Is it possible to pull users GCLID thru the Measurment Protocol? I found this docs https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/parameters but not sure if they reference exact params
I tried hitting the endpoint but I'm not seeing the param
Related
Is it possible to use GA4 Measurement Protocol to send events to Google Analytics and view and analyze them in the GA dashboard without using gtag.js or any other front-end script? The use case would be that some events are being sent to my server and I will just push these events to GA through the API.
One thing that makes me think is that the official Measurement Protocol API say:
In order for an event to be valid, it must have a client_id that has already been used to send an event from gtag.js. You will need to capture this ID client-side and include it in your call to the measurement protocol. In send an event to your property, we use "client_id" as the client_id. You will need to replace this with a real client_id that comes from gtag.js.
(https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/ga4/verify-implementation?client_type=gtag)
That suggests that only events that have a valid client_id that originate from gtag.js will be counted.
I did some experimenting with randomly generated client_ids and what I discovered was that I was able to see my events in the Realtime section of the GA4 console (the Event count by Event name section), but all the other sections would be empty and the Users in last 30 min section would always show 0.
Can someone please explain to me why it's zero and if such a use case is valid at all? Thanks
tl;dr
You can use any value in client_id, as long as it uniquely identifies the user (we use a GUID/UUID), but it seems like you also need to send a value in user_id. We use the same value for both.
Also, you need to add the 'engagement_time_msec' parameter to get any user metrics to register.
Longer answer:
We're trying to do the same, i.e. send all events to the GA4 Measurement Protocol from the server, so that it is not dependent on the current user's GDPR cookie settings.
We currently do this for a Universal Analytics property with no issues, but it seems that Google is trying to prevent this in future, by restricting the scope of the Measurement Protocol in GA4, whilst forcing everyone to move to it by July 1st 2023. See the documentation at https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/ga4#full_server-to-server, where it states:
While it is possible to send events to Google Analytics solely with
measurement protocol, only partial reporting may be available. The
purpose of measurement protocol is to augment existing events
collected via gtag, GTM, or Firebase.
We have something working with GA4, in that the events are being registered on the GA4 property correctly, using a client id that is just a GUID/UUID that we define in our own site cookies. So, any value can be used in the client id, as long as it uniquely identifies the user. The same value is used to populate the user_id parameter.
When sending events, the realtime event details were showing on the GA4 dashboard, but user metrics were not until we also populated the 'engagement_time_msec' parameter, as described in https://stackoverflow.com/a/71482548/7205473
We still have issues with things like getting the user location and the platform details, which previously were automatically populated by passing the IP address and the User Agent, but which seem to no longer work in GA4.
We were also passing page load timing events through the Measurement Protocol, but again, these features seem to have been removed in GA4.
It is possible to use GA4 directly without gtag.ja or the Firebase SDK. Its not supported, so it takes some work. We have this working in a desktop app reasonably well. There a couple things that need to be done.
As stated elsewhere the "engagement_time_msec" param must be set using the "_et" parameter. This is the number of milliseconds between now and the previous event.
The client id "cid" has a specific format; it should be:
"randomNumbers(10).unixTimeStamp()"
The session id "sid" format is:
"randomNumbers(10)"
The "_z" parameter needs to be set. I think this is a cache buster. Looking deep into the gtag.js code it is a url safe base64 encoding of "CCD", which always results in the value "ccd.v9b"
The page hash parameter "_p" can be set to this; not totally sure its correct but it works.
"randomString(3).randomString(3)"
Set the "User-Agent" HTTP request header in whatever framework/lib you are using. GA4 uses this to determine many things including Operating System. You will need to create a fake user agent based on the local device information. This is what we use for a Windows 11 x64:
"myco.testapp/4.0.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)"
The IP will be taken fromn the web request which is where the geolocation data comes from.
Since a full working example is worth 1,000 words of documentation; here is a "test" event with a parameter "animal=dog":
https://www.google-analytics.com/g/collect?cid=0078745494.1659679529&_et=364&_p=pfJ.Aev&seg=1&sid=2678664821&tid=G-???&ul=en&v=2&_z=ccd.v9b&en=test&ep.animal=dog
It's possible to extract outgoing GA4 request from a GTM container debug/preview view and map any GA4 (automatically collected and custom) event.
