Google Analytics 4 measurement protocol not working - http

I tried to send event to Google Analytics 4 using the postman.
And GA4 just response 204 No Content and the event is not recorded in the data stream.
I checked the measurement_id and api_secret has right value.
Is there anything wrong?
Thank you.

I encountered this issue today.
For me personally, it turns out I was looking for my received data in the wrong place: I was looking in Admin > Data Streams, which incorrectly told me "No data received in past 48 hours."
Where I actually needed to look was in the "Realtime Overview" (Reports > Realtime - see picture):
In there, there was a handy little event counter that showed me my events were, in fact, getting through just fine.
If you check here and it's still zero, here are some other things to try:
You may need to set the Content-Type header to "application/json".
Validate your events by sending them to the endpoint https://www.google-analytics.com/**debug**/mp/collect rather than https://www.google-analytics.com/**debug**/mp/collect - as long as you get "validationMessages": [] back, you should be good to go.
Make sure the JSON you're sending matches this format
According to the folks over at this similar StackOverflow question, You may need to set the User-Agent header, though I personally did not have to.

The object should be payload, not body.
Try to see this video: https://youtu.be/WSxdrG1G_yE

Related

Telegram API: answerCallbackQuery's "text" is not optional? (documentation states it is)

I seems that "text" argument of the answerCallbackQuery API request is not optional, even though the documentation states it is:
Text String Optional Text of the notification. If not specified,
nothing will be shown to the user, 0-200 characters
It also says:
NOTE: After the user presses a callback button, Telegram clients will
display a progress bar until you call answerCallbackQuery. It is,
therefore, necessary to react by calling answerCallbackQuery even if
no notification to the user is needed (e.g., without specifying any of
the optional parameters)
That is exactly what I'm trying to do, but alas I receive the error "Bad Request: MESSAGE_EMPTY" if "text" property is omitted. I can't believe that I'm the only one who has stumbled over this problem. Therefore I strongly suspect that I'm doing something wrong here. Can you please help?
I don't want notification to be shown on click because the reaction to click is going to be sent as the message, briefly after the click. Also it seems that other bots have no such problem, for example the BotFather.
Also, does anyone know a forum or another place where I can get a support regarding the API?
I think it is optional for text parameter yet.
I tried this request, and no error shown.
You can join #BotTalk group which is created by Telegram Support Force, and ask if others have same problem.
It seems that it was a temporary bug that was fixed in the same day.
Thanks to Sean for advising #BotTalk where problem was resolved.

Google Analytics: How to overcome payload size restriction?

I use Google Analytics Enhanced E-commerce for some shops. On catalog page I have many products and I need to track their impressions. I do not track each product one-by-one, cause it will cause many requests, instead I add all of them through .ec:addImpression and then track entire pack by sending single pageview.
And everything was going well until I faced a problem, that on page with too many products requests to collect stopped working with no error. I've installed analytics debugger for Chrome and found out, that I've exceeded a payload limit, which is set to 8 KB (according to official documentation):
payload_data – The BODY of the post request. The body must include
exactly 1 URI encoded payload and must be no longer than 8192 bytes.
And this is fine, but here's my question: is there any way to overcome this restriction? Maybe some option or method, that will allow not to bother about payload size and it will be automatically split into proper chunks? Or at least a method to get a payload in run-time to check its size. I run through documentation and found nothing.
Note: currently I manually track a "safe" number (which was discovered by experience) of products added by addImpression and then send them by non-interaction pageview hit. Of course, this solves my problem, by I want to know if there's a built-in solution.
Another possibility is to send only true impressions, that is, only for those products/items that the user is actually seeing above the fold. Not all products that you are sending impressions for are actually seen by the user until they scroll down the page below the fold. So this would require a modification to the implementation where you send your impression data as the user scrolls down the page and reveals more products. You can likely send more information with each product and still not exceed the payload, and you get a more accurate measure of your impressions.
Create a product data import that matches your product ids to product to product attributes (name, category, price etc). Wait until the data is processed, then change your tracking code so that only product ids are sent.
That should shrink down the request body enough to send all products, and the ids will be joined with the imported data when the incoming hits are processed.
Imported data is not applied retroactively, so it'S important that you do the data import first.
AFAIK there is no way to get your payload size from google analytics and it's a crying shame that analytics.js does not handle this issue automatically since the analytics.js library which constructs the payloads is best suited to handle this and thus minimise load on Google's servers...
I like Eike's solution, though if your products change a lot it might require automation. As #nyuen implies - sending only real impressions may help and is more accurate.
Another trick is to send the impression one at a time. (As shown or on page load) This will require the smallest change and reduce the payload to well bellow the limit.

