I have a user based segment created in GA that is working as expected. However, with user based segments, one can only apply a maximum date range of 90 days to the report.
This is as per their documentation (Limits on segments): https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3123951?hl=en
Is there a workaround this? I have a use case where I would want to apply the user based segment over a date range of ~1-2 years to get a better sense on the trend over time.
If I re-create the GA report in Google Data Studio - is there a way to apply this user based segment over a longer date range?
Thanks!
No there's no option for extending 90-days reporting timeframe. The only solution is to get user-level data through the Reporting API and process them within 3rd party software. However, to do that you'll need some custom tracking implemented beforehand.
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I'm tracking data associated with an event, for this I put a parameter of programProgress(0 - 1), I created this in the Firebase console as a custom metric.
When I check the console all I see is a graph(attached) of what seems to be the average, no segmentation(like custom dimensions), no explanations. I've gone through multiple documentations and haven't found an answer.
Questions:
Is this graph an average of all data collected, what's the formula?
Is there a way to segment it(preferably in the console) and see amounts for different values i.e. 20 hits for 0.3, 40 for 0.4 etc
Is there a way to segment and see values for different custom dimensions i.e. 30 hits of 0.9 for x dimension(preferably in the console)
Thanks
I believe the easiest way to achieve what you're looking for would be to go into the Google Analytics (GA4) console directly and using the Segment Comparison feature in either the User Explorer or Cohort Explorer techniques.
You can build segments using the programProgress parameter and create multiple for each range you want to specify.
I'm looking to download hit data from a Google Analytics view for a small period of time that includes unique ID for a session and URL that was viewed. I believe I could do this going forward by setting something in Google Tag Manager to a Custom Dimension, but I was looking to avoid that (we have a good number of custom dimensions) and because I wouldn't be able to go backward.
Is it possible in the free version of GA to do something like? I picture the output being the URLs in my x-axis and my users in the y-axix with counts.
I'll be looking to take this data and do a cluster analysis to determine user behavior types.
Nope. Google Analytics does not expose a user specific id via the API or via data exports in a standard account (in GA360 you could use BigQuery to extract the client id).
You either have to set up a custom dimension (as you said this does not work for historic data), or try and use calcuated fields in Google Data Studio in the hope that if you aggregate enough different dimensions into one field you will end up with something specific per user.
This may be a possible duplicate of this question, but according to all the Google Analytics documentation I really should be able to pull my list of custom segments.
Since I have a very large list of them, it would be suboptimal for me to manually copy the segment ids over one at a time.
I'm following this walk through. Steps to reproduce:
Create a custom segment using date of first session in your Google Analytics account.
Authorize the Google Analytics guide to access your Google Analytics account.
Try their on-page query tester, and inspect whether your custom segment is there.
One thing I've already ruled out was the user that created the segment. I've manually created a segment with the same user that I'm querying the API with and it still does not show. Is there a flag I need to set somewhere to include custom segments?
Edit:
It turns out that it will list some custom segments, but not ones created with date of first session, so this is a duplicate of this question, which means that there is a bug in the Google Analytics API.
There was a bug which is now fixed. So it is now possible to list the Date of Session Segments in the Google Analytics Management API by calling the segments.list() method.
So after days of trying to solve this one I've come to the conclusion that it cannot be done as asked.
There is, however, another way to do it. For every segment set up a daily (or weekly, etc) email report to a email as a TSV. In each email body specify the name of the segment so when you're consuming the emails you can know which segment the attached TSV is for. It doesn't look like the daily reports were designed with segments in mind, since non of the metadata included in the TSV mentions which segment it is for.
From there it's trivial. Connect to the email address using an IMAP client once a day and update the numbers.
Note that the daily email only contains the numbers for that day (not a specified range), so you'll need to first generate the report one time with the historical data to load in.
While hacky, one nice thing about this approach is that it keeps your reports in sync with your (faked through email) api code (provided you match the column headings in the TSV). So, if for example, a new filter is included into a report, the new daily fields will continue to update.
Unfortunately though, the past data won't be reflected in the change.
Obviously this isn't great, but if you are monitoring daily cohorts it's the best you've got if you need to stay with Google Analytics. I have raised this as a bug to the Google Analytics developers, but I haven't heard back as to whether or not they plan to fix it.
Suppose I have 65 people that register on January 1, 2012.
I want to find out how many of those 65 people returned to the site that same week. (More generally, if n people signup on date A, I want to be able to find out how many of those n people return in a given date range.)
Is there a way to do this using Google Analytics? If so, how? I am currently getting the user's username for each page hit.
If you only need to track people who sign in then you don't need to get very fancy. You can copy the relevant user attributes, such as sign up date, from your DB to GA using events or session level custom variables.
But if you want to track everyone, including those who don't sign up, then you'll need to use visitor level custom variables (GA cookies).
I explain how to set this up in detail in this post so I'll just highlight the key points here:
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. This is what it might look like if you were tracking weekly retention, for example:
This is not a full solution, but here are some points on how I would approach this problem with the help of Google Analytics:
You have to make sure that you somehow store the registration date of each user, either in your database or in a cookie. Then have a look at Google Analytics Event Tracking. You could for example set up a new category based on the registration date. On every page load in your page, you then have to set up this event tracking call, for example like:
_trackEvent("returns", "2012-01-01", "UserId:123123123")
This way you will receive all page views for users that registered on that particular date. To add a date range in this, you have to make sure that these events only get fired for the number of dates after the signup (e.g. 7 days).
After your date range, you will be able to see how many page views and how many users returned - you even know which users came back.
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