I am using this bot to get id by username: #get_any_telegram_id_bot
And for many accounts it returns same id. Is it by mistake?
It returns this id only for account which I would call "suspicious" - like black market and so on.
How can this be explained? Bot bug? Or it returns this id for accounts marked in some way?
user_id is supposed to be unique, and it's most likely the bot implementation cause.
How they even receive user ids is a big question; methods for that are a bit hacky. It could happen for instance, that the bot keeps a database of user ids fetched in some hacky way (ways), and returns some id because of some data corruption issue.
Of course, that all would be a guessing game until we see the bot's source code, which seems to be unavailable.
Related
I am using Google Analytics 4 (GA4) on the client to track a whole bunch of different events. However, there are 2 scenarios that I can't cover client side:
A user completing check out on a payment page hosted by a third-party (Stripe in this case).
A refund that is made by the support team.
These events are handled by the server using webhooks. To me it seems like the most straightforward solution, would be to let the server send the event to GA4 (as opposed to the client sending it). I believe the Measurement Protocol should be used for this.
For each event submitted through the Measurement Protocol a client_id is required. When the client is submitting an event, this is an automatically generated ID which is used to track a particular device.
My question thus is, what should the client_id be when submitting an event server-side?
Should the same client_id perhaps be used for all events, as to recognize the server as one device? I have read some people proposing to use a randomly generated client_id for each event, but this would result in a new user to be recognized for every server-side event...
EDIT:
One of the answers proposes to use the client_id, which is part of the request as a cookie. However, for both examples given above, this cookie is not present as the request is made by a third-party webhook and not by the user.
I could of course store the client_id in the DB, but the refund in the second example is given by the support team. And thus conceptually it feels odd to associate that event with the user's client_id as the client_id is just a way to recognize the user's device? I.e. it is not the user's device which triggered the refund event here.
Another refund event example would be when user A makes a purchase with user B and user B refunds this purchase a week later. In this situation, should the client_id be the one of user A or of user B? Again, it feels odd to use a stored client_id here. Because, what if user A is logged in on two devices? Which client_id should be used here then?
Great question. Yes, your aim to use Measurement Protocol is a proper solution here.
Do not hardcode the client id. It's gonna be a hellish mess in reports. The nature of user-based reporting (which GA is) demands client ids to uniquely identify users. To your best ability.
GA stores the client id in a cookie. You should have convenient and immediate access to it on every client hit to BE. The cookie name is _ga. GA4 appends the measurement id to the cookie name. Here, google's docs on it: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/cookie-usage But you can easily find it if you inspect "collect" hits and look at their payloads. There's another cookie named _gid that contains a different value. That would be a unique client id. Set it too if you can, but don't use it for the normal client id. It has a different purpose. Here how the cookie looks here, on stack:
And here it is in Network. You will need it for proper debugging. Mostly to make sure your FE client ids are the same as BE client ids:
Keep an eye on the cases when the cookie is not set. When a cookie is not set, that most frequently means the user is using an ad-blocker. Your analysts will still want to know that the transaction happened even if there's a lack of context about the user. You still can track them properly.
3.1 The laziest solution would be giving them an "AnonymousUser" client id and then append a random number to that so that it would
both indicate that a user is anonymous and still make it possible
for GA to separate them.
3.2 A better solution would be for you to make a fingerprint client id for such users, say, hashing a concatenated string of their
useragent+ip+locale+screen resolution, this is up to your analysts
to actually work on the definition of a unique user if the google
analytics library is unable to do it.
3.3 Finally, one of the best solutions for you would be generating a client id on your own, keeping GA's format and maybe adding an indicator there that it has been generated on your end just for easier debugging in the Future and setting it as a cookie, using it instead of _ga. Just use a different cookie name so that ad-blockers wouldn't know to block it.
If you want to indicate that a hit was sent through the server, that's a good idea. Use custom dimension for that. Just sync it with your analysts first. Maybe they wouldn't want that, or maybe they would want it in a different dimension.
Now, this is very trivial. There are ways to go much deeper and to improve the quality of data from here. Like gluing the order id, the transaction id, the user id to that, using them to generate client id, do some custom client tracking for the future. But I must say that it's better than what more than 90% of, say, shopify clients have.
Also, GA4 is not good enough for deeper production usage. Many things there are still very rudimentary and lacking. I would suggest concentrating on Universal Analytics and having GA4 as a backup for when Google makes GA4 actually good enough to replace UA. That is, unless you're downloading your data elsewhere and not using GA's interface for analysis.
It seems that this page (Relevant portion in the screenshot below), advices to either send the data along with the client_id or user_id. However fails to address the fact client_id is a mandatory field as stated here.
I believe it is probably safe to assume that randomly generating this field should work. At least it seems to on my end however be warned that I am unsure if this has any impact on attribution.
* In the above image, Device ID refers to client_id
I’m part of a telegram group. I can see other users on the group, and I can message them individually (and manually). Is it possible to automatically (programmatically) message all the users on the group individually? Note I am not the admin.
