Does the time get stored with the date OOTB with the Google Analytics 4 (GA4) on eCommerce events?
On my company’s implementation when I look at the data stored to e-commerce events, like the purchase dimension, everything is showing as occurring at 12am. Do you know why this is? Is it a config issue or the way I am connecting?
I’ve seen posts where people create JavaScript variables to track time in GA4 and save to a dimension but this makes no sense given the high cardinality of time. I would have thought it would be more efficient to store as a datetime data type and track as part of the GA4 application.
Does anyone here see the time an event occurred on GA4 eCommerce events?
Related
I created an e-commerce connection via GTM. I’m sending data via dataLayer on the thank_you_page. After that, I’m sending data to Google Analytics 4. I can see purchases in GTM, also I can see purchases in GA4 debugging (Configure --> DebugView) at that moment. I can see that purchases are registered and I can see their parameters but I have a big delay before we can see it in a report (Report --> Monetization --> E-commerce purchases). A delay is something around 6-12 hours or even more. Is it okay? Can you help me with this problem? How can we see purchases in reports without a delay(or around 1 hour). Or it’s a normal delay for a GA?
Maybe I can fix it?
Thank you!
It's a very normal situation for this.
You can see the data shows in real-time report and debug view immediately.
But if you want to see in report.
You will need to wait until GA processed the data.
In the Reports Snapshot (Report -> Monetization -> E-commerce purchases) it may take 1-4 hours according to the docs (personally I've seen up to 12 hours delay) and for the Explore custom reports it might take 24-48 hours.
What I usually do to debug is:
Expect up to 48 hours to debug a scenario / end 2 end flow.
Use the DebugView to quickly check the incoming events.
Use whatever reports I can to make sure they are being stitched up correctly (i.e. purchase events to get stitched with the proper user/client)
Finalize verification with custom reports after a day or two.
So basically it is very long process to introduce changes with some of the events with GA4, it wasn't like that with UA. :/
This is the document for GA4.
And that's another one for data freshness, which doesn't really say which types of reports or features are delayed with each of the Intervals, but it gives you an idea of the Intervals they work with internally.
I have successfully created a GTM trigger and tag using the click_text parameter. When I preview and when I published the change both were successful in showing up on my Google Analytics 4 debug and real time tabs. I cannot seem to find a recorded total for this new tag trigger in either GTM or GA4 anywhere. Does this exist in either of these, or do I need to create an event in GA4 unrelated to what I set up in GTM. I have read most of Google's provided documentation on this specific step and it stops flat at this step of things.
Thank you in advance.
If you see your event in real time data report in GA, you're good. The data is in that property. It, however, is not yet available for aggregation, so you won't be able to count them or use them in other reports.
You should wait up to two days for the data to be in the non-real time reports. Vast majority of the data will be available for aggregation in one day, however. Some starts showing up in hours. GA 360 (paid version of GA) shortens the two days to four hours until all data is there.
I'd also suggest using Adswerve plugin for GA debugging: it will print all DataLayer changes as well as everything that is being sent to GA in the console. It's much more comfortable than using real time hits report and it will show you all dimensions that are being sent to GA.
I am currently successfully tracking purchases from website using enhanced ecommerce (via GTM).
I have Goals configured that correctly track these in real time. E.g. event goal for Category = Enhanced Ecommerce and Action = transaction.
However, when I try to track purchases using the measurement-protocol I get the event for the enhanced ecommerce, but I can find nothing in conversion (under the goals or otherwise) about the purchase. I am using the hit-builder.
I have configured various goals and tried many different variations. In my last attempt I created a goal which should match if the label is equal to "serverevent".
Then I sent this:
v=1&t=event&tid=MY_TID&cid=5ca7c46d-a46a-4e0b-a395-b4d1bb228fee&ti=T123415789&ta=test&tr=150&pa=purchase&pr1id=P123459&pr1nm=GiftCard_150&pr1ca=test&cu=EUR&iq=1&ec=Ecommerce&ea=Activation&ni=1&pr1qt=1&el=serverevent
In GA I can see the event coming in with event category "Ecommerce", action "Activation" and label "serverevent", but I see nothing in conversions and the goal still has 0 hits.
I have used POSTMAN to post to https://www.google-analytics.com/debug/collect, and I get back "valid" and "Found 1 hit in the request."
I don't know what else I can try. To be clear I am trying to track server side purchases because these are sales by third parties through our API.
The google analytics standard reports take time to process Google stats it can take between 24 -48 hours for the data to complete processing.
You can see if your hits are being recorded by checking the real time api. As for the standard reports your going to have to wait between 24 - 48 hours to see if the results have completed processing.
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/ecommerce
Using the Google analytics Ecommerce tracking, is it possible, recommended to send Item and Transactions at different times?
Reason being, we do not actually know the revenue amount until a much later time.
Suppose I have 65 people that register on January 1, 2012.
I want to find out how many of those 65 people returned to the site that same week. (More generally, if n people signup on date A, I want to be able to find out how many of those n people return in a given date range.)
Is there a way to do this using Google Analytics? If so, how? I am currently getting the user's username for each page hit.
If you only need to track people who sign in then you don't need to get very fancy. You can copy the relevant user attributes, such as sign up date, from your DB to GA using events or session level custom variables.
But if you want to track everyone, including those who don't sign up, then you'll need to use visitor level custom variables (GA cookies).
I explain how to set this up in detail in this post so I'll just highlight the key points here:
First, decide how to layout the data in Google Analytic's custom variables based on your requirements. For example, are you storing retention dates for daily, weekly or monthly tracking? Do you also want to track cohort goals? Partition this data into the available custom variable slots.
Write the cohort data to these custom variables when visitors arrive or achieve goals using Google Analytic's _setCustomVar function. Setting the fourth parameter of that function to 1 indicates you want to do visitor-level (cookie) tracking.
For each cohort you wish to analyze, create an advanced segment in Google Analytics. Using a regex expression in the condition will give you the flexibility to segment for interesting cohorts. ex: "All users whose first visit was the week before Christmas".
Analyze the results with reports by specifying a date range and the corresponding cohort-sliced advanced segments. Another option is to extract the data using the Google Analytics Data Feed Query Explorer or their API.
Once you've put in the work your new visitors will be stamped by their first visit date and nicely fall into each daily or weekly retention bucket. This is what it might look like if you were tracking weekly retention, for example:
This is not a full solution, but here are some points on how I would approach this problem with the help of Google Analytics:
You have to make sure that you somehow store the registration date of each user, either in your database or in a cookie. Then have a look at Google Analytics Event Tracking. You could for example set up a new category based on the registration date. On every page load in your page, you then have to set up this event tracking call, for example like:
_trackEvent("returns", "2012-01-01", "UserId:123123123")
This way you will receive all page views for users that registered on that particular date. To add a date range in this, you have to make sure that these events only get fired for the number of dates after the signup (e.g. 7 days).
After your date range, you will be able to see how many page views and how many users returned - you even know which users came back.