Compare 2 pages (old/new) in 2 different timeframes in Google Analytics - google-analytics

On site.com I've two products: site.com/product-1 (old product) and site.com/product-2 (new product)
On these two pages, I have to compare their
• page visits
• users
• time spent on page
• bounce rate
• etc
in a different timeframe: same period last year and this year.
I already had a look at Can I compare two different page's stats in Google Analytics? but it's not what I'm looking for.
Thanks for any kind of suggestion!

I think there are two parts to your question, one part is about how to compare two different timeframes, the other is how to get a report with page visits, users, time spent on page, bounce rate, etc. Maybe a third is about filters.
Comparing stats in two different periods
In the date selection, there is a "Compare to" checkbox, check that and select the periods that you want to compare, like so (I'm comparing 2017 to 2016):
Creating a custom report
Here's a guide on how to get the dimensions and metrics that you want. In your case, I would select the "Page" dimension and select the metrics that you want to include (avg. time on page, pageviews, users, bounce rate, etc). Make sure the report type is "Explorer"
After you finish creating the report, you'll see a list of all the pages on your site with the metrics you've selected. Click on the "advanced" link beside the "search" to do some advanced filtering. Add a "Matchin RegExp" filter like so (the "|" means Or):
When you apply the filter, you should see only those two product pages listed, if not, look at your regex to make sure they're specific enough. Here is a quickstart if you're not familiar.
When you have done that, use the "compare to" period to select the periods you want to compare.
Then when you're done, there should be checkboxes beside the product pages you want to compare, check those and click on "Plot Rows" at the top and you should see the two pages plotted in the graph above as well.

Related

Programmatically parsing Google Analytics "What pages do your users visit?" day by day?

I am not a Google Analytics power user, but something tells me that if I wanted to parse out the "What pages do your users visit?" box:
It should be a lot easier to do it by individual day than manually clicking through "Today", "Yesterday", then selecting individual calendar dates using "Custom". Unfortunately, if I click on the "PAGES REPORT" option and select the date range I'd like to explore in full (e.g., previous year or more), I can't see on what days what page was visited because the results are all binned together per page visited per date range, with no indication of the specific individual days that it was visited:
Is there a programmatic way (e.g., using an API) to cleanly query and parse Google Analytics "What pages do your users visit?" results to obtain day-by-day info without needing to select today, yesterday, the day before, etc. manually by hand hundreds of times?
The only relevant post I could find on this was: Get a result for each day, instead of total in date range, with Google Analytics API (but it wasn't particularly helpful to me)
You have to select a date range and select Date as secondary dimension, so you can see pages visited in each day without doing it one day at a time.

Google Analytics list of page views with timestamps?

Is it possible to export a list of all page views, with timestamps, out of google analytics?
Currently I can see page views per day, but not specific times for each view. I do see real-time data as it comes in, so I assume the time for each view is being stored.
If not, how might I go about sending that data when I report the page view in a way that will make it accessible in the dashboard?
[[UPDATE]] The Google Analytics v4 API now includes a "dateHourMinute" dimension.
Inside Google Analytics, I think the problem you will run into is that a "timestamp" includes Date, Hour, Minute, Second (and maybe millisec) and you can only drill into one secondary dimension at a time (ie: just date). An alternative method is to use the query explorer or just use the Google Analytics API.
Ad Hoc Report with query explorer
You can use the Google Analytics API Explorer: https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/query-explorer/
It will allow you to select:
A date range
Metrics: (like Users, pageviews, etc)
Dimensions: pagePath, Date, Hour, Minute (can't go to second or further, as in a timestamp, though)
Use filters to get rid of some data.
If your website gets a decent amount of traffic (> 50,000 pageviews per month), you might want to grab it 1 month (or less) at a time to avoid hitting limits/sampling effects.
#doctaj solution works. Please just note that if you are using the query-explorer for example, "dateHourMinute" dimension is considered 3 dimensions and will burn 3 spots from your available 7 or 10 dimensions that you can query. So if you need more dimensions, you need to decide which is more important to you. For example, you may want to query for the date and hour dimensions separately to drop the minutes in favour of something else.

Can I filter a Google Analytics segment based on content grouping pageview count?

