What is new "Reset on new activity" option about on Google Analytics? - google-analytics

Google analitycs announced today their new policy about data retention
Google Analytics Data Retention
Along with the option for choosing how long data will be stored (I chose do not delete data, obviously), there is an option "Reset on new activity".
I cannot find info about what is this option about. What they mean by 'activity'? If I don't switch it off, the option could be reset and data deleted?

It means that the counter for data retention is reset when the user visits the page again.
Image your retention period is set to 15 months.
User visits once = after 15 months the data is purged.
User visits. One month later the user visits a second time = second visit resets the counter, effectively user data is retained for 16 months in total.

Related

Google Analytics -

I created a new custom dimension on November 9th called Purchase Prediction Score. I previously had another custom dimension called Cookie Id.
So the goal of the Purchase Prediction Score is to score every returning user and each user will get a score hot, warm or cold. The Cookie Id is a string with this format: 937464.746545
I created a custom report and I found out that I have Purchase Prediction Score data even before to have created that custom dimension on the 9th. The first time I pushed Purchase Prediction Score data was on the 9th. What can be the explanation?
If you click on the shield in top of the report (over "All users" segment, not visible in your screenshot) a message will appear saying that:
The table rows have been filtered to include only the data for
"Purchase Prediction Score", while the chart and table headers
include totals for all data.
So this is the reason.

GA - Creating a report of pages visited by the hour of the day?

I would like to create a custom report that will have a table like so:
page name visit time
page1 15:30:15
page2 15:31:12
page1 15:30:45
and so on.
Is it possible to create such a report in Google Analytics?
The highest level of precision available by default is the minute available with the ga:dateHourMinute dimension:
https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/dimensions-metrics-explorer/?#ga:dateHourMinute
If you need more precision than minutes, you have to implement a custom dimension (eg to record seconds or milliseconds).
Here is an example for implementing such hit timestamp with millisecond precision using GTM:
https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/13-useful-custom-dimensions-for-google-analytics/#11-hit-timestamp
You need to pass a custom dimension (called in this case 'visit time') at hit level that contains the timestamp of the hit when it is sent to Analytics.

Is google analytics new user affected by lookback window?

I recently found out that visitNumber in big query google analytics export starts over at 1 if a user has not visited the site in 183 days or more. I am now trying to understand if the same lookback window is applied when google analytics defines new users?
The result of SUM(totals.newVisits) in bigquery is exactly the same as the new user count reported in Google Analytics Audience report for a day in my exported data that has users marked as new visitors eventhough they have visited our site earlier. I therefore conclude that google analytics also uses the same lookback window.
I found that in order to count new users depending on their actual first visit (cookie creation date) it's possible to use the last part of the client id. As an example, this query finds the number of new users for 20181025:
#StandardSQL
SELECT SUM(CASE WHEN cookie_date = '2018-10-25' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS new_visitors,
count(*) AS all_visitors
FROM (SELECT clientId,
DATE(TIMESTAMP_ADD("1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC", INTERVAL min(CAST(REGEXP_EXTRACT(clientId, r'[0-9]*$') AS INT64)) SECOND), "Europe/Berlin") as
cookie_date
FROM `xxx.ga_sessions_20181025`
GROUP BY clientId)

Date of first session segment using Analytics V4

Does anyone know how to build a dynamic segment, using Google Core Reporting API V4, that gets only users that had a given event action, and for which the first session was recorded on DD/MM/YYY.
Ex: looking for all users who "installed" (first session) the (mobile) app on Dec 14, and have generate at least one event "clicked xxxx".
No way to find this in docs.
On google analytics dashboard, this can be achieved by creating a segment with a "Date of first session" value.
Thanks a lot,
You cant do this with a segment but i'll give you another option:
You can take advantage of the 'ga:sessionCount' parameter. Just make a query for all sessions en X day and another one of all N events in Y day. Finally, cross the data of X and Y day and you will end up with every user that had his first session on X day and made N events on Y day.
(Use ClientID as KEY when crossing the data)

Working with event stat in google analytics api

I have the website where merchants sell some stuff. Each item has stats like unique views during last 24 hours, a week and a month and a number of visitors that clicked on "show contacts" button. Uniqueness based on IP. This works, there're huge tables that collects all (IP,item_id) pairs during the last month, and there're a lot of updates.
Today I dig into google analytics api, I would like to know if it's possible to use it instead of my system.
The fact is all this stat is private, available only for merchant, so I don't need to have all stat at a time (it's not compared etc.). So it might be requested on demand for the specific item.
I created service account, connected it to analytics data and it seems export works (based on this example). Then enabled event tracking for "show contacts" button.
For example, when user click on "show contacts" where should I add item_id? Is it eventLabel or eventValue? So, for item_id=1234 it should be
ga("send","event","Contacts","show","",1234) or ga("send","event","Contacts","show",1234)?
I'm confused with eventValue column in Top Events report (it seems that eventValue keeps a sum of all eventValues and even caculates Avg.Value). Does it mean item_id should be stored in eventLabel as string?
I added second, nonInteraction event for collecting item views, ga("send","event","Data","show","1234",1,{nonInteraction:true}). It count all events, but I need only unique ones (performed by unique visitors) in specified period of time (day, week, month). Is it possible?
1) The parameters are category, action, label and value. "Value" is a metric and is expected to be an integer. Since it's a metric it will be added up. So if you do
ga("send","event","Contacts","show","",1234)
you will increment a metric by 1234, not store an id. You do not want this (especially if you have a linked adwords account, since this will be used to calculate your "return on advertising spent").
You want to use your item_id as label, however label is a string. So what you need to do is:
ga("send","event","Contacts","show","1234")
i.e. wrap the value for your label in quotes.
2) Is there anything wrong with ga:uniqueEvents for your purposes ?

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