I started to notice that my Google Ads clicks wasnt 100% counting by google analytics (For exemple, during a certain period I had 300 clicks and only 100 sessions were counted as Paid Search on analytics). So I contacted Google Ads Support, they investigated and came to me with this:
Actually, your site is losing the attribution of Google Ads because of an automatic redirection of the structure in which it was developed.
When we have Google Ads linked with Google Analytics, they are talked through a parameter called GCLID. To verify this loss, follow the path I made (in several products, here is an example):
1- I accessed the link https://mywebsite.com/products/running-shoes?variant=15320930779194
2- After full site loading, I added the & gclid = Tester123 parameter to the URL (in the browser, so the final URL was https://mywebsite.com/products/running-shoes?variant=15320930779194&gclid=Tester123) and hit Enter
3- To understand if there is a redirect, the normal behavior would be for the URL to remain the same (with & gclid = Tester123 at the end), but in this case, the parameter some (and hence the assignment)
So, the campaign actually appeared (not set) in Analytics, and could be assigned to any of the other channels (Direct, Organic, ...) For this to be resolved, the site structure must stop causing this automatic redirection in the final URL of each product. With this, the results will be effectively assigned to Google Ads.
They also said that if even if I want to use manual tracking (UTMs) I would still have that problem, since the redirections would keep spoiling it.
As I use Shopify as my website platform, I checked with them and I have no redirections that are causing this problem, at least not created by me nor that their support know.
So I am lost over all this. I dont know where to start solving this problem. Google doesnt tell me what kind of redirections may cause this, I dont use any kind of redirections, and Shopify cant tell me if their code causes this problem (what I dont believe, because other shopify websites would also been suffering from this).
So can anyone give me any direction about this? What redirections may be causing this lost of data?
Thanks for your time!
One thing to note, Google Ads might have a different way of counting, there is the possibility of multiple clicks per session.
That said, you can try Google Tag Assistant, start your recording, click on one of your ads, follow that through and see the parameters being passed.
Unfortunately, it is hard to debug with limited information. The more details you can provide the better.
Check where your GA code is placed in the page code. If GA script is at the bottom of page or there are some heavy scripts above GA tracker, losses of bounced sessions can be large. I.e. user enters the page and immediately closes it. GA script doesn't have time to download.
Why user closes the page immediately?
Сlick by mistake
Slow site
And check that all your landing pages are OK and have 200 server response.
Related
we have recently implemented social login to our website. We are running ads to that website and after implementing the social login we lost all conversion data - everything is accounted to facebook.
Also we have kind of "sub-website" shop-domain.com where are some products that are sold separately and user can migrate between domain.com and shop-domain.com and vice versa. Can this loose conversions as well?
My question is:
how can we configure analytics / ads / website to correctly count the conversions?
What have I done:
In google analytics documentation I found something called linker to fix user migration between domains and page referrer after login. But it doesnt seem to help
gtag('config', 'UA-XXXXXXX-1', {
'linker': {
'domains': ['domain.com', 'domain.eu', 'shop-domain.com', 'shop-domain.eu']
},
'page_referrer':'domain.com'
});
Thanks for any suggestions
Honestly, this issue is a bit complicated to solve over a forum discussion like this. You will probably need to hire an expert to audit your setup and look for the cause of the problem.
But let me try giving you some hints and point you in the right direction so that you can debug on your own if you like.
If the Facebook login is the only addition to the code recently and you started seeing conversions credited to it since setting it up, then the probable culprit is that FB login. In that case, one of the possible solutions is to exclude it from referrers in GA, but that might or might not resolve the issue, and it might require bypassing it in some other ways (through GA filters for example).
If the actual problem appeared even before the FB login and the traffic sources for the conversions were not accurate (but back then, some other traffic source was taking the most significant chunk of the conversion sources, and you didn't see it as suspicious), then the something might be happening with the GA setup. In most of the cases, in GA subdomains shouldn't need any Linker parameters for the traffic sources to be credited properly, and you most probably should remove the Linker between them completely. Check if both domain and the subdomain have the cookieDomain set to "auto" and it should be fine.
We are implementing a native analytics system and want to apply the same tracking principles Google Analytics uses. We've figured everything out but one thing:
Every time I refresh a page with an url that has utm-parameters attached to it, Google Analytics somehow figures out that it's not actually a visit but the same page that gets refreshed and shows only one visit in its dashboard from that particular source.
Is anybody aware how GA specifically does that so I can replicate it in our system?
