inf_field_Country=United+States&
inf_field_StreetAddress1=4835+Bluff+Street&inf_field_Email=JeffreyBBrewer@example.com&inf_field_StreetAddress2=&
inf_field_Country2=null&inf_field_City2=null&inf_field_State=MD&inf_field_MiddleName=&
inf_field_City=Silver+Spring&inf_field_PostalCode2=null&inf_field_State2=null&inf_field_Company=&
inf_field_Address2Street2=null&inf_field_Address2Street1=null&inf_field_LastName=Brewer&orderId=173

Using the above example, the variables for "personally identifiable information" are:

inf_field_FirstName
inf_field_MiddleName
inf_field_LastName
inf_field_Email
inf_field_StreetAddress1
inf_field_StreetAddress2
inf_field_Address2Street1
inf_field_Address2Street2
inf_field_Company

We are going to tell Google Analytics to never record these variables (remove them from the URL). This won't change anything on your website, it just tells Google what parts of the URL to erase as it saves the URL. From inside your Google Analytics account, go to "Admin" (top menu bar) -> "View" -> "View Settings" and add these variables to "Exclude URL Query Parameters" as shown in the below example. Note the comma and space used to separate the variables.

After entering the variables, click the "Save" button and you're done. This won't change any historical data, but everything moving forward will be in compliance.

Related Resources

Google Analytics Cross-Domain Tracking For Infusionsoft

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