If it is indeed possible, is there any sample code you can share?
It would be particularly awesome if the message could be customized for admin and non-admin. This means I’d need to detect if a particular user is an admin.
Thanks
I'm not sure if I get what you are looking for but I assume you have a Telegram Bot and wanna message all users in an specific group/supergroup. First I have to remind you bot can't start private message according to this link
Bots can't initiate conversations with users. A user must either add them to a group or send them a message first.
If I got it wrong feel free leave comment and I will update the answer ASAP ;-) ^_^
Background of my specific environment: I am trying to set up GA to track the user journeys around an iOS native app written in React Native. The app is in-house only and all users consent to being tracked in this way.
As I understand it, the measurement protocol allows either Client ID (cid) or User ID (uid). In the docs, both are optional, but at least one is required. Makes sense so far. Client ID is an anonymous UUIDv4 that tracks a browser or device, but not necessarily a user. User ID on the other hand is some uniquely-identifying value for a user, but may cross devices/browsers.
Initially I wrote my application using cid (as I hadn't yet read the docs on uid). Every time a user logged in the user's uuid would be stored and sent as the cid parameter. I also used session control sc. This worked - I saw sessions coming in, the User Explorer showed me the individual user uuids and sessions, etc. But upon rereading the docs, this seemed like an incorrect use of cid. It seems like cid is meant to be consistent and not something that changes as you log in and out.
As people on my app can log in and out (and possibly will - staff members may well share devices), using a long-lasting cid that is specific to the device won't allow me to track the habits of individual users and changing it per login-session, as mentioned above, feels wrong.
So I switched out cid for uid. The docs say both are optional and one is only required if the other is not used, so I figured I could just use uid and use the user's uuid in that field and it's otherwise act the same.
However, when doing it this way no hits seems to be registered at all - in "real time data" as well as the User Explorer.
Am I doing something wrong or is this by design? (If by design, are the docs wrong to say cid and uid are both optional or am I reading it incorrectly?)
Either way, best-practices-wise, do I:
Just go back to using an ephemeral cid that only changes when people log in and out. Individual sessions in the app don't change the cid but I do use sc to explicitly start and end sessions by navigation inference (click 'home' = sc=end, navigate from 'home', sc=start).
Use uid as I am trying to (i.e. switching out the current cid for uid), but also include a random cid that never changes (regardless of session lifetime, logging in and out, etc.).
Something else?
I have seen this question and its answer but it does not really answer my actual question regarding how cid and uid should actually be used, and if my issue is me or the way that GA works.
Oki so client-id is randomly generated value and must be sent with all hits.
In a non-User-ID-enabled view, Client-ID is used to calculate unique users. In a User-ID-enabled view, User-ID is used to calculate unique users
In reference to your app, you can send the unique Device id value in place of random value for client-id. This will resolve all your problems and ensure that the client id is sent with all the hits, otherwise it wont get registered in GA
Google Analytics now has UserID tracking to better track individual users across devices. Is it possible to add a tracking variable (like utm_campaign) specifying user_ID so that GA will associate those links with the user?
I'm looking for a solution that'll work even when the user isn't logged in (mainly for email link tracking).
No. Of course you can append the user id yourself and set it in your tracking code. But that would not uniquely identify a user (links get bookmarked or passed around e.g. when the email is forwareded to somebody) and someone else might end up with that id. The idea of the user id is that the CMS or CRM takes responsibilty for uniquely identifying users so we don't have to rely on the somewhat fragile client side mechanisms.
If you use it for email tracking it should IMO be enough if the user id is set in the first call of the tracking code if you have session unification enabled, so you'd just need to tag the link in the mail and read the id from there, without needing to persists the user id via the links. While I haven't tested this extensively the documentation seems clear on the point:
Session unification is a User ID setting that allows hits collected
before the User ID is assigned to be associated with the ID, so long
as those hits happen within the same session in which a specific ID
value is assigned for the first time.
Please note that the user id feature does not expose data for individual users via the interface, insofar the idea that it "better track[s] individual users" is not quite right (it will recognize users across devices but will still aggregate the data). If you want individual user you need to store the user id (or some other unique id) as custom dimension.
I'm having a problem with my Facebook competition where users are entering multiple times. The required fields to enter are first name, last name and email. They can not enter the same email more than once, but they are just using different email addresses. I can not delete their entries however because there is no way to "prove" that it's the same person, even though it's dead obvious (exact same first and last name, all entries within 30 seconds of one another).
Our terms and conditions say that only one entry is allowed per person, per competition but apart from the email validation I can't find a way to enforce this.
When a user likes our page (which is required to enter the competition) is the ID of that user available from the signed request? Would it be within the Facebook guidelines to store this ID along with their entry details?
Thanks
no, you need to authorize the users then you get the Facebook ID.
You then can display a diffrent page as you know this user already taken part in the competition - so you dont give them the change to submit more than once for one Facebook ID.
as this will probably to late know, you can store a cookie. but be aware that users can delete this cookie.