Google Analytic Disparity - google-analytics

From March 28th there is a disparity in Google Analytics when compared to the same day to next day.
For example 16th April night it shows 26,649 but if see it next day its decreased by 2k.
I have few AMP pages too on my site, I hope that's not making this disparity.
(16th night)
(later day)
(Comparison)

What I see is that you're not comparing the same requests: for the 16th you're making a comparison with the 9th (which might trigger sampling and explain why numbers differ) whereas for the later request you're only querying for the 16th.
Make the same April 16 vs 9 comparison again and see at the top of your report if the results are being sampled.

Related

Google Analytics - Wrong count is reported for "users" in specifc Segment compared to actual "Users" count

When I look at the data in Audience Overview and select one of the country segments I’ve set up, for certain time periods I get completely different numbers than those when I’m looking at the segment “All Users” in Geo/Locations.
In below image, "users" from United Stats are reported as 1,773 for period of 2nd May, 2018 to 30th Apr, 2019 (previous period comparison).
But if run country specific report for 2nd May, 2018 to 30th Apr, 2019 - count of users from United Stats are 6,331.
It would be great if you can give any insight into why GA providing diffrence counts.
Thanks,
Chintak.
If a segment contains visitor data, date range is automatically limited to 93 days from your start date. However, your time interval is much higher so the problem I would say is in the configuration of your segment.
See the screenshot below:

Compare Google Analytics date ranges

I am working on a redesign and we would like to validate this by comparing the old design's data to the new design's data. The new design will be used from april 2018. From that moment will we start collecting data through Google Analytics to see if we improved.
What I find difficult is to which date range should I compare this data. Should I compare it to April 2017 (one year ago) or March 2018 (one month ago) or something else?
I think this is a bit easy to answer as you can compare your data with last month March 2018, Also you can wait till 3 months and set the comparison with last 3 months to see any improvement. No need to compare with April 2017 as there might be so many up and down between year.

Using enhanced e-commerce (GA) how long does it take Google Analytics to aggregate data?

Before Tuesday, March 14th, we saw the data lag in Google Analytics at approximately 1-2 hours. (It was never immediate.) You can see this effect on the Conversions > Ecommerce > Overview page if you search by date and select "today" to "today" (1 day's worth of data)
As of Tuesday, March 14th, we started seeing the lag for this overview report anywhere from 8-12 hours, with an inconsistent aggregation time. For example, it is now 4 PM here on the east coast (EDT), and here is a screenshot of our GA overview tab (I have obscured the revenue number for our privacy). As you can see, there are no numbers after 6:00 AM.
We saw this same effect yesterday (about 8-10 hour lag), and the following day the overview report seemed to fix itself (catch up with all of the aggregated data).
Now, what's more interesting, is that if we either A) Add a "Secondary Dimension" or B) use a "Custom Report", we can see all our data near real-time. For example, if I switch into the Ecommerce > Sales Performance report, then add a Secondary Dimension of "Hour of Day", I can see all my data through 2 PM today (about a 2 hour lag as it is now 4:22 pm as I am writing this)
[
Note that to replicate this I sorted the "Hour by day" column by descending order (showing most recent first.)
Our questions are:
(1) Does anyone know why searching by Secondary Dimension or Custom Report shows us the data in more real-time than just looking at the overview report?
(2) Can anyone else confirm that what used to be a 2-3 hour delay now appears as if it is a 8-12 hour delay, starting on or around March 14th (possibly a few days earlier, this is the first day we can remember seeing this effect)
We are using Universal Analytics (with Enhanced E-commerce) implemented via the newer analytics.js. We are NOT using the older ga.js (we moved away from that about a year ago.)
We are not a GA 360 customer, just a regular free account.
From Google Analytics Help Center article.
Processing latency is 24-48 hours. Standard accounts that send more than 200,000 sessions per day to Analytics will result in the reports being refreshed only once a day. This can delay updates to reports and metrics for up to two days. To restore intra-day processing, reduce the number of sessions your account sends to < 200,000 per day. For Analytics 360 accounts, this limit is extended to 2 billion hits per month.
What it means is that for Standard accounts up to 48h delay is normal, if you have more data it can take more if you have less data it can be faster.
Regarding your observation that certain reports load faster than others this is linked to the design of Google Analytics Backends. Google will generate pre-aggregated tables with common reports to speed up consult and that sometimes can takes longer to process. Other non-common reports can't be answered by aggregated reports so it can be responded by a different backend that already has fresher data. So it is considered normal to see different levels of freshness in different reports.
Google Analytics 360 has fresher data of course.
This other table from the HC article highlights some of the differences and has more info.

Google Analytics showing less monthly visitors than yesterday

I typically use GA by selecting the first day of the month then selecting the current day and viewing my results for the current month. At this point I have no special filters or anything, just the vanilla setup. I check GA daily and have noticed on occasion that GA will occasionally show me lower monthly visits than the previous day checked. It's as if GA is revising it's data first showing me X monthly visitors only to change those numbers to X-Y the next day.
Yesterday I got a decent spike in traffic and was happily watching new visits/page counts come in from a specific domain that linked to my site. I also have regular users that access my site directly. I wake up this morning and all the traffic from yesterday is gone. I am seeing data come in for today, but yesterday shows 0 visitors and 0 page views. Any idea what is happening?
[SFMPE] In the last two days I also noticed similar changes. On Wednesday I saw 1600 visitors in GA for Tuesday, but on Thursday only 600 for Tuesday. On Thursday I saw 1600 visitors for Wednesday, today (Firday) only 600. Today (Friday) I see 1600 visitors for yesterday. I guess tomorrow it will change to 600 again. Meanwhile Awstats shows increase in traffic: 1200 on Tuesday, 2400 on Wednesday, 4000 on Thursday. I also noticed some sort of robot activity (spammy meaningless comments-flow with links) so I think it's up to that, and GA just made some second cleaning.
Not sure.

Using the Google Analytics Export API to get a websites trend

i am working on an application that uses the Google Analytics Export API and i am trying to get the "Trend" result that Google shows against each of your site accounts as a percentage
ie UP 35.04% or DOWN 16.02%
How/where do they get this figure and is it available in the API somewhere.
i have tried comparing averages of last month to this month/first week of the period vs last week of the period etc, but i cannot seem to get the same numbers that Google provides.
any ideas?
thanks in advance
Doug
The formula is pretty simple (excluding today's data):
(Visits over the last 30 days - Visits
between 31 and 60 days ago) / (Visits
between 31 and and 60 days ago).
You can see it in action in the interface if you go to the default dashboard, where it shows you the last 30 days, then on the calendar, click "Compare to past" and select the default amount. It'll show you the numbers used for each calculation and the calculations as they appears in that account list.
The API does not, however, expose pre-calculated numbers (for example, they don't compute bounce rate for you; they just give you the pieces for it.)
So, you'd need to do two API requests to get this data. One for ga:visits in the last 30 days, and then one for ga:visits in the 30 days prior.
Then, when you get it, just subtract, divide, and multiply by 100, and you'll have the percent you're looking for.
UPDATE: The striked out part of the answer was true, but is no longer. The newest version of the Google Analytics API does provide access to some pre-calculated values.

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