Push affiliate publisher data into google analytics? - google-analytics

I run a blog and publish AWIN affiliate campaigns on my website.
The Awin affiliate network offers a transaction feed that automatically push near transaction notifications to a URL I am able to define.
Detailed infos: https://wiki.awin.com/index.php/Transaction_Notification
I wonder if there is a way for me to push/import this data from Awin directly into my Google Analytics account and if so how?

Yes, this feature is called Data Import. What you will need is to choose a dimension (called the import key) with which you can blend GA and AWIN data. Practically, what you might need to do is:
Implement a custom dimension as your import key so you can store an affiliate identifier from AWIN against your users in GA, this will be your blending dimension.
Create other custom dimensions/metrics as needed to hold the other data points from AWIN
Create and import data sets on a regular basis to import new AWIN data
Please note that a few weeks ago Google Data Studio now has a feature to blend data sets, so once step 1 is done, you could perform steps 2 and 3 in data studio (which might be easier for you as you don't need to create the extra dimensions/metrics AND you could have your AWIN data in a Google Sheet synced automatically with your GDS report, thus saving you the data imports).

Related

Download Google Analytics information with a unique user ID

I'm looking to download hit data from a Google Analytics view for a small period of time that includes unique ID for a session and URL that was viewed. I believe I could do this going forward by setting something in Google Tag Manager to a Custom Dimension, but I was looking to avoid that (we have a good number of custom dimensions) and because I wouldn't be able to go backward.
Is it possible in the free version of GA to do something like? I picture the output being the URLs in my x-axis and my users in the y-axix with counts.
I'll be looking to take this data and do a cluster analysis to determine user behavior types.
Nope. Google Analytics does not expose a user specific id via the API or via data exports in a standard account (in GA360 you could use BigQuery to extract the client id).
You either have to set up a custom dimension (as you said this does not work for historic data), or try and use calcuated fields in Google Data Studio in the hope that if you aggregate enough different dimensions into one field you will end up with something specific per user.

Is it possible to track actual affiliate sales in Google analytics

I have a website that I built and am getting sales everyday now via "affiliate window" I was curious if it was possible to track the commission in analytics so I am able to see what pages are performing the best?
Thanks
You should look into purpose-built affiliate trackers. Voluum, Thrive, Adsbridge etc. CharlesNgo.com has a lot of info about these.
You can also use these trackers to dynamically insert user data into your landing pages, and they are a lot easier than GA to use. Example: https://charlesngo.com/how-to-insert-user-data-into-landing-pages-using-voluum-tokens/
After a clarifying comment: Yes, you can do this, although with some caveats (one of them that it might not be worth the effort unless you make a lot from your affiliate pages).
You can do data imports, and more specifically you can add data to urls (there are different kinds of data import and "content data" is one of them).
You need a dataset that contains a "key" field that is used to match external data to GA data and one or more fields with values you want to import.
Imported data is always dimensions, i.e. categorical data (that is per Documentation The interface allow to to select custom metrics, but I have not yet tried this and cannot give any guidance on how that would work). So if you try to import revenue you have the problem that new entries will not be added to existing entries, they will replace them
What I would probably do is to sort the data from the "affiliate window" into three categories (low, medium, high), and then prepare a csv file with the urls as first column and the categories as second column.
Then create a custom dimension with a name of i.e. "performance" (else you'd have to overwrite an existing dimension in GA and you probably not want that).
Both custom dimensions and data imports are created on a property level (however you can apply an import to a specific view and I would urge you to test this on a test view first). So in the property settings go to data import, new, content data. Key will be "page", Imported data will be the custom dimension you just created. Check "overwrite hit data" (else the data will not change after the first import, however note that this might make comparisons between different timeframes difficult).
Download the "schema" file (simply a template for your csv upload file in which you insert your data). Click finish.
Next go to data imports, "manage uploads" and upload the file. Processing will take a day or so (errors, if any, you will see shortly after the upload).
Then go to your content reports, select your custom dimension as secondary dimension and you will if the url in question was a low, medium or high performer.
You can automate this via the GA API, bit that's a bit beyond an SO answer.
---- (old answer)---
This is actually what campaign parameters are for. Your affiliate links should be tagged with campaign parameters, e.g.
http://example.com/?utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=[[Affliate
Name]]&utm_campaign=[[Campaign Name]]
The things in the angled brackets are placeholders, you would replace those with the name of your affiliate and the name of your campaign.
Now you can look into the aquisition reports and group by source (values for all affiliate links), by source (breakdown by affiliate name) or campaigns, or combinations thereof.
However tracking the commission you pay out via Google Analytics is probably not a good idea, at least from the point of view of your affiliates - JavaScript based tracking is not necessarily accurate enough to track billable services (some people have js disabled or opted out of GA or use adblockers that block tracking etc).
Yes it's possible. You can use sub-id's and fill them with unique visitor data (Google Analytics Used ID). Once an affiliate sale is tracked in an affiliate network, you'll get the sub-id that generated the sale. You can now push that sale to google analytics and let google analytics match the visitor data with their data, showing you the full visitor reports (including landingpage info etc.). You need developer skills to get this working with your affiliate networks but there are complete easy to use tools that does the trick for you such as Ivanhoe.io and Coincrack.