I know that I can use
performance.navigation.type
in my JS script, but it doesn't give me desired results.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Attribution in GA happens on the Google servers, so JavaScript will be of limited use. Basically since a reload means that the user has the same client id and no change in the channel (source, medium and campaign are the same as in the previous visit) the existing session will be continued (a change of campaign/source information would trigger a new Google Analytics session).
Google has a very nice chart that explains how campaign information and traffic source information is processed.
We have been using Google analytics for awhile now. It has been great for both live traffic and historical reporting.
Suddenly on Sept 5 our reporting shows zero traffic (using the standard reporting overview tab).
This seems really strange as you can see there is near constant traffic in the real-time tab.
Has anybody else experienced this problem when integrating Google analytics? We had a filter that only traffic from our main domain (app.domain.com) would show. Even after removing this we get nothing in the reports.
Check the filters on that profile. Go into Admin on the top right and check the Filters tab on the profile.
Filters are not applied to real time data.
So what you're seeing here is data being filtered out from the profile, but still showing up in the real time.
This could be a few different things
A temporary glitch by Google - this happened to me (which is how I got to this page). I could see traffic in the real time view but nothing in reports. To fix: be patient - this resolved itself after about 12 hours.
profile issue - you may have a profile set up that has filters which are blocking more traffic than you were expecting. To fix: Try setting up a separate profile (if you don't have one already) that has no filters applied. Remember- profile filters work by stripping or manipulating traffic before they reach your reports. The answer above is incorrect- the real time view does take filters in to account. You can easily test this making a filter change and you'll see it take affect in the real time view
tag has dropped off your pages To fix: if you're using GTM you should be able to check this. Or if not check HTML page source on one of your pages you know is getting traffic
finally - you may not getting any traffic :)
I have a web app that I deployed in AppHarbor with Google Analytics. Development is still ongoing and I test it very often live to checkout for example stuffs I did with the CSS, etc.
Everything is working fine but I'd like to know how many times I am accessing the website apart from the rest of the visitors who visits it. When checking the reports in Google Analytics it only shows me the ISPs of the visitors. I'll need something more drilled down like an IP address, but this seems to go against Google Analytic's policy and I do not know if this is even possible still.
Like right now I have 72 visits. But I have been testing so a lot of those could just be me. Would be good to know the actual visitor count.
I know this is probably a little late but you can set a filter to ingore your own traffic from reports. Here is how you do it.
In addition for adding a deprecated variable and using filters, you can build the code so that it only prints the tracking code if e.g. an identifier cookie is not found. Other common option is a URL parameter.
You can then set this cookie for your browser and be excluded from traffic.
Is there a way to test the url you're entering in a step, to see if Google Analytics will recognize it?
What I'd like to do is provide some web page or some web service with a URL, and get a pass or fail. It passes if Google Analytics recognizes a page hit to the url.
Let me give some context.
We've been having issues with our goal funnel steps in Google Analytics. The instructions on adding steps say not to use the domain.
e.g.
DO NOT use : http://www.mysite.com/step1.html
INSTEAD use: /step1.html
Our custom CRM uses friendly urls and as a result GA is having a hard time picking up on them. So we've experimented with changing around url we've placed in the step, however we've got to wait a day to see if the new url we've provided is going to work! Hence why we're looking for something quicker.
OK- so what you're doing is futzing around with the friendly URLs to see what's being tracked (so you can distinguish one URL from another), but you don't want to have to wait?
There are a few Firefox plugins which report on on-page GA (WASP & Observepoint), but the Firebug Net panel is as good as anything.
The other option is to pass a 'virtual URL' to GA in the _trackPageview, rather than depend on the friendly URL - maybe something like this
_trackPageview("/goal1/step1")
although I'd attempt to have the virtual URL (it's really just the path) named more like the actual steps in the process.
What I'd like to do is provide some web page or some web service with a URL, and get a pass or fail. It passes if Google Analytics recognizes a page hit to the url.
This would be a waste of time for someone to make, so you won't find it; it's a waste of time to make it because all that anyone needs to do to see if the page is being tracked by google analytics or not is to look at their 'content -> top content' report to see if the page is listed or not.
One can also go to the page with Firefox, and using the Firebug addon on can see if a call for the _utf.gif image is made, or not, and confirm that the ga account id's are correct, which would mean that GA is receiving the data, but this does not tell you if the data is making it past your ga profile filters. The only way to determine that the page is tracked and that the tracked page view is available in your profile is to check your content reports.