Is it possible to get a breakdown reporting in Google Analytics for the number of sessions/users during day and time on a specific URL? I was looking at some custom reporting and going down the route of using a pivot table, but I'm not sure if that's overkill for something that can be done directly in GA outright.
You can use custom report with page and hour of day as dimensions and sessions as metric.
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Is it possible to export a list of all page views, with timestamps, out of google analytics?
Currently I can see page views per day, but not specific times for each view. I do see real-time data as it comes in, so I assume the time for each view is being stored.
If not, how might I go about sending that data when I report the page view in a way that will make it accessible in the dashboard?
[[UPDATE]] The Google Analytics v4 API now includes a "dateHourMinute" dimension.
Inside Google Analytics, I think the problem you will run into is that a "timestamp" includes Date, Hour, Minute, Second (and maybe millisec) and you can only drill into one secondary dimension at a time (ie: just date). An alternative method is to use the query explorer or just use the Google Analytics API.
Ad Hoc Report with query explorer
You can use the Google Analytics API Explorer: https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/query-explorer/
It will allow you to select:
A date range
Metrics: (like Users, pageviews, etc)
Dimensions: pagePath, Date, Hour, Minute (can't go to second or further, as in a timestamp, though)
Use filters to get rid of some data.
If your website gets a decent amount of traffic (> 50,000 pageviews per month), you might want to grab it 1 month (or less) at a time to avoid hitting limits/sampling effects.
#doctaj solution works. Please just note that if you are using the query-explorer for example, "dateHourMinute" dimension is considered 3 dimensions and will burn 3 spots from your available 7 or 10 dimensions that you can query. So if you need more dimensions, you need to decide which is more important to you. For example, you may want to query for the date and hour dimensions separately to drop the minutes in favour of something else.
I'm using the Google Analytics Real Time API (https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/realtime/v3/) to track the active visitors per minute. For this, I use the metric rt:activeVisitors. Everything is working fine.
However, I want to track the page views per minute, but I did not find any overview of available metrics.
Is it possible to fetch the current page views?
You can find a list of the Dimensions and metrics available in the RealTime API here : Dimensions & Metrics Reference
It doesnt look like page views is something you can see in the RealTime API
As seen here: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/realtime/dimsmets/pagetracking
You can use
rt:pageviews
the documentation is not really clear on the time frame. But my experiments seem to hint per minute.
The closest you can get is to use pagePath dimension and have activeVisitors as the basic metric (and the only one available, pretty much).
I don't think there is any real value in having live page view stats, you can find those in real time reports built-in standard GA reporting set anyway.
Suppose I have 65 people that register on January 1, 2012.
I want to find out how many of those 65 people returned to the site that same week. (More generally, if n people signup on date A, I want to be able to find out how many of those n people return in a given date range.)
Is there a way to do this using Google Analytics? If so, how? I am currently getting the user's username for each page hit.
If you only need to track people who sign in then you don't need to get very fancy. You can copy the relevant user attributes, such as sign up date, from your DB to GA using events or session level custom variables.
But if you want to track everyone, including those who don't sign up, then you'll need to use visitor level custom variables (GA cookies).
I explain how to set this up in detail in this post so I'll just highlight the key points here:
First, decide how to layout the data in Google Analytic's custom variables based on your requirements. For example, are you storing retention dates for daily, weekly or monthly tracking? Do you also want to track cohort goals? Partition this data into the available custom variable slots.
Write the cohort data to these custom variables when visitors arrive or achieve goals using Google Analytic's _setCustomVar function. Setting the fourth parameter of that function to 1 indicates you want to do visitor-level (cookie) tracking.
For each cohort you wish to analyze, create an advanced segment in Google Analytics. Using a regex expression in the condition will give you the flexibility to segment for interesting cohorts. ex: "All users whose first visit was the week before Christmas".
Analyze the results with reports by specifying a date range and the corresponding cohort-sliced advanced segments. Another option is to extract the data using the Google Analytics Data Feed Query Explorer or their API.
