There doesn't seem to be many resources available for troubleshooting Google Optimize. I've been using the software for a year now with no issues. Optimize experiments update with new session data once or twice a day. As of recently, every time new data comes through, Optimize will zero out the session data.
The session data here looks correct until I click into the experiment:
When I click into an experiment, you'll see the Experiment Sessions don't add up correctly. The experiment sessions were being tracked correctly last night, and they correctly added up to the total Collected Sessions.
Everything is tracking correctly until Google pulls in more data. I'm not sure what's causing this and I can't get support from their community or support team. Data was collecting fine a week ago. I haven't changed my experiment goals or how the tests are running. The only thing I've changed in that time is how many tests I'm running at the same time. I used to only run 1 test at a time, and I'm now running 3. None of the tested pages, or primary goals overlap. I do have some secondary goals that overlap. Any thoughts?
It looks like this was happening as a result of Google Analytics Goal Events being delayed. It can take 24-48 hours for website event data to come through.
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We are using the free level of GA and have been creating reports using Custom Dimensions and Metrics since last summer.
We also use the Google Sheets Analytics add-on to post process data pulled from the API.
Overnight on 16-17 May (UK Time), our reports suddenly started showing as being sampled. Prior to that we had no sampling at all, as our reports are scheduled so I can look back through the revision history to see changes made when the scheduled reports run.
This sampling is occurring in custom reports viewed in the GA platform and in GA sheets. I've done some analysis and it appears to only occur at the point that more than one Custom Dimension is added to a report, or when the GA dimensions ga:hour or ga:dateHour are used (ga:date does not trigger sampling).
All our Custom Dimensions and Custom Metrics are set at Hit level (I've read a post where it was claimed to be due to mixing scopes on Dimensions & Metrics, but we are not doing this).
If I reduce the date range of a query (suggested as a solution on many blogs), the sampling level actually gets worse rather than better.
For the month of May we didn't even hit 4k sessions at property level. I can't find any reference anywhere to any changes being made to GA that would cause sampling to apply to our reports (change documentation, Google Blogs etc).
Is anyone else experiencing this or can anyone shed any light on why this might be happening? Given how we use GA if we can't resolve this then it's a year of work down the drain, so I'm really keen to at least know why this has suddenly happened even if ultimately nothing can be done about it.
In our project we stored all users event data in our database for over one year , but it's not indexed.
now we are going to use google analytics to store our analytics and analyze the report using google analytics dashboard.
but before start using google analytics , i would like to emigrate all old statics (about 2 million events) to google analytics.
for this matter i should use Measurement Protocol and it's limit allow me to transfer 2 million hits with no problem.
but i didn't succeed to know how to set the time of the event. Measurement Protocol has Queue Time but google says :
Values greater than four hours may lead to hits not being processed.
how it's possible to transfer 2 million events to google analytics with there event time ?
Thanks
You are correct you can use the measurement protocol to send events data directly to google analytics. I don't see any problem in sending 2 million events. However its not possible to set the event time longer then four hours ago.
Queue time is used to set the time that the event occurred as you can see it cant be more then four hours ago and I have found that if you do set it to four hours ago its a bit fuzzy if the data is correct or not. This feature is probably most use in mobile devices where they may go off line for a short time you can store the data then send it all once the device is online again.
So the dates will be the date that you sent the event to Google Analytics you cant back date the data to more then four hours ago. So I am not sure how much use the data will be to you when it is all inserted.
There is no way to do this, but you can make it easier on yourself.
Unfortunately, there is no way to add, remove, or otherwise edit Google Analytics hit data retrospectively, except to delete all of it. You also cannot copy, or move it between accounts, or download it all.
You are not the first to have to come to terms with this.
In this situation, we recommend to our clients that they run their new and old systems in parallel for a testing period (usually 6 months or a year), before switching off one of them.
Yes, it's difficult to let go of old data, but sometimes it has to be done.
I set up a new Universal Analytics property about 1 hour ago and added the code to my page. Everything looks fine and the same code is working well on other pages.
However, I cannot see any real-time data in the reports. If I only change the property ID in my code an leave everything else the same real-time data immediately shows up.
Does it take some time and if so how much until a property starts collecting data?
Well then ... it just started reporting data. Hope this post at least helps some others while being too impatient.
Took about 60 Minutes until it started to collect data.
If you have correctly installed the tracking snippet, collection will start immediately and you can verify in real time reports, assuming you are not filtering your own visits. Data won't appear in standard reports, however, for up to 24 hours (and you could even get data in as short as 1 hour as you have observed).
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'm using "Reporting google Analitics API" and I can’t find information about what the last “end date” with data in Analytics is.
For example, let's suppose you want to retrive the last month’s data.
When do you have to perform the query?
The first day of the current month?
...or the second one?
...or maybe the third one?
And only another question: are the returned data for days in pacific time?
Google Analytics API is supposed to have access to the same data you have in the interface.
Google says that data can take up to 24h to process. The time it takes to really update the data depends on the type and size of the account. Small accounts are updated multiple times a day and can have data available in just a few hours. Once you reach 1M hits a month you are moved to a different mode where the data on your account is updated only once a day. Google Analytics Premium customers have updates more often even for large ammounts of traffic.
There's no way to tell through the API what is exactly the time of the last hit processed. You can query the data for today by the hour and see for yourself though.
Usually you don't care and just want to make sure that the data you're querying has been fully processed for that day.
So if you query data for yesterday there's a chance it has not being completely updated, for example if it's midnight the data for yesterday is just a couple minutes ago and probably haven't been completely processed yet. The safest bet in this case is to query data for 2 days ago.
So if today is 2012-06-15 and you want to get 1 month of data a safe approach is to query data with start-date=2012-05-13 and end-date=2012-06-13. This will most of the time give you data for days that have been fully processed, but it's not 100% safe as well. Google Analytics have had outages in the past where data took longer than that to process, these are not usual though. When you get the data out it's really hard to tell just for the API if the data for those days have been fully processed or not, using the 2 days ago isea you just make it more likely that it is.
The days are aggregate following your timezone settings configured on the Google Analytics profile.