I want to create a Google Analytics segment for our users who view at least a certain number of pages on our site. From what I can tell (please correct me if I'm wrong) this is easy to do if you don't care about what kind of page they view: you create a filter for the segment that checks to see if Unique Pageviews is greater than some value such as 4. However our site has a whole bunch of pages that I don't really care if someone reads (our "about page" for example). So what I'm trying to do is create a segment of how many people view at least X pages of what we call "Learning Content" (basically two specific page types on our site). How can I segment the users who read a certain amount of learning content?
Two types of pages fit into our definition of learning content. The first one has a URL matching a regex that sort of looks like /learning_content_1/.* and the second matches regex /learning_content_2/.*. I've already created a content group for learning content that correctly identifies these two content groups. However I wasn't able to find any way to filter a segment based on how many unique pageviews (or even just pageviews) come from a specific content grouping. Is this even possible? If not, how might I work around that?
The research I've done so far: Google Analytics: How to segment by many groups of pages was somewhat helpful but didn't address the question of how to create an actual GA segment based on pageview information for a content grouping or content group.
The only way I can think of handling this, is by associating a specific custom event that gets triggered on this page. Then you can create a segment that matches users who have that event category:
and total events greater than 4:
It's a workaround, and it doesn't work if you are tracking other events, but maybe that works for you?

Google Analytics how to get metric for 'number of active users on website at any one time'

In Google analytics how can i get a metric to put "number of active users on website at any one time". I want to put it against past date periods.
I.E I was scrolling through the metrics, trying to add a widget to my dashboard but, I can't find this metric!
It looks like it's possible because google analytics uses it on their standard report, real-time, "current active visitors on website"
How can I achieve this?
Simply, you can't out of the box. There are some limitations in real-time reports and the ways GA counts unique visitors.
However, if you do not need a detailed analysis, this custom report might do the work (just import it for your Analytics Profile/View and click Customization tab). It basically shows the generic numbers (you can change them to fit your needs) according to hour of a day.
Add any secondary metrics to find out how numbers change in days/weekends etc. Or you can slice the data with segments and see if some traffic is more active in the morning etc.
Hope hits helps.
PS: Beware of data sampling...

Unique events are greater than total events

I'm having an issue with Unique Events and Total events. I don't really understand why unique events are greater than total events (image attached: https://analytics-a-googleproductforums-com.googlegroups.com/attach/584c3c65bd24cfec/Screenshot%20at%202013-05-14%2017:00:40.png?gda=9qkpgUYAAADqfLbDOUx1KZ9vP-6pB8mH0QevsNJBCwpb2zqmxh9R_FqJw8mf6kYUxitGhb4bDE5x40jamwa1UURqDcgHarKEE-Ea7GxYMt0t6nY0uV5FIQ&view=1&part=4).
Someone can explain how this is posible?
Santiago Vázquez
Found the thing: you will see that "Unique Events" are great than "Total Events" when you look at an event category or action, put "Event Label" as a secondary dimension and the event has been triggered some times with no label input. Google Analytics hasn't the option "(not set)" for this particular dimension, so it just doesn't show you those events in the Total Events Count, but still counts as "Unique Events" all the users that executed this particular event category / action.
I am seeing this same issue in my the first view of my Custom Report as well. I don't know WHY it is showing more, but there seems to be a more accurate Custom Report drilldown for you to use. In my reports, one page shows in my Page drilldown with 30 total events but 62 Unique Events. However, when I click into the next dimension drilldown view, in other words click to narrow in on just one page, it shows that same page with 30 total events and only 29 unique events. That seems more accurate.
My dimensions drilldowns for this custom report are "Page" and then "Event Label"
Hope this helps!
I think Google Analytics is simply buggy.
They have to work on event reporting a bit more.
We are tracking events and e-commerce data to our own database, and we realised that both Google Analitics and Universal Analitics misses some events and e-commerce data.
We are trying to find the reason for this, but no luck yet.
If you have a segment applied it's probably sampling. You can confirm or deny sampling is the cause by seeing if there is a yellow background note above the graph but below the date selection on the report page. There is also a grid of filled in and not filled in circles next to the new scholar cap (also below the date selection) sometimes.
Unique events are calculated by session, while total events are determined by the main dimension.
In the example report below, I wanted to look at how many events occurred on each page. The dimension drilldown is Page, with Total Events and Unique Events as metrics.
Users can visit a page, but not send an event by that page ( 0 total events ). However, if their session includes an event, then unique events will be 1 or more.
Custom reports allow data combinations that may not be clear (not sure if someone already posted this point or if I saw it in another thread). Basically, my report should not include Unique Events to prevent this problem from happening, though this was probably the wrong way to go about this altogether.
Template: https://www.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=XafJ7KvSSf-n5KWWPyvn_g
Google has deprecated (renamed) Unique Events metric as it was seriously confusing. We are expecting to see a number of times event with unique combination of category / action and label happened per other dimensions in report. Instead GA calculated a unique combination of every dimension in the report!
Now, this metric is deprecated and renamed to legacy.
New one: Unique Events is giving expected results.
I written about why total events are higher than in my blog as too many questions.
Total Events are calculated as the total number of interactions with a tracked web page object. On the other hand, where a single user session (or visit) has one or more events, this is calculated as a single Visit w/Event, or Unique Event in the reports. For example, if one user clicks the same button on a video 5 times, the total number of events associated with the video is 5, and the number of unique events is 1.

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