I have already installed Outbound Link tag on Google Tag Manager, but I was wondering if it is possible for Google Tag Manager to read what the visitor writes in their address bar, or if they go to a bookmarked link.
I can't find much infomation on it, and wondering if it is even possible.
Thanks.
This is not possible. (Plus it ll be a total violation to the user privacy)
Related
I started to notice that my Google Ads clicks wasnt 100% counting by google analytics (For exemple, during a certain period I had 300 clicks and only 100 sessions were counted as Paid Search on analytics). So I contacted Google Ads Support, they investigated and came to me with this:
Actually, your site is losing the attribution of Google Ads because of an automatic redirection of the structure in which it was developed.
When we have Google Ads linked with Google Analytics, they are talked through a parameter called GCLID. To verify this loss, follow the path I made (in several products, here is an example):
1- I accessed the link https://mywebsite.com/products/running-shoes?variant=15320930779194
2- After full site loading, I added the & gclid = Tester123 parameter to the URL (in the browser, so the final URL was https://mywebsite.com/products/running-shoes?variant=15320930779194&gclid=Tester123) and hit Enter
3- To understand if there is a redirect, the normal behavior would be for the URL to remain the same (with & gclid = Tester123 at the end), but in this case, the parameter some (and hence the assignment)
So, the campaign actually appeared (not set) in Analytics, and could be assigned to any of the other channels (Direct, Organic, ...) For this to be resolved, the site structure must stop causing this automatic redirection in the final URL of each product. With this, the results will be effectively assigned to Google Ads.
They also said that if even if I want to use manual tracking (UTMs) I would still have that problem, since the redirections would keep spoiling it.
As I use Shopify as my website platform, I checked with them and I have no redirections that are causing this problem, at least not created by me nor that their support know.
So I am lost over all this. I dont know where to start solving this problem. Google doesnt tell me what kind of redirections may cause this, I dont use any kind of redirections, and Shopify cant tell me if their code causes this problem (what I dont believe, because other shopify websites would also been suffering from this).
So can anyone give me any direction about this? What redirections may be causing this lost of data?
Thanks for your time!
One thing to note, Google Ads might have a different way of counting, there is the possibility of multiple clicks per session.
That said, you can try Google Tag Assistant, start your recording, click on one of your ads, follow that through and see the parameters being passed.
Unfortunately, it is hard to debug with limited information. The more details you can provide the better.
Check where your GA code is placed in the page code. If GA script is at the bottom of page or there are some heavy scripts above GA tracker, losses of bounced sessions can be large. I.e. user enters the page and immediately closes it. GA script doesn't have time to download.
Why user closes the page immediately?
Сlick by mistake
Slow site
And check that all your landing pages are OK and have 200 server response.
I give each visitor who signs up to my Google Form an unique url to my landing page for them to share with their friends. The idea is the more they share and their friends visits the site through their given unique url, I'll move them up the waiting list for a product launch.
So for each visitor I gave them example.com/?ref=uniqueCode which is unique to each visitor. Currently I'm using Google App scripts to programatically generate individual url to each visitor who signs up my Google Form.
The goal is if I see traffic coming in from eg: example.com/?ref=a, and I know tag a belongs to John Doe, I'll move John Doe up the waiting list.
Tried googling for a solution but couldn't find any. All solution directs me to creating a particular campaign in Google Analytics with the URL building which really isn't the right solution for this purpose.
How do I set this up with Google Analytics and track the incoming traffic for each unique code of the ref tags of each user?
Going over your question I cannot see why URL builder does not fit your needs.
However, when it comes to immediate and accurate statistics of incoming referrals you may also use a server side script to track incoming visitors.
Also for lots of existing CMS there are plugins to track referrals. If you use a CMS please update your question.
All,
There is a website that doesn't seem legitimate that and keeps showing all of these page views in my google analytics. Is there a way to ban certain URLs from being processed in google analytics?
You can make an IP address not show up by adding it to a filter.
Please look at http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55481, even though it talks about excluding internal addresses, it should work well as a guide how to do it with the "difficult" site too.
Edit: To filter on referrals you need to create a custom filter.
See http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55492 for a guide.
http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=1034830&answer=1034842 talks specifically about excluding referrers.
Note that the filters will only act on future data, the referrals that are already collected will still show up.
I don't want to be counted as visitor every time I test my page in the hosting. Does Google know i'm the owner of the site by checking if i'm logged in my Gmail account?
I don't think Google does anything like this automatically. But they do provide instructions for excluding based on IP address (or range) and apparently also now by cookie. If you use a CMS or admin interface, you could put the code they provide in an HTML file that you then include into the admin interface pages by IFRAME (to ensure that the cookie stays set for anyone who uses that interface).
One option is to install Ghostery addon your browser. Ghostery can block trackers and scripts used on webpages likes google analytics, google adword and other adwares.
You can also block or unblock the trackers for a specific site or specific tracker for a particular site.This add on is available for Firefox and chrome browsers. If you have this installed on your browser, your visit wont be counted as google analytic script wont be executed.
You can learn more about ghostery at: http://www.ghostery.com/about
There are also often application specific ways of blocking google from counting administrators. For example I've used a wordpress analytics plugin that would automatically not include the tracking code if the user was logged in as an administrator. If you are application has the concept as admin then you could write something similar that controls when the code is added.
If you visit your site frequently from connections with a dynamic IP address, eg. home broadband, then excluding IP addresses is not particularly practical. To go beyond IP exclusion, you can create an isolated page on your site that only you know about that includes a call to Analytics to label your cookie.
The Google Analytics _setVar() function lets you label yourself with an arbitrary string, eg. 'internal'. You only need to do this once per browser as long you don't clear your cookies.
Having labelled yourself as 'internal', you can create an Advanced Segment within Google Analytics to exclude visitors with that label.
Google Analytics relay on you embedding a call to their JavaScript see this link - do not confuse it with how Google does page ranking.
So the answer to your question is that your pages should be smart enough to recognize when the request comes from you and skip the call to the JavaScript.
I have a site running Google analytics and I end up being a large fraction of the traffic to it (like 1 of the 2 hits per day). Is there any way I can set it so that my browsing doesn't skew the numbers so much? I'd be happy if it just didn't record anything for accesses that are logged in as my Google account.
Use the Filter Manager in your analytics settings
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55481&cbid=-1j8it19c4uzvt&src=cb&lev=answer
You can use filter to exclude
Traffic from a a domain
IP address
Sub directory
or you can use a custom filter. You can edit your site to set a campaign code if you login in and use the custom filter to exclude that campaign code.
You can also try out the ip filter if you use the same machine.
One option would be to use an ad blocking or javascript disabling extension in your browser to prevent google analytics from being loaded.
A neat solution is to simply stop the tracking javascript from being sent to the browser based on a cookie set on your machine. This can be done by simply adding a few lines of code to your page. Take a look at this article for a full explaination.
If you login there logged in as a site user, maybe you basing on this you just do not put the JavaScript for Google Analytics in the output HTML. This is a typical case when you are an administrator and you do not want to mess the results basing on your activities.
If you are able to touch the code that runs your site I think this is the simplest way to go.
If it is not the case, please provide some more details.