Once you've put in the work your new visitors will be stamped by their first visit date and nicely fall into each daily or weekly retention bucket. This is what it might look like if you were tracking weekly retention, for example:
This is not a full solution, but here are some points on how I would approach this problem with the help of Google Analytics:
You have to make sure that you somehow store the registration date of each user, either in your database or in a cookie. Then have a look at Google Analytics Event Tracking. You could for example set up a new category based on the registration date. On every page load in your page, you then have to set up this event tracking call, for example like:
_trackEvent("returns", "2012-01-01", "UserId:123123123")
This way you will receive all page views for users that registered on that particular date. To add a date range in this, you have to make sure that these events only get fired for the number of dates after the signup (e.g. 7 days).
After your date range, you will be able to see how many page views and how many users returned - you even know which users came back.
Tools like Mixpanel, KISSmetrics and others support cohort analysis out of the box but I've heard that you can do this with a bit of effort in Google Analytics as well. How do you set this up if you want to track, say, the daily and weekly retention of your visitors?
Google Analytics can do a lot but retention analysis is one of it's weak points. Since it tends to focus on visits (as opposed to visitors) you'll need to configure the cookie tracking yourself using Google Analytic's custom variables. Having said that, it's not too hard to get a simple solution running quickly.
First, decide how to layout the data in Google Analytic's custom variables based on your requirements. For example, are you storing retention dates for daily, weekly or monthly tracking? Do you also want to track cohort goals? Partition this data into the available custom variable slots.
Write the cohort data to these custom variables when visitors arrive or achieve goals using Google Analytic's _setCustomVar function. Setting the fourth parameter of that function to 1 indicates you want to do visitor-level (cookie) tracking.
For each cohort you wish to analyze, create an advanced segment in Google Analytics. Using a regex expression in the condition will give you the flexibility to segment for interesting cohorts. ex: "All users whose first visit was the week before Christmas".
Analyze the results with reports by specifying a date range and the corresponding cohort-sliced advanced segments. Another option is to extract the data using the Google Analytics Data Feed Query Explorer or their API.
Once you've put in the work your new visitors will be stamped by their first visit date and nicely fall into each daily or weekly retention bucket. If you need more detail there's a full walk through on my blog:
How to do Cohort Analysis in Google Analytics.
This really interested me so I did a little research and basically you have to customize the GA javascript in the pages to upload custom variables into google.
Once you have done that you need to go to "Advance Segments in Google Analytics" and select your custom variables. Here is a detailed description on how to accomplish this:
Hacking a Cohort Analysis with Google Analytics
I am interested in seeing visits on my site broken down by hour - is there any way to generate a report of this in Google Analytics? It appears that all metrics are only broken down by day. Maybe I can get this information through the GA API?
Since Google Analytics was revised the currently accepted answer is no longer available. The current version of Google Analytics will let you view visitors per hour:
Go to the Reporting Tab
Select "Audience"
Select "Overview"
Select "Hourly"
If you're trying to determine total traffic by hour of the day for a given date range then you can use this custom report:
https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?type=custom_report&uid=pToP7693ReSxfSIpbqHmWg
Only a few reports have hour-by-hour data; as far as I know, they're all in the 'Visitors' section.
For example, to see Visits by hour over a period of time, click Visits, Visitor Trending, then Visitors. Then, in the top right of the report, select Graph by: (icon of a clock)
All of the reports under Visitor Trending have hour-by-hour data, except Absolute Unique Visitors.
As far as the API goes, you can check what query combinations are valid here (since there are restrictions): http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataReferenceDimensionsMetrics.html
According to that, all metrics can be viewed by an hourly dimension except Campaign metrics and Visitor (not to be confused with Visit) metrics.
You can test the query you want to run with the Google Analytics Data Feed Query Explorer
If using a (downloadable, emailable) custom report is an option, you can use the custom report described on http://salman-w.blogspot.com/2012/07/analytics-day-of-week-hour-of-day-report.html
The article tells you to do the following:
Create a custom report with flat table (I am sure it will work with explorer style reports too)
Add the dimension hour (not hour of day)
Add the metric visits, pageviews, etc
Preview