Is it possible to report uid from Google Analytics?

I am collecting data using Google's Measurement Protocol, and sending the uid parameter. This works fine. But I would like to be able to fetch the uid back from Google. I can fetch the value of a custom dimension, but I would prefer not to set cd1 = uid for every request if possible.
I notice in this question that there is a comment by #DaImTo saying that it is not possible... and I suspect he's right, but I'd like to hear from someone who knows for sure.
I don't believe it is possible to get the uid without setting it through a custom dimension.

Why is the GET method faster than POST in HTTP?

I am new to web programming and just curious to know about the GET and POST methods of sending data from one page to another.
It is said that the GET method is faster than POST but I don't know why.
One reason I could find is that GET can take only 255 characters?
Is there any other reason? Please someone explain to me.
It's not much about speed. There are plenty of cases where POST is more applicable. For example, search engines will index GET URLs and browsers can bookmark them and make them show up in history. As a result, if you take actions like modifying a DB based on a GET request, it might be harmful as some bots might also traverse the URL.
The other case can be security issue. If you post credentials using GET, it'll get listed in browser history and server log files.
There are several misconceptions about GET and POST in HTTP. There is one primary difference, GET must be idempotent while POST does not have to be. What this means is that GETs cause no side effects, i.e I can send a GET to a web application as many times as I want to (think hitting Ctrl+R or F5 many times) and the requests will be 'safe'
I cannot do that with POST, a POST may change data on the server. For example, if I order an item on the web the item should be added with a POST because state is changed on the server, the number of items I've added has increased by 1. If I did this with a POST and hit refresh in the browser the browser warns me, if I do it with a GET the browser will simply send the request.
On the server GET vs POST is pure convention, i.e. it's up to me as a developer to ensure that I code the POST on the server to not repeat the call. There are various ways of doing this but that's another question.
To actually answer the question if I use GET or POST to perform the same task there is no performance difference.
You can read the RFC (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html) for more details.
Looking at the http protocol, POST or GET should be equally easy and fast to parse. I would argue, there is no performance difference.
Take a look at the raw HTTP headers
http GET
GET /index.html?userid=joe&password=guessme HTTP/1.1
Host: www.mysite.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0
http POST
POST /login.jsp HTTP/1.1
Host: www.mysite.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0
Content-Length: 27
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
userid=joe&password=guessme
From my point of view, performance should not be considered when comparing GET and POST.
You should think of GET as "a place to go", and POST as "doing something". For example, a search form should be submitted using GET because the search result page is a "place" and the user will want to bookmark it or retrieve it from their history at a later date. If you submit the form using POST the user can only recreate the page by submitting the form again. On the other hand, if you were to perform an action such as clicking a delete button, you would not want to submit this with GET, as the action would be repeated whenever the user returned to the URL.
Just my few cents from 2016.
I am creating a simple message system. At first I used POST to receive new alerts. In jQuery I had:
$.post('/a/alerts', 'stamp=' + STAMP, function(result)
{
});
And in PHP I used $_POST['stamp']. Even from localhost I got 90-100 ms for every request like this.
I simply changed:
$.get('/a/alerts?stamp=' + STAMP, function(result)
{
});
and in PHP switched to $_GET['stamp']. So a little less than 1 minute of changes. Now every request takes 30-40 ms.
So GET can be twice as fast as POST. Of course not always but for small amounts of data I get same results all the time.
GET is slightly faster because the values are sent in the header unlike the POST the values are sent in the request body, in the format that the content type specifies.
Usually the content type is application/x-www-form-urlencoded, so the request body uses the same format as the query string:
parameter=value&also=another
When you use a file upload in the form, you use the multipart/form-data encoding instead, which has a different format. It's more complicated.
I agree with other answers, but it was not mentioned that GET requests can be cached while POST requests are never cached. I think this is the main reason for some GET request being performed faster.
(Of-coarse this means that sometimes no request is actually sent. Hence it's not actually the GET request which is faster, but your browser's cache.)
HTTP Methods: GET vs. POST: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_httpmethods.asp
POST will grow your headers more, just making it larger, but the difference ought to be negligible really, so I don't see why this should be a concern.
Just bear in mind that the proper way to speak HTTP is to use GET only for actions and POST for data. You don't have to, but you also don't want to have a case where Google bots can, for example, insert, delete or manipulate data that was only meant for a human to handle simply because it is following the links it finds.

