I've been looking at my statistics and lately, I found a difference between the number of sessions in Google Analytics and Shopify.
Google Analytics reports 20% fewer sessions than Shopify...The implementation between Analytics and Shopify seems to be ok, as there isn't any duplicate code or tag.
Do you know how I can solve this?
I've read some similar questions but I haven't found an answer yet.
There are many possible reasons for differences in tracking results:
Differences in how page reloads and unique visitors are counted. Google counts every page reload, but a browser doesn't count reloads of cached pages.
Differences in how sessions are defined. For example, some analytics software counts search bots as visitors, while other software doesn’t.
Google can only count visitors with JavaScript and cookies enabled. Some visitors might not allow cookies or JavaScript.
Customers can use browser extensions to block Google Analytics from tracking their sessions and purchases.
Discrepancies might be introduced because of different reporting time zones. Read about changing your Google time zone here.
It’s unlikely that identical tracking mechanisms are being used by each of the services, so your visitors aren't recorded equally. Details of recording mechanisms are proprietary information and are never shared.
Related
I have started using GMP on an eCommerce website as I am concerned about transactions not being tracked correctly due to ad blockers and subsequently the conversion data in Adwords being incorrect.
However, I've started using it and I've found it to be a nightmare to get to work as you'd expect. I found this question still unanswered which is worrying!!
Measurement protocol transactions from Google Analytics to Google AdWords
However, my question is similar. But not the same. I'd like to know if I'm supposed to set the referrer, source & medium only once? For the first request?
i.e. Lets say someone clicks an eCommerce shopping ad (So it has a glid). Comes onto the site. And I set the medium to cpc and the source to google.
Then they start to browse around the site before making a purchase. The referrer will then be registered as the current domain and the source and medium will not be recorded.
Is this correct? As currently it's attributing all conversions to the site itself and not to google even though I am passing in the glid on the first request.
How (im)precise is Google Analytics actually? I've been using Google Analytics for years now on a pretty well visited web site (800k+ visits per month).
Now I decided to log every page request in a database table, and I'm tracking the user-agent of the request. I have also eliminated bot requests (googlebot, bingbot and many more...)
What I found out is that I have almost more than double requests to a page than Google Analytics pageviews is willing to admit.
E.g. GA shows 137 pageviews to a specific URL, but I tracked even 255!
Google Analytics is VERY precise. It's not very accurate though. And that's the difference you're seeing since you're not looking into trends but instead at absolute numbers.
Start by reading this post by Avinash:
Reflections: Accuracy, Precision & Predictive Analytics
Bots are everywhere these days and a lot of times disguised as real user agents. You should come up with a testing to make sure client have both javascript and cookies enabled. In that case he'll be tracked by Google Analytics.
Besides that that some users might have adBlocks extensions that block Google Analytics. This is fairly uncommon but depending on the public can be more common. Tech savvy users have a higher chance to use a plugin that blocks GA, thus IT blogs might be hit by this harder than an average site.
The best way to test the real accuracy of Google Analytics ignoring user agents without javascript, cookies and that block GA tracking is to track the users on your site using GA as well. You can do that in Google Analytics using the LocalRemoteServerMode.
Add the following line at the end of your GATC (GA Tracking Code):
_gaq.push(['_setLocalGifPath', 'http://mysite.com/__utm.gif']);
_gaq.push(['_setLocalRemoteServerMode']);
Make sure to replace http://mysite.com/__utm.gif with a path on the same domain as your website and that respond a gif. Use a lightweight gif, like the one GA uses.
Then you can get the logs of access to this gif and see in their parameters the urls visited. You'll need to do some extra processing but you'll be using the same framework GA uses to collect data and thus will measure more efficiently GA precision.
More Info:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/methods/gaJSApiUrchin#_gat.GA_Tracker_._setLocalGifPath
I'm using both on a site and getting very different numbers from each. Why is this?
The discrepancy is also mentioned in a Quora answer (Which is better, Facebook Insights or Google Analytics?)
Footnote: if you decide to use both, do not report them side-by-side,
and never expect them to match. Trying to explain the differences will
drive you mad.
Could someone explain?
This problem is quite common, and very hard to explain to clients why numbers do not reconcile amongst different analytics platforms.
