I'm having a problem reconciling some figures in GA / GTM for two sites where I know the number of clicks from one to the other but the referral information doesn't seem to tally up I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction/advise.
I have two sites:
a main corporate site (https://www.nhsnss.org)
transactional service on a separate URL(https://prescription-tracker.nhsnss.scot.nhs.uk/ ).
I have analytics and GTM installed on both. There is a link to the prescription tracker from a service start page on the main site (https://nhsnss.org/services/practitioner/pharmacy/prescriptions/prescription-tracker/)
I've got a tag/trigger (tracked as events) set up to look at the number of times a link is clicked from the main site to the service site based on the button class and as a double check since 27 May I've got a second tag/trigger looking at all outbound link (trigger - click url does not contain "nhsnss.scot") clicks to check if anyone has added any other links directly to the tracker elsewhere on the nhsnss.org.
Looking at the event figures from 28 May to 2 June they agree at 1863 total events or 1697 Unique events. This to me shows that my tag/trigger setup in GTM is ok( apart from the double counting!)
Looking at the referral figures from nhsnss.org on the tracker for the same period I am getting the following figures on the home page of the tracker site (/):
Users: 1,555
Sessions: 3,243
Again I've tried to double-check these figures, this time by looking at the referral path which matches with the figures and the service start page on nhsnss.org ( /services/practitioner/pharmacy/prescriptions/prescription-tracker/)
Happy to be wrong on this but I'd have thought that a single link click from nhsnss.org to the tracker service would have started one session to be measured by analytics on the service.
Any advice/knowledge or solutions are gratefully received!
Many Thanks,
Robert
You probably have double the amount of sessions because you might have both GA snippet and GTM snippet hardcoded on the website. That means that if you also have a GA Pageview tag served through GTM, GA will receive 2 pageviews for one user, one from the GA snippet hardcoded and one from the GA tag via GTM. Either pausing the GA pageview tag in GTM or removing the GA snippet from the website should fix your numbers.
Related
I have implemented facebook ads which shows my website received 290 link clicks over 2 days , but in my google analytics from the day before I started ad it shows 57 users , why is it so ?
There are several reasons why there is a discrepancy between clicks on Facebook Ads (as well as on Google Ads) and Google Analytics sessions. It is a more or less known situation.
Some of these are for example that you are comparing 2 different pieces of information, such as clicks on one side and sessions or users on the other.
Clicks can include clicks on different elements or double clicks.
The session is also detected when the Analytics code on the site page is loaded, so if the user clicks on the ads and exits before the site page is loaded (for example because it loads slowly or because he didn't want to click) you will have clicks counted but not sessions.
In your case you are also talking about users, so the discrepancy is certainly higher since if the same person clicks an ads from his smartphone in the morning, then in the afternoon, then in the evening, he will have 3 clicks on Facebook Ads, in the best of cases will result in 3 sessions in Analytics but for the latter it will result in 1 user.
Adding to Michele's answer a couple of points:
Make sure your cookie banner allow Google Analytics and FB Pixel in the same way (e.g. both are loaded only after the user's acceptance), and make a test also with an AdBlock.
Try optimising your campaign for landing page view optimisation, as they will be counted only those users who click on the ads AND load the page. Maybe this will help.
Edit: be aware about the iOS14 changes that may impact this tracking as well
I will start with describing what I am trying to achieve, in order to avoid x-y problem. And if the solution I try to apply is not the best one, please, tell me a different one.
I have a website. There is an audio player on it. I would like to track in my GA how many users started the audio, how many users listened 25% of it, how many users listened 50% of it and so on. I can access the needed information (e.g. user reached 25%, so it is time to tell about this to GA through GTM) in client-side JavaScript, the question is only about setting up the GTM and GA correctly.
So, now that I described my intentions, let me show what I was able to do so far.
1 I created a custom metric with Hit scope in GA.
2 I created a tag which increments the metric created in the 1.
3 I created a custom event in GTM. When user starts playing the audio I fire the event with the help of dataLayer. And the event fires the tag which I created in 2.
4 I created a custom dashboard in GA to track how many users started the sound.
And now I am stuck. I get the needed data from my website to GTM. I trigger the tag which should send the data over to GA. I have the needed metric and dashboard set up in GA. And now I would expect the widget in my custom dashboard in GA to show that the audio was started, but it does not happen.
I am very new to GA and GTM and may not understand some concepts, as a result I may miss some necessary for troubleshooting information. I will gladly provide it if you need it.
