Here's a riddle (serious question actually): if two users are on GA at the same time but are located in two different timezones, do they see the same data?
I ask because an associate and I are observing a dip in traffic but at wildly different rates: I see -17% on my side but he sees -45%. I'm currently in Pacific Standard Time and he is in Australian Eastern Daylight Time.
Any insights?
You can view or set up a timezone in Google Analytics View.
By default, Google Analytics will work with this timezone set. However, you can adjust the time zone per view, which could come in handy for sites that operate in a different timezone than you.
Related
I want to know the total amount of time any one of our users has spent on the site, across sessions. Is there a way to find this stat in Google Analytics?
If you want to track an individual customer through different sessions, it is not natively possible under Google Analytics, and there are quite a few traps you need to avoid to make sure to be complying with the conditions of use of the service. You can find more information here
If you mean tracking the total duration of sessions, Session Duration and Time on Page should give you what you want.
They basically measure the same thing, but can give you slightly different results depending on your implementation.
I've read here and here that the GA timezone depends on the timezone set in the GA account. Does this mean that I can't get the UTC data for each day?
Something you can do is set the Time Zone country to United Kingdom and the Time Zone itself to GMT+00:00 GMT (no daylight saving).
It's a bit of a hack, but GMT and UTC are considered interchangeable. UTC replaced GMT, so although GMT is no longer officially maintained by the scientific community, it's still basically the same thing.
From the left-hand menu, go to Admin > View > View Settings.
You answered your own question.
Google Analytics dates and times are in the time zone of the Google Analytics account. The website displays in that time zone and the Google Analytics API returns data in that time zone.
You have tagged your question both Google Analytics and Google Analytics API. If you are using the API and want it in UTC you will have to convert it after you have extracted the data. If you are using the website there is nothing you can do. (Besides removing API tag from your question)
Setting your account to GMT/UK does not achieve this because for part of the year The UK observes daylight savings, taking it out of sync with UTC. Iceland works for now because it is UTC all year round.
This is a hack because a country's time zones and whether or not they observe daylight savings can change. Also note that if you set your location to Iceland for the timezone google will think your business is in Iceland and send you offers for advertising and things in Icelandic context!
What we need is for google to support UTC as a reporting time rather than only supporting places. You can enter your real location on your google analytics account and then set UTC (Iceland) as the reporting time for each property, again not perfect.
I'm looking to use google analytics for its web interface only. A large dataset such as gasoline prices would be submitted to analytics via the api and viewed. Is this possible? Or is analytics purely tailored to viewing website statistics?
The Google Analytics data model is really geared toward datasets that can be thought of in terms of users, sessions, and hits (hits being things like pageviews and events).
If your data can be thought of in these terms, it will probably work. If, on the other hand, you're trying to do things like joins or calculate averages or other statistical operations, you're probably better of using something else.
While the others are correct, Google Analytics is geared towards users, sessions, and hits. It is none the less simply an application for data analysis. The question will be how to get the data into the system.
I think you need to give us a little more information about your data set. But let me assume a few things.
You have a dataset with gasoline prices over a period of days.
you have a dataset with gasoline prices for different gas stations.
It would be really nice if this wasn't old data that this is new gas prices coming in.
If I had this dataset I could insert it into Google Analytics. Directly using the measurement protocol.
The measurement protocol has a few required things, the first being hit type. 'pageview', 'screenview', 'event', 'transaction', 'item', 'social', 'exception', 'timing'. the second would cid or session id.
Now cid I think I would probably set to the different gas stations and probably add a custom dimension with the gas station name.
As for hit I think I would probably say screenview and make an application Google Analytics account. Mainly because well this isn't a website its a little different.
Then every time the price of Gas changes I would send a screenview, cid of the station with the custom dimension of the station, add a custom metric with the price.
The main problem you are going to have is that Google analytics doesn't handle old data well. If you are going to insert this data with a date associated the date and time cant be grater then 4 hours ago or the server wont process it.
Have you considered putting it in big Query instead?
This question really is to broad or opinion based, but it was fun to consider.
It is possible to send all kinds of hits with the Measurement Protocol. But Philip is correct in stating that the data model is largely geared towards users, sessions and hits. But you could probably get a good ways with custom dimensions and metrics.
I've been using a SSIS Integration component to download data from Google Analytics in order to keep an historical view of some websites and track the evolution of them. Basically the metrics we track are Visits (now Sessions) and Visitros (now Users), and the dimensions are Year and Month. However, today I noticed that the data I downloaded for july had a variation on the Users metric. I heard that google analytics uses an estimation method to "calculate" some (if not all) of their metrics, could it be that after that they "adjust" the data with more acurate information? If so, is this mentioned in the documentation? (a link would be highly appreciated) Since the users are complaining that we are not delivering the real GA Data. I tried looked on the Google analytics documentation page with no luck.
Thanks for your time.
PS: Sorry for my english, it isn´t my native language
If you are using the standard version of Google Analytics (you'll know if you are paying $150k for premium), data is sampled depending on volume. Have a read of this article can-you-trust-your-google-analytics-data
I have seen very slightly differing results being returned if you repeatedly call the api with the same historical parameters repeatedly. In my case the figures only differed by 1-2 over a daily set of several thousand, but nevertheless it differed.
If you want to guarantee your results, consider upgrading to premium
Sampling could be an issue if what you are requesting is over 50,000 rows for the time period you are requesting. To avoid it you can download more often, such as daily.
But I think your issue is that there is a processing time for Google Analytics - if you are downloading at 3 am on the 1st it is probable that the processing for the previous day has not finished.
Google Analytics Premium SLA is for 4 hour data freshness, so even that would have trouble. Pragmatically you should allow 24 hours before you download data for the previous day, 48 hours for e-commerce data.
Thirdly make sure it is not Unique Visitors you are requesting, as this is dependent on the time period you are requesting.
I have web application which controls the stores locate din different time zones.
In this web application user will set rules that, any particular product is in discount for any given period of time i.e. 1-Aug 2014 to 5-Aug-2014. so how can this rule be executed in web application. this info can be inserted from anytime zone. but store in Europe and Store in US should have to make this product available from exact 1-Aug-2014, Europe will be early compare to US.
SO how we can handle this kind of scenarios.
In general:
Store the time zone for each store, such as America/Los_Angeles or Europe/London.
When checking for discounts, get the current UTC time and use the store's time zone to determine the appropriate local time.
Compare that local time against the expiration date for the discount.
This assumes that the business rule is to rely upon the store location's time zone. This might not necessarily be the case - as many online stores serve customers worldwide without regard to where the physical store or product is located. In that case, you need to determine who's time zone is applicable. Is it a single fixed time zone for the whole company? Or perhaps it's aligned the end-user's time zone, such that those in different time zones would have the offer expire at different times. You'll need to decide what is appropriate for your particular business.
Sorry I can't be more specific, but you didn't provide many details to go on. If you need further assistance, please consider editing your question to include details such as what language and platform you're using, what code you have tried, and what the specific business rules are.