Working on "converting" a Google Data Studio report from Universal to GA4 and I am noticing a significant differences with some metrics, such as new users and pageviews
In Universal, I got this for Pageviews
But I am getting these results on GA4 for the exact same period:
The same for new users:
Vs GA4
I know GA4 and Universal are tracking metrics differently , but it looks to me that the numbers are way different
What am I missing here?
I was looking where you were initially and had the same reaction, until I realized that in GA4, the pageview stat is considered an Event and when I went to that section, I found the far more accurate stat (still slightly off from UA but within that percentage margin that Google states may exist). Navigate to Reports > Engagement > Events. The page_view Event should have the more accurate total you are looking for when comparing to the Page View number traditionally found in UA.
Do you have any filter to remove query parameters in Universal Analytics?
GA4 does not have filters to remove query parameters. Is your home page, landing page for your campaigns?
In GA4, the dimension you have selected is page path + Query String. In this case URL [page path] will also have details of query parameters.
There might be multiple rows present with home page URL with query parameters appended.
Related
We'd like to track behavior flow in our single page application using Google Analytics. We use the hash to route in the application, and we can track the URL within the app with virtual pageviews as described in Google's documentation. However, many of the URLs in the application contain ids, and are considered distinct URLs, despite representing the same page. Thus, we're unable to get accurate behavior flow information in Google Analytics for those pageviews.
For example,
http://example.com/#/dashboards/8a86204a-7b10-4bf5-961b-be16d209f2b0
and
http://example.com/#/dashboards/d8d6a9b5-b6f1-4159-bd6b-622e628f87b2
would be considered distinct pages, when really, we'd like to group these two urls together to determine how users use the dashboard view, rather than how users use a particular dashboard.
Is there a way to unify URLs like this so we can view metrics and behavior flow in aggregate (either in Google Analytics, or in the SPA)?
Completing the answer from #Eike. You can indeed use virtual pageviews to just set the url to '/#/dashboards' using the command
ga('set', 'page', '/#/dashboards'); and then send your pageview. But in my opinion keep the individuality in your data and use a custom dimension to achieve the aggregation you want. Meaning that you should define first a custom dimension that is named for example 'sitePageAggregate'. This dimension will take the value of your website's 'section' url for example 'dashboards' or 'search results' or anything else that might need the aggregation for the behavior flow. This can be done by code in before your pageview hit in each page like this
ga('set', 'dimensionN', 'dashboards');
where N is the custom dimension index. More info on how you can do this here. Now you will just go to your GA interface, Under Behavior -> Site Content -> All pages and just set the secondary dimension as 'sitePageAggregate'. In that way you are retrieving the results you want.
I've just set up a tool on a client site that users can use to request a quote from our client. To do this the user lands on a form page, fills in their details, submits and then lands on a thank-you page. Pretty basic.
I set this process up as a goal in Google Analytics, using the destination type goal: "begins with /thank-you" and shared that goal as a conversion in Google AdWords.
I decided to run a few Google AdWords ads to promote the tool. I also wanted to double-check the conversion data that AdWords gives you so I set the destination URL in Adwords to www.example.com/form-page?adsrc=adwords1 (2, 3, 4 etc. for each ad) and I configured the DB so that there was a column that tracked which URL the user was on when filling in the form (this would be the column I counted to get the number of conversions that came from AdWords so I could compare)
Further to this, I made sure that the initial URL parameters that the user landed on were stored in the session so that if the user browsed to other pages and came back to fill in the form later, it would still attribute the conversion to AdWords.
I tested this thoroughly on a staging and production environment and everything was working correctly.
I ran the campaign for a week and when I checked, the conversion results in the Data Base vs the ones coming from AdWords are wildly different. The DB tells me I've had 5 conversions while AdWords gives me 21.
Is there anything in the way Google uses its gclid that may be causing this issue? Or is there a problem with the way I've set up the measurement structure?
This can be caused by few things, but I think this is the GA/AdWords issue, more than your DB/session set-up.
Gclid shouldn't influence your goal, since it is used only for AdWords/Analytics interactions, Goals should not be affected in your set-up.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2938246?hl=en
Probable cause: If your goal set-up only contains "begins with /thank-you", isn't it possible, that you are counting all the sessions which reach thanks-you page? Not just AdWords?
