I have traffic coming from Salesloft emails sent by sales reps that gets bounced off a subdomain and then has a sbrc parameter appended to the URL. I'd like to ensure that this traffic gets counted by Google Analytics as coming from Email, whereas it's currently falling under the "Direct" bucket. Ideally, users would also be appending utm parameters to their links, but this isn't happening consistently.
I tried creating a filter to search and replace the following regex (?:^|\?|&)(sbrc=[^&]*&?) with ?utm_medium=email&utm_source=salesloft in the Request URI. This changed the displayed URL when looking at my realtime traffic, but did not change how GA categorized the channel of the traffic (still direct).
I then tried editing the default channel groupings for Email to be the system categorized OR Landing Page URL contains "sbrc" and dragged Email to the first channel grouping at the top. This doesn't seem to have done anything at all.
How can I make GA recognize this custom parameter as being attributable to the Email channel?
You could use advanced filters to solve this task. The Advanced filter lets you construct Fields for reporting from one or two existing Fields.
In your case, advanced filters let you assign values to campaign source and campaign medium, based on the content of the request URL. This is a sample setup for the source field, and you need a second similar filter for medium as well:
Ideally, users would also be appending utm parameters to their links,
but this isn't happening consistently.
If they add their own and use a utm_medium other then utm_medium=Email, then it will not be defined as being in the default Email channel.
Filters are not retroactive.
Filters also run after data has already been processed by Google, to only change how it displays in the reports as it gets sent back into the GA reports.
A Search and Replace Filter applied to the RequestURI for
?utm_medium=email&utm_source=salesloft is not going to have the result you want.
It will change the appearance of the RequestURI in reports, not actually change how that traffic is attributed.
Changes to the default Channel grouping are not retroactive, it should have affect going forward though.
To see the changes in historical data for the Channels, you would do best to create a custom Channel grouping at the View level, this can then be applied retroactively to the historic data.
Related
I have a requirement where I need to track whether a user clicked a link in a PDA email where the link included in the email is >900 characters.
I'm not sure if Google analytics support tracking in PDA.
If anyone has ever done this,please help me out.
Thanks
I seem to have misunderstood the question, so here is an update. Google will usually track any valid Urls. The two exceptions I can think of are more theoretical than a practical concerns.
Some old browsers (I think IE6 and similar vintages) have a character limit for GET requests (2048 bytes IIRC), so very long links will not work, and this not be tracked correctly. For all practical purposes these browsers should be extinct by now
A Google Analytics request is limited to 8096 bytes.The request has to transmit the document location as part of the payload, so if your URL is really massively oversizes (technically 8000 characters is ">900") this would not be tracked. Again, this is hardly a practical concern (unless there is a lot of other data, like e.g. Enhanced E-Commerce product impressions in that request).
Old (and probably irrelevant) answer:
Google Analytics does typically not track actions within emails, since email clients do not usually support javascript (there are implementations of email open tracking via "web bugs" linked to a script that does a measurement protocol request, but event that does not work particularly well).
If this is a link that points to your homepage the typical way to track this would be via utm parameters - i.e. you do not track the action within the email itself, but the result (the visit to your homepage).
UTM parameters (or "campaign parameters") are
utm_medium - the kind of traffic (if it's paid advertising, banner ads, or in your case e.mail)
utm_source - the specific vendor (e.g. "google" if the link is from a paid Google Ad, or in your case it could be the name of the department that sent out the mail)
utm_campaign - your advertising campaign; in the case of a periodic newsletter this could be e.g. the number of the newsletter
utm_term - you usually would not use that in an email, that's reserved for when a link is a result of a search (then you would insert the search term)
utm_content - if you have multiple links with the same link target and campaign info you can add additional information (e.g. if you have the same link at the top and the bottom of your mail you could indicate the position here)
You cannot do anything dynamic, though - if you want to mark links with a specific character count you would have to do this within your newsletter programm and insert the number. GA would then be able to pick this up from the campaign parameters.
