Google Analytics as an "I acknowledge" button under Admin/Property/Data Settings/Data Collection.
The text under it reads: "I acknowledge that I have the necessary privacy disclosures and rights from my end users for the collection and processing of their data, including the association of such data with the visitation information Google Analytics collects from my site and/or app property."
I can't find any explanation of what the necessary privacy disclosures are or what rights I need to get from end users.
What are the disclosures? What are the rights?
Any mention of the button outside of Google only says to simply click it.
Do I need to show users a website popup that they have to agree to?
Do I need put a tiny notice at the bottom of the website?
Do I need to bury legalese deeply inside a terms of use page that nobody reads?
Is this a dirty little secret where Google really needed permission, but they trust that site owners will simply click the button and take culpability for not actually asking the end users?
Related
I know that by going to Audience>Geo>Location I can see which state uses my website the most
Is there a way to tell what search term/keywords the people in those state uses the most when they visit my website?
When I put in "keyword" and "search query" as secondary dimension in analytics, the result is (not set) or (not provided).
Is it something with my settings or is it google not letting us view user search by state?
Is there another analytics tool that would give me that info?
Back in 2010, Google announced that it would no longer provide the keyword data as a result personalising our search experiences based on our behaviour, and this change has been implemented in the interest of protecting the privacy of the searcher.
I believe Google did it also to push on Google Ads, in that case it is possible to know the keywords entered by users who click on the ads link.
Analytic tagging service like Google Analytics, Firebase Analytics, Amplitude, MixPanel, Flurry etc all requires you to map a tag name to an action in your application like a button click or a page view.
For a small application, it is easy to keep track of the tag as in you would know which tag does what in which page. But in a huge application where you have hundreds of tags, it is hard to keep track of which tag does what.
The result is stakeholders regularly asks the developer to trace back to that particular action and provide them with the tag name.
For a non-technical person (without debugging or looking at the code), how does one knows which tag does what in which page? Is there any tools to help keep track of the tags?
You need Tag Management System, for example, Google Tag Manager.
I'd like to track screenviews in my website, is this possible or are screenviews just meant to be used on apps? If so, how can I do it? Let me give you an overview of my situation.
I am restructuring a web site. Some of the pages that used to live under differents urls are now living under the same, with a hash id to denote the particular area of the page the user is in. So, for example, http://www.example.com/topics/topicA, http://www.example.com/problems/topicA and http://www.example.com/equations/topicA, are now in http://www.example.com/topics/topicA#content, http://www.example.com/topics/topicA#problems and http://www.example.com/topics/topicA#equations.
Now, I'd like to keep track of users visiting these areas. My initial idea was send a page view when the url is loaded and send a screenview each time the user clicks on the button to change the area of the page (i.e. #content, #problemas or #equations). For doing so, I used something like ga('send', 'screenview', {'screenName': 'content',});. As I couldn't see the screenviews in reports, I played a bit, setting the app name, the app id, the installer id etc before sending the screenview, for example:
ga('set', {
'appName': 'myAppName',
'appId': 'myAppId',
'appVersion': '1.0',
'appInstallerId': 'myInstallerId'
});
ga('send', 'screenview', {'screenName': 'content',});
So I can't see the screenviews in the real time reports (though I can see the page views). I can't see them in the regular reports either. I decided to create custom reports with dimensions Page and Screen name. There, I see sometimes screenviews are tracked (I think it happens when I set the appid etc before sending it, but not sure about this point).
Are screen views adecuate for tracking this behaviour or should I use just events, as I'm not on an app at all (just a responsive website)?
By the way, I am using Drupal 7 but that shouldn't make a difference.
Thanks in advance for your time and I hope I am making my question clear enhough.
Technically speaking its probably possible to send both pageviews and screenviews to the same Google Analytics web property.
The problem you will have is seeing the information. The way the Website is set up its either application or web account, Screenviews or pageviews. The reports are different, and you cant swap between them.
So you could send screenviews to a web site web property but you would never be able to analyse it on the website you would have to use the API to rip the data out. That and you would be analyzing apples and cars. Screenviews and pageviews are different they cant be analysed together.
Because of this web property's should be kept separate one for application (screenviews) one for web sites (pageviwes).
You should in my opinion do this using events.
+1 for an interesting question that made me think :)
Is possible, actually in BigQuery you can reach both data and see how this interact, both will have the same schema and will be stored in the same dataset(it is linked the raw data view). Even in the same sessions, you can send pageview and screen views having funny results.
But there is some important consideration when you implement this.
You need 2 different views, one Web View and One App View. Both views will let you access to different information and is not possible on the web interface of Google Analytics to access to both info at the same time. Not sure if with the API you can access to both info at the same time, I think that is totally possible
In the App View, you will able to see only information of screenview, events and ecommerce.Is also mandatory the App Name parameter on this hits.
In the Web View, you will able to see only the pageview reports,events and events.