Thank you (y).
We are having an issue with our tracking on www.x3tradesmen.com where a Google Tag Manager tag is firing way too many times and we cannot determine why...
We only have one website event tag linked to Google Analytics called Form Submit and typically we would receive between 2-10 Form Submit events per day at the most, however, recently we have noticed that the tag is firing 1000's of times sporadically and we cannot pinpoint the issue. We have also noticed that our users have drastically increased for short time periods (minutes/hours). We typically only get 40-80 users per day on our website but we saw a massive spike of around 400 users in less than one hour once.
We recently added the facebook pixel via GTM and that is really the only change that we have made and now we are seeing these issues. Does anyone know of any common reasons to why this would be behaving this way or can anyone see any major issues with our implementation of GA or GTM on our website that would cause this?
I know this information is vague, so please let me know if there is specific information that would help identify the issue.
Thanks in advance!
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I presume it is the FB pixel - Facebook automatically collects information in addition to what you have configured yourself and uses post/submit events to send them. You can disable that behaviour as per documentation and see if it makes a difference:
Automatic Configuration
The Facebook pixel will send button click and
page metadata (such as data structured according to Opengraph or
Schema.org formats) from your website to improve your ads delivery and
measurement and automate your pixel setup. To configure the Facebook
Pixel to not send this additional information, in the Facebook Pixel
Base code, add fbq('set', 'autoConfig', 'false', '')
above the init call.
I had a similar issue where suddenly additional submit events turned up in the GTM preview pane that I finally tracked down to FB, so there is a good chance that yours is the same problem.
I'm a consumer data analyst who is not very familiar to coding other than occasional encounters with HTML and Python, and I'm just starting with the coding part of Web Analytics. In particular, I need to learn about checking websites I don't own (therefore I don't have access to their Analytics accounts) for tracking info, but it has been phenomenally hard to find information on which tracking function each component of code stand for, or to what extent it is visible from the page source.
For a project, here is a page I'm trying to check for Google Analytics/Tag Manager/alternative analytics setup, and see what is exactly being tracked on it. Other than the source code, I checked it with Ghostery, which gave me this Tag Manager code page. Is it possible to check tracking info from these two (events, pageviews, URI and how many custom dimensions there is, specifically), and which part of the code includes that info (particularly URI and dimension info - the first two, I have more idea about)?
This is a page I'm also looking into. I can see that this one has Google Analytics/Tag manager, but again, I can't make sure of what is being tracked, and whether the Analytics/Tag Manager setup is looking -potentially- problematic in any way. Here is the Tag Manager page for this one that I obtained through Ghostery.
Any help would be much appreciated...
Looks like what you are looking for is Google Tag Assistant extension for google chrome: https://get.google.com/tagassistant/
you can download it from here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tag-assistant-by-google/kejbdjndbnbjgmefkgdddjlbokphdefk?hl=en
When you install it it will appear as icon on any page you visit and it will show you all GA implementations on a page:
You can select tracking ID you are interested in and it will tell you how many Page Views/events were fired for that particular tracking ID only:
Then you can select individual tracking event/page view and see all data that are being sent with that tracking request. Just Click on URLs and click the icon to put the data in table:
Here "cd" stands for Custom Dimension, so here you can clearly see 2 custom dimensions that are being tracked:
Hope this helps, good luck!
I'm new to Google Analytics. Yesterday, I created an account and I pointed it to our website. I've added the JavaScript codes that Google Analytics generated for us. I put the code on all of our .html files.
I've been hitting our website from outside and so does my officemates since last night and also today. However, when I visited https://www.google.com/analytics under Reporting, everything was showing 0. I don't see any single spike at all.
I would recommend navigating to the Reporting -> Realtime -> Overview tab within your Google Analytics (GA) account. This is an almost realtime view into users on your site. In a separate tab access your site and refresh the page, this page view event should then be visible in the GA Realtime view.
If you can see your page view then its likely that you've inserted the correct GA script into your page and that you've used the correct GA property id. If you cant see your own page view then you will know that your script is incorrectly inserted or your GA property id is incorrect.
Last bit of advice: GA often has a 24-48 delay before you are able to use its full suite of insight tools (such as GA Goals). If you're expecting to see Goals populate immediately you're gonna have a bad time.
Last-last bit of advice: make sure that you select the current date from the date range picker in the top right of the GA Reporting view. It defaults to yesterday.