E.g. for your use case you might construct a target URL like
www.example.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=my_department&utm_campaign=pda_mail&utm_content=<number of characters>
and then get the information from the Aquisition reports in Google Analytics.
If the links do not point to your own homepage you would need to set up an intermediate page that tracks the utm_parameters before it redirects to the intended destination.
I recently ran an e-mail campaign with a partner, who sent me over a URL with their own UTM parameters so they could track performance on their side.
When I handed the information over to our e-mail team and checked as the campaign went live, it appeared that they, out of habit, had added their own UTM parameters on top of the ones sent over by the partner, resulting in a click-through URL that looked like the following -
http://spirit.cruises.com/?cm_mmc=partner_email-_-sprt-multi_product--20161028--clia_plan_a_cruise_month&utm_medium=partner_email**&utm_source**=sprt-multi_product**&utm_campaign**=20161028&utm_content=clia_plan_a_cruise_month**&utm_source**=responsys**&utm_medium**=email**&utm_campaign**=20161028_50pct__Dual_Cruise_Email
As you can see, there are duplicate source, medium, and campaign parameters.
Does anyone know what happens in this situation? Does Google Analytics count both, or just the first, or just the last, or none? What is best practice when there are two parties that want to track performance of a URL in a campaign, and they may have different naming conventions?
(This is my first question, so please be nice :) Thanks!)
GA counts the last set. The proper way to deal with this is to avoid the situation. Email Software is often set to automatically add utm parameters to links (do you do not have to do it manually), but then all email marketing software I know would allow to override the configured default parameters.
I am not sure how your partner could track performance "on their site" via utm parameters unless they have their own GA code integrated in your website (or do you mean that they have access to your GA ?).
If there are two sets of analytics code that require different campaign attribution you would have use differently named parameters - let's say utm_medium2, utm_source2 and utm_campaign2 - and manually override campaign attribution for the second tracker:
// add this to after your usual tracker
ga('create', 'UA-XXXXX-Y', 'auto', 'partnerTracker');
ga('partnerTracker.set','campaignName',<value of utm_campaign2>)
ga('partnerTracker.set','campaignMedium',<value of utm_medium2>)
ga('partnerTracker.set','campaignSource',<value of utm_source2>)
ga('partnerTracker.send','pageview')
That would send data to a second account and override campaign attribution fields. It seems quite unlikely that you have or want that, but if you want to allow your partner to independently track utm values on your website (and everything else with it) that would the way to go.
Frankly I think you should just remove your partners utm parameters. Utm parameters make only sense for the owner of the respective GA account, and that is probably you, not the partner.
I agree with the first answer except for that last point where has says to remove the partner's UTM parameters.
In your case, the destination for the link provided to you by your partner is NOT your own website. The link goes to your partner's website. Therefore, your GA account has zero relationship with the link he sent you.
The way we're getting around this (without doing anything in analytics) for our many partners that we send links to is by using different email subjects per partner. Most email platforms use the subject line (or the internally defined Campaign "Name") as the value for UTM_Campaign.
So different subjects that include the partner organization in them:
"Special discount for ABC Organization members!"
"Special discount for XYZ Company members"
We can then analyze each unique campaign name in GA.
How can I set up Google Analytics goal to track traffic from a single website and track whether the user ends up on specific pages (as in, track how they move through the funnel/website) as well if they convert to a subscriber (I can put that tracking code on a signup / thank you page).
But I am concerned about traffic only from a single domain, as a specific and unique measuring statistic, in addition to overall traffic tracking, obviously.
I can't figure it out for the life of me....
Thanks.
The filtering would not be a goal setting. Set up, either:
A custom segment that filters users based on the referrer / hostname / whatever you need. It sounds like you are looking to filter on the referrer or referrerPath. Then set up the goal and when you report, change the segment
Or set up a separate view that filters for traffic based on the criteria above. That view can then have the goal, inclusive funnels, set up.
Both methods have drawbacks, the second method is cleaner if that goal is something you plan on reporting on for the foreseeable future.
