Google Analytics Hit Quotas - google-analytics

I wonder whether someone can help me please.
I have a user who under a specific property, sporadically receives the following error:
Some hits sent on 03-Jul-2018 to property ...... exceeded one or more hit quotas and were therefore not processed.
Hits can be dropped when daily or monthly hit limits are exceeded. You can view your hit volume levels in Property Settings in Analytics.
Hits can also be dropped if visitor hit limits are exceeded. This can happen when your site is incorrectly generating the visitor ID for a GA session. Contact your website administrator to check that the visitor ID generation has been correctly implemented.
They are not using the Premium account but when I look at the data for the day in question, there aren't any issues with regards to 'High Cardinality' which unless I've misunderstood I'd expect to see.
Could someone look at this please and offer some guidance where the issue may be because this area is fairly new to me.
Many thanks and kind regards
Chris

Collection limits are influenced by 2 factors:
The tracker: whether you use ga.js,gtag.js,analytics.js etc... here are the details.
The property type: whether you are using GA (10M hits / month) or GA 360 (2B hits / month).
In your case you are facing a property limit. To find out when such limits where reached, you can create a custom report using a time dimension (eg date+time) combined with the hits metric. You can also combine the hit metrics with other dimensions (country, browser, device) to see if you find any patterns as to why you're getting so many hits.
Cardinality is something else: it refers to the number of unique value combinations for your dimensions. For instance if you have 500K events where each event category is different, you'll have a Cardinality of 500K on the event category dimension. The more hits, the more likely you'll have a high cardinality, but the 2 aren't necessary related (if you send 10B events with the same category, the cardinality on the category is 1).
So focus on identifying and solving your limits/quotas issue, as it's the real issue here:
If the number of hits is legitimate (you have a huge amount of traffic), then the only options are to upgrade to GA 360 or reduce the number of hits for each session
If the number of hits is abnormally high (eg traffic is stable but hits increased dramatically), look for implementation issues, especially generic event trackers such as error tracking with tools like Google Tag Manager

Related

Google Analytics data limits

We are using Google Analytics on a webshop. Recently we have added enhanced ecommerce to measure more events so we can optimize the webshop. But now we are experiencing less pageviews and other data is missing.
I don't know what it is, but on a specific page we are nog measuring anymore, I removed some items from the ga:addImpression data, and now the pageview is measured again.
I can find limits for GA, but I can't find anything for the amount of data that can be send to GA. Because is this seems to be related to the amount of data that is send to GA. If I shorten the name of a product, the pageview is also measured again. GA is practically broken now for us because we are missing huge numbers of pageviews.
Where can I find these limits, or how will I ever know when I'm running into these limits?
In one hand, im not sure how are you building your hits but maybe you should keep in mind the payload limits to send information to GA. (The limit is 8Kb)
In the other hand there is a limit in fact that you should consider (Docs)
This applies to analytics.js, Android iOS SDK, and the Measurement Protocol.
200,000 hits per user per day
500 hits per session
If you go over either of these limits, additional hits will not be processed for that session / day, respectively. These limits apply to Analytics 360 as well.
My best advise is to regulate the amount of events you send really considering which information has value. No doubt EE data is really important so you should partition productImpression hits in multiple ones of the problem is the size. (As shown in the screenshot)
And finally, migrate to GTM.
EDIT: Steps to see what the dataLayer has in it (in a given moment)
A Google Analytics request can send max about 8KB of data:
POST:
payload_data – The BODY of the post request. The body must include
exactly 1 URI encoded payload and must be no longer than 8192 bytes.
URL Endpoint
The length of the entire encoded URL must be no longer than 8000
Bytes.
If your hit exceeds that limit (happens e.g. with large product lists in EEC tracking) it is not (as far as I can tell) processed.
There are also restrictions to field length for some fields (e.g. custom dimension with max 150 bytes, others are detailed in the parameter reference ).
In some cases the data type is relevant, e.g. if in your event tracking the event value is set to a string the call might fail.
I think this is the page you are looking for Quota and limits page can help
These limits apply to the Web Property / Property / Tracking ID.
10 million hits per month per property
If you go over this limit, the Google Analytics team might contact you and ask you upgrade to Analytics 360 or implement client sampling to reduce the amount of data being sent to Google Analytics.