How to decode google gclids

Now, I realise the initial response to this is likely to be "you can't" or "use analytics", but I'll continue in the hope that someone has more insight than that.
Google adwords with "autotagging" appends a "gclid" (presumably "google click id") to link that sends you to the advertised site. It appears in the web log since it's a query parameter, and it's used by analytics to tie that visit to the ad/campaign.
What I would like to do is to extract any useful information from the gclid in order to do our own analysis on our traffic. The reasons for this are:
Stats are imperfect, but if we are collating them, we know exactly what assumptions we have made, and how they were calculated.
We can tie the data to the rest of our data and produce far more accurate stats wrt conversion rate.
We don't have to rely on javascript for conversions.
Now it is clear that the gclid is base64 encoded (or some close variant), and some parts of it vary more than others. Beyond that, I haven't been able to determine what any of it relates to.
Does anybody have any insight into how I might approach decoding this, or has anybody already related gclids back to compaigns or even accounts?
I have spoken to a couple of people at google, and despite their "don't be evil" motto, they were completely unwilling to discuss the possibility of divulging this information, even under an NDA. It seems they like the monopoly they have over our web stats.
By far the easiest solution is to manually tag your links with Google Analytics campaign tracking parameters (utm_source, utm_campaign, utm_medium, etc.) and then pull out that data.
The gclid is dependent on more than just the adwords account/campaign/etc. If you click on the same adwords ad twice, it could give you different gclids, because there's all sorts of session and cost data associated with that particular click as well.
Gclid is probably not 100% random, true, but I'd be very surprised and concerned if it were possible to extract all your Adwords data from that number. That would be a HUGE security flaw (i.e. an arbitrary user could view your Adwords data). More likely, a pseudo-random gclid is generated with every impression, and if that ad is clicked on, the gclid is logged in Adwords (otherwise it's thrown out). Analytics then uses that number to reconcile the data with Adwords after the fact. Other than that, there's no intrinsic value in the gclid number itself.
In regards to your last point, attempting to crack or reverse-engineer this information is explicitly forbidden in both the Google Analytics and Google Adwords Terms of Service, and is grounds for a permanent ban. Additionally, the TOS that you agreed to when signing up for these services says that it is not your data to use in any way you feel like. Google is providing a free service, so there are strings attached. If you don't like not having complete control over your data, then there are plenty of other solutions out there. However, you will pay a premium for that kind of control.
Google makes nearly all their money from selling ads. Adwords is their biggest money-making product. They're not going to give you confidential information about how it works. They don't know who you are, or what you're going to do with that information. It doesn't matter if you sign an NDA and they have legal recourse to sue you; if you give away that information to a competitor, your life isn't worth enough to pay back the money you will have lost them.
Sorry to break it to you, but "Don't be Evil" or not, Google is a business, not a charity. They didn't become one of the most successful companies in the world by giving away their search algorithm to the first guy who asked for it.
The gclid parameter is encoded in Protocol Buffers, and then in a variant of Base64.
See this guide to decoding the gclid and interpreting it, including an (Apache-licensed) PHP function you can use.
There are basically 3 parameters encoded inside it, one of which is a timestamp. The other 2 as yet are not known.
As far as understanding what these other parameters mean—it may be helpful to compare it to the ei parameter, which is encoded in an extremely similar way (basically Protocol Buffers with the keys stripped out). The ei parameter also has a timestamp, with what seem to be microseconds, and 2 other integers.
FYI, I just posted a quick analysis of some glcid data from my sites on this post. There definitely is some structure to the gclid, but it is difficult to decipher.
I think you can get all the goodies linked to the gclid via google's adword api. Specifically, you can query the click performance report.
https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/appendix/reports#click
I've been working on this problem at our company as well. We'd like to be able to get a better sense of what our AdWords are doing but we're frustrated with limitations in Analytics.
Our current solution is to look in the Apache access logs for GET requests using the regex:
.*[?&]gclid=([^$&]*)
If that exists, then we look at the referer string to get the keyword:
.*[?&]q=([^$&]*).*
An alternative option is to change your Apache web log to start logging the __utmz cookie that google sets, which should have a piece for the keyword in utmctr. Google __utmz cookie and you should be able to find plenty of information.
