I'm new when using google analytics for App and it make me quite confused, I have several question that I want to ask:
Is Google Analytics still track unique users? some of source that I read say no but and some say yes I'm quite confused about this
Let say if I want to search a Unique users can I use User Type dimension with users metric to get the right value for new users (Not with session but users)
for question number 2, let say it have New Users and Returning Users as user Type dimension and users have a metric and from google analytics itself give an explanation such as this:
Users who have initiated at least one session during the date range. Learn more about how Analytics calculates the number of users.
Can someone help me to understand this? I'm already using it for 2 weeks and still confused with this
By default, Google Analytics track unique users by setting an unique id (clientId) in device memory (a cookie in web tracking). This method isn't accurate because cleaning a cookie or device cache would reset clientId, causing the tool to identify a new user in the next session. To avoid it you can collect User Id, a built-in dimension specific to user tracking.
Related
I’m wondering if anyone can help me. I’m currently working on a project which involves trying to understand customers who have abandoned one of the stages within a checkout but then returned to the site at a later stage and converted. I would then break this down to the number of days before they returned. I’ve tried creating segments however the data doesn’t seem to be making sense. Has anyone any idea how I’d go about this? Is this even possible in GA or is this something I can only accomplish in BigQuery if at all?
Your help will be very much appreciated.
Google Analytics(GA hereafter) is counting a visitor as a new or returning user by persisting cookie values in client side(in the browser). So once a user is visited, It stores an id which is specific to that user (actually this user means the browser which had been used to visit the website). So when a user visits the site for the first time, GA will store a specific id in a GA related cookie in the client side. If the user visits the website again later in another session, then GA check if there is a client.id for that user stored in the client side. If it found then that user is count as a returning user or New user otherwise.
In Google Analytics, goto Audience -> User Explorer. In there you can see an aggregated view of each user(client.id) interacted with your website and clicking on one client.id will show each user's activities with the website(differentiated by sessions) and will show all the sessions related to that user with the information like time, URL and some other dimension values.
Also if you want to separate out New users or Returning users from each other, you can create a new segment with a condition checking for the User Type dimension against the values "New Visitor" or "Returning Visitor".
To measure returning customers after an abandonment and converted, you can create a segment as follows,
It seems that it's not possible in GA.
There are no metric like "Days between abandoned funnel and conversion" (only "Days before transaction" - between acquisition day and transaction day). So you need a date for abandoned funnel and a date for conversion separately: i.e. you need two reports.
I know solution, but Excel or smth like this is needed if you want to calculate days before conversion.
At first you need to have Client ID as a custom dimension.
Then create custom report contains dimensions Client ID and Date and metric [Your Goal] Abandoned Funnel (Goal with Funnel needs to be set).
And the second report - Client ID, Date and [Your Goal] Complection.
And to merge these tables using Client ID parameter.
We have just linked our GA360 account to BigQuery but we noticed from the docs that the userId doesn't get exported. This is really annoying as one of our main use case was to join the userId with our CRM system.
Why is Google not exporting the userId ? Is there workaround ?
Thank you for your answers.
The solution is to create a User level custom dimension and pass your user's ID into that as well.
There's no restriction on exporting your custom dimensions, and these are exported to BigQuery.
Enjoy :)
How User-ID works
User-ID enables the association of one or more sessions (and the activity within those sessions) with a unique and persistent ID that you send to Analytics.
To implement User-ID, you must be able to generate your own unique IDs, consistently assign IDs to users, and include these IDs wherever you send data to Analytics.
For example, you could send the unique IDs generated by your own authentication system to Analytics as values for User-ID. Any engagement, like link clicks and page or screen navigation, that happen while a unique ID is assigned can be sent to Analytics and connected via User-ID.
In an Analytics implementation without the User-ID feature, a unique user is counted each time your content is accessed from a different device and each time there’s a new session. For example, a search on a phone one day, purchase on a laptop three days later, and request for customer service on a tablet a month after that are counted as three unique users in a standard Analytics implementation, even if all those actions took place while a user was signed in to an account. While you can collect data about each of those interactions and devices, you can’t determine their relevance to one another. You only see independent data points.
When you implement User-ID, you can identify related actions and devices and connect these seemingly independent data points. That same search on a phone, purchase on a laptop, and re-engagement on a tablet that previously looked like three unrelated actions on unrelated devices can now be understood as one user’s interactions with your business.