Google Analytics Client Sampling when over 10milion hits/month

Google Analytics Documentation says the following:
hese limits apply to the Web Property / Property / Tracking ID.
10 million hits per month per property
If you go over this limit, the Google Analytics team might contact you
and ask you upgrade to Analytics 360 or implement client sampling to
reduce the amount of data being sent to Google Analytics.
For monthly total Analytics 360 limits, please contact your account
manager or service representative.
What does this mean exactly ?
I know there is sampling , the one which you see in your reports..
But if your traffic exceeds the 10 milion hits per month, is there an automatic sampling system which forbids you to capture all incoming traffic?
In other words : Does google limit your traffic automaticly at the source? Not in the reports but in the source, let's say I capture 20mil hits a month, will i have all that traffic in my property or does it stop at a certain point?
AGAIN : i'm not talking about report sampling but about the actual captured data a month
Thanks in advance
No, Google does not limit data collection. You have to implement this yourself, although they give you a means to do that at least in the Javascript Tracking code. Implementing sampling yourself would be a little tricky since you want to sample out whole sessions, not individual pageviews.
If you record 20 mio hits you will have them in your property. But at that point you operate outside your quota and Google has the right to terminate your account (they will not do that without getting in contact with you, provided you respond to mails send to the Google accounts authorized to use your GA properties).
So far Google has been, in my experience, very generous even with large overruns, but you should not base something business critical on the violation of TOS for a free service.

Hits Processed Per Month?

If you refer to http://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/analytics/premium/features.html, you will notice that Standard allows for 10 million hits processed per month and Premium allows for 1 billion.
I have a website on an account, with multiple "folders" for different sub-domains, and also different "Views" or dashboards for some of these sub-domains.
The website I am on recently lost tracking for conversion rates, and everything has plummeted to near 0%, which is an incorrect statistic. I am curious as to how I can figure up if this account is reaching the 10 million limit on the standard version. Or at least how to figure actual hits processed a day, week, or month?
Any ideas?
Thanks!
I don't know how Google enforces hit limits in 2015. However in 2013 a Google representative sent one of our bigger clients a document (answering a question about data limits) that contained the following paragraph:
How do data limits impact sampling? Google Analytics does not sample
your clients data at the point of collection or processing, regardless
of how far they exceed our stated limits. So no hits are discarded.
The only way to sample data at the point of collection is for clients
to use_setSampleRate in their tracking code.
[...]
[...] we reserve the right to shutdown their account [sc. if limits are exceeded], but it won't
happen before we have attempted to contact the account Admins multiple times
and we have exhausted all other options.
Unless Google has changed it's policy in the last 1,5 years I would say not, unprocessed hits are not your problem; it seems Google would have contacted you with an request to limit your hits or upgrade to Analytics Premium before problems occurr.
Plus, since you mentioned that you have several views - views do not count towards your quota (they display the same data in different ways). However properties (I think that is what you mean by "folders") do.
Updated 2017: It seems that Google intends to enforce limits more strictly. One of my clients now has the following warning in his GA interface:
Your data volume (XXX hits) exceeds the limit of 10M hit per month as
outlined in our terms of service. If you continue to exceed the limit
you will lose access to future data.
You can create a database table, like this:
visits(
id bigint primary key auto_increment,
ip text,
visit_date timestamp default current_timestamp
)
Upon each page visit, you can insert a record into the table. Later you can view statistics. For instance, visit count in a given day would look like:
select id, ip, visit_date
from visits
where visit_date >= '2015-07-21 00:00:00' and visit_date < '2015-07-22 00:00:00'

