I have traffic coming from Salesloft emails sent by sales reps that gets bounced off a subdomain and then has a sbrc parameter appended to the URL. I'd like to ensure that this traffic gets counted by Google Analytics as coming from Email, whereas it's currently falling under the "Direct" bucket. Ideally, users would also be appending utm parameters to their links, but this isn't happening consistently.
I tried creating a filter to search and replace the following regex (?:^|\?|&)(sbrc=[^&]*&?) with ?utm_medium=email&utm_source=salesloft in the Request URI. This changed the displayed URL when looking at my realtime traffic, but did not change how GA categorized the channel of the traffic (still direct).
I then tried editing the default channel groupings for Email to be the system categorized OR Landing Page URL contains "sbrc" and dragged Email to the first channel grouping at the top. This doesn't seem to have done anything at all.
How can I make GA recognize this custom parameter as being attributable to the Email channel?
You could use advanced filters to solve this task. The Advanced filter lets you construct Fields for reporting from one or two existing Fields.
In your case, advanced filters let you assign values to campaign source and campaign medium, based on the content of the request URL. This is a sample setup for the source field, and you need a second similar filter for medium as well:
Ideally, users would also be appending utm parameters to their links,
but this isn't happening consistently.
If they add their own and use a utm_medium other then utm_medium=Email, then it will not be defined as being in the default Email channel.
Filters are not retroactive.
Filters also run after data has already been processed by Google, to only change how it displays in the reports as it gets sent back into the GA reports.
A Search and Replace Filter applied to the RequestURI for
?utm_medium=email&utm_source=salesloft is not going to have the result you want.
It will change the appearance of the RequestURI in reports, not actually change how that traffic is attributed.
Changes to the default Channel grouping are not retroactive, it should have affect going forward though.
To see the changes in historical data for the Channels, you would do best to create a custom Channel grouping at the View level, this can then be applied retroactively to the historic data.
I have a goal which detects if someone made a purchase on my website. I want to know where that person came from (adwords, facebook, organic, etc).
The problem is that Analytics tells me the source of all these people is the payment processor. This isn't surprising as the flow looks as follows:
Checkout Page -> Paypal.com -> Payment Success Page
It tells me all my goals came from paypal. I want to know where these people came from originally. How would I do that?
You probably forgot to add the payment processor to the referral exclusion list in the property settings. If you do that it will be ignored as a traffic source and the original channel information will be retained. It will also affect the number of sessions - a change in traffic attribution starts a new sessions, so after the change you should expect somewhat fewer sessions with more pageviews.
Unfortunately the setting is not applied retroactively, so traffic data up until you implement the setting is lost for good.
I recently ran an e-mail campaign with a partner, who sent me over a URL with their own UTM parameters so they could track performance on their side.
When I handed the information over to our e-mail team and checked as the campaign went live, it appeared that they, out of habit, had added their own UTM parameters on top of the ones sent over by the partner, resulting in a click-through URL that looked like the following -
http://spirit.cruises.com/?cm_mmc=partner_email-_-sprt-multi_product--20161028--clia_plan_a_cruise_month&utm_medium=partner_email**&utm_source**=sprt-multi_product**&utm_campaign**=20161028&utm_content=clia_plan_a_cruise_month**&utm_source**=responsys**&utm_medium**=email**&utm_campaign**=20161028_50pct__Dual_Cruise_Email
As you can see, there are duplicate source, medium, and campaign parameters.
Does anyone know what happens in this situation? Does Google Analytics count both, or just the first, or just the last, or none? What is best practice when there are two parties that want to track performance of a URL in a campaign, and they may have different naming conventions?
(This is my first question, so please be nice :) Thanks!)
GA counts the last set. The proper way to deal with this is to avoid the situation. Email Software is often set to automatically add utm parameters to links (do you do not have to do it manually), but then all email marketing software I know would allow to override the configured default parameters.
I am not sure how your partner could track performance "on their site" via utm parameters unless they have their own GA code integrated in your website (or do you mean that they have access to your GA ?).
If there are two sets of analytics code that require different campaign attribution you would have use differently named parameters - let's say utm_medium2, utm_source2 and utm_campaign2 - and manually override campaign attribution for the second tracker:
// add this to after your usual tracker
ga('create', 'UA-XXXXX-Y', 'auto', 'partnerTracker');
ga('partnerTracker.set','campaignName',<value of utm_campaign2>)
ga('partnerTracker.set','campaignMedium',<value of utm_medium2>)
ga('partnerTracker.set','campaignSource',<value of utm_source2>)
ga('partnerTracker.send','pageview')
That would send data to a second account and override campaign attribution fields. It seems quite unlikely that you have or want that, but if you want to allow your partner to independently track utm values on your website (and everything else with it) that would the way to go.
Frankly I think you should just remove your partners utm parameters. Utm parameters make only sense for the owner of the respective GA account, and that is probably you, not the partner.
I agree with the first answer except for that last point where has says to remove the partner's UTM parameters.
In your case, the destination for the link provided to you by your partner is NOT your own website. The link goes to your partner's website. Therefore, your GA account has zero relationship with the link he sent you.