Example page_view request URL:
https://www.google-analytics.com/g/collect?v=2&tid=G-XXXXXXXXXX>m=3oes1i1&_p=1545013558&_dbg=1&cid=P%2FdJWyULMwcT21TMrzn7pZdlNt%2FxtttGVqGUmqNYbhc%3D.1669722847&ul=nl-nl&sr=2560x1440&uaa=x86&uab=64&uafvl=Not_A%2520Brand%3B99.0.0.0%7CGoogle%2520Chrome%3B109.0.5414.75%7CChromium%3B109.0.5414.75&uamb=0&uam=&uap=Windows&uapv=10.0.0&uaw=0&_s=1&_uip=XXX.XXX.XXX.X&sid=1674235261&sct=1&dl=https%3A%2F%2FXXXXXXXXXX.com%2F%3Fgtm_debug%3D1674235654105&dr=https%3A%2F%2Ftagassistant.google.com%2F&dt=OM%20test&jscid=XXXXXXXXXX.1669722847&seg=1&en=page_view
Tip: use Postman to analyse and experiment with parameters
regardless of the platform used to make a call the Measurement Protocol, you should use a client id generated by gtag.js, or the app ID if using Firebase.
I am sending an offline event to Google UA using their measurement protocol. I am trying to tie it to the users previous visits to get attribution and using Google's own Client ID from their cookie to do that. While the event does appear in Google UA, it is not tied to other client id sessions.
Here an example of the API call
In this example, "1859919454.1455744839" are the X.Y elements parsed from the _ga cookie's client id.
Am I doing something wrong or making some wrong assumptions about google analytics accepting their own Client ID instead of creating and using my own as suggested in their measurement protocol's parameter reference? I have seen plenty of forum threads that suggest google's own client id is acceptable.
I checked your API call and you are missing a measurement protocol parameter in the URL "t" (https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/parameters#t)
which defines what type of hit you are trying to send i.e. event or pageView
Google has created a debug tool to check whether the url generated is valid or not. You can also send hits to your GA using the tool.
https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/hit-builder/
turns out there is an unpublished parameter in the newer UA interface that allows for strict or loose userid. If strictly enforced, the userid MUST be a UUID. If strict is false it will accept google's own user id. Once that parameter is passed everything worked
I'm having issues with Google Measurement Api. I need to manually report ecommerce transactions to the analytics, and the only data i'm getting from the payment processor is Country Code (which is not precise enough for our analytics process) and IP address of person doing the purchase.
We've tried sending uip (User IP override) param but analytics ignores IP and does not extract the Geolocation from it.
We've tried using geoid, but as i said is not precise. We need city information too. I see that geoid can take integer as param which describes the precise location, but i don't know how to get to that number if only thing i have is IP address.
Any help or advice will be appreciated.
Which hit type do you use?
You must fulfill all mandatory fields of GA measurement protocol so the request could be accepted by GA.
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/parameters
I am completely new to the Google Analytics Measurement protocol.
Trying to fetch the results and load it in iframe of an registered tid domain.
My query string looks something like this:
http://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&tid=UA-XXX-1&cid=555&t=pageview&dp=%2Fauth"
But i get the response as : GIF89aÿÿÿÿ,D;
What am I doing anything wrong? I also tried passing domain name with it and its title. Still no success.
And also do I need to call this get or post from the origin domain or can I do it from Postman-Rest client?
I think your having an issue with understanding what the Measurement Protocol is.
You said:
Trying to fetch the results and load it in iframe of an registered tid
domain.
What the measurement protocol is for:
Measurement Protocol Overview
The Google Analytics Measurement Protocol allows developers to make
HTTP requests to send raw user interaction data directly to Google
Analytics servers.
The measurement protocol is for sending hits to Google Analytics, If you want to get your Google Analytics data out you use the Reporting API
Response
The response you are getting back from the measurement protocol is good it means it recorded your message. GIF89aÿÿÿÿ,D;
What you're seeing is the content of the 1x1 GIF pixel that Google Analytics uses, which you can safely ignore. As long as the response code of your request is 200, you should be fine.
The origin domain of the request doesn't matter; you can—for instance—also send Measurement protocol requests from server-side scripts and it still works.
Have the below parameters in collect.gif. Not sure why utma,utmz and utmht parameters gets passed in collect.gif. Could anyone explain about it.
fl:14.0 r0
_utma:183250937.727261133.1403674305.1403674305.1403678301.2
_utmz:183250937.1403678301.2.2.utmcsr=testsrc1|utmccn=testcamp1|utmcmd=testmed1
_utmht:1403679675665
_u:MACCAAQ~
cid:727261133.1403674305
_utma, _utmz, and _utmht are part of the ga.js cookie collection that Google Analytics sets up to gather session and traffic information (duration, number of visits, where traffic is coming from, etc).
After the upgrade, analytics.js only uses one cookie to store information, _GA. If you're seeing these parameters in your GET request, that means you still have the old ga.js cookies sitting around. Clear your cookies, and these parameters will disappear from the request.
Google's developer documents has lots of information on their use of cookies with Google Analytics if you care to read about how these cookies used to be used and what the _GA cookie does.