I have three goals that have the same destination URL. They all have different funnels but report the same number of conversions in the past 7 days in the Admin > Goals screen. When I verify the goal they all have the same percentage of completions. If I look at the goal funnel visualization it will show different numbers as the final outcome over what I believe is the same past 7 days for each goal.
Shouldn't the outcome of the goal funnel visualization be the same conversion number on the Admin > Goals screen?
Is the tracking of what's on the Admin > Goals screen past 7 day conversions and the final value of the goal funnel visualization just inherently different?
In all reports you will see the same number of Goal Completions and CR for all your 3 goals.
Only in report 'Funnel Visualization' you will see conversions for each funnel separately.
The Funnel Visualization has a logic of its own, read the documentation for differences with the most reliable Goal Flow in Analytics:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2976313?hl=en
Here you will find more information about the inconsistencies of the Funnel Visualization:
https://www.analyticstraps.com/stesso-obiettivo-ma-totale-completamento-diverso/
https://www.analyticstraps.com/quando-la-visualizzazione-canalizzazione-mente/
Related
I have an issue with my Funnel Visualization in Google Analytics where the funnels are showing as zero for every step - even although the Goal Funnel report just above it shows a conversion rate for that goal.
I have Funnel as 'ON' for this goal, but it is not showing anything.
Am I misunderstanding something about funnels here or is my setup wrong?
This appeared to simply be a case of waiting for the funnel reports to populate. I was under the impression that they would be populated in a matter of hours, but in this case it was 24hrs+.
I have two goals in Google Analytics. Each use a custom template and are type destination. Each have a required funnel. One has a longer funnel.
Goal 1
Destination
http://www.example.com/form/thank-you.html
Step 1
http://www.example.com/form/
Goal 2
Destination
http://www.example.com/form/thank-you.html
Step 1
http://www.example.com/
Step 2
http://www.example.com/form/
Each report the identical completions. However, in the Funnel Visualization, the longer funnel shows fewer, as expected completions. The completion numbers in both funnels are completely different than in the Overview.
Why is this? I know that the completions as listed in the Funnel Visualization is accurate. Why can't this data, a single number, be surface to a Dashboard Widget?
As Eike have mentioned this is caused by the fact that Goal Steps and Required first step apply only to the funnel visualization. The Goal Completion metric you find everywhere else is based solely on the number of sessions that reached your destination configured on the goal. If the destination is the same the completion will be the same for both your goals.
There's also this article I recommend that compares Goal Funnels to Goal Flow. Though not exactly what you are asking it does a good job explaining some of the details on how Funnels work.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2976313?hl=en
I'm utilizing Google Analytics for my mobile apps (iOS & Android) and set Goals to track how many users successfully touch down Home page (Intro - Sign up - Welcome - Rate Movies - Home)
So I set these two goals for test:
Both Goals are URL Destination types.
Goal #1. Intro(Required) -> Sign Up -> Welcome(Set as Goal URL)
Goal #2. Intro(Required) -> Sign Up -> Welcome -> Rate Movies -> Homm(Set as Goal URL)
Now it's been a few days and I can check the data but both of them returned same number of Intro views (9905) but different numbers in Sign Up (5772 vs 8328). In same period.
Please advise me why this happened.
The figures inside the various steps of the funnel are not accurate. In the situation you have described, the problem is most probably caused by the "back-filling" of Sign-Up step visits. You may rely on the goal conversion rate, not on the funnel visualization nor goal flow.
If you really want to visualize the funnel, you may have to build it by yourself, extracting data from Google Analytics API.
Articles giving more explanations about how the conversions funnels work:
Goals & Funnels in Google Analytics: Confusion and Workarounds
The Google Analytics Conversion Funnel Survival Guide
steps higher in the funnel are artificially “backfilled” when a lower step has a greater number of pageviews
I have an Adwords account linked to a Google Analytics account and I am wondering is there a way to view or import the keyword quality score from Adwords to be viewed in Analytics?
Or would this have to be pulled from the Adwords API and joined to Analytics data separately?
Thanks.
Keyword Quality Score cannot be directly imported to/viewed in Analytics. It is provided as a metric after the fact, but not a current state/output that you could append as a UTM variable.
Joining the Adwords Data to Analytics after the fact would be flawed too, as Quality Score is fluid (recalculated often). Unless you are pulling and tracking Quality Score Data multiple times daily, you will find inaccuracies. If you take the keyword data for the last 30 days in Analytics and then pulled your Keyword Quality scores and married that data, you would be projecting the the Keyword Quality Score from the single moment in time that you pulled the data onto the previous 30 days of performance. This is problematic because the Keyword Quality Score could have been much higher or lower for the majority of the 30 day date range.
We currently manually download QS data via Adwords Editor on a weekly basis. It isn't an ideal situation but it does give us visibility over the account over time.
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