Track individual via Google Analytics

I am new to Google Analytics. I have a conversion set up, and I'd like to capture demographics for individuals who convert at e individual level. When a user converts, I'd like to pass the statistics from Google Analytics into my own database, or keep a record of the ID assigned at conversion in Google Analytics and download the data. Is this possible? I want to do analysis on who is likely to convert versus not - age, shopping habits, etc - and link these details back to the type of specific conversion.
Thoughts?
We if want to add add track users at individual level, try creating a Custom diamension and passing the userID everytime you make a GA call.
Next to view the same :- in tables that you view your analytics data, there will be this option called 'Secondary diamention', from the list that appears.. Choose the custom diamension name that you had assigned. Now you will be able to see each row with the userID along slide.
Add user ID to your tracking script
The first step to your question is to add the user ID to your tracking. If you have some way to identify users on your website (ie: through email marketing tool, your CRM, etc), then you should set up user ID tracking. Here is the Google Dev article about that:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/cookies-user-id?hl=en
However, basically... you just have to add this to your tracking script (replacing the 'create' line you currently have, replacing "USER_ID" with the user ID your system gives them.
ga('create', 'UA-XXXXX-Y', { 'userId': USER_ID });
In addition, I usually include this UserID as a custom dimension, so that I can view it in Google Analytics and other reports. To do this, first set up a custom dimension for your ID, as a "User-level" dimension. Then just add this after your user ID is available (assuming this is your first custom dimension):
ga('set', 'dimension1', USER_ID);
Connect User ID to Demographics
Unfortunately, the demographics information that Google Analytics provides (under "Audience") is not compatible with custom dimensions (like userID). So, the API only allows you to pull the audience data in aggregate (ie: connected to City, number of users, pageviews of those types of people... etc). If this works for you, check out the GA Query Explorer (below) to try out different combinations of dimensions & metrics to drill down as deep as you can and maximize the information you gain from this demographic info.
Connect Google Analytics Data to Your Database
In order to connect GA data to your database in an automated fashion, you will need to set up some kind of scheduled process that runs a query off of the Google Analytics API. To explore what combinations of metrics and stuff are available, I'd suggest checking out the Google Analytics API Explorer and the Google Analytics API reference material. What I did was set up an SSIS package (using SSIS GoogleAnalyticsSource) as the data source, which made it fairly easy. Then just scheduled that to run daily, populating the data I want into my database.
Alternatively, you could download less complicated reports directly from Google Analytics and import them into your database with something like SQL Server Management Studio.

Use data import for update revenue

I have problem with integration our crm system with google analitycs. We want to use offline revenue tracking. We use google tag manager. I setup new Ecommerce tag, and as i see - it works fine. After that I created new data in admin panel with this options
My example csv file:
ga:transactionId,ga:productSku,ga:transactionRevenue,ga:quantityRefunded
1433493048,a1d7311f2a312426d710e1c617fcbc8c,28000,1
1433494861,a1d7311f2a312426d710e1c617fcbc8c,29000,1
1433500564,a1d7311f2a312426d710e1c617fcbc8c,30000,1
1433501589,b440509a0106086a67bc2ea9df0a1dab,31000,1
1433505297,405e28906322882c5be9b4b27f4c35fd,32000,1
I uploaded file, and status is "Completed". No errors and no alerts.
But in Reporting panel data not updated.
Refund data upload is for, well, refunding.
One guess is that Google Analytics does not want to refund more money than people have actually paid. If you want to import transactions I suggest you use the measurement protocol to send transaction data.
Also your example csv is wrong: the third field is supposed to be the product price, not transaction revenue (so look into the individual transactions to see if the number has been recorded as product price. Analytics does not automatically sum up product prices in a transaction as transaction revenue, you have to pass that in yourself).

Getting MCF Conversions path data from Google Bigquery

I am using Google Bigquery to extract data on conversion paths from Google Analytics (GA).
When I analyze these conversion paths from the exported dataset, the last-click conversions match the Acquisition report in GA, but not to the Multi Channel Funnel (MCF) data. Apparently Bigquery doesn't really export raw data, but transforms it by deleting all last direct clicks. like described here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1319312?hl=en.
Is it possible to get the Bigquery data to correspond to Multi Channel Funnel (MCF) conversion path data? To undo the deletion of last non-direct click and get proper 'raw' user level data?
All of the trafficSource fields in BigQuery Export for Google Analytics use campaign attribution as described in this processing flow, which will overwrite direct traffic with the most recent campaign (if there is one and it is within the specified timeout), as you mentioned.
If you are using Universal Analytics, you can adjust the campaign timeout to be shorter than the 6 month default. For example, if you set the campaign timeout to be one day, any direct visits that come in at least one day after a visit with a campaign will be attributed to direct instead of the previous campaign. This can be done with Classic Analytics as well using _setCampaignCookieTimeout. This technique will affect data collection from the time it is implemented going forward.
This thread is rather dated, so I thought I'd update just in case anyone else comes across this same question.
There is a field that was introduced (both in the Google Analytics interface and the BigQuery export) that allows you to match the numbers in the MCF reports. In BigQuery, look for the field trafficSource.isTrueDirect
BigQuery Export Schema
trafficSource.isTrueDirect
True if the source of the session was Direct (meaning the user typed
the name of your website URL into the browser or came to your site via
a bookmark), This field will also be true if 2 successive but distinct
sessions have exactly the same campaign details. Otherwise NULL.

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