Every day I get views of the same two pages in the same minute from the same user (using Chrome 65.0.3325.181 on Windows 10).
Interesting though the pages are, obviously (?), I don't believe these are real, intentional, views, especially as one of them is our main catalogue and there are never any events signalled for this session, which is untypical for that page.
I think all this must be happening automatically, perhaps because tab content is re-activating when the browser is restarting?
Does anyone know how such spurious page views can be filtered out of GA? I only want to count views that someone is actually looking at!
Many thanks
Mandy
Additional information as requested by Michele to whom I am very grateful.
I've prepared a spreadsheet with more info re all this user's visits, it's here: https://www.iperimeter.co.uk/Resources/SpuriousPageViews.xlsx.
Notes:
1) There look to be 2 puzzles here: firstly the user's strange activity, looking at only these pages over and over again, and secondly the lack of signalled GA events when there must have been /some/ for him/her to have got to the point they did (see comments in spreadsheet).
I suppose it is just possible the activity is 'normal', so that the lack of signalled events is the only real mystery.
2) Website is http://www.notamos.co.uk.
3) User has same GA cookie, operating system/version, and browser/version throughout.
4) My GA setup dates from early Dec 2017, so, given that there is no 'original' source for the direct referrals listed, I can only imagine that the user favourited my site pre December.
Have you checked the option 'Exclude all hits from known bots and spider' in the view setting?
Related
Environment: injected Google Analytics tracking in my SharePoint Online site - all good.
Now I have been clicking pages for more than an hour and wanted to check results. I see that tracking is working (see screenshot) - at that moment there was one active user (me) and have >30 page views in a 30min time window.
Problem: reports (user and page view count) seem to be empty, but I assume that there should be at least one user and multiple page view information. Is that correct or I am misusing Google Analytics?
Update:
Pressed "Refresh Report" and Google fetched new data. Unfortunately, nothing changed and data still is empty.
This report was generated on 12/04/2019 at 16:17:25
The time of when the report was generated is not reflective of how "fresh" the data is. For the free version of GA, there is no SLA and it can take upwards of 2 days, but generally under 24 hours. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7084038?hl=en
Seeing the user in realtime doesn't mean the data for the reports are updated. You need to be patient and wait.
If you're seeing data in the real time reports then the standard reports should populate. This can take time though in my experience the latency is usually less than 1 hour. Are you looking at the standard reports in an entirely unfiltered view - might be worth checking to see if any filters are impacting your data though they should effect the real time reports as well.
I would like to create a small sidebar on each page of my website that contains related/popular pages with perhaps the top five pages users visit after reading the current page.
I could track and record user movements across the site myself and build the list that way, but as my site already uses Google Analytics and I know the data is there I'd rather access that if all possible.
The trouble is that I don't have the faintest idea whether it is possible or not.
Remember that the Google Analytics Reporting API is not real-time it can take between 24 - 48 hours for the data to finish processing and be in the API for you to request.
The Realtime Google Analytics api is real time but the data is only about 5 minutes old and its very limited to the dimensions and metrics you can request.
Quota, with either of those APIs you are limited to 10,000 requests per day per profile / view. I have no idea how many pages there are on your site or how may users are on your site but this could quickly blow out this NON extendable quota.
Options: Except that its not realtime data and use the reporting api every night run a request against the api get everything for two days ago then show your users on your site data that's two days old. Store the data in the database then you are showing them data on in your DB and wont have an issue with the quota as you only requested it once.
But this isn't exactly what you want as its not showing a users activity over the site. TBH I am not sure you can exactly use Google Analytics to track a user as the data is user non specific.
If you don't want to get involved with learning the API and develop this from the ground up, check out EmbeddedAnalytics (disclaimer: I created the service). We could provide such a widget.
You may find This Article useful. It provides the necessary query to find the "next page visited" using the page of interest as a filter. Ultimately your query would look like this:
https://www.googleapis.com/analytics/v3/data/ga?ids=ga%3Aabc&start-date=30daysAgo&end-date=yesterday&metrics=ga%3Apageviews&dimensions=ga%3ApreviousPagePath%2Cga%3AnextPagePath&sort=-ga%3Apageviews&filters=ga%3ApreviousPagePath%3D%40pricing
The query above will give you the "Next Page" along with pageviews assuming the "previous" page contains the word "pricing".
We could easily build such report widget for you:
You would insert a javascript source code snippet into your page. The javascript would pass the page url to our server and we would return the next "most popular pages visited".
The pages could be "linkified" so that someone could click the link to go to that page.