The way we're getting around this (without doing anything in analytics) for our many partners that we send links to is by using different email subjects per partner. Most email platforms use the subject line (or the internally defined Campaign "Name") as the value for UTM_Campaign.
So different subjects that include the partner organization in them:
"Special discount for ABC Organization members!"
"Special discount for XYZ Company members"
We can then analyze each unique campaign name in GA.
I have a website that allows people to create an account (that is the conversion I wish to track).
I wish to know where a specific person is coming from. I have google analytics installed and have set up the registration page as a goal, but the reporting tells me traffic sources as an aggregated pie chart. It doesn't report down to the user account level to say that 'person with email xyz' came from 'facebook' for example.
What custom variables or mark up would I need to add to GA to report at that detailed level, if that is at all possible?
Otherwise, I will just have to record the first http_referer in a cookie and stick it in a database during the registration process.
Any advice?
Firstly I must ask you, how actionable do you think it is to look at data at that granular of a level? Finding out what % of people who registered came from facebook or some other place is actionable, because it helps you do things like determine where to focus marketing efforts. But individual users? How is this actionable to you? (hint: it's not)
However, if you are still determined to know this, you should first note that it is against Google's ToS to record personally identifiable data both directly (recording the actual value in GA) or indirectly (e.g. - recording a unique id that you can use to tie to personal info stored within your own system). If this is something you don't want to risk, I suggest moving to another analytics tool that does not have this sort of thing in their ToS (e.g. Adobe SiteCatalyst, which costs money, or perhaps you may instead prefer to choose an "in-house" approach, like Piwik)
If you are still determined to follow through with this and hope not to get caught or whatever, Google Analytics doesn't record data like what info a visitor filled out in a form (like their email address) unless you populate that data in a custom field/dimension/metric/event to be sent along with the request. Usually you would populate this on the form "thank you" page (which is usually the same page you use as your goal url or goal event if you're popping and using an event for your goal). So you would populate the email address in one of those custom variables and then have it as a dimension to break down the http referrer by.
Now, I realise the initial response to this is likely to be "you can't" or "use analytics", but I'll continue in the hope that someone has more insight than that.
Google adwords with "autotagging" appends a "gclid" (presumably "google click id") to link that sends you to the advertised site. It appears in the web log since it's a query parameter, and it's used by analytics to tie that visit to the ad/campaign.
What I would like to do is to extract any useful information from the gclid in order to do our own analysis on our traffic. The reasons for this are:
Stats are imperfect, but if we are collating them, we know exactly what assumptions we have made, and how they were calculated.
We can tie the data to the rest of our data and produce far more accurate stats wrt conversion rate.
We don't have to rely on javascript for conversions.
Now it is clear that the gclid is base64 encoded (or some close variant), and some parts of it vary more than others. Beyond that, I haven't been able to determine what any of it relates to.
Does anybody have any insight into how I might approach decoding this, or has anybody already related gclids back to compaigns or even accounts?
I have spoken to a couple of people at google, and despite their "don't be evil" motto, they were completely unwilling to discuss the possibility of divulging this information, even under an NDA. It seems they like the monopoly they have over our web stats.
By far the easiest solution is to manually tag your links with Google Analytics campaign tracking parameters (utm_source, utm_campaign, utm_medium, etc.) and then pull out that data.
The gclid is dependent on more than just the adwords account/campaign/etc. If you click on the same adwords ad twice, it could give you different gclids, because there's all sorts of session and cost data associated with that particular click as well.
Gclid is probably not 100% random, true, but I'd be very surprised and concerned if it were possible to extract all your Adwords data from that number. That would be a HUGE security flaw (i.e. an arbitrary user could view your Adwords data). More likely, a pseudo-random gclid is generated with every impression, and if that ad is clicked on, the gclid is logged in Adwords (otherwise it's thrown out). Analytics then uses that number to reconcile the data with Adwords after the fact. Other than that, there's no intrinsic value in the gclid number itself.
In regards to your last point, attempting to crack or reverse-engineer this information is explicitly forbidden in both the Google Analytics and Google Adwords Terms of Service, and is grounds for a permanent ban. Additionally, the TOS that you agreed to when signing up for these services says that it is not your data to use in any way you feel like. Google is providing a free service, so there are strings attached. If you don't like not having complete control over your data, then there are plenty of other solutions out there. However, you will pay a premium for that kind of control.
Google makes nearly all their money from selling ads. Adwords is their biggest money-making product. They're not going to give you confidential information about how it works. They don't know who you are, or what you're going to do with that information. It doesn't matter if you sign an NDA and they have legal recourse to sue you; if you give away that information to a competitor, your life isn't worth enough to pay back the money you will have lost them.
Sorry to break it to you, but "Don't be Evil" or not, Google is a business, not a charity. They didn't become one of the most successful companies in the world by giving away their search algorithm to the first guy who asked for it.
The gclid parameter is encoded in Protocol Buffers, and then in a variant of Base64.
See this guide to decoding the gclid and interpreting it, including an (Apache-licensed) PHP function you can use.
There are basically 3 parameters encoded inside it, one of which is a timestamp. The other 2 as yet are not known.
