We excluded URL query parameters to stop Google Analytcis from counting certain URL parameters as multiple pages.
This worked but hasn't backdated the GA data, is it possible to do so?
Unfortunately no. Most (99.9%) of GA settings only affect the data coming in from the time the changes were saved. You cannot retroactively alter the data.
Related
The number of unique URLs exceeds the daily limit in our Google Analytics Analytics notification.
We tried to exclude URL Query Parameters in the View Settings but it doesn't work, GA continue to accept all this unique URLs. URL Query Parameters excluded.
Who knows how to solve this problem?
Daily hits will be reprocessed after midnight, so if you set correct parameters in exclusion list you can see URL cleaned tomorrow.
I have traffic coming from Salesloft emails sent by sales reps that gets bounced off a subdomain and then has a sbrc parameter appended to the URL. I'd like to ensure that this traffic gets counted by Google Analytics as coming from Email, whereas it's currently falling under the "Direct" bucket. Ideally, users would also be appending utm parameters to their links, but this isn't happening consistently.
I tried creating a filter to search and replace the following regex (?:^|\?|&)(sbrc=[^&]*&?) with ?utm_medium=email&utm_source=salesloft in the Request URI. This changed the displayed URL when looking at my realtime traffic, but did not change how GA categorized the channel of the traffic (still direct).
I then tried editing the default channel groupings for Email to be the system categorized OR Landing Page URL contains "sbrc" and dragged Email to the first channel grouping at the top. This doesn't seem to have done anything at all.
How can I make GA recognize this custom parameter as being attributable to the Email channel?
You could use advanced filters to solve this task. The Advanced filter lets you construct Fields for reporting from one or two existing Fields.
In your case, advanced filters let you assign values to campaign source and campaign medium, based on the content of the request URL. This is a sample setup for the source field, and you need a second similar filter for medium as well:
Ideally, users would also be appending utm parameters to their links,
but this isn't happening consistently.
If they add their own and use a utm_medium other then utm_medium=Email, then it will not be defined as being in the default Email channel.
Filters are not retroactive.
Filters also run after data has already been processed by Google, to only change how it displays in the reports as it gets sent back into the GA reports.
A Search and Replace Filter applied to the RequestURI for
?utm_medium=email&utm_source=salesloft is not going to have the result you want.
It will change the appearance of the RequestURI in reports, not actually change how that traffic is attributed.
Changes to the default Channel grouping are not retroactive, it should have affect going forward though.
To see the changes in historical data for the Channels, you would do best to create a custom Channel grouping at the View level, this can then be applied retroactively to the historic data.
My website has a feature to login via Google. So whenever they log in via Google, in my Google Analytics it counts'accounts.google.com' as a referral. Is there any way to prevent this from going to 'referral'?
You have yo use the referal exclusion list, this prevent the session cutting and avoid the creation of new sessions when the user return from account.google.com, but if the domain is google.cm make sure to use the correct domain (you dont want to mess the Organic and SEM data).
To exclude you have to go to the property tab and them referral exclusion list
And them add the domain
This change is not retroactive, that means if the user got this referral as campaign you have to wait until this expire on the server, bu default this is 30 days. So can you see remnants during that date range.
You have set it up already, only thing I would do is escape the dots
accounts\.google\.com
You can Verify the filter before saving.
If there is significant difference in data it will show message otherwise you get this
This filter would not have changed your data. Either the filter configuration is incorrect, or the set of sampled data is too small.
This message means that filter is not significant enough to improve data or set up incorrectly. You may have to play a little with it to get to right result.
Hope that helps.
Say I have two pages on a site called “Page 1” and “Page 10”. I'd like to be able to see the paths visitors take to get from “Page 1” to “Page 10” with full URLs intact. Many of the URLs (including those for “Page 1” and “Page 10”) will include query strings that are important.
Is this possible? If so, how?
Try using behavior flow reports. The report basically shows you how visitors click through your website. There are a lot of ways to customize the report, with which you will need to play around to really answer your question. By default, the behavior flow focuses on entry and exit points of visitors, regardless how many times they hit the different subpages in between. However, I'm sure you can set appropriate filters and settings to answer your question.
I use two methods for tracking where people have been on my website:
Track and store the information in my own SQL database. (details below)
Lead Forensics (paid subscription, but you can do a trial).
For tracking and storing my own data, I record unique visitors based upon the IP Address they're connecting from and then have a separate table that records all page views that links back to the unique visitor table.
Lead Forensics data simply allows me to link up those unique visitors with actual companies that have viewed my website.
Doing it yourself means you don't have to rely on Google working for your records to work, and in my experience Google Analytics tends to round numbers so you don't get a true indication of numbers, and also you can remove bots and website trawlers from your data by tracking the user agent string.
As a somewhat ugly hack you could use transaction tracking. If you use the same transaction id multiple times subsequent products will be added to the existing data. So assign an ID at the start of the visits and on each page record a transaction with the current page url as product name (and the ID as transaction id). This will give you the complete path per user (I am frankly not to sure how this is useful - at some point you probably want aggregated data. Plus each transaction and product counts towards your quota for interaction counts, so on a large site you might run over the 10mio hits limit).
you can do it programatically
have a MAP in the backend which stores the userId (assuming u would have given a unique ID at the time of login to each user) with a list of Strings(each string being URL visited by that user)
whenever the user hits another URL from Page 1(and only from page1, check it using JS), send a POST request to backend with the new URL in its data section.
In the backend, check if the URL is of Page 10 and if not, add this URL as a string into the MAP for that corresponding user
Finally, when the user clicks on the Page 10 URL, you know the URLs in the way from Page 1 to Page 10 and so use them.
Though if I consider JS and I have not misunderstood your question, we can get the previous URL from request header information using document.referrer.
Are you trying to do it from 'Google Tag Manager'? I am not sure whether you are trying to trace the URLS in clientside or server side?
I am changing my WordPress permalinks from:
/%category%/%post_id%/
to:
/%postname%/
Is it possible to make Google Analytics to continue gathering the post's data correspondingly?
Unfortunately, there is no way to have GA remap previous page name values to new page name values, so you will not be able to compare historical data to current data within GA. To do that, you will have to do a query on your wordpress data to make your own lookup table, etc..
One thing you can do is have GA continue to populate with the old URL...the _trackPageview call takes an optional argument to specify the page name you want reported. You will have to write some server-side code to expose the old value to GA though. Or maybe it might be exposed in a variable already and you just have to pass it to GA.
Another thing you can do is kind of a hybrid.. let GA start recording the new URL as the page name, but also populate one of GA's custom variables with the old URL. You would have to expose it like above, but then it will tie the two values together within GA. There would still be some manual work to do in GA to do things like compare historical data to new data but it might be easier for you to go this route.
You needn't worry about that. It will handle the permalink change automatically and collect the stats as usual.