I have started using GMP on an eCommerce website as I am concerned about transactions not being tracked correctly due to ad blockers and subsequently the conversion data in Adwords being incorrect.
However, I've started using it and I've found it to be a nightmare to get to work as you'd expect. I found this question still unanswered which is worrying!!
Measurement protocol transactions from Google Analytics to Google AdWords
However, my question is similar. But not the same. I'd like to know if I'm supposed to set the referrer, source & medium only once? For the first request?
i.e. Lets say someone clicks an eCommerce shopping ad (So it has a glid). Comes onto the site. And I set the medium to cpc and the source to google.
Then they start to browse around the site before making a purchase. The referrer will then be registered as the current domain and the source and medium will not be recorded.
Is this correct? As currently it's attributing all conversions to the site itself and not to google even though I am passing in the glid on the first request.
Related
I believe I have followed the instructions for adding Google Tag Manager to the letter -- including adding the scripts to all pages of my website. I then added the tag for Google Analytics 4. I have tested this tag many times via the Preview and Debug mode in Google Analytics. In debug mode, I could see when pages were loading, in terms of the basic functions. I have also gone live and have supposedly had this functioning for a few weeks now. If I monitor the Real-Time Report in Google Analytics , then call up my website, I can see my activities showing up including additional tags for monitoring YouTube videos and their progress. When monitoring the Network activity in the browser debug tools, I see data is being sent and replies (presumably from Google) acknowledging them with a 204 thumbs up.If I go to another computer under another name, I can also get those visits to show in the Real-Time data. However, there has been no data accumulating for website visitors. My website is new and does not get a lot of hits, but it gets many more than GA is reporting. I see something like 23 for the last three weeks. Cloudflare Analytics shows over 1,100 unique visitors in the last month with between 30 and 97 new visitors per day. There must be something simple I have missed but I cannot seem to find the answer anywhere through searches or YouTube video aids. How can I install GA4 and know for sure that the data is being accumulated by Analytics at Google? I really want this to work.
Google Analytics Report -- One Month
Cloudflare One Month Requests
Cloudflare One Month Unique Visitors
We are implementing a native analytics system and want to apply the same tracking principles Google Analytics uses. We've figured everything out but one thing:
Every time I refresh a page with an url that has utm-parameters attached to it, Google Analytics somehow figures out that it's not actually a visit but the same page that gets refreshed and shows only one visit in its dashboard from that particular source.
Is anybody aware how GA specifically does that so I can replicate it in our system?
I know that I can use
performance.navigation.type
in my JS script, but it doesn't give me desired results.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Attribution in GA happens on the Google servers, so JavaScript will be of limited use. Basically since a reload means that the user has the same client id and no change in the channel (source, medium and campaign are the same as in the previous visit) the existing session will be continued (a change of campaign/source information would trigger a new Google Analytics session).
Google has a very nice chart that explains how campaign information and traffic source information is processed.
So a problem has arisen on my site when I placed the google analytics script on each of the pages, as when I log into google analytics its gives me incorrect data.
I know this because only 4 people have been given access (from London) to the site and in google analytics under "New Users" we have people from USA, Thailand, and other countries. Any ideas as to why we are recieving incorrect data from google analytics?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I doubt the numbers are incorrect. Is the login page for the site exposed to the world? If so, I suspect the majority of the unknown visits are people who hit the login page but don't actually login.
You should also check the Hostnames report to verify the code is coming from the expected website. We've seen instances where a development shop copies GA code from one site to another and forgets to change the UA number.
How (im)precise is Google Analytics actually? I've been using Google Analytics for years now on a pretty well visited web site (800k+ visits per month).
Now I decided to log every page request in a database table, and I'm tracking the user-agent of the request. I have also eliminated bot requests (googlebot, bingbot and many more...)
What I found out is that I have almost more than double requests to a page than Google Analytics pageviews is willing to admit.
E.g. GA shows 137 pageviews to a specific URL, but I tracked even 255!
Google Analytics is VERY precise. It's not very accurate though. And that's the difference you're seeing since you're not looking into trends but instead at absolute numbers.
Start by reading this post by Avinash:
Reflections: Accuracy, Precision & Predictive Analytics
Bots are everywhere these days and a lot of times disguised as real user agents. You should come up with a testing to make sure client have both javascript and cookies enabled. In that case he'll be tracked by Google Analytics.
Besides that that some users might have adBlocks extensions that block Google Analytics. This is fairly uncommon but depending on the public can be more common. Tech savvy users have a higher chance to use a plugin that blocks GA, thus IT blogs might be hit by this harder than an average site.
The best way to test the real accuracy of Google Analytics ignoring user agents without javascript, cookies and that block GA tracking is to track the users on your site using GA as well. You can do that in Google Analytics using the LocalRemoteServerMode.
Add the following line at the end of your GATC (GA Tracking Code):
_gaq.push(['_setLocalGifPath', 'http://mysite.com/__utm.gif']);
_gaq.push(['_setLocalRemoteServerMode']);
Make sure to replace http://mysite.com/__utm.gif with a path on the same domain as your website and that respond a gif. Use a lightweight gif, like the one GA uses.
Then you can get the logs of access to this gif and see in their parameters the urls visited. You'll need to do some extra processing but you'll be using the same framework GA uses to collect data and thus will measure more efficiently GA precision.
More Info:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/methods/gaJSApiUrchin#_gat.GA_Tracker_._setLocalGifPath
I'm using both on a site and getting very different numbers from each. Why is this?
The discrepancy is also mentioned in a Quora answer (Which is better, Facebook Insights or Google Analytics?)
Footnote: if you decide to use both, do not report them side-by-side,
and never expect them to match. Trying to explain the differences will
drive you mad.
Could someone explain?
This problem is quite common, and very hard to explain to clients why numbers do not reconcile amongst different analytics platforms.
Firstly, I believe that because there are remote connections to google or facebook some user sessions will get lost (What happens when they hit stop on the Browser page before the .js downloads for instance).
Secondly I believe ad blocking software may stop the file from being downloaded therefore the session is not captured.
Most hosting providers will have their own analytics platform with your hosting package. This is what I rely on as a true indicator for actual page views etc. These are usually generated directly from your web server logs so they are more accurate. Sadly I've never seen one of these packages have as many features as google or facebook.
There are tons of possible reasons. They might identify returning visitors in a different way or users might block scripts from a specific domain (e.g. *.facebook.com but not *.google.com). In general, ignore the discrepancy. Just pick one solution and use it. You'll always have visitors blocking all such scripts or just one or two specific trackers. The only (almost) 100% accurate way to do it, would be using local scripts, but even those could be blocked. You could as well look at open source solutions such as Piwik
Different web analytics products use diferent methods to track data on the site.
These differences between them is the reason why is hard do do a side-by-side comparison.
On the two links bellow you can find more info about that:
Why does Google Analytics report different values than some other web analytics solutions?
Using Google Analytics & Facebook Domain Insights to Track Social Actions on Your Website
In addition to the notes above, I also wanted to mention Google samples data when there are large volumes & dimensions. This may be a contributing factor.
Facebook reports on clicks and Analytics reports on pageviews.
The amount of pageviews might be less than the amount of clicks for a number of reasons:
There are filters on your Analytics that are blocking the pageviews from being recorded
The user left the page before the Analytics code could be recorded
Or the ads being clicked by bots and the Analytics isnt recording them
This seems to be a big problem with Facebook ads. I run a number of campaigns with facebook and I only see 30-50% of the reported traffic actually make it to the site. I cant believe this is due to only the first two reasons.
I have gone into more details on my blog http://www.bradtollefsen.com/facebook-ads-adding/