I am wondering whether it's possible to track the amount of users
who go from url1 -> url2 -> url3 on my website.
This might be a pretty basic question, but I really couldn't figure it out so far.
I don't have direct access to my websites source code because it is hosted by an external provider. (Google Analytics is enabled though, I can see the data google.com/analytics)
Therefore, it would be great if there is an option where I don't have to add code.
Hope somebody can help me.
Thank you!
Try to use custom segment with sequences: include sessions where Step1 was url1, Step2 was url2 etc. In the right of window (see screenshot) you will see number of users.
You can also set this up as a funnel. Go to admin, click Goals and set it up as a Destination Goals with url3 as the conversion and url 1 and url 2 as funnel steps. It won't be back-dated, but it will track it from the time you set it up.
Related
I am trying to collect some data for a pet study. I would be collecting some metadata on the video suggestions based on a search. I was wondering if it is possible to do the following using the Youtube API(python or R) :
Input a search keyword and get the results
Choose one of the videos randomly and see the list of video suggestions.
Choose one of the suggested videos randomly.
Repeat this "n" times.
Is there a way to emulate this entire process? I think web-scraping can be an option but I am not really sure, how I would go about it. So if there are nay pointers that would be amazing and get me started.
Also, Is it possible to have no history, as in an option to erase all the cookies for the previous attempt(Steps 1 through 4) and start afresh? (More like an option to have this in Incognito Mode)
TIA for your suggestions.
AFAIK Google tracks the computer you are using in such a way that you can't escape their filter bubble. Even through Tor, YouTube might prefer some content related to the exit node IP location (and so language) or any previous YouTube search done by you (through this exit node) or another user of the end node or any computer using the same IP as the exit node...
The YouTube Data API v3 has a possibility to retrieve suggestions thanks to part=suggestions with Videos: list by authenticating with OAuth (so results might not be neutral). You can get the initial videos thanks to Search: list thanks to q filter. Web-scraping is also doable to be less tracked, my open-source YouTube operational API is able to web-scrape search results for instance.
Note that a French person claims having achieved to have done such a neutral French YouTube suggestions graph.
So the following which I'm writing is just to discuss whether something like this is even possible or if any of you would have any better ideas/suggestions or understanding how this might work. I thank anyone who takes time to read this in advance and I hope I don't explain myself too incoherently:
Let's say I have a page in WordPress which has a little bit of text and a video. Basicly I would like to share that page's link or I'd want to forward that page via e-mail to a certain group of people (let's say 10-50 specifically chosen people) and I want to track who of them opened the link and for how long they were on the page or watched the video.
I would like to make this happen in a way that I wouldn't have to make 50 different pages or 50 different URLs for each person (or 50 different tracking strings for that matter). Or that I wouldn't have to take a newsletter-mailer type page in between this process.
Basicly, I would like to make the sharing/forwarding and analytics overview process as easy as possible, so that an admin or moderator wouldn't have to check too many different pages to get the info.
I really appreciate any and all feedback.
[Also really sorry if I posted this in the wrong place. Please feel free to redirect me to a corresponding slot].
Technically, Google Analytics isn't meant to be used to track this specifically- it's typically meant to track groups of anonymized users. That being said, it is capable of doing this (but may not be as automated as you had hoped).
You are correct in thinking that you'd either need to duplicate the pages or create multiple different campaign URLs.
The other thing to keep in mind is that as emails are forwarded, there is no way to update the URL after the email has been sent, so if you email me and I forward it to someone else who clicks through, you're going to think someone else is me.
One way around this would be if you know your users IP addresses (not only is that a big "if", but it can also be spoofed), or some other uniquely identifying feature (any chance these people have signed-up through your website and have actual user IDs? That'd make things infinitely easier!).
Maybe you could customize the email to add their email address as a query string? That could still require a lot of work (and you couldn't just share a single link).
Now, you can not store personally identifiable info in GA (including IP and email addresses), but at the server-level you could assign a custom dimension with a uniquely generated ID and send that to GA. Now you've got all the info you need!
Unfortunately this method only works if you can detect some kind of "fingerprint" of your users.
Unfortunately what you described isn't quite what Google Analytics was designed to do. If you wanted to get into detailed user-specific tracking, I'd advise you look into a CRM. Those systems are designed specifically for user tracking as you described.
Hope that gets you pointed in the right direction.
I manage an internal website and we recently implemented campaign tracking for our emails and homepage links to see where traffic comes from.
I set up the URLs using the Google URL builder.
The data we're receiving is very bloated. We ran a test URL with 8 people, and we received 129 "views", with an average of 9 views per day for over a month. No one clicked this link after the first day.
Our average session times were about 30 minutes, which is very strange.
My questions are:
how does google track campaigns? If you use a tracking URL, does the cookie track views for any organic views after that?
Is there a tool we can use to only track first time visits using a campaign URL?
Admittedly, I'm fairly new to Google Analytics, but no one on our marketing analytics team was able to help.
Since you used the Google URL builder I don't think you have made any mistakes there. However I strongly think that the bloated data is due to Bot traffic in your account. And yes, the bot traffic does increase average session duration.
So here's a set of steps I'll suggest:
1) Create 3 views in Google Analytics (It is a best practice):
Unfiltered, Master, Test
2) Check for Langauage spam and weird referrals in your report.
3) Add filters to "Test" view to remove these bots & spam referrals. You'll need to write a regular expression for each of these filters. Also make sure you have enabled "bot filtering" in view settings for master & test view. (I am leaving Unfiltered view as it is our data backup in case if anything goes wrong.)
4) Check your traffic for next few days and try doing the URL test again and see the results.
5) If the results in Test View are correct, then apply the same filters to "Master" view.
I hope this helps.
I've been asked to set-up some custom variables but as I'm new to it, have no idea on how to get started. I have researched as much as I can but am getting confused.
Here's what I need to do:
An app generates a unique URL in the form http://www.example.com/folder/?userID=12345&BookTitle=ABCDE&DateAndTime=201208080800. I then need the custom variables from the URL ('UserID',
'BookTitle' and 'DateAndTime') to be passed to Google Analytics so I can track which users of the app are visiting the page at that URL.
I've looked into setting up custom variables but don't understand if I need 3 separate lines of code for the 3 separate variables nor how I can pass the various elements of the URL through to these.
Can anyone shed any light on how I might go about doing this?
Many thanks for any help in advance.
-Jack
Never mind. It turns out this kind of usage is against Google Analytics' TOS.
Going about it a different way by asking the user for some info up-front instead.
Google's ToS has changed. You can do this now as long as the UserID is internal to you and cannot be used to identify the customer (by Google).
I've got a multi-stage online questionnaire form, and I use a _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/Form_Stage_XX']) code to register form's stages destinations (the "XX"s stand for actual stage numbers).
I also set up the URL-destination Goals based on pages /Form_Stage_XX (same as in _gaq.push).
Now in the Site content -> Pages report I can see the visits of /Form_Stage_XX registered as expected, but the related Goals won't get reached.
Any ideas why is this?
Many thanks.
Please do check your goals configuration in the Profile Settings - > Goals Page to see if the URL is set to the same as /Form_Stage_XX and also if the Match Type is set to Exact Match. I would also recommend using the Match Type: Regular Expression with .*\Form_Stage_XX as the parameter.
You should be able to see if your goals are beign tracked as expected in the Conversions - > Goals Report.
One more thing is that form goals are usually better tracked as a Funnel Conversion, so you can track the flow from each step and thus visualize where visitors are leaving your form.
You can find more information in this great video lesson, made by Google