Is it possible to track users' browsers' history in GA4? More precisely, which social media or E-commerce platforms do they visit?
Also, I would like to find out whether it's possible to track users' occupations if they are not registered on your website.
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I'm trying to finish my analytics setup and I've got a bit confused what is the best way forward. The end goal is to have tracking setup that enables me to optimize my Google and Facebook campaigns towards approved users instead of just signed up users. Our product has the following funnel:
User visits our website
He signs up for our product using website lead form (at this moment I have user's email, name, phone number etc.)
Based on our evaluation (that can take hours or days) the user is approved or disapproved in our CRM
I want to provide the advertising systems (mainly Google Ads and Facebook Ads) with an information when the user was approved with all the required ids so the system can trace the event back to the ad the user clicked.
I have the following analytical stack that I am working with:
Website GTM container
Server GTM container (GA4+ UA clients, GA4 + UA + FCAPI tags)
Facebook Conversion API implemented in sGTM
What would be the best way in your opinion to implement the tracking of the event that is fired from our CRM when user is approved? I was thinking about using Measurement Protocol to send the event to sGTM/GA4 or Enhanced conversions for leads for Google Ads but neither solutions seems to fit 100 % to my scenario. What would you recommend? Thank you for any inputs.
GA4 Measurement Protocol or Google Ads API and Facebook Ads APIs are the right way to go.
You'll have to store click & user identifiers ad platforms use (fbclid, fbp, gclid/_ga etc) and then pass them to Google Ads (either through GA4 measurement protocol and GA4-GAds connection or directly to Google Ads API) and Facebook CAPI together with the conversion. There are services like Able CDP that do the entire process - recording ids, getting conversions from CRM, sending them to APIs.
Doing it with sGTM or something like Zapier alone would be significantly limited. They don't remember what click ids, IP address, browser etc the user had when signing up and only around half of the conversions without click/user ids recorded at a lead form submission and sent together with the conversion will be attributed typically (the ones for which ad platforms recognise the users' emails).
I've been looking at my statistics and lately, I found a difference between the number of sessions in Google Analytics and Shopify.
Google Analytics reports 20% fewer sessions than Shopify...The implementation between Analytics and Shopify seems to be ok, as there isn't any duplicate code or tag.
Do you know how I can solve this?
I've read some similar questions but I haven't found an answer yet.
There are many possible reasons for differences in tracking results:
Differences in how page reloads and unique visitors are counted. Google counts every page reload, but a browser doesn't count reloads of cached pages.
Differences in how sessions are defined. For example, some analytics software counts search bots as visitors, while other software doesn’t.
Google can only count visitors with JavaScript and cookies enabled. Some visitors might not allow cookies or JavaScript.
Customers can use browser extensions to block Google Analytics from tracking their sessions and purchases.
Discrepancies might be introduced because of different reporting time zones. Read about changing your Google time zone here.
It’s unlikely that identical tracking mechanisms are being used by each of the services, so your visitors aren't recorded equally. Details of recording mechanisms are proprietary information and are never shared.
Why do I have website traffic coming from Instagram in my analytics when I don't have an Instagram account?
image of analytics report
You don't need to have social accounts to get traffic from those sources.
This could be anything from someone linking to your site from their own Instagram account to a bot hiding behind an Instagram referrer. Use other reports and dimensions to find some context to that info (such as Hostname, Landing Page, Bounce Rate) and/or even a segment to determine what else the user did.
It may not illuminate much since there was only 1 acquisition from Instagram (especially if they bounced).
I'm wondering if it is possible to receive user specific information (frontend or backend) from Google Analytics.
For example: A user arrives on our site and we can read from Google Analytics, hey this person is XX years and has these interests.
I've read some blogs about Google Analytics and the cookies, from which it should be possible to extract the unique user ID (NOT given by us but by Google Analytics). Maybe that's where the identification could start.
Is it possible and if, how?
Kind regards!
What you are referring to is the Demographic and interest reports. This data comes to Google by the way of DoubleClick cookie.
What is the Double click cookie?
DoubleClick uses cookies to improve advertising. Some common applications are to target advertising based on what’s relevant to a user, to improve reporting on campaign performance, and to avoid showing ads the user has already seen.
User ID in Google analytics:
User ID enables the analysis of groups of sessions, across devices, using a unique, persistent, and non-personally identifiable ID string representing a user.
Note: The user id is used internally by Google Analytics its not possible for you to see this User id via the Website or the API.
Personal information:
The Google Analytics terms of service, which all Google Analytics customers must adhere to, prohibits sending personally identifiable information (PII) to Google Analytics (such as names, social security numbers, email addresses, or any similar data), or data that permanently identifies a particular device (such as a mobile phone’s unique device identifier if such an identifier cannot be reset), even in hashed form. Your Google Analytics account could be terminated and your data destroyed if you use any of this information.
Answer: It is not possible to receive personal user specific information from Google Analytics, while it is possible for you to send this information yourself in the form of a custom dimension it is not advisable because it is against the terms of service.
I am building a website and every user will upload images. The users' images will have unique IDs. The users will have their own dashboard with analytics.
I want to provide every user with analytics data (unique visitors, page views, bounce rate, etc.) for their own information. I am thinking of using google analytics for this instead of building something on my own.
Can this be done through google analytics legally? Are there any restrictions on showing such analytics information directly to the user?
The legal restriction with the Google TOS is that Google must not have any way to connect collected data to an existing person ( "data which can be reasonably linked to such information by Google", TOS §7). You are allowed to store anonymous IDs that can be matched in your own backend to persons as long as they cannot be resolved to individual users by Google.