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).
Related
Google's marketing platform has a feature called 'Google Signals' that makes it possible to track users across devices. This is possible on Chrome browsers where users have logged chrome into their google accounts (which happens by default if the user logs into a google service).
My question: when the google analytics tracker beacons tracking data back to google, which query string parameter contains the 'cross-device user id'?
Here's what the query string parameters look like:
Google Signals will only provide you with data on users with ad personalization turned on in their Google account settings.
The parameters you've referenced is for the measurement protocol, which is the foundation for all the different GA implementations (GTM, gtag.js, analytics.js).
I think all the matching is done server-side by Google and possibly a combination of fingerprinting all the devices the google account has signed in with and activity on those accounts, maybe even a pool of GA client IDs & properties.
We are trying to have a full view of user journeys through the web application we are developing. In the middle of the journey, there's no problem because it's more or less a traditional web application, but the beginnings and the end are not usual.
The journey begins with us sending email to the customers (don't worry, it's not spam). Is it possible to send events to Google Analytics about email being sent? I can include the UserID in those events. If I then implement user id in my web application, would I be able to correlate emails send to website visits?
At the other end of the journey, the conversions don't happen by the user that's being coverted but by a manager manually marking the user as converted in a sort-of admin-side to the web application. Can I then again inject the event that the user was converted with the appropriate UserID? Will Google Analytics then be able to map the whole journey? Do I need anything else?
The goal is for those events to end up mapped in the charts that look like this:
You'll need to do what you're asking in a CRM.
That said, I think what you CAN do is use campaign tracking and track the links in the email sent to the users. This way you'd know if they've acted on the emails or not.
Then you'd be able to track them on your site when they interact with the email. If there are CTAs on your site for the users to contact a manager to be converted, then you can track those as events, then set up goals around these events to see conversions.
On a website with affiliate links, where there is no programmatic access to the conversion logs, I treat it as offline conversions.
My Setup
Online
A user visit my website, see the affiliated ad and a promotion view hit is being sent.
When the user clicks the ad, a promotion click hit is being sent and the user is redirected to another page on my site.
On the "redirection page", an product view hit is being sent, and the user is being redirected to the affiliation link, passing his Google Analytics clientId.
Offline
Once a week I download the stats from the affiliate program, which looks something like:
clientId visits conversions revenue
4444444444.3333333333 1 0 $0
1234567890.1234567890 1 1 $16.40
Then I use the Measurement Protocol to send offline events:
For each line of visit, I send a product click hit.
For each line of conversion, I send a product purchase hit.
My Problem
The conversion shows up on the eCommerce report:
Because the offline hits are being sent after the original session is already closed, a new session is opened which doesn't contain the info about the user.
So I can't see the conversion on the demographic report, for example:
Optional Solution?
I'm thinking of using the user-id feature of Google Analytics.
Even though the users are not identified, I can identify them by their clientId.
Sure, this is not what Google intended when they introduced that feature, but I believe it will solve my issue. I'm just not sure about the negatives.
My Questions
Any feedback on my setup?
Why is it even necessary to pass the clientId after the session is closed? what kind of information is being shared between the real session and the offline hit?
Is it a bad idea to pass the clientId as a userId to Google Analytics? Why?
Relevant Articles
A Comprehensive Guide to Tracking Offline Interactions in Google Analytics using the Measurement Protocol
Google Universal Analytics isn’t Linking Offline and Online User Properly
We were able to link offline action through as you did with measurement protocol but the problem is that those sessions are not included in demographic and age report.
Rather looking those report I used them to do segmented analysis E.g. pages they have look at, sources they used to come also I used it with attribution model to understand best channels to drive more conversions.
Yes you can use CID as a user ID but I haven't tried it with offline tracking. Share the result with us.
I have a booking site that refers customers to other companies websites to confirm and pay for bookings. I only make money off of conversions, not clickthroughs. These sites are owned by other corporations and I do not have access to their website code, just to clarify.
I know that I can use GA to track clickthroughs from my site, but how do I track the actual conversions?
You cannot track conversions on another site unless they agree to send some data back to you. That's actually the answer, but I included a bit more info below.
Your business model is that of an affiliate. Affiliate tracking usually works by appending an parameter to the link that goes from your website to the partner website. The partner website has to take care that your parameter is persisted throughout the booking process. Finally on the confirmation page, if your id is present, they send a beacon that informs you a booking has actually happened.
That beacon is usually an image pixel on your server; if the pixel is called it writes a line to a logfile that contains information passed via the image source (e.g. the total price if your renumeration depends on revenue). If you want you can also use Google Analytics; it is unlikely that any partner site agrees to implement fully fledged GA implementation with cross domain tracking, but you could use the measurement protocol to construct a web beacon that is implemented as an image pixel that sends data back to your GA account. If you submit not only your affiliate id, but also the client id for the visit you referred to the partner site you could even attribute the conversion to the original traffic source.
But for conversion tracking you have to rely on the cooperation (and honesty) of your parters. There is no way to record transactions on their sites without some sort of tracking code.
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.