I inherited an older GA account and noticed the previous user has quite a few custom dimensions. Because custom dimensions are a "hit" on a page, would removing the custom dimensions improve page speed, albeit if even a small amount?
Custom dimensions are usually sent along with either event, pageview or transaction hits.
Removing custom dimensions from GA would not net you any savings in terms of page performance.
What might yield some performance increase is if you:
removing the capturing of the custom dimension along with code required to come up with the value of the custom dimension for collection from the pages you're capturing these dimensions.
Removing the events/hits associated with capturing these custom dimensions.
Overall, just deleting/deactivating them from GA web UI will not have any effect on your page speed performance.
Related
I have a custom build page where users can filter products based on price, category, brand, ...
These are made out of checkboxes and a range input for the price.
I'm trying to figure out what the best way would be to track every action/filter in order to find out which brand / categories are the most popular.
Important to know
The menu contains a submenu for the categories. When the user clicks one of these links the filterpage will have this category checked in the filters.
The page does not reload when applying a filter. I'm using JS to perform a search and show new results. The page url gets updated with the correct search query parameters.
I think I have 2 options:
Track click events on the checkboxes and send every change with datalayer.push.
Track the page URL after each filter.
Option 1 is an issue because people might go to the page with some parameters in the URL. This won't be tracked because there was no click event. This issue will also apply to users that click the category in the submenu that prefills the filter.
Option 2 also is an issue because with this solution the category might be tracked 5 times if the user keeps adding or removing other filters. It always tracks all filters instead of the one that has been added.
The first step of tracking is using the analog of Occam's Razor. You want to cut off stuff that has no chance of answering legit business questions.
Your business question here is: What filters are the most helpful for the users? Now it's important to know why the business wants to know it. Cuz remember, the business is not very competent at data analysis even if it doesn't realize it.
So you need to know exactly how answering that question improves OKRs/KPIs. In this case, the legit answer could be: cuz we want to sort the filters by the usage frequency and measure if that would ease the engagement and thus, improve the conversion rate for the part of the journey from the product list to the pdp
That's a pretty weak reason, but passable. Especially if there's an issue in that transition currently.
Good, now having that context, why would we want to track filters used in pre-populated urls? Say some overzealous employee made a mistake and pre-populated some weird unneeded filter using, say, date and time of when the product has been added. And now they use that URL in all ads, so you get a lot of third party traffic coming to product lists with a date as a filter.
And then, let's say, that employee keeps using that filter for other persistent links to the effect of the date/time filter becoming uncanningly popular. There. Your data slowly becomes garbage and stops answering the original question.
There are other issues with tracking pre-set filters, some of which you've outlined, but the real issue is the ability of the data to answer good business questions clearly. Tracking all filters may be able to answer some technical questions, but it's not the aim of behavioral analytics to answer technical questions. Let them use access logs and whatever else they use to answer those.
I'm looking to track custom timings of Brightcove videos with Google Tag Manager. I have a tag set up that tracks Brightcove's default data layer values, which include Media Play/Pause, Media Begin, and % Milestone Passed. However, I'm not sure if there's a way to track custom timings beyond this standard set that Brightcove tracks? I haven't found documentation outlining how to do this.
I followed the process in this article to set up tracking: https://iabramo.com/2016/03/08/track-brightcove-player-with-google-tag-manager/
If anyone has advice on how to track custom timings (ie. at 1 minute, 53 seconds), please let me know. Thanks in advance!
Elizabeth,
We recently released a Google Tag Manager Plugin for use with the Brightcove Player. Using that, you can configure custom dimensions in addition to the standard ones track by GA.
In the docs, there is a reference to a dimension called bcvideo_video_milestone which might be able to be set to 1 min 53 seconds if that is the milestone you want to trigger an event for.
https://support.brightcove.com/google-tag-manager-plugin-brightcove-player
I found 10% high number of sessions in the GTM analyitcs data than the GA. Both has different tracking properties, have similar settings(as Simoahava mentioned #here), Hence the Ecommenrce rate is affecting due to huge difference of sesions data in both properties. Any insights ?
Screenshots :
Session via GTM Session via GA
Even when out of scope for the question i need to advice you to remove the legacy UA code from site and just duplicate the hits from GTM. (Simo has a post about it)
Now going into the question it self this can have a couple of reasons:
Does the filters on both views match?