Say I have two pages on a site called “Page 1” and “Page 10”. I'd like to be able to see the paths visitors take to get from “Page 1” to “Page 10” with full URLs intact. Many of the URLs (including those for “Page 1” and “Page 10”) will include query strings that are important.
Is this possible? If so, how?
Try using behavior flow reports. The report basically shows you how visitors click through your website. There are a lot of ways to customize the report, with which you will need to play around to really answer your question. By default, the behavior flow focuses on entry and exit points of visitors, regardless how many times they hit the different subpages in between. However, I'm sure you can set appropriate filters and settings to answer your question.
I use two methods for tracking where people have been on my website:
Track and store the information in my own SQL database. (details below)
Lead Forensics (paid subscription, but you can do a trial).
For tracking and storing my own data, I record unique visitors based upon the IP Address they're connecting from and then have a separate table that records all page views that links back to the unique visitor table.
Lead Forensics data simply allows me to link up those unique visitors with actual companies that have viewed my website.
Doing it yourself means you don't have to rely on Google working for your records to work, and in my experience Google Analytics tends to round numbers so you don't get a true indication of numbers, and also you can remove bots and website trawlers from your data by tracking the user agent string.
As a somewhat ugly hack you could use transaction tracking. If you use the same transaction id multiple times subsequent products will be added to the existing data. So assign an ID at the start of the visits and on each page record a transaction with the current page url as product name (and the ID as transaction id). This will give you the complete path per user (I am frankly not to sure how this is useful - at some point you probably want aggregated data. Plus each transaction and product counts towards your quota for interaction counts, so on a large site you might run over the 10mio hits limit).
you can do it programatically
have a MAP in the backend which stores the userId (assuming u would have given a unique ID at the time of login to each user) with a list of Strings(each string being URL visited by that user)
whenever the user hits another URL from Page 1(and only from page1, check it using JS), send a POST request to backend with the new URL in its data section.
In the backend, check if the URL is of Page 10 and if not, add this URL as a string into the MAP for that corresponding user
Finally, when the user clicks on the Page 10 URL, you know the URLs in the way from Page 1 to Page 10 and so use them.
Though if I consider JS and I have not misunderstood your question, we can get the previous URL from request header information using document.referrer.
Are you trying to do it from 'Google Tag Manager'? I am not sure whether you are trying to trace the URLS in clientside or server side?
I have a website that allows people to create an account (that is the conversion I wish to track).
I wish to know where a specific person is coming from. I have google analytics installed and have set up the registration page as a goal, but the reporting tells me traffic sources as an aggregated pie chart. It doesn't report down to the user account level to say that 'person with email xyz' came from 'facebook' for example.
What custom variables or mark up would I need to add to GA to report at that detailed level, if that is at all possible?
Otherwise, I will just have to record the first http_referer in a cookie and stick it in a database during the registration process.
Any advice?
Firstly I must ask you, how actionable do you think it is to look at data at that granular of a level? Finding out what % of people who registered came from facebook or some other place is actionable, because it helps you do things like determine where to focus marketing efforts. But individual users? How is this actionable to you? (hint: it's not)
However, if you are still determined to know this, you should first note that it is against Google's ToS to record personally identifiable data both directly (recording the actual value in GA) or indirectly (e.g. - recording a unique id that you can use to tie to personal info stored within your own system). If this is something you don't want to risk, I suggest moving to another analytics tool that does not have this sort of thing in their ToS (e.g. Adobe SiteCatalyst, which costs money, or perhaps you may instead prefer to choose an "in-house" approach, like Piwik)
If you are still determined to follow through with this and hope not to get caught or whatever, Google Analytics doesn't record data like what info a visitor filled out in a form (like their email address) unless you populate that data in a custom field/dimension/metric/event to be sent along with the request. Usually you would populate this on the form "thank you" page (which is usually the same page you use as your goal url or goal event if you're popping and using an event for your goal). So you would populate the email address in one of those custom variables and then have it as a dimension to break down the http referrer by.