Lets say I wish to track
User action - game he played - which area he stays - his house number.
If I were to track these event actions in Tabular format, it would look like:
UserId|Game|Area|House|Timestamp so on.
Then I can always run SQL queries if I want to answer few business queries. Like
1. In a given day/week, who is the most active User
2. Which game is most-played?
3. Which area plays most events
4. Which user from which area are the most active
Whats the best way to capture this using Google analytics? Will custom dimensions be useful. Or GA is not suitable for this kind of insight?
Thanks.
First of all, the house number is too precise, it would be against GA's ToS.
In GA everything is captured in "hits", you can think of this as one "row" of data.
Let's look at what you wanted to find out:
Most Active User? - This depends on how you determine "Active". Is it the longest Session durations? Tried most games? Most logins? Most sessions? To track a user, you'd need a User ID tracked.
Which game is played the most? - Again, what is played the most? Longest time in game? Most "start" games? This would require you to know the Game that was played and when someone started playing
Which area is most active? -This would go back to the definition of active, the region information is needed along with the active definition
Which users are most active in an area? Same as above, the user would need to be identified and area
To determine which Custom Dimensions (CDs) you want, let's look at the example data points you want to track and try to determine the scope and if it already exists as a standard dimension:
User ID - this is obviously related to the user, makes sense to be user-scoped
Game - This is a tougher CD. I would think that in a single session, users can play multiple games, thus I'd think you'd want this to be hit-scoped.
Area - GA already provides this based on the ISP
Timestamp - GA already provides time dimensions
From above, we can determine that you need to create two CDs, one to track User ID, the other to track the Game.
You can also look into using the userid feature in GA for cross-device tracking.
Related
Hello FullCalendar team,
I am looking to build a feature that would limit the type of events that could go into a specific timeslot.
For example, I would like to indicate to a front-desk end-user that only a certain type of appointment was allowed to be entered into the timeslot. Perhaps the timeslot only takes meeting types that are tagged "check-ins" and "follow-ups" arbitrarily set by some higher up admin.
What would be the best way to go about building this limitation and displaying it to the user? I saw that there is an overlap function I might be able to use along with background-events. The higher-up admin might be able to create background-events that if they overlap with another requested event then limits the type. THen it would be very clear that any certain color-coded event set by the higher-admin would indicate that only certain types could be added.
But am I missing a very obvious way to do this? I was hoping there might be an easier way to templatize the day for end-users. Appreciate the advice.
This seems really basic but i am struggling with it
We have a client who runs a travel website.
They have a few different search bars eg Flights, Hotels, Carhire.
I am trying to track the performance of each... "What % of people completed a sale that ran a Flight search." Same for Hotel, and for Car hire
Any ideas for the best way to get this info in GA?
Many thanks
There are a few ways to get this information, each with their pros and cons. The options that I see immediately available are segments and goals.
Segments are great because they are retrospective and generally more flexible, with the ability to be changed if you find your criteria isn't quite right. You create here, and specify sessions that go through search results pages etc:
Then you can create another segment for booking confirmation page, and any other intermediary steps that you'd like to report on. The main con of segments is that you can only pull in 4 at a time, but if you have more you can pull them 4 at a time and copy+paste the data into an excel sheet or google sheet. Segments can also be pulled via the Core Reporting Api and DataStudio which makes them great for automating into dashboards.
Goals are cool because they pull into the default reports, and basically track sessions through a particular page, event or sequence. The main con I see and the reason is that I don't use them is that they only start tracking fro mthe time you create them , and if you change the configuration it does not impact historical data, so your data can get messed up quickly if you don't have sandbox GA views or sandbox goals for your testing before putting it into a dedicated goal slot. You can also only have 10 or 20 goals depending on your plan, so once data is tracked against that goal you can't remove or clear it.
I would like to compare some data between a 3rd party analytics tool and GA.
Now I would love to see the IP addresses that Ga is receiving however it seems that they do not reveal this information, fine, however, I cannot find a way to use the flat table in the GA custom report to show me the following if possible;
Full Date Time (Seems as though they don't want you to have this either)
Browser Version
Browser Width & Height
Page (from the hit)
And I would like this data not to be grouped by the metric, this way I can see that if the same user has hit a page 3 times it isn't grouped.
If anyone can help please let me know. If the question is poorly phrased please let me know.
Thanks,
Connor.
This requires some work, and it will allow the breakdown only for future hits, not for hits that are already collected.
To view individual hits you need to create a hit based dimension that is unique per hit. Unless your page has an amazing amount of traffic a timestamp in milliseconds (e.g. new Date().getTime()) will be sufficient (for your report you might want to format that in a nice way). So in the admin section of your GA property you go to custom definitions, create a hit scoped custom dimension, and then modify your pagecode to send the timestamp to that dimension. Hit scoped means it is attached to the pageview (or other interacton hit) it is sent with.
If you want to break down your report by user you need the clientid (clientid is how Google recognizes that hits belong to the same user). Again, send it as a custom dimension.
This does not tell you how many sessions the user had (there is no session identifier in GA). If you need to know that you can create a session scoped custom dimension and send a random number along ("session scope" means that GA only stores the last value in a session, so you don't need to maintain a session id over multiple pageviews, since the last value will be set for all hits within the session). The number of different sessions ids per client id then tells you the number of sessions per user.
The takeaway is that GA only shows aggregated data, and if you want to defeat this mechanism you need to throw data at it that cannot be aggregated further. You might run into other constraints (i.e. there is a limited number of rows per report).
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.
Are dynamic advanced segments retroactive at the session or visitor level? Can it retroactively recalculate session data or can it retroactively recalculate visitor data?
Here is an example as this is a foggy question.
Say I add an event tag to GA today. Tomorrow i run a report where the dynamic segment is for visitors who have triggered the event. The report requests unique visitors over time.
Now, if it is retroactive at the visitor level, the visitor is now tagged as having triggered the event. The report should show data going back in time (assuming these are not first time visitors). In this scenario GA will see if the visitors tagged arrived 2 days ago even though the events did not exist yet.
This answer no longer reflects up to date information.
Advanced Segments are not queried at the visitor level, and are thus not able to query data across sessions. They query particular sessions (or, visits), not visitors.
So, if you visit the site today, trigger an event, and then visit the site again tomorrow and don't trigger the event, an advanced segment for that event will be a query that says "Show me all sessions in which this event was trigger"; the former will be included and the latter excluded.
Similarly, if you do an advanced segment for a particular page, what you're saying is "Filter down to all the sessions in which this page was viewed" (this can be confusing for people who apply an advanced segment for a particular page, and the result contains more than just that page.)
However, they are dynamic and can be applied to the retroactively. In other words, the results of the advanced segmentation are not contingent on when the advanced segment itself was created. (This stands in contrasts to, say, account filters, that do not apply themselves retroactively.) They tend to be calculated on the fly; you'll notice that complex advanced segments can often take a long time to process, and tend to increase the likelihood that Google Analytics will return sampled (or, "fast access") data.
There is no way to use advanced segmentation to query across sessions.