As far as understanding what these other parameters mean—it may be helpful to compare it to the ei parameter, which is encoded in an extremely similar way (basically Protocol Buffers with the keys stripped out). The ei parameter also has a timestamp, with what seem to be microseconds, and 2 other integers.
FYI, I just posted a quick analysis of some glcid data from my sites on this post. There definitely is some structure to the gclid, but it is difficult to decipher.
I think you can get all the goodies linked to the gclid via google's adword api. Specifically, you can query the click performance report.
https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/appendix/reports#click
I've been working on this problem at our company as well. We'd like to be able to get a better sense of what our AdWords are doing but we're frustrated with limitations in Analytics.
Our current solution is to look in the Apache access logs for GET requests using the regex:
.*[?&]gclid=([^$&]*)
If that exists, then we look at the referer string to get the keyword:
.*[?&]q=([^$&]*).*
An alternative option is to change your Apache web log to start logging the __utmz cookie that google sets, which should have a piece for the keyword in utmctr. Google __utmz cookie and you should be able to find plenty of information.
How accurate is the referer string? Not 100%. Firewalls and security appliances will strip it out. But parsing it out yourself does give you more flexibility than Google Analytics. It would be a great feature to send the gclid to AdWords and get data back, but that feature does not look like it's available.
EDIT: Since I wrote this we've also created our own tags that are appended to each destination url as a request parameter. Each tag is just an md5 hash of the text, ad group, and campaign name. We grab it using regex from the access log and look it up in a SQL database.
This is a non-programmatic way to decode the GCLID parameter. Chances are you are simply trying to figure out the campaign, ad group, keyword, placement, ad that drove the click and conversion. To do this, you can upload the GCLID into AdWords as a separate conversion type and then segment by conversion type to drill down to the criteria that triggered the conversion. These steps:
In AdWords UI, go to Tools->Conversions->Add conversion with source "Import from clicks"
Visit the AdWords help topic about importing conversions https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/7014069 and create a bulk load file with your GCLID values, assigning the conversions to you new "Import from clicks" conversion type
Upload the conversions into AdWords in Tools->Conversions->Conversion actions (Uploads) on left navigation
Go to campaigns tab, Segment->Conversions->Conversion name
Find your new conversion name in the segment list, this is where the conversion came from. Continue this same process on the ad groups and keywords tab until you know the GCLID originating criteria
Well, this is no answer, but the approach is similar to how you'd tackle any cryptography problem.
Possibility 1: They're just random, in which case, you're screwed. This is analogous to a one-time pad.
Possibility 2: They "mean" something. In that case, you have to control the environment.
Get a good database of them. Find gclids for your site, and others. Record all times that all clicks occur, and any other potentially useful data
Get cracking! As you have started already, start regressing your collected data against your known, and see if you can find patterns used decrypting techniques
Start scraping random gclid's, and see where they take you.
I wouldn't hold high hope for this to be successful though, but I do wish you luck!
Looks like my rep is weak, so I'll just post another answer rather than a comment.
This is not an answer, clearly. Just voicing some thoughts.
When you enable auto tagging in Adwords, the gclid params are not added to the destination URLs. Rather they are appended to the destination URLs at run time by the Google click tracking servers. So, one of two things is happening:
The click servers are storing the gclid along with Adwords entity identifiers so that Analytics can later look them up.
The gclid has the entity identifiers encoded in some way so that Analytics can decode them.
From a performance perspective it seems unlikely that Google would implement anything like option 1. Forcing Analytics to "join" the gclid to Adwords IDs seems exceptionally inefficient at scale.
A different approach is to simply look at the referrer data which will at least provide the keyword which was searched.
Here's a thought: Is there a chance the gclid is simply a crytographic hash, a la bit.ly or some other URL shortener?
In which case the contents of the hashed text would be written to a database, and replaced with a unique id.
Afterall, the gclid is shortening a bunch of otherwise long text.
Takes this example:
www.example.com?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc
Is converted to this:
www.example.com?gclid=XDF
just like a URL shortener.
One would need a substitution cipher in order to reverse engineer the cryptographic hash... not as easy task: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/300/reverse-engineering-a-hash
Maybe some deep digging into logs, looking for patterns, etc...
I agree with Ophir and Chris. My feeling is that it is purely a serial number / unique click ID, which only opens up its secrets when the Analytics and Adwords systems talk to each other behind the scenes.
Knowing this, I'd recommend looking at the referring URL and pulling as much as possible from this to use in your back end click tracking setup.
For example, I live in NZ, and am using Firefox. This is a search from the Firefox Google toolbar for "stack overflow":
http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=stack+overflow&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&client=firefox-a&rlz=1R1GGLL_en-GB
You can see that: a) im using .NZ domain, b) my keyword "stack+overflow", c) im running firefox.
Finally, if you also stash the full landing page URL, you can store the GCLID, which will tell you the visitor came from paid, whereas if it doesn't have a GCLID, then the user must have come from natural search (if URL tagging is enabled of course).
This would theoretically allow you to then search for the keyword in your campaign, and figure out which adgroup them came from. Knowing the creative would probably be impossible though, unless you split test your landing URLs or tag them somehow.