From Google analytics about the userid feature the user id is used in the background by google analytics to analyse your data.
If you want to analyse on the user id you can just add it as a custom dimension you will then be able to see it.
I'm looking to get information about users sessions from google analytics. Things like:
date of visit
referral
device type
exit page
browser
time on site
etc.
However, Analytics API seems to only offer this data as totals, and not per user. So I can't know how much a specific user stayed on the website for example.
The final result I'm looking for is to tie this data from analytics with the user id from our CRM platform using the google UUID saved in cookie.
Is it possible to retrieve this data from Analytics or you can only access it with Analytics 360?
User level data is not available in standard GA (except in a limited fashion via the User Explorer report which cannot be exported). You'd need to store user id or client id in a custom dimension (you must not store personally identifiable data in GA, even in hashed form, so take care what you use as user id) and then select this as first dimension when you export the data. Obviously this does not help you with data that's already been collected.
I am searching for a way to track user behavior on my website. I want to know if it is possible to get a table with data looking something like this:
+------+---------------+-----------------+------+---------+
| time | ip or user_id | user_session_id | link | actions |
+------+---------------+-----------------+------+---------+
(Link - where user came from)
I want to track different user actions by sessions. Is this possible using Google Analytics or I should search other tools? My site is currently set up to track events but on my Analytics account I get only the number of events that occurred. I want to track what a specific user does on my site.
tl;dr: if you must do this use Mixpanel or similar software.
Time based dimensions are already available (date, hour, minutes and datetime). "link" would be referrer. Actions in Google Analytics are basically pageviews, events and transactions, so you have that, too.
IP and user id are a big no-gos. Storing anything that that identifies a person is a violation of Googles Terms of Service and depending on your location might be a violation of national laws.And if by user_id you mean the Google Analytics feature of the same name, Google says you may set it for logged in users and have to unset it for user that log out, so by extension that means storing it in Ga would probably be a violation of their TOS.
The GA session id is not exposed via the interface. You may read it from the cookie and store it in a custom dimension (I'm not sure if this is allowed within the TOS, on the other hand GA premium customers get this via a BigQuery export in any case, so it should be allowed).
If you simply want to tell different users apart you might simply generate a string in the UUID format and store that in a custom dimension. If you want to actually identify users (by name, adress etc), well, you are not allowed to and Google will terminate your account if they find out.
Not to mention that it completely eludes why so many people want to track individual users. You must not use GA information to target individuals, and simply looking at individual user paths will not help you (I wrote an article about that, although I do not expect that this will convince you).
Google Analytics is for technical and legal reasons not a good tool for tracking individual users, if you need to do this use a software that is made for this purpose. Mixpanel is often mentioned in that context but I'm sure there are many other solutions.
What is the simplest way to count # of visits by a user in an ASP.NET web app?
Our app services anonymous users, registered users and an intermediate user, called a "prospect". Prospects are users that request information but do not create an account.
We leave an ID cookie for every type of user, and that's the key into our database for visit information.
Prospects never "sign in" per se, but we still want to count those visits. We also want to count member visits, even when they don't sign in.
I am thinking of storing the ASP.NET Session cookie and then incrementing our counter every time the session cookie changes.
Anyone out there already solve this, or have any suggestions?
PS: We are ASP.NET 1.1
Refinement: We want this data in our app's database, so Google Analytics is not a reasonable solutions for this...and we are using Google Analytics.
Use Google Analytics. You can specify "goals" and "funnels" that lead to these goals quite easily.
Since you're using 1.1... in the Global.aspx... in the App_EndRequest (or whatever), insert a record into a DB with Name, IPAddress, timestamp, etc.
EDIT: Don't do the session thingy, sessions can be cleared, plus how will you report on them days, or weeks later... insert a record (including the Request.Url.Path if you'd like to have those kinds of stats).
Because it's on the EndRequest method, it's pretty safe even if there is some sort of glitch... also, performance won't matter as the user has gotten his page sent to him already.
We leave an ID cookie for every type of user, and that's the key into our database for visit information
Sounds to me like you already have a counter, you just need to figure out a way to make this data useful.
SELECT COUNT(1) FROM TblUsers WHERE UserType = 'Prospect' AND DateRange Between....