Google Analytics Event Tracking reporting inflated event values

We recently released two typefaces on our website for free (albeit suggesting an optional donation). I decided we should track downloads through Google Analytics using the event feature, so we ended up adding the corresponding JS snippet to the download form (on submit), something akin to this:
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Typeface', 'Download', 'Typeface #1', parseInt($('input[name=amount]').val(), 10) || 0]);
I also decided we might as well use GA to keep track of donations, so as you might have noticed the optional donation amount is being sent as the event value argument. There's already a browser-side numeric-only verification, and it will set it to 0 in case it's empty (NaN), so we're completely sure it's always an integer (required type for the argument).
I configured two different goals (one for each typeface) in our GA profile, using the two different events as their respective conditions, as recommended by every howto I've been reading about this subject.
However, some of the reported data appears to be somewhat inflated. According to GA there's been, as of now, 455 unique events out of 550 total events, which seems to be okay, but apparently it's worth a value of over a million dollars. And, believe me on this, we have not received such a huge amount, at least just yet.
According to GA: Event Value is the total value of an event or set of events. It is calculated by multiplying the per-event value by the number of times the event occurred.
I assumed I could set individual values to different instances of the same event, even GA documentation leads me to believe so with their examples, so I don't really understand why it's being reported as such an inflated total value.
Is there something wrong with my assumption? Is this the correct approach to what I'm trying to accomplish? should I just forget about keeping track of donations using this method and resort to using the e-commerce feature instead as I've also been reading about?
I'm not checking for any verification of a donation successfully completing, so I'm left with an estimate and I'm okay with that. Maybe someone jokingly wrote off some exaggerated amount then never completed the donation process?
Your assumption is right : you could set individual values to each event and "the report adds the total values based on each event count" (as explain in doc).
The main problem with your approach is the one you mentioned : you count the donation at form validation, before its confirmation and even before you told your visitor that the donation must be made via PayPal. So yes : some people probably wrote off some exaggerated amount or simply not complete the donation process.
I recommend you to use e-commerce tracking after the PayPal payment to avoid unconfirmed donation tracking and the lack of deduplication using goals values to monitor amounts.

How are dynamic segments in Google Analytics retroactive?

Are dynamic advanced segments retroactive at the session or visitor level? Can it retroactively recalculate session data or can it retroactively recalculate visitor data?
Here is an example as this is a foggy question.
Say I add an event tag to GA today. Tomorrow i run a report where the dynamic segment is for visitors who have triggered the event. The report requests unique visitors over time.
Now, if it is retroactive at the visitor level, the visitor is now tagged as having triggered the event. The report should show data going back in time (assuming these are not first time visitors). In this scenario GA will see if the visitors tagged arrived 2 days ago even though the events did not exist yet.
This answer no longer reflects up to date information.
Advanced Segments are not queried at the visitor level, and are thus not able to query data across sessions. They query particular sessions (or, visits), not visitors.
So, if you visit the site today, trigger an event, and then visit the site again tomorrow and don't trigger the event, an advanced segment for that event will be a query that says "Show me all sessions in which this event was trigger"; the former will be included and the latter excluded.
Similarly, if you do an advanced segment for a particular page, what you're saying is "Filter down to all the sessions in which this page was viewed" (this can be confusing for people who apply an advanced segment for a particular page, and the result contains more than just that page.)
However, they are dynamic and can be applied to the retroactively. In other words, the results of the advanced segmentation are not contingent on when the advanced segment itself was created. (This stands in contrasts to, say, account filters, that do not apply themselves retroactively.) They tend to be calculated on the fly; you'll notice that complex advanced segments can often take a long time to process, and tend to increase the likelihood that Google Analytics will return sampled (or, "fast access") data.
There is no way to use advanced segmentation to query across sessions.

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