Firstly, I believe that because there are remote connections to google or facebook some user sessions will get lost (What happens when they hit stop on the Browser page before the .js downloads for instance).
Secondly I believe ad blocking software may stop the file from being downloaded therefore the session is not captured.
Most hosting providers will have their own analytics platform with your hosting package. This is what I rely on as a true indicator for actual page views etc. These are usually generated directly from your web server logs so they are more accurate. Sadly I've never seen one of these packages have as many features as google or facebook.
There are tons of possible reasons. They might identify returning visitors in a different way or users might block scripts from a specific domain (e.g. *.facebook.com but not *.google.com). In general, ignore the discrepancy. Just pick one solution and use it. You'll always have visitors blocking all such scripts or just one or two specific trackers. The only (almost) 100% accurate way to do it, would be using local scripts, but even those could be blocked. You could as well look at open source solutions such as Piwik
Different web analytics products use diferent methods to track data on the site.
These differences between them is the reason why is hard do do a side-by-side comparison.
On the two links bellow you can find more info about that:
Why does Google Analytics report different values than some other web analytics solutions?
Using Google Analytics & Facebook Domain Insights to Track Social Actions on Your Website
In addition to the notes above, I also wanted to mention Google samples data when there are large volumes & dimensions. This may be a contributing factor.
Facebook reports on clicks and Analytics reports on pageviews.
The amount of pageviews might be less than the amount of clicks for a number of reasons:
There are filters on your Analytics that are blocking the pageviews from being recorded
The user left the page before the Analytics code could be recorded
Or the ads being clicked by bots and the Analytics isnt recording them
This seems to be a big problem with Facebook ads. I run a number of campaigns with facebook and I only see 30-50% of the reported traffic actually make it to the site. I cant believe this is due to only the first two reasons.
I have gone into more details on my blog http://www.bradtollefsen.com/facebook-ads-adding/
I am most interested in an answer for Android, though it would be great to know if the answer is generalizable to websites, iOS, etc. Can I anonymize IPs (using setAnonymizeIp()) in Google Analytics and still track unique visitors? I understand Google Analytics uses cookies for websites, and so I thought it might be possible (or perhaps even automatic).
Yes. The only effect that the anonymizeIp function is that it instructs Google to remove the last octet of the IP address from it's logs.
So, if your user's IP is:
123.45.678.90
And you run this function, Google will store it as:
123.45.678.XX
The only practical effect is that this results in less accurate Geographic reporting, but that's it. It won't affect counts of unique visitors in any way, and is totally unrelated to how GA tracks unique visitors, since Google Analytics does not rely on IP addresses for unique visitor identification. For websites, maintaining unique user identification is done by the Google Analytics cookies. In this specific case, the Google Analytics Android SDK handles the user session management for you using a local storage mechanism analogous to cookies.
I dont know if the accepted answer is correct. I've enabled setAnonymizeIp myself on my app, and it had a huge effect on my analytics results.
Pages/visit shot up.
Visits halfed.
Avg time on site shot up.
Ip address is not the value used to identify a unique visitor/user on Google Analytics, so it shouldn't be an issue. Analytics uses a unique identifier in a cookie or mobile app data so attach to all of the user's hits in order to identify as a unique visitor, so I don't see a reason why ip masking should affect it.
We have a website (domainX) which opens up within an iFrame from a website (domainY)
We have google analytics implemented on domainX including a goal tracking event set up in GA to see how many people complete an application form.
We have found that the traffic numbers are running less than half the actual numbers. We have confirmed this a number of ways
a) comparing actual number of applications submitted compared to # goals reached in GA
b) # of pageviews for domainX in GA compared to the number of pageviews of the host page in domainY
c) analysis of server side logs
Has any one had experience in GA not reporting the correct information when inside an iframe?
The site is a business focesed site so the only thing we could put it down to was that corporate firewall of our customers could be blocking the GA call?
Any other suggestions?
When an iframe of domainY is included on a page of domain X, the cookies set within the iframe are considered third-party cookies.
Therefore, a higher percentage of users block those cookies by default. Specifically, iOS and Safari block third party cookies by default, and other users block them on an optional basis. Third-party cookies are less reliable for data for this reason.
(Third party cookies likely explain a part of it; the rest of probably a combination of all the reasons that GA generally undercounts compared to server logs. ie, bots, noscript, crawlers, and GA blockers.