I am implementing v5 Firebase+GTM SDK with the sole purpose of tracking the events in Google Analytics.
I can't seem to find a way to access GA Client ID (using previous versions of GTM SDK, I was able to access tracker object and get or set the value).
I am talking about this value:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/field-reference#clientId
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/parameters#cid
Is there a way to reach to GA object hidden inside FIRAnalytics?
Yeah, I don't think tracker object is surfaced.
What you can do is to generate your own clientID (a simple guid would do) and in Google Tag Manager configure a tag to set it as a field. This way you will fully control the cliend id (&cid) and therefore change it as you see fit
This is not possible as of today, since Firebase does not expose data via a REST API. There is no API to even pass on the GA client ID.
From GTM's side of things, that is again a closed system since the data from Firebase is intercepted by GTM but cannot be pulled out or tweaked before it is passed to GA.
Related
How would I detect a Google Tag Manager publish event and send that to an external system?
I am trying to pinpoint effects of specific tag changes for certain properties and correlate them in a graph the way I might do with a new GitHub tag being created.
I've looked thru documentation but have not uncovered anything yet specifically for this scenario.
You could user container notifications to have an email sent to some service that processes the mail and stores the information.
Or you can use the API, retrieve the container fingerprint and compare it against a stored version of the fingerprint to see if it has changed. This would require you do implement some sort of polling in the API script to check every n minutes for changes.
Is it possible to use GA4 Measurement Protocol to send events to Google Analytics and view and analyze them in the GA dashboard without using gtag.js or any other front-end script? The use case would be that some events are being sent to my server and I will just push these events to GA through the API.
One thing that makes me think is that the official Measurement Protocol API say:
In order for an event to be valid, it must have a client_id that has already been used to send an event from gtag.js. You will need to capture this ID client-side and include it in your call to the measurement protocol. In send an event to your property, we use "client_id" as the client_id. You will need to replace this with a real client_id that comes from gtag.js.
(https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/ga4/verify-implementation?client_type=gtag)
That suggests that only events that have a valid client_id that originate from gtag.js will be counted.
I did some experimenting with randomly generated client_ids and what I discovered was that I was able to see my events in the Realtime section of the GA4 console (the Event count by Event name section), but all the other sections would be empty and the Users in last 30 min section would always show 0.
Can someone please explain to me why it's zero and if such a use case is valid at all? Thanks
tl;dr
You can use any value in client_id, as long as it uniquely identifies the user (we use a GUID/UUID), but it seems like you also need to send a value in user_id. We use the same value for both.
Also, you need to add the 'engagement_time_msec' parameter to get any user metrics to register.
Longer answer:
We're trying to do the same, i.e. send all events to the GA4 Measurement Protocol from the server, so that it is not dependent on the current user's GDPR cookie settings.
We currently do this for a Universal Analytics property with no issues, but it seems that Google is trying to prevent this in future, by restricting the scope of the Measurement Protocol in GA4, whilst forcing everyone to move to it by July 1st 2023. See the documentation at https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/ga4#full_server-to-server, where it states:
While it is possible to send events to Google Analytics solely with
measurement protocol, only partial reporting may be available. The
purpose of measurement protocol is to augment existing events
collected via gtag, GTM, or Firebase.
We have something working with GA4, in that the events are being registered on the GA4 property correctly, using a client id that is just a GUID/UUID that we define in our own site cookies. So, any value can be used in the client id, as long as it uniquely identifies the user. The same value is used to populate the user_id parameter.
When sending events, the realtime event details were showing on the GA4 dashboard, but user metrics were not until we also populated the 'engagement_time_msec' parameter, as described in https://stackoverflow.com/a/71482548/7205473
We still have issues with things like getting the user location and the platform details, which previously were automatically populated by passing the IP address and the User Agent, but which seem to no longer work in GA4.
We were also passing page load timing events through the Measurement Protocol, but again, these features seem to have been removed in GA4.
It is possible to use GA4 directly without gtag.ja or the Firebase SDK. Its not supported, so it takes some work. We have this working in a desktop app reasonably well. There a couple things that need to be done.
As stated elsewhere the "engagement_time_msec" param must be set using the "_et" parameter. This is the number of milliseconds between now and the previous event.
The client id "cid" has a specific format; it should be:
"randomNumbers(10).unixTimeStamp()"
The session id "sid" format is:
"randomNumbers(10)"
The "_z" parameter needs to be set. I think this is a cache buster. Looking deep into the gtag.js code it is a url safe base64 encoding of "CCD", which always results in the value "ccd.v9b"
The page hash parameter "_p" can be set to this; not totally sure its correct but it works.
"randomString(3).randomString(3)"
Set the "User-Agent" HTTP request header in whatever framework/lib you are using. GA4 uses this to determine many things including Operating System. You will need to create a fake user agent based on the local device information. This is what we use for a Windows 11 x64:
"myco.testapp/4.0.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)"
The IP will be taken fromn the web request which is where the geolocation data comes from.
