We have just linked our GA360 account to BigQuery but we noticed from the docs that the userId doesn't get exported. This is really annoying as one of our main use case was to join the userId with our CRM system.
Why is Google not exporting the userId ? Is there workaround ?
Thank you for your answers.
The solution is to create a User level custom dimension and pass your user's ID into that as well.
There's no restriction on exporting your custom dimensions, and these are exported to BigQuery.
Enjoy :)
How User-ID works
User-ID enables the association of one or more sessions (and the activity within those sessions) with a unique and persistent ID that you send to Analytics.
To implement User-ID, you must be able to generate your own unique IDs, consistently assign IDs to users, and include these IDs wherever you send data to Analytics.
For example, you could send the unique IDs generated by your own authentication system to Analytics as values for User-ID. Any engagement, like link clicks and page or screen navigation, that happen while a unique ID is assigned can be sent to Analytics and connected via User-ID.
In an Analytics implementation without the User-ID feature, a unique user is counted each time your content is accessed from a different device and each time there’s a new session. For example, a search on a phone one day, purchase on a laptop three days later, and request for customer service on a tablet a month after that are counted as three unique users in a standard Analytics implementation, even if all those actions took place while a user was signed in to an account. While you can collect data about each of those interactions and devices, you can’t determine their relevance to one another. You only see independent data points.
When you implement User-ID, you can identify related actions and devices and connect these seemingly independent data points. That same search on a phone, purchase on a laptop, and re-engagement on a tablet that previously looked like three unrelated actions on unrelated devices can now be understood as one user’s interactions with your business.
From Google analytics about the userid feature the user id is used in the background by google analytics to analyse your data.
If you want to analyse on the user id you can just add it as a custom dimension you will then be able to see it.
Related
I'm looking to get information about users sessions from google analytics. Things like:
date of visit
referral
device type
exit page
browser
time on site
etc.
However, Analytics API seems to only offer this data as totals, and not per user. So I can't know how much a specific user stayed on the website for example.
The final result I'm looking for is to tie this data from analytics with the user id from our CRM platform using the google UUID saved in cookie.
Is it possible to retrieve this data from Analytics or you can only access it with Analytics 360?
User level data is not available in standard GA (except in a limited fashion via the User Explorer report which cannot be exported). You'd need to store user id or client id in a custom dimension (you must not store personally identifiable data in GA, even in hashed form, so take care what you use as user id) and then select this as first dimension when you export the data. Obviously this does not help you with data that's already been collected.
Due to the nature of my website, it is very complex to get a proper attribution model, cross device tracking is complex but necessary.
I would like to know if it is possible to obtain somehow a users google+ userId whenever he visits my site.
I know there is a feature called UserId where I need to generate my own ID and track it upon a customers visit, but due to the nature of my website, there is very little probability they will log in prior to converting (Fact which will make every cross device interaction useless).
You cannot use a Google ID as the User ID in Google Analytics. The User ID must be private and non PII, i.e. Google must have no way to determine who that ID belongs to. Obviously if it's a Google-based ID, they would be able to tell pretty easily.
The relevant bit from the TOS is paragraph 7 :
You will not (and will not allow any third party to) use the Service
to track, collect or upload any data that personally identifies an
individual (such as a name, email address or billing information), or
other data which can be reasonably linked to such information by
Google.
We're creating a flow for boarding new customers and would like to use the enhanced ecommerce tracking of universal analytics to track the boarding steps.
A single applicant fills in a form supplying information about their business and delivery addresses and such. The problem is that after the application has been submitted, the applicants need to electronically sign an agreement. There can be multiple people signing, and the person signing therefor doesn't necessarily need to be the same person that filled in the application. Is it possible to track a flow where another user/session takes over and finalizes the application?
If all participants in the application process sign in with a token - same token for all - you can set it as userID and enable session stitching - you'll need special userID view (and update your privacy policy) which will only show visits for which the userID was set and will recognize users across multiple computers, devices etc.
However this will still give you aggregated data only, so if you want to track individual users in addition to the flow you have to set the userID as a custom dimension (talk to your lawyer first, even with an anonymous ID profile building might be a privacy issue). The userID must contain nothing that would allow anybody but your own company to identify a specific user or device (no e-mail-addresses, no MAC addresses etc). Then you can pull the individual data with the custom dimension as key and match it with your CRM data.
No guarantees, but that seems the closest you can get to your requirements using GA.
Is it possible to use a single google analytics account, in particular, e-commerce, for more than user? I fact, I need it to be used for as a lot of users. What I want in a nutshell is this:
The users come to my web site and provide me their e-commerce data in json or any other format somehow. I have a google analytics, so I take that e-commerce data and send to google analytics. And then show them the reports for their data from google analytics by google analytics API (I guess it's reports API?)
The question is not whether or not it is profitable, makes sense, etc. The question is, can I use my, single google analytics account to achieve what I've described above?
Yes you can. Since you need to keep the users apart in a way that does not allow them to look into other users data you can use a single account for up to 50 users, since this is how many data views you can have per account (view permissions can be set at account level)1. Filter the view by hostname (or whatever) to record only the current users data per view.
If you do not need the interface (i.e. if you want to query GA via the api and build custom dashboards) you can have even more - simply store in unique id per user and use that to filter the data before displaying it in a dashboard. So as far as that part of the question is concerned you are safe.
Where things probably start to fall apart is data collection. Is looks like you want to do some sort of batch processing of accumuluated e-commerce data. Since you cannot send a timestamp for a user interaction all dates within GA will be off. Plus you have data limits (I'm thinking of max interactions per minute that you can send), so your insertion process might be not very efficient. It would probably be better to create something on top of the measuremnt protocol that allows your clients to send data in realtime.
1 To make this a little clearer, you can set up 50 entities whith different access permissions. Of course every view can have as many users a you like, but they will all see the same data.
I'm trying to get the Google UserID working so that I can identify certain users journeys through my website.
I've enabled the USER ID feature as per the docs, which created a new view named Users in my Analytics account. There's data in there, but I can't see to separate it. It looks like a standard account.
How do I spilt data by the user ID I've given them?
You don't. Userid is not displayed. It is used to stitch user sessions together when users come from multiple devices, it does not identify individual users in the interface.
If you want to do that you have to use a custom dimension and store an identifier per user there.