I recently got to work on a GA360 property, and came to know that there's a weird issue going on with it.
Basically, the company had created a custom dimension to record the GTM container version and ID for whichever container was currently live. For e.g., if the current container ID is XYZ and version is 23, then the dimension would record "XYZ version 23".
Then they created a custom report, showing this dimension and the corresponding number of hits.
Now coming to the issue, since the past few months, they've been seeing hits coming from both live AND older versions of the same container. The older versions are not supposed to be live but somehow they still show up in the reports.
Purely based on the description, can anyone share their suggestions as to what might have gone wrong?
EDIT: It is an app property.
Related
Previously working code that downloads a csv file from our site, now fails. Chrome, Safari and Edge don't display anything helpful except "Blob Blocked", but Firefox shows a stack trace;
Uncaught TypeError: Location.href setter: Access to 'blob:http://oursite.test/7e283bab-e48c-a942-928c-fae0907fdc82' from script denied.
Then a stack dump from googletagmanager
This appears to be a fault in the tagmanager code introduced in the last couple of weeks.
The fault appears in all browsers and is resolved immediately by commenting out the tag manager. The problem reported by a customer on the production system, and then found on both staging and locally. The customer advised they had used the export function successfully 2 weeks ago.
The question really is, do Google maintain a public facing issues log for things like the tag manager?
It's not about GTM as a library really, it's about poor user implementation. It's not up to Google to check for user-introduced conflicts with the rest of the site's functionality.
What you could do is go to GTM, and see what has been released in the past two weeks. Inspect things and look for anything that could interfere with the site's functionality. At the same time - do the opposite, see all the front-end changes introduced during this time frame by the web-dev team.
Things to watch for is mostly unclosured JS deployed in custom HTML tags. junior GTM implementation specialists like to use the global space, taking the global variables, often after the page is loaded, thus overwriting front-end's variables.
Sometimes, people would deploy minified unclosured code to the DOM, thus chaotically taking short var names. To the same end.
This is likely the easiest and most common way for GTM to break front-end. There definitely still are many ways to do so besides this though.
If this doesn't help, there's another easy way to debug it: make a new workspace from Default (or whatever is live), go into the preview mode and confirm that the issue still happens. Now start disabling newest created fired tags one by one and pinpoint which one causes the issue.
Let us know what it was.
Solution was to replace the previous tag manager code with the latest recommended snippet
Looking more for some fresh ideas to help me troubleshoot the below problem than solving any coding issues (which may come next).
Creating a similar site to an existing one that uses all previous GA tech (analytics.js, _gaq.push, Google_Service_AnalyticsReporting_ReportRequest(), etc) and provides all the easy data needed for my simple GA reports (i.e. page views by date and location).
However, not quite ready to bite off the whole enchilada (GTAGMgr, GA4, and such) so created dual Properties (UA and GA) as many forums have recommended when making the transition.
Setup the website same as the active [UA] site but using the gtag.js (per the Property Tracking Code snippet provided in ADMIN) vs the analytics.js code. Created View(s), new Service Account for the "user", an API Map Key for the Google Map Charts, and any other pieces I could find.
Have the GTAG.JS setup on each page and added any special page tracking via gtag('event', 'page view', {...}) but letting the default page view still occur as well.
Page view hits are coming through as expected EXCEPT the page views locations (City, State, Country, Region) are not being populated. All that comes thru is the "not set" for any location. Ironically, the old analytics.js code was still active initially and location data was being populated.
Would think if gtag.js is collecting standard page view info for the configured Property, that location data would be there as well. Am sure it is but possibly the older getReport calls need tweaking. No doubt I probably have a something not quite right but if REALTIME data shows usage, page views, etc. AND my GA Report calls are working, would think location data would be there too.
Any brainstorming ideas would be appreciated.
Thank you,
LarryG
ANSWER ... the EZ Button ... my code and calls were correct using old and [semi] new way. The majority of the problems were McAfee VPN kicking in. It is set to turn on with reboot and I do not always remember to turn it off. The first obvious clue was the realtime location for my actions were not where they were supposed to be. Also, appears Google API PHP Client has some issues with PHP7.4FastCGI.
So if you took the time to read ... check your VPN settings if you are getting an abnormal amount of NOT SETS in your GA data.
Begs the question ... with the increase in companies providing VPN services out of the box, that renders some of the tracking a moot point.
LarryG
I have an issue that's happened since we replaced the UA code with GTM and now run everything through tag manager.
Everything was working fine with analytics using plain UA. We could see ecommerce, user journeys etc all in one sessions however last October we changed to GTM. Initially we left the UA ecommerce code in place as our Devs did not have the capacity at the time to replace that.
That cause an issue where everything after a certain page become a new session. I tried setting the tracker name in GTM to blank, which I've been told fixes the solution, but still 90% of those who gave (It's a charity) would start a new session one a process giving page. Note: There are about 10% who appear not to be affected.
We then thought it might be because the GTM code and the UA code wouldn't accept each other as the same session, so we recently removed the UA ecommerce code and replaced it with GTM.
This broke the ecommerce altogether and I only managed to fix that yesterday. We also had some virtual page views for checkout journey which were also only fixed yesterday but were working fine on UA until we implemented GTM.
The issue seems to be that at the last virtual page on the form people are having their session ended. Then there's this processing page and then the thankyou page with the ecommerce code on.
I have looked through the user journeys prior to us having GTM and I cannot see any pages in that journey which I can't see currently (by this I mean I don't think there are any other pages that I should be making sure have GTM code on and thus breaking the journey in two) but even if there were, sure since GA sessions last 30 mins, it shouldn't necessarily matter if there were a phantom page.
Should I be setting the Tracker ID to blank again? I'm at a loss as I've been fixing all these problems since October and my brain has melted.
Edit: After a bit more research it looks like secure trading might be the issue. Does anyone know how to overide secure trading making a new referrer and keeping the sessions the same?
I think my question is simular to https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/74724/set-a-default-segment-for-google-analytics, however it has not been answered since January and due to hight volume of spam lately, maybe google has added a feature i cant find.
I have 10 websites on a new overview showing sessions/bouncerate/time on site etc.. Looks very nice, however the numbers are not real as 40% is spam.
I then downloaded and edited a segment from the gallery and applied. When i enter one of the website and apply the segment it looks good.
BUT when i see the overview its still ALL SESSIONS showing and user HAS TO go in and change the Segment manually
Is there a way that I can remove ALL SESSION totally and replace it with my own "ALL Session -Spam"
I know i can use shortcut to make it easier for customers but that is only valid for that one link. If they click deeper in, the ALL SESSIONS are applied and data becomes unusable.
So remove ALL SESSION as default and apply my own "ALL SESSION -spam" as default.
Can this be done?
Thanks
I recently signed up for a google analytics account in anticipation of a new site I'm putting together. The site has not been published, and the tracking script has not been put in the code yet.
Somehow after logging back in to grab the tracking code, it's showing I've already had 275 views in the past month. How is this possible???
These are very likely ghost referrals sent by spammers targeting random GA property IDs (which explains why you see them even before your Web site is live). Since you are setting up a new site, probably the easiest way to get rid of them is to create a new Web property so that you get an ID not ending with -1. The reason is that this type of spam is only targeted at the first property in an account.
If you want to get more information about how referrer spam works and alternative solutions to eliminate it, here is an article I wrote some time ago:
http://veithen.github.io/2015/01/21/referrer-spam.html