I am studying about the scope in Google Analytics and, obviously, I have read that we shouldn't combine different scope metrics and dimensions. However, I have some questions regarding the exceptions allowed. I will give some examples:
A. Users by Page (user-level metric by hit-level dimension)
I would expect to get a table that shows how many users visited each page of my site. Based on my research, this combination can be used because hits do contain user information (the client id).
B. New Users by Source / Medium (user-level metric by session-level dimension)
Why are we allowed to combine New Users with Source / Medium, while we are not allowed to combine Users with Source / Medium (or at least we must be careful)?
C. Sessions by User Type (session-level metric by user-level dimension)
Why are we allowed to combine Sessions and User Type?
D. Pageviews by User Type (hit-level metric by user-level dimension)
Why are we allowed to combine Pageviews and User Type?
E. Pageviews by Source / Medium (hit-level metric by session-level dimension)
Are, and if yes why, are we allowed to use this combination if we want to calculate the number of pageviews generated from users arriving from a specific source/medium?
F. Bounce Rate by Page (session-level metric by hit-level dimension)
Regarding this combination, I have read that we should never combine session-level metrics and hit-level dimensions, because when combining any session-level metric with a hit-level dimension, the metric will only contain data from the first hit of the session. However, in this case we do have such a combination. Why?
Also, I have found these two articles:
In the first one, bounce rate is noted as session-level metric. https://www.bounteous.com/insights/2016/11/30/understanding-scope-google-analytics-reporting/
In the second one, bounce rate is noted as hit-level metric.
What is the correct one?
G. Exit Rate by Page (session-level metric by hit-level dimension)
The same holds for this combination.
Related
I'm querying the Google Analytics API, and got a question about combining different dimension and metric scopes. Is it possible to combine a user-level dimension like "Device Category" with a hit-level metric, i.e. "Unique Pageviews"?
I know I can't combine hit-level dimensions like "Page" with session-level metrics like "Sessions". But I can't seem to find any documentation of other combinations.
My gut tells me it should be possible as user-level dimensions are stored in a cookie and then be associated with each hit. But I'd really like to get a second opinion on this.
You can identify valid combinations of dimensions and metrics with Dimensions & Metrics Explorer tool:
https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/dimensions-metrics-explorer/
Since not all dimensions and metrics can be queried together, with this tool you can select a dimension or metric checkbox to see all the other values that can be combined in the same query.
[EDIT]
If your request is which dimensions and metrics may be misleading when combining, the answer is... depends on the result you want to obtain and on knowing how to recognize the data. If you want to know which pages are most viewed when a user lands in a specific landing page, you can do this by querying landing pages dimension and page dimension. You will have repeated the landing page many times in the reports (many times how many pages have been viewed from sessions originating in that landing) but this does not mean that it is wrong. Sure depending on what you combine you can get a misleading result, but Google Analytics cannot know if it is misleading for you or if you wanted to do it.
I've created goal funnels with a required first step, /cancel. When I look at my pageviews reports, the unique pageviews for the /cancel page differ from the value reported in the funnel visualization for the required step 1. Why?
In the funnel report the number is sessions and not pageviews.
Here are the definitions:
Sessions: total number of Sessions within the date range. A session is the period time a user is actively engaged with your website, app, etc. All usage data (Screen Views, Events, Ecommerce, etc.) is associated with a session.
Pageviews: is the total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
Unique Pageviews: is the number of sessions during which the specified page was viewed at least once. A unique pageview is counted for each page URL + page Title combination.
It is important to know that the unique page metric does not closely match the deduplication of the number of times a page has been viewed in a session, as a unique pageview in Analytics is counted for each page URL + page Title combination.
So you can't consider page views because goals talk about sessions and you can't compare these metrics because they are different information with different scope.
I have a number of different product pages and i'm interested in seeing how many users view each product more than 5 times. I understand I can do this for one of them with a segment and sequence, but I have too many pages that i'm interested in tracking. Could I do this with a custom metric? Maybe a calculated metric in analytics or data studio?
there's no reasonable way to do that because Google Analytics metrics are reported in an aggregated way and there's no way to introduce some custom conditions like 'if metric X is greater than N for specific user' other than segments.
the only way is to implement custom tracking that would watch for the number of page views for a particular page/product and then send data to analytics when a specific number of page views is reached.
I've set up a Custom Dimension at the website and the data is being registered correctly, as I am able to segment standard reports with a secondary dimension (using this Custom Dimension) and also to use this Custom Dimension as a segment.
However, when I set up a new View in GA filtering by this Custom Dimension, I see less than 20% of the data (sessions, pageviews, transactions, etc.) compared to what I see in a view without filters, but segmenting with the same Custom Dimension.
Has anybody had this kind of problem?
This can be an issue of the scope. For example, include view filter requires that filtered dimension be present in every hit. So if you're using session level custom dimension and only send it once per session then only 1 pageview will be there in filtered view. Contrary, Session segment requires that the filtered dimension appear at least once in the session and include all of the particular session hits.
In report All Traffic,If i choose primary dimension as "Landing Page" i see some (not set) entries.
Why it may happen?
Also it entries have page/visits=0, % new visits < 2% and bounce rate = 0%.
Are you filtering out pageviews, but events or social interactions are still going through the filters and hitting GA, spawning new visits that don't have pageviews? Then (not set) might mean that the dimensions you're combining don't have a real relationship. Another reason might be data that GA couldn't lookup for that dimension and there are some different reasons that might happen.
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/08/back-to-basics-not-set-entries.html
http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2820717