Solution: if you need to count conversions in AdWords (for performance improvements), use AdWords conversion code at the same page, this counts only those users, who clicks an ad and reach your thank-you page in x (default 30) days. Be sure to count only unique conversions (users by cookie).
Differences between GA/AdWords conversion count:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2679221?hl=en
Google attributes conversions to the last marketing channel, where direct visits do not count as a marketing channel (if you look at their attribution flow visualization you see that the penultimate step is to check for existing campaign information for the user). So GA might overcount Adwords visits (or other campaigns) and conversely shows fewer conversions for direct visits.
On contrast your database probably records the last traffic channel without an elaborate attribution model, so it will show less campaign traffic.
Also IIRC the adwords interface records the conversion for the time of the ad click, not the actual goal conversion, so the timeframes for the conversions differ.
I've currently looking at my Google Analytics statistics for Berlin and I can see that I have 1 Visit but 0 Pages / Visit. Is this just some blip in the GA software - or is this likely to be a problem in my code? I can't see think how someone could have visited my site without visiting one of its pages.
(This is a fairly uncommon problem, I should say. I've just noticed it now and then and was wondering what the cause of it could be.)
You have some other kind of hits.
The types of hits in GA are:
Pageviews (_trackPageview)
Events (_trackEvent)
Social Interactions (_trackSocial)
Custom timming (_trackTimming)
Set Var (_setVar) deprecated
Ecommerce items (_addItem + _trackTrans)
Ecommerce trans (_addTrans + _trackTrans)
The most common is probably _trackEvent, check your events table and try to find out why some visits get events but no pageviews.
It can also be due to bad filtering rules. Some kind of rule that filter out pageviews from a profile but not other hit types, causing visits with only other hit types.
If you still use the old _setVar you can probably see the data inside the "User Defined" report, if that's the case, then it's time to remove these calls and move on.
I've got a multi-stage online questionnaire form, and I use a _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/Form_Stage_XX']) code to register form's stages destinations (the "XX"s stand for actual stage numbers).
I also set up the URL-destination Goals based on pages /Form_Stage_XX (same as in _gaq.push).
Now in the Site content -> Pages report I can see the visits of /Form_Stage_XX registered as expected, but the related Goals won't get reached.
Any ideas why is this?
Many thanks.
Please do check your goals configuration in the Profile Settings - > Goals Page to see if the URL is set to the same as /Form_Stage_XX and also if the Match Type is set to Exact Match. I would also recommend using the Match Type: Regular Expression with .*\Form_Stage_XX as the parameter.
You should be able to see if your goals are beign tracked as expected in the Conversions - > Goals Report.
One more thing is that form goals are usually better tracked as a Funnel Conversion, so you can track the flow from each step and thus visualize where visitors are leaving your form.
You can find more information in this great video lesson, made by Google
I am interested in seeing visits on my site broken down by hour - is there any way to generate a report of this in Google Analytics? It appears that all metrics are only broken down by day. Maybe I can get this information through the GA API?
Since Google Analytics was revised the currently accepted answer is no longer available. The current version of Google Analytics will let you view visitors per hour:
Go to the Reporting Tab
Select "Audience"
Select "Overview"
Select "Hourly"
If you're trying to determine total traffic by hour of the day for a given date range then you can use this custom report:
https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?type=custom_report&uid=pToP7693ReSxfSIpbqHmWg
Only a few reports have hour-by-hour data; as far as I know, they're all in the 'Visitors' section.
For example, to see Visits by hour over a period of time, click Visits, Visitor Trending, then Visitors. Then, in the top right of the report, select Graph by: (icon of a clock)
All of the reports under Visitor Trending have hour-by-hour data, except Absolute Unique Visitors.
As far as the API goes, you can check what query combinations are valid here (since there are restrictions): http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataReferenceDimensionsMetrics.html
According to that, all metrics can be viewed by an hourly dimension except Campaign metrics and Visitor (not to be confused with Visit) metrics.
You can test the query you want to run with the Google Analytics Data Feed Query Explorer
If using a (downloadable, emailable) custom report is an option, you can use the custom report described on http://salman-w.blogspot.com/2012/07/analytics-day-of-week-hour-of-day-report.html
The article tells you to do the following:
Create a custom report with flat table (I am sure it will work with explorer style reports too)
Add the dimension hour (not hour of day)
Add the metric visits, pageviews, etc
Preview