I've been working with Google Analytics, and while I have all the necessary settings in the right configuration to collect demographic information, I'm not seeing anything. Other information (active users, geographic info) is showing up as I'd expect, so it's not that everything is broken. What I'm wondering is if there is a way to test the demographic data collection, to ensure that it's not just that users are blocking that data (it is a very low traffic site). Other tips are also appreciated in case I'm missing something else that could be causing this to happen. Thanks very much for your attention!
Seeing the demographics data in the reports takes a lot of hits, because they are based on a sample of total sessions.
Anyway, you can check if you have activated them by looking in the browser network if you are also sending hits to doubleclick as well as Google Analytics.
Related
We are implementing a native analytics system and want to apply the same tracking principles Google Analytics uses. We've figured everything out but one thing:
Every time I refresh a page with an url that has utm-parameters attached to it, Google Analytics somehow figures out that it's not actually a visit but the same page that gets refreshed and shows only one visit in its dashboard from that particular source.
Is anybody aware how GA specifically does that so I can replicate it in our system?
I know that I can use
performance.navigation.type
in my JS script, but it doesn't give me desired results.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Attribution in GA happens on the Google servers, so JavaScript will be of limited use. Basically since a reload means that the user has the same client id and no change in the channel (source, medium and campaign are the same as in the previous visit) the existing session will be continued (a change of campaign/source information would trigger a new Google Analytics session).
Google has a very nice chart that explains how campaign information and traffic source information is processed.
I'm very new to online analytics. I just deployed a site a few days ago, told no one, and Google Analytics is saying I have hundreds of users and sessions all over the world.
Even if events are logging from my own development, there shouldn't be so many users (and so many sessions...I'm not developing THAT vigorously.)
Also, my server logs indicate the level of activity I expect: ~0. So it's not like I'm magically getting traffic somehow. It really is nonexistent.
What could be going on? I can understand seeing a few sessions here and there, for web crawlers, but I don't understand why the numbers are so high.
Any common gotchas?
I realize this is a vague question, but I'm not sure what other information to provide, so please let me know what I can do to help.
Traffic source
First check, if traffic comes through your website (through your analytics.js library). To do this, just remove analytics.js for a while and check, if traffic is still going into Google Analytics (e.g. Realtime report).
If is still going, maybe somebody use Measurement Protocol to spam your account.
To prevent this, add, for instance, custom parameter into your call and create filtered view only for this. All without this param, throw away.
Check sessions and returning visitors
Check, if the traffic is random (usualy one pageview per session) or if the behavior of users is normal.
Custom client ID
Check if you dont play with client ID in analytics.js configuration. IF you dont have random number generator there.
Check traffic source (referal), browsers
If there is one significant, or there is some pattern in versioning (absolute randomness is pattern too)
Preventing random access through website
For every visitor who is first-time on your page, set up a cookie with current timestamp. If cookie is not older than e.g. hour or day, do not track this user. Or buffer hits and fire them later after you prove the user is real.
Anyway, if you have some new hints or information from your analysis, we should help you better. This is still like reading a magic sphere :-)
I'm working on the architecture for a project that includes a Android and iOS apps and a web interface with a subset of the mobile apps functionalities. The project is basically a e-commerce solution. In all three interfaces I'm using Google Analytics to track some information. However I'm having an internal discussion about the extent of the information I should send to GA. What should I store in GA and what should I store in my own server?
Let me give you some examples.
Session tracking is clearly something that belong to GA.
ProductDetailViews. Sounds like something that should go into GA, specially considering the enhanced e-commerce module.
Shared item. When a user shares some content over a social network, should I store that information on GA or in my own server? I'm inclined to GA but it becomes more ambiguos.
Do you see my point? Can someone share a general rule or recommendation on what should be saved in GA and what should be saved on the projects own server?
Thanks
For those examples I would generally send all the hits to Google Analytics. Here are a few reasons:
Preventing data silos. You want all of your data in one place and Google provides you with a database reachable via the API where you can keep all your data organised in one place. This is important when you are considering measuring performance, as you want to avoid duplication of conversions or traffic hits
Useage of Google Analytics advanced segments. With all your data in GA, you will be able to create advanced segments for analysis. But the real power is if you are using AdWords or retargeting, as you can send those Advanced Segments to AdWords, and target those users around the web with your custom data
Single point of reference for users All analytics are inaccurate, but you want to make sure they are inaccurate to the same degree. Using GA keeps all your data on the same playing field
Usability and Freedom of information Its easier to serve up your data to users within the GA interface as people are more likely to know how to navigate that than your database. You can also use the GA API to pull out any data you need to push into other visualisation tools.
User session merging With your data and userID tracking in GA, you may be able to track users as they arrive via mobile to desktop and back again, over multiple sessions.
What you need to avoid putting in to Google Analytics is personal info such as names, email address etc. There are against the TOS. But you can capture a unique userID, and match that outside of the tool later.
We have been using Google analytics for awhile now. It has been great for both live traffic and historical reporting.
Suddenly on Sept 5 our reporting shows zero traffic (using the standard reporting overview tab).
This seems really strange as you can see there is near constant traffic in the real-time tab.
Has anybody else experienced this problem when integrating Google analytics? We had a filter that only traffic from our main domain (app.domain.com) would show. Even after removing this we get nothing in the reports.
Check the filters on that profile. Go into Admin on the top right and check the Filters tab on the profile.
Filters are not applied to real time data.
So what you're seeing here is data being filtered out from the profile, but still showing up in the real time.
This could be a few different things
A temporary glitch by Google - this happened to me (which is how I got to this page). I could see traffic in the real time view but nothing in reports. To fix: be patient - this resolved itself after about 12 hours.
profile issue - you may have a profile set up that has filters which are blocking more traffic than you were expecting. To fix: Try setting up a separate profile (if you don't have one already) that has no filters applied. Remember- profile filters work by stripping or manipulating traffic before they reach your reports. The answer above is incorrect- the real time view does take filters in to account. You can easily test this making a filter change and you'll see it take affect in the real time view
tag has dropped off your pages To fix: if you're using GTM you should be able to check this. Or if not check HTML page source on one of your pages you know is getting traffic
finally - you may not getting any traffic :)
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/