Does both views has the same region (on the config)?
And i have another theory but this is not at all checked. (i would like to look into it)
GTM has a noscript snippet which allows to send non-script dependent tags even when javascript is not enabled. This is an advantage against the old GA code which doent have this feature.
Point i may have to look into:
Does the pageview count as a non-script dependent tag?
Is the traffic without javascript that relevant in volume? (10% is a lot)
Hope it helps !
I am really new to Google Analytics and I had a requirement of tracking clicks and impressions. I followed following link
http://www.statstory.com/tracking-clicks-and-impressions-in-google-analytics/
and sucessfully implemented the same.
Now my requirement is to get the no.of clicks and no. of impressions
to my html page. I am googled for past quite hours but couldnot find
any luck with the same.
Any help would be highly appreciated.
You should really consider implementing Google Analytics Enhanced E-commerce functionality.
Google Analytics Enhanced E-commerce
In regards to answering your question of the API, you should query it asking for events. Namely category, action and label events and apply a filter to only return the data you wish to receive, such as 'Impressions' as a filter for 'Event Action'. That will return all impressions and if you instead change the filter to use 'Click', you'd get all clicks instead.
If you followed the above guide and made it into Universal, then you'd see the calls you set and it is set up in the following way:
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Banner', 'Click', 'BANNERNAME',1.00,true]);
This bit of code pushes (legacy version) Analytics data in the form of:
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Category', 'Action', 'Label',1.00,true]);
So, changing the different sections means you change how you define the data and how it will be visible in reports. Category defines the Event Category, Action defines the Event Action and Label defines the Event Label.
Take a look at the core development guide. Also, here you can see all the API calls available: Dimension & Metrics explorer for Google Analytics
I gather that you want to track impressions for banner advertising that is displayed by yourself (i.e. not through an adserver) in your website.
I agree with Mr Sponge that you should upgrade to Universal Analytics. if you want to implement enhanced e-commerce tracking (EEC) you probably want to read about Measuring internal Promotions, which is a feature specifically build for that kind of reporting.
If you just need the raw number of banner impressions and/or need a solution that's easier to implement (but less capable) you can increment a custom metric every time you banner shows up (this is basically a counter, you might want to use it together with a custom dimension that holds the banner name). Click tracking would still be done by events (with similar custom metrics and dimensions). From that data you can assemble a custom report and use a calculated metric for click through rates etc.
Not as good as EEC by a fair margin but much easier to do.
I'll use StackOverflow as an example.
A user can reach a question/answer page from
outside of stackoverflow
from another page of stackoverflow
from a search result
from a link in other posts (link in another question or answer)
from Similar Questions section
from a user profile page
I'd like to know how those internal links are used.
Main question is What are the percentages of each type of links which led users to the Q/A page in stackoverflow
I want to know the answer for the Q/A pages as a whole not for each individual Q/A page.
Is this implementable using GA and if so, I'd like to hear a general guide so I can dig in.
Is there a term for this kind of analysis? (internal link analysis? Knowning a term helps me to google further..)
Edit
I found one way to do this using sitesearch.
http://cutroni.com/blog/2010/03/30/tracking-internal-campaigns-with-google-analytics/
It's from 2010, and not sure its still the best way to do it.
To be able to tell different links from the same page e.g. you will need to setup enhanced link attribution by requiring the plugin via this command
ga('require', 'linkid', 'linkid.js');
the plugin also requires decorating each link that reffers to the same destination (the question) a unique id. you can also chose to decorate a container element such as a div which holds link or its parent (up to 5 levels)
there are a number of ways to get at this data.
One way is a under reporting look at Behavior>Behavior Flow. The view crates a sunkey diagram. which you can narrow down using a custom segment + creating a content grouping. The advantage of the Behavior flow is that it is visual - but it is difficult to customize.
Another approach you could take is to locate the question in the Behavior > Site Content>All pages and the set the secondary dimension to "Previous Page Path". You can use the advanced filter to select a specific question, and to limit the previous pages to page paths matching the pattern for each type of page you discussed.
To view the attribution for different links you need to select the In-Page Analytics tab.
FYI, I've implemented it using Google tag manager.
I defined event navigateToQnA.
And fired the event with different event action for different type of clicks I care about.
Maybe bit laborious than the sitesearch method I linked in the question.
But cleaner in a sense that you don't pollute url parameters to collect the data.