I have a question regarding sessions attribution in Google Analytics.
Imagine I am in New York and it's 9.00pm on 01/01/2018 and I am visiting "www.amazon.fr" and it's therefore 3.00am on 02/01/2018 in France. Will my session belong to the "01/01/2018" data or to the "02/01/2018" data ?
Thank you.
The time reported in GA is relative to the timezone set in the view settings. In your case, assuming your view is set to France time, it will be of the next day 3am.
Related
Here's a riddle (serious question actually): if two users are on GA at the same time but are located in two different timezones, do they see the same data?
I ask because an associate and I are observing a dip in traffic but at wildly different rates: I see -17% on my side but he sees -45%. I'm currently in Pacific Standard Time and he is in Australian Eastern Daylight Time.
Any insights?
You can view or set up a timezone in Google Analytics View.
By default, Google Analytics will work with this timezone set. However, you can adjust the time zone per view, which could come in handy for sites that operate in a different timezone than you.
When I check the website's Users since a certain date it returns a super low value.
The example:
If I want to see the data from 01/01/2016 until 13/06/2021 I get 6 Users, 32.323 New Users, 37.611 Sessions, etc.
The Users number don't make any sense.
However, if I do 01/09/2016 until 13/06/2021 I get 16.849 Users, 16.973 New Users and 22.142 Sessions.
These numbers do make more sense.
So basically, if I consider ANY START DATE before the 01/09/2016 I will always get a super reduced value in the Users part, however, if I consider any start date after, and including, 01/09/2016 I will get reasoable values.
Has anyone ever had this issue?
From 1 September 2016 Google Analytics has brought a new feature, the ability to set the Users metric as the main metric, instead of Sessions. This event has taken the name of Users Everywhere and involves some relationships including Audience Reports and Acquisition Reports.
If the date range includes a period of time, even one day only, prior to 1 September 2016 or around that date, the result is like this:
This is valid, however, if the option to enable the Users metric in the reports , present at the Property level, is active:
Note: Google Analytics Standard properties have aggregated user metrics data since September 1, 2016 while Google Analytics 360 properties started aggregating data from May 1, 2016).
Source: https://www.analyticstraps.com/zero-utenti-con-sessioni/
Does Google Analytics have enough information to answer the question of how much time have my top 100 users spent on my site? I don't need their user information, I don't care about ID or name which I know it doesn't even have. Just the identification of individual users by the cookie GA uses, and a report of how much time the top 100 loyal users spent on my site.
is such a thing possible at all with GA?
From your comment on Colwin's answer:
I don't need google if I have to track this for GA, I just hoped it already has this information such as "page visit duration" on a per-user, ongoing basis. If I had to feed Google that information myself, I can feed my own database and run analytics on it. Thanks anyway.
The Google analytics sessions is
a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame. For example a single session can contain multiple page views, events, social interactions, and ecommerce transactions.
Average session duration will be calculated as
total duration of all sessions / number of sessions
I don't think this is available from GA out of the box. But you can build something like this with Custom Dimensions available within GA
This will let you setup and send custom metrics dimensions for users that you can then create reports for.
Google Analytics doesn’t allow you to out in PII but random visitor id's should be fine. You can then compare against your own database outside of GA if needed too.
This will allow tracking the same visitor even without them being logged in to your site.
Sending the custom dimensions could possibly look like this.
ga('send', 'pageview', {
'dimension5': '1234567890'
});
You get 20 free custom dimension slots with GA and 200 with GA 360 -> More info here
I think this article has what you are looking for
https://webanalyticsguy.com/2018/01/18/google-analytics-capture-client-id-reporting-purposes/
It shows how to capture the client id which is a decent way to track a specific user. And goes further to explain how to associate that with a metric, in this case the author uses PageView.
You could change this to Average Session Duration or another metric that gives you a sense of time spent.
I guess that you are looking for something like this:
http://www.analytics-ninja.com/blog/2015/02/real-time-page-google-analytics.html
You can get the counts of the users on your site. You can get the seconds they spent on your website page.
I guess this answer will be helpful too: https://qr.ae/TWpkI0
I visited two relatives in two distant cites, each family member in each location logged into my WordPress blog with their computers and spent over 10 minutes navigating through most of the pages of my blog.
The next day, back home, I checked the GA Geo Location report, which was approximately 15 hours later, and neither city showed up in the Geo Location Primary Dimension: City report.
Does it take longer than 24 hours for their visits to show up in GA, or am I doing something wrong?
I am worried that not all visits to my blog are being recorded by GA.
It's possible that the person was already logged into a Google account which could shield their location. It's also possible that you might need to change the date at which you are viewing the analytics information.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1010052?hl=en
Not all visits get assigned to a city. Depending on where your visits are coming from, a significant percentage may show up as (not set). I'm not sure what determines whether or not GA can assign a city, but have noticed that some are missing. Here is an example, showing that 11 out of 160 visits on one day to my account were (not set).
The situation is even worse with the "Metro" dimension, as you can see below.
In recent 2 days, my website's average visits duration fell from about 1:30 to 50sec in Audience>Overview window and fell from 2:00 to 1:30 in Content>Overview window. The visits duration parameters has a steady value for a long time.
The website (www.rapidtables.com) seems to function well.
Hosting server activity history graph seems normal.
All other analytics parameters (visits and pages/visit) seem normal.
Why visit duration is different in Audience>Overview and Content>Overview windows?
What could have caused the sudden drop in the duration parameter? (analytics bug / old urchin.js usage ...)?
Do you have historical data to compare to? If so, is this the first year it has happened, or do you see a dip about this time every year? If you have absolutely verified that nothing went wrong with your tracking code or your website in general, then it boils down to speculation. You just have to research the industry your site caters to and look for reasons that might have caused it. Maybe some new competitor opened shop? Maybe whatever product or service you offer is "seasonal"?