Is it possible to see which of the users acquired through direct channels in Google Analytics came from directly typing in the url/emails not a part of a chain/were just unknown sources and categorized there? If anything, the last category is the most important for me to differentiate from.
If the channel is direct you cannot understand if it arrives i.e. by typing the url, from an email or from a bookmark. You need to use the UTM parameters in the URL to customize the traffic sources.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en
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I want to have Google analytics ignore all traffic that comes with a specific query parameter, ?mysearch=1
I am using that query parameter from an internal tool that I cannot change nor can I have the tool use a specific user agent, it's an ancient monitoring tool that I am being mandated to use.
It will always hit the site at a few different specific URLs, e.g. https://example.com/?mysearch=1 or https://example.com/about/?mysearch=1 or https://example.com/team/?mysearch=1
There will never be a time that real traffic will have the ?mysearch=1 query variable.
You can try to use a segment when you see your Analytics data that exclude all users that contains page with ?mysearch=1. So you can see report without these users.
Can you set up alerts in Google Analytics to flag potential PII/NPI such as name, email address, billing address, billing details etc.? If so, how?
First I have do say I do not understand the downvote(s). For example I have seen applications with user logins where a full name was part of the page title - combined with time based dimensions that gave profile that say which user looked at what page at what time, and that would be clearly illegal. Even worse I have seen a case where security tokens were transmitted to GA that allowed access to secured resources. So clearly accidental transmission of PII to Google Analytics is a real thing.
Unfortunately there is not much you can do about it. You can either do a custom report with relevant dimensions and have it sent to you for a manual audit, or pull them via the API and have them programmatically examined via regular expressions that look for patterns like e-mail addresses etc. But by the time you can do that it is already to late, the data will already be permanently recorded in the GA property.
You have to stop this before the data is collected - if at all possible already in the website (via form validation etc), or use Google Tag Manager with custom javascript variables with validation rules, or filters in the analytics view (the latter being cumbersome and not very promising for this purpose).
The good news is that GA will not suddendly start to track PII on it's own. So you only need to check if your GA account tracks PII when you set up the account. Collect a few days data, validate that everything is okay, make changes as necessary and after all flaws are straightened out copy the view to start data collection from scratch and drop the old view if it contains PII.
Google Analytics tracks the following acquisition types (ways in which its users reached your site):
Referrals
Search
Direct link
A direct link means entering a site name directly into the browser URL. A search means doing a google search and clicking on one of the results. A referral means someone clicked on a hyperlink which got them to your site.
It is obvious that since google search is run by google, clicking on a link in the google search results can submit the information of what clicked to the google analytic servers.
What is obvious is the other two cases (direct link and referrals). It seems to me that since these requests don't go through google, that google would have to own some software on interim TCP/IP routers for this to work.
So, my question is, how does Google Analytics manage to track referrals and direct links at the software level?
So, my question is, how does Google Analytics manage to track
referrals and direct links at the software level?
If there is no referrer (accessible via http headers) it's a direct type-in. If there is a referrer and it's not from a list of known search engines or social networks it's a referrer.
Since the referrer is accessible both via javascript (via document referrer) and via the http headers there is really not mystery here and they do not need to intercept traffic - source attribution works simply by way of exclusion (i.e. if it's not campaign traffic as per campaign parameters in the url it's a referrer or a direct visit).
In fact Google has a very nice flowchart to show how source attribution works. Once you realize that the referrer is public information (except for those user agent that choose not to send a referrer in the http headers) it's easy to understand how this works.
I need to track E-Commerce data in my Google analytic account using measurement Protocol. In the request I need to send following data and those data need to be tracked in my account.
Billing City (utmtci)
Billing Region (utmtrg)
Billing Country (utmtco)
But when I tried to find the parameters for these using enter link description here I could not find any matching parameter. Please help if any one know whether I can track these using measurement protocol.
This has been discussed (but not yet answered) here - basically it seems those fields have been deprecated.
I do not see that spelled out in the documentation, but those field do not appear in the parameter reference, not in the API (via the query explorer) and not in the GA user interface. If stuff is not part of the documentation it's pretty safe to assume that it is not there.
You can create custom dimensions in your property settings and send the geo information there.
Using the Google Analytics API I would like to display the domain associated with each GA profile. Is this possible or is there another way to do it? I have been unable to find any documentation for the domain.
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataReferenceAccountFeed.html#accountResponse
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/mgmt/mgmtFeedReference.html#profileFeed
I can't use profileName because depending on how the user has their GA account setup, it may just be a string and not a domain.
One thing you might do is perform a query using ga:hostnames as the dimension and either ga:visits or ga:pageviews as metrics. This will yield a chart of the host name (what is in the browser address bar) to reach that site. Sort of a hack in a way. Technically you can use a single GA Tracking code on multiple sites. So there is no "Official" domain name associated with a profile.
Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible with the current API. Furthermore, you can't explicitly depend upon the domain they enter as the only domain the profile is tracking since there is further customization that allows the user to specify if they want to track subdomains and/or top-level domains. I believe your only option is to ask the user the same information Google asks the user and help the user understand they will have to manually keep two lists in sync due to limitations of the Google API.