How accurate is the referer string? Not 100%. Firewalls and security appliances will strip it out. But parsing it out yourself does give you more flexibility than Google Analytics. It would be a great feature to send the gclid to AdWords and get data back, but that feature does not look like it's available.
EDIT: Since I wrote this we've also created our own tags that are appended to each destination url as a request parameter. Each tag is just an md5 hash of the text, ad group, and campaign name. We grab it using regex from the access log and look it up in a SQL database.
This is a non-programmatic way to decode the GCLID parameter. Chances are you are simply trying to figure out the campaign, ad group, keyword, placement, ad that drove the click and conversion. To do this, you can upload the GCLID into AdWords as a separate conversion type and then segment by conversion type to drill down to the criteria that triggered the conversion. These steps:
In AdWords UI, go to Tools->Conversions->Add conversion with source "Import from clicks"
Visit the AdWords help topic about importing conversions https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/7014069 and create a bulk load file with your GCLID values, assigning the conversions to you new "Import from clicks" conversion type
Upload the conversions into AdWords in Tools->Conversions->Conversion actions (Uploads) on left navigation
Go to campaigns tab, Segment->Conversions->Conversion name
Find your new conversion name in the segment list, this is where the conversion came from. Continue this same process on the ad groups and keywords tab until you know the GCLID originating criteria
Well, this is no answer, but the approach is similar to how you'd tackle any cryptography problem.
Possibility 1: They're just random, in which case, you're screwed. This is analogous to a one-time pad.
Possibility 2: They "mean" something. In that case, you have to control the environment.
Get a good database of them. Find gclids for your site, and others. Record all times that all clicks occur, and any other potentially useful data
Get cracking! As you have started already, start regressing your collected data against your known, and see if you can find patterns used decrypting techniques
Start scraping random gclid's, and see where they take you.
I wouldn't hold high hope for this to be successful though, but I do wish you luck!
Looks like my rep is weak, so I'll just post another answer rather than a comment.
This is not an answer, clearly. Just voicing some thoughts.
When you enable auto tagging in Adwords, the gclid params are not added to the destination URLs. Rather they are appended to the destination URLs at run time by the Google click tracking servers. So, one of two things is happening:
The click servers are storing the gclid along with Adwords entity identifiers so that Analytics can later look them up.
The gclid has the entity identifiers encoded in some way so that Analytics can decode them.
From a performance perspective it seems unlikely that Google would implement anything like option 1. Forcing Analytics to "join" the gclid to Adwords IDs seems exceptionally inefficient at scale.
A different approach is to simply look at the referrer data which will at least provide the keyword which was searched.
Here's a thought: Is there a chance the gclid is simply a crytographic hash, a la bit.ly or some other URL shortener?
In which case the contents of the hashed text would be written to a database, and replaced with a unique id.
Afterall, the gclid is shortening a bunch of otherwise long text.
Takes this example:
www.example.com?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc
Is converted to this:
www.example.com?gclid=XDF
just like a URL shortener.
One would need a substitution cipher in order to reverse engineer the cryptographic hash... not as easy task: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/300/reverse-engineering-a-hash
Maybe some deep digging into logs, looking for patterns, etc...
I agree with Ophir and Chris. My feeling is that it is purely a serial number / unique click ID, which only opens up its secrets when the Analytics and Adwords systems talk to each other behind the scenes.
Knowing this, I'd recommend looking at the referring URL and pulling as much as possible from this to use in your back end click tracking setup.
For example, I live in NZ, and am using Firefox. This is a search from the Firefox Google toolbar for "stack overflow":
http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=stack+overflow&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&client=firefox-a&rlz=1R1GGLL_en-GB
You can see that: a) im using .NZ domain, b) my keyword "stack+overflow", c) im running firefox.
Finally, if you also stash the full landing page URL, you can store the GCLID, which will tell you the visitor came from paid, whereas if it doesn't have a GCLID, then the user must have come from natural search (if URL tagging is enabled of course).
This would theoretically allow you to then search for the keyword in your campaign, and figure out which adgroup them came from. Knowing the creative would probably be impossible though, unless you split test your landing URLs or tag them somehow.

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