The ecommerce info and events will be reachable from both views, there is no way to know if this comes from a web or an app ( technically). So is tricky to read this kind of reports in that case.
Sessions can experiment stranges behaviors. As example gosht sessions coming from the screen view with no page view, sending events.
Taking this into consideration, as Dalmto says, the best to you is use events or sent virtualpage view.
Mixing pageview and screen view is not recommended by Google but is totally possible.This kind of implementations is only useful when you have an embed web-app and a webpage on the same server and you want to have it all on the same dataset, if this case apply, is highly recommended to add a custom dimension to filter the app info on the web view and the web info on the app view and keep both worlds separated.
As the last point, your code is working, I can see the screen info on the desktop property. But not be able to see it in the web view.
I have been requested to get involved with a family member's site.
To date, they have been paying an SEO outfit, which I believe has been feeding them lies and milking them for money.
I can see that all pages in the site have Google Analytics. However, the SEO outfit refuses to let us see the Analytics page, and has always just forwarded them some (presumably doctored) slideshows.
The only tracking service that lists their site is Compete, which shows a number of visitors far from what they are paying for.
I would like to add their site to my own Analytics account. I have ftp access to their server, and permission from the site owners to modify any files I want.
However, I don't want to do anything that might destroy the entire existing history of analytics data, or even that would interfere with the current SEO outfit [until I have something concrete in-hand].
Does anyone know:
Can I add Analytics to my own account when it was originally setup by someone else?
Will there be any negative results of attempting this?
Any other ideas?
Thanks
Edit: Can anyone suggest a better title - I can tell mine is not good?
I've put two Google Analytics tracking codes from different accounts on the same site without issues. It may cause the site to be a tiny bit slower (as it communicates twice with Google) but it'll do nothing that would delete old data or impede collection of new data.
In short, what you're doing sounds like a good first step.
You will not, however, be able to access past data by doing this. You will be able to compare their numbers with the numbers you're getting, though, which should be valuable.
I don't know if you can add the same domain to two different Google Analytics accounts (easy enough to try, though), but you can always add another service's Javascript snippet, e.g. Woopra. Google and Woopra produced very similiar results in my experiments.
You may want to leave their Google Analytics tracking in place while adding your own Google Analytics tracking. In that case, your numbers should be identical to whatever is being tracked by this third party.
You'll need to set up your own account and then add in the creation of your pagetracker object and your own track page view. You don't need to recreate the entire page code. You can do it with two more lines. It would look something like:
var pageTracker =
_gat.getTracker("UA-XXXXXXXX-1"); //EXISTING pageTracker._trackPageView();
var secondTracker =
_gat.getTracker("UA-XXXXXXXX-1"); //YOUR TRACKING ACCOUNT secondTracker._trackPageView();
I am setting up a website for students of a school, which must include a schedule page which will show a calendar with events populated by feeds from various teachers' calendars. After trying out a variety of scripts and tools made for showing calendars, I finally hit upon a very shoddy, hacked-together way of doing it, and I want to know if theres any specific things wrong with my implementation.
My requirements from this calendar are posted in a previous question
This is how my implementation is gonna work:
The teachers make their schedules in their own calendar programs and make those feeds available in the iCal format. A common Google account for the school subcribes to all these calendars, and so gets read only access to ALL the teacher's schedules in school.
Google Calendar has a feature that lets you select some of your calendars, and then get the html code for an iframe to embed on your website, so that visitors to the site can see what events are coming up. When I experimented around with the options in the Google 'Configurator', I found that by simply including certain codes in the url called for the iframe contents, you could change which calendars were visible. These codes, or calendar ids, are clearly displayed in the settings for each calendar. Thus, my final solution is thus:
For every student, there is a record stating which courses he has taken, and hence which calendars he should be shown. With some SQL magic, I can retrieve the calendar ids from a pre-prepared database of all the calendar ids, and then generate the correct url for the iframe using php, and display it.
I hope that wasn't too convoluted to understand. Now can anyone tell me if there are any inherent security flaws or bad programming practices etc in this. Something about the whole idea of dynamically generating urls, using iframes, using a common google account etc just screams 'Mistake!'. Can someone tell me if this is an ok way to go about it, or is there some problem with it?
Actually, I think your solution has the potential to be very secure. Using a single google account to collect the read-only calendars into one place is just an organizational shortcut. As long as the calendars themselves are read-only, your single account contains nothing that isn't already public.
Generating URLs is perfectly reasonable, as long as you are combining strings that you've sanitized beforehand. Since your database can only get calendar IDs from your aggregation google account, you know that potentially malicious users can't cause arbitrary characters to end up in your synthesized URLs.
The biggest problem you'll probably run into is that the google embedded calendar iframe only allows up to ten calendar feeds.
The most likely security vulnerability you'll face is the security of all of the teachers' google calendars.
By default, google calendars accept "invitations" and post them as events. You might find that anyone can "invite" a teacher's calendar to prank events and those prank events will then show up on student calendars.