We already have caching mechanism in place. So each pageview would not require a new query to google (making it quicker and also staying away from the API quota that was mentioned above). For pages that are hardly ever looked at (e.g. less than once a week), we could make "on-demand" calls to get the statistics.
In my experience with the API, the lag in the API is only a couple hours. It may be longer for larger sites.
Please let me know if you are interested in such widget and I can work with you.
We've been tracking visitors to our site for over a year now, and when comparing last year to this year, site visitation, unique visitors, etc. have all been cut in half (roughly, not exactly half).
There isn't really a marketplace explanation for the decrease, and we're wondering if there are any technical problems we may have had to cause this to happen. We had another developer working on the site last year (who is no longer with us), and we're wondering if maybe the tracking code had been placed improperly. Our current developer looked back at the code during this time period and said that is not the issue.
Any other ideas as to why our analytics might be so off kilter?
Thanks,
Some of the reasons why this could happen are:
Some of the pages were removed.
Some code was removed (you say that this is not the case.)
there was some problem specific to your site (like large number of international users etc)
I am using Google Web Analytics Online Tool to monitor visits on my site.
What bugs me is that often I see that records contain the folloowing entries:
Page Visits: 1.00
Average Visit Duration: 00:00:00
Bounce Rate: 100%
What does that mean?
If the visitor comes to my site it should stay at least couple of seconds until he leaves?
Could that mean that something is wrong with accessing my site (I had similar problems before, but I am convinced I fixed them since I am not getting any errors when I try to access my site from different computers.)
When a visitor comes to your page google analytics sets a cookie where a timestamp is stored. When the user visits a second page in your site Google compares the stored timestamp to the actual time and calculates visits duration from the difference between the two. If all your visitors have bounced there is no second data point to compare the stored value to and google is unable to compute a duration.
A common workaround is to set a javascript timeout and trigger an event after ten seconds or so (with the "interaction" flag in the event set to true, see Google Analytics event tracking docs for details). The assumption is that somebody who looks for more than ten seconds at you page is not actually a bounce (I think that since "bounce rate" has so hugely negative connotations people try to avoid high bounce rates even at the price of introducing bad data; you should realize that "bounce rate" simply means that there are not enough data points to say anything meaningful about those particular visitors).
Personally I do not like that approach because it means to redefine inaction of a visitor as action. A better idea (IMO) is to implement a meaningful interaction point - like a "read more" link that loads content via ajax or something like it - and track that via event tracking or virtual page view.
Event tracking guide:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/eventTrackerGuide
Short Update: With Universal Analytics the technical details have changed (i.e. there are no longer cookies with timestamps, all information is processed on the GA servers). So the first paragraph is no longer up to date, however the rest of the answer is still valid.
I'm having a similar issue, i monitor those placements and recently found out the traffic is hardly getting to my site, recent experiment showed that those are placements triggered via clicks from GDN, but people have not even reached my page, were blocked by pop-up blocker or other similar software
We have some third parties that are sending us traffic and have asked us to put a tracking pixel on the confirmation page so they can track through the sales.
We are currently using Google analytics for our own usage.
Google will remember the original referral through cookies. This may be a good or bad thing. If someone purchases through company B's link but they had originally found our site through company A - then company A still gets the 'referal'. That doesn't seem fair, but it seems to be the way google analytics works:
For example, if this is the user's
first visit to your site, the tracking
code will add the campaign tracking
information to the cookie. If the user
previously found and visited your
site, the tracking code increments the
session counter in the cookie.
Regardless of how many sessions or how
much time has passed, Google Analytics
"remembers" the original referral.
This gives Analytics true
multi-session tracking capability.
Currently we only have one tracking pixel on our 'receipt page' from a company that we're not even doing business with. Having a second company ask me for us to add one makes me thing 'wait a minute - we're going to suddenly be inundated with these things!'. Plus it means someone can look at the source and see all the people we do business with.
This isn't Oprah - you cant ALL have tracking pixels. Right ?
How should we manage sales from multiple traffic sources in the most honest way for both sides - especially if they already have a system set up that they insist on using?
Here's how I solved the problem at our company: we gave our partners a URL that has a parameter in the query string. This parameter triggers a cookie. On the "goal"/confirmation page (where the tracking pixel is usually inserted), we insert some logic to see if the cookie value is correlated with a one of our recognized partners (chained if-else or switch statement). If a match is found, then the tracking pixel is displayed.
Even though you asked this question a while ago, I hope that this still helps you or someone else with the same problem!