Since a full working example is worth 1,000 words of documentation; here is a "test" event with a parameter "animal=dog":
https://www.google-analytics.com/g/collect?cid=0078745494.1659679529&_et=364&_p=pfJ.Aev&seg=1&sid=2678664821&tid=G-???&ul=en&v=2&_z=ccd.v9b&en=test&ep.animal=dog
It's possible to extract outgoing GA4 request from a GTM container debug/preview view and map any GA4 (automatically collected and custom) event.
Example page_view request URL:
https://www.google-analytics.com/g/collect?v=2&tid=G-XXXXXXXXXX>m=3oes1i1&_p=1545013558&_dbg=1&cid=P%2FdJWyULMwcT21TMrzn7pZdlNt%2FxtttGVqGUmqNYbhc%3D.1669722847&ul=nl-nl&sr=2560x1440&uaa=x86&uab=64&uafvl=Not_A%2520Brand%3B99.0.0.0%7CGoogle%2520Chrome%3B109.0.5414.75%7CChromium%3B109.0.5414.75&uamb=0&uam=&uap=Windows&uapv=10.0.0&uaw=0&_s=1&_uip=XXX.XXX.XXX.X&sid=1674235261&sct=1&dl=https%3A%2F%2FXXXXXXXXXX.com%2F%3Fgtm_debug%3D1674235654105&dr=https%3A%2F%2Ftagassistant.google.com%2F&dt=OM%20test&jscid=XXXXXXXXXX.1669722847&seg=1&en=page_view
Tip: use Postman to analyse and experiment with parameters
regardless of the platform used to make a call the Measurement Protocol, you should use a client id generated by gtag.js, or the app ID if using Firebase.
I have settled my google tag manager as from the guide.
I have got in place a page that redirect just after the tag gtm-load is collected into the dataLayer. It's actually a "transition" page that should redirect instantaneously.
In this way I make sure google-analytics.com/r/collect is called, as I can see from the network ta of my browser, seems the only way to do so for an "instant redirect page".
However I need to test it from the back-end side.
Is there any way to have a feedback from Google Analytics about the data is actually sent? For example something like google-analytics.com/get/data/lastEntry, so that I can use a restAPI to check it out?
As far as I know, google analytics provide only metrics through a web page, and no actual data sent to.
Moreover there are some Rest API here but they are only for configuration purpose.
you might pass a JavaScript function as a hitCallback parameter of analytics send command and it will be called right after hit data were sent:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/field-reference#hitCallback
Here's an example of how to use it with GTM alongside another useful feature of eventcallback
https://www.simoahava.com/gtm-tips/hitcallback-eventcallback/
Hope this helps.
There is a realtime API in Google Analytics, so what I have done for testing is to call my test URL with utm campaign parameters attached. Then I made a call to the realtime API and filtered by my custom campaign.
The realtime API is fairly limited (no session based values, obviously, you cannot test custom dimensions etc), but at least this tells you if your hit has registered in GA.
I have a question to the following case. We want to track a content platform using google tag manager. However, not every time the platform is online but GTM would send data to our internal server. Therefore our concern is if data collected during this offline period will be kept or if we loose them.
Do you know if there is some period during which data collected offline through Google Tag Manager is kept and once it gets online then it is sent to Google Analytics?
Thank you,
Lukas
No, that is not how Google Tag Manager works. GTM for web is basically a javascript injection engine. It bundles your configured tags,triggers and variables with a selector engine and injects that into your page. There is no serverside component that stores data.
I'm sure one could come up with a solution to your problem - e.g. store your data with localstorage in the browser, poll you server to see if it is available, and when it's online send the data with a queue time parameter to Google Analytics. However that has nothing to do with GTM.
Having said this, it is hard to understand your use case - if your server is offline, then where does the data come from ?
If you have an offline PWA app (with a Service Worker), you can use the Workbox Google Analytics module to handle the collection of data, and to report it upstream when your site comes back online.
This module has a service worker fetch handler that intercepts the calls that you would make with analytics.js or gtag.js, and stores your data locally in IndexDB in the event that the call fails because it is offline.
I am sending an offline event to Google UA using their measurement protocol. I am trying to tie it to the users previous visits to get attribution and using Google's own Client ID from their cookie to do that. While the event does appear in Google UA, it is not tied to other client id sessions.
Here an example of the API call
In this example, "1859919454.1455744839" are the X.Y elements parsed from the _ga cookie's client id.
Am I doing something wrong or making some wrong assumptions about google analytics accepting their own Client ID instead of creating and using my own as suggested in their measurement protocol's parameter reference? I have seen plenty of forum threads that suggest google's own client id is acceptable.
I checked your API call and you are missing a measurement protocol parameter in the URL "t" (https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/parameters#t)
which defines what type of hit you are trying to send i.e. event or pageView
Google has created a debug tool to check whether the url generated is valid or not. You can also send hits to your GA using the tool.
https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/hit-builder/
turns out there is an unpublished parameter in the newer UA interface that allows for strict or loose userid. If strictly enforced, the userid MUST be a UUID. If strict is false it will accept google's own user id. Once that parameter is passed everything worked