What's Property hits volume? - google-analytics

Property hits volume = pageview?
I checked my Google Analytics and yearsterday I got 200 users but when i go to Administrator->Property->Property Configurations->Property hits volume, I saw that i got 10,000 Property hits volume yearsterday.
Where is this traffic coming from?!
I want to know the meaning of "Property hits volume".

Here's the definition from Google:
Hit
An interaction that results in data being sent to Analytics. Common hit types include page tracking hits, event tracking hits, and ecommerce hits.
Each time the tracking code is triggered by a user’s behavior (for example, user loads a page on a website or a screen in a mobile app), Analytics records that activity. Each interaction is packaged into a hit and sent to Google’s servers. Examples of hit types include:
page tracking hits
event tracking hits
ecommerce tracking hits
social interaction hits
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6086082?hl=en
Essentially combine your total number of non-unique pageviews and total number of non-unique event counts over the last 30 days, it should match closely (unless you have ecommerce and social as well)

Related

Google Analytics Funnel reports differ from pageviews

I've created goal funnels with a required first step, /cancel. When I look at my pageviews reports, the unique pageviews for the /cancel page differ from the value reported in the funnel visualization for the required step 1. Why?
In the funnel report the number is sessions and not pageviews.
Here are the definitions:
Sessions: total number of Sessions within the date range. A session is the period time a user is actively engaged with your website, app, etc. All usage data (Screen Views, Events, Ecommerce, etc.) is associated with a session.
Pageviews: is the total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
Unique Pageviews: is the number of sessions during which the specified page was viewed at least once. A unique pageview is counted for each page URL + page Title combination.
It is important to know that the unique page metric does not closely match the deduplication of the number of times a page has been viewed in a session, as a unique pageview in Analytics is counted for each page URL + page Title combination.
So you can't consider page views because goals talk about sessions and you can't compare these metrics because they are different information with different scope.

GA measurement protocol tracks event but not enhanced ecommerce purchase

I am currently successfully tracking purchases from website using enhanced ecommerce (via GTM).
I have Goals configured that correctly track these in real time. E.g. event goal for Category = Enhanced Ecommerce and Action = transaction.
However, when I try to track purchases using the measurement-protocol I get the event for the enhanced ecommerce, but I can find nothing in conversion (under the goals or otherwise) about the purchase. I am using the hit-builder.
I have configured various goals and tried many different variations. In my last attempt I created a goal which should match if the label is equal to "serverevent".
Then I sent this:
v=1&t=event&tid=MY_TID&cid=5ca7c46d-a46a-4e0b-a395-b4d1bb228fee&ti=T123415789&ta=test&tr=150&pa=purchase&pr1id=P123459&pr1nm=GiftCard_150&pr1ca=test&cu=EUR&iq=1&ec=Ecommerce&ea=Activation&ni=1&pr1qt=1&el=serverevent
In GA I can see the event coming in with event category "Ecommerce", action "Activation" and label "serverevent", but I see nothing in conversions and the goal still has 0 hits.
I have used POSTMAN to post to https://www.google-analytics.com/debug/collect, and I get back "valid" and "Found 1 hit in the request."
I don't know what else I can try. To be clear I am trying to track server side purchases because these are sales by third parties through our API.
The google analytics standard reports take time to process Google stats it can take between 24 -48 hours for the data to complete processing.
You can see if your hits are being recorded by checking the real time api. As for the standard reports your going to have to wait between 24 - 48 hours to see if the results have completed processing.

Google Analytics versus Clickmeter data

what is difference between unique referrals on Clickmeter and New users on Google Analytics? One of our vendor is using Clickmeter and we are using Google Analytics and the data doesn't match. Any suggestions on tracking unique referrals on Google Analytics?
In ClickMeter a click is unique if is human (it does NOT come from a bot/spider) and if there are no clicks on the same link from the same IP in the 30 mins before this click was made. More info here: https://blog.clickmeter.com/click-types
GA determines unique using cookies (a completely different technique). In order for Google Analytics to determine which traffic belongs to which user, a unique identifier associated with each user is sent with each hit. track all the visits to a specific website https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2992042?hl=en.
Moreover, GA analyzes all user on a specific website in the same bucket while ClickMeter performs a different count per each link. It may happen that more ClickMeter links point to the same site and a user that click two or three links together is counted as unique three times.
Please keep in mind that GA and ClickMeter are NOT the same thing and are used (together or not) for different reasons. https://blog.clickmeter.com/google-analytics-alternative

Count of sessions exceeds pageviews when using measurement protocol for event reporting

We have created a server-side tracking for file downloads when users are simply getting a direct download link. We are passing an event collection to GA using Google analytics measurement protocol. Everything seemed fine, but we've noticed that the number sessions started to surpass the pageviews. After the investigation, we found that every time event is sent to GA using measurement protocol it also counts as a session. In the end of the day, it's like 100 sessions and 50 pageviews, which is absolutely wrong.
Any ideas how to solve this?..
A hit looks like this: v=1&t=event&tid=UA-XXXXXX-X&cid=555&ec=File%20Download&ea=Download&el=Filename&dh=xxxxxxx.com
Add ni=1 to make hits non-interactive.
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/parameters#ni.

Google AdWords Conversions not matching database entries

I've just set up a tool on a client site that users can use to request a quote from our client. To do this the user lands on a form page, fills in their details, submits and then lands on a thank-you page. Pretty basic.
I set this process up as a goal in Google Analytics, using the destination type goal: "begins with /thank-you" and shared that goal as a conversion in Google AdWords.
I decided to run a few Google AdWords ads to promote the tool. I also wanted to double-check the conversion data that AdWords gives you so I set the destination URL in Adwords to www.example.com/form-page?adsrc=adwords1 (2, 3, 4 etc. for each ad) and I configured the DB so that there was a column that tracked which URL the user was on when filling in the form (this would be the column I counted to get the number of conversions that came from AdWords so I could compare)
Further to this, I made sure that the initial URL parameters that the user landed on were stored in the session so that if the user browsed to other pages and came back to fill in the form later, it would still attribute the conversion to AdWords.
I tested this thoroughly on a staging and production environment and everything was working correctly.
I ran the campaign for a week and when I checked, the conversion results in the Data Base vs the ones coming from AdWords are wildly different. The DB tells me I've had 5 conversions while AdWords gives me 21.
Is there anything in the way Google uses its gclid that may be causing this issue? Or is there a problem with the way I've set up the measurement structure?
This can be caused by few things, but I think this is the GA/AdWords issue, more than your DB/session set-up.
Gclid shouldn't influence your goal, since it is used only for AdWords/Analytics interactions, Goals should not be affected in your set-up.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2938246?hl=en
Probable cause: If your goal set-up only contains "begins with /thank-you", isn't it possible, that you are counting all the sessions which reach thanks-you page? Not just AdWords?
Solution: if you need to count conversions in AdWords (for performance improvements), use AdWords conversion code at the same page, this counts only those users, who clicks an ad and reach your thank-you page in x (default 30) days. Be sure to count only unique conversions (users by cookie).
Differences between GA/AdWords conversion count:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2679221?hl=en
Google attributes conversions to the last marketing channel, where direct visits do not count as a marketing channel (if you look at their attribution flow visualization you see that the penultimate step is to check for existing campaign information for the user). So GA might overcount Adwords visits (or other campaigns) and conversely shows fewer conversions for direct visits.
On contrast your database probably records the last traffic channel without an elaborate attribution model, so it will show less campaign traffic.
Also IIRC the adwords interface records the conversion for the time of the ad click, not the actual goal conversion, so the timeframes for the conversions differ.

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