I own multiple affiliate websites and I am currently working on a piece of software that matches clicks and sales to visitors in GA. This allows me to see my earnings, the number of transactions and best advertisers directly in GA rather than having to sum up the different commissions from various networks.
However, sometimes a sale is rejected by an advertiser, for instance if someone returns (some of) the products sold. In these cases, I need to update the sales in GA. I currently use the normal (not enhanced) GA E-commerce plugin where I can easily submit a transaction or (partial) refund with this payload via the measurement protocol:
{v: 1, t: transaction, tid: something, cid: something, ti: xxx, tr: (-)xx, ta: advertiser}
However, every time I issue a refund, GA increases the transaction count and conversion rate, which skews my data. How can I solve this? I've had a look at the enhanced E-commerce plugin, but it seems partial refunds only work when using products and their respective prices, which is information that I simply do not have for every sale.
Thanks in advance.
You can't. Even though Google supports negative transactions via their documentation this is not a refund, this is just another transaction (which e.g. means if you select your timeframe so that is encompasses only the original or only the negative transaction your data is just as skewed as before, this works only if both transactions are within the timeframe. Also make sure your negative transaction is attributed to the same channel as your original transaction, or channel based reporting will be off).
Even EEC does not reverse transactions, it stores the refund in a separate field.
Since a proper reversal or removal of transactions would require a massive recalculation of data I do not think this will come anytime soon.
Related
I wonder whether someone can help me please.
I have a user who under a specific property, sporadically receives the following error:
Some hits sent on 03-Jul-2018 to property ...... exceeded one or more hit quotas and were therefore not processed.
Hits can be dropped when daily or monthly hit limits are exceeded. You can view your hit volume levels in Property Settings in Analytics.
Hits can also be dropped if visitor hit limits are exceeded. This can happen when your site is incorrectly generating the visitor ID for a GA session. Contact your website administrator to check that the visitor ID generation has been correctly implemented.
They are not using the Premium account but when I look at the data for the day in question, there aren't any issues with regards to 'High Cardinality' which unless I've misunderstood I'd expect to see.
Could someone look at this please and offer some guidance where the issue may be because this area is fairly new to me.
Many thanks and kind regards
Chris
Collection limits are influenced by 2 factors:
The tracker: whether you use ga.js,gtag.js,analytics.js etc... here are the details.
The property type: whether you are using GA (10M hits / month) or GA 360 (2B hits / month).
In your case you are facing a property limit. To find out when such limits where reached, you can create a custom report using a time dimension (eg date+time) combined with the hits metric. You can also combine the hit metrics with other dimensions (country, browser, device) to see if you find any patterns as to why you're getting so many hits.
Cardinality is something else: it refers to the number of unique value combinations for your dimensions. For instance if you have 500K events where each event category is different, you'll have a Cardinality of 500K on the event category dimension. The more hits, the more likely you'll have a high cardinality, but the 2 aren't necessary related (if you send 10B events with the same category, the cardinality on the category is 1).
So focus on identifying and solving your limits/quotas issue, as it's the real issue here:
If the number of hits is legitimate (you have a huge amount of traffic), then the only options are to upgrade to GA 360 or reduce the number of hits for each session
If the number of hits is abnormally high (eg traffic is stable but hits increased dramatically), look for implementation issues, especially generic event trackers such as error tracking with tools like Google Tag Manager
i have a question on e-commerce tracking. As i know in a latter stage that a conversion is successful or not i want to be able to convert a sale as conversion but with 0 value and then when the sale is actually converted to change the value of revenue for this specific sale. Is somebody able to help on that?
Best regards and happy weekend to all.
As far as I can tell this does not really work.
If you do E-Commerce tracking you can send a second transaction using the same transaction id, and at a first glance this will look like it changed to original value; however internally this will still be recorded as two transactions and change some of your metrics (e.g. conversion rates). Also the second transaction will not be connected to the original session and will most likely be attributed to a different marketing channel. Still, this is the closest you will get to change the transaction value (and you won't be able to change goal conversion values at all).
While GA has data imports it does not have a transaction data import, and at least the free version cannot change data that is already collected (data imports only apply to newly incoming data), so this will not help you.
All in all it would be simpler/more reliable to pull the data via the API and connect it to your revenue data in a spreadsheet.
If you refer to http://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/analytics/premium/features.html, you will notice that Standard allows for 10 million hits processed per month and Premium allows for 1 billion.
I have a website on an account, with multiple "folders" for different sub-domains, and also different "Views" or dashboards for some of these sub-domains.
The website I am on recently lost tracking for conversion rates, and everything has plummeted to near 0%, which is an incorrect statistic. I am curious as to how I can figure up if this account is reaching the 10 million limit on the standard version. Or at least how to figure actual hits processed a day, week, or month?
Any ideas?
Thanks!
I don't know how Google enforces hit limits in 2015. However in 2013 a Google representative sent one of our bigger clients a document (answering a question about data limits) that contained the following paragraph:
How do data limits impact sampling? Google Analytics does not sample
your clients data at the point of collection or processing, regardless
of how far they exceed our stated limits. So no hits are discarded.
The only way to sample data at the point of collection is for clients
to use_setSampleRate in their tracking code.
[...]
[...] we reserve the right to shutdown their account [sc. if limits are exceeded], but it won't
happen before we have attempted to contact the account Admins multiple times
and we have exhausted all other options.
Unless Google has changed it's policy in the last 1,5 years I would say not, unprocessed hits are not your problem; it seems Google would have contacted you with an request to limit your hits or upgrade to Analytics Premium before problems occurr.
Plus, since you mentioned that you have several views - views do not count towards your quota (they display the same data in different ways). However properties (I think that is what you mean by "folders") do.
Updated 2017: It seems that Google intends to enforce limits more strictly. One of my clients now has the following warning in his GA interface:
Your data volume (XXX hits) exceeds the limit of 10M hit per month as
outlined in our terms of service. If you continue to exceed the limit
you will lose access to future data.
You can create a database table, like this:
visits(
id bigint primary key auto_increment,
ip text,
visit_date timestamp default current_timestamp
)
Upon each page visit, you can insert a record into the table. Later you can view statistics. For instance, visit count in a given day would look like:
select id, ip, visit_date
from visits
where visit_date >= '2015-07-21 00:00:00' and visit_date < '2015-07-22 00:00:00'
I wish to extract (via the Analytics Core Reporting API) all the transactions made TODAY by users that had a specific ga:eventCategory few weeks ago.
I'm looking to see the date of a transaction and all dated of event that are related to that transaction.
If GA was sql I would join by the ga user and take in the dimension both his transactions date and his dimension update date...
Thanks.
Noam.
Like I have indicated in my comment you can segment the data to include only those users who have the specific event. Segmentation works fine with the core reporting API.
Your segment defintion would look like this:
users::condition::ga:eventCategory==[myEventCategory]
(where obviously the thing in [brackets] is a placeholder that needs to be substituted for the event category name). The "users::" prefix means you are segmenting by user scope (as opposed to sessions), so this will include all sessions in the selected timeframe for users who had the event at least in one of their session (even if the event was outside the selected timeframe).
Select transactionId as dimension and some metric (revenue) and todays date and you are done. Or you would be done if this was actually going to work, but there are at least two caveats:
Google Analytics does not work in realtime, so it's unlikely that TODAYs transactions are fully available (Google says it's 24 hours until the data is processed - actually it might happen faster, but you cannot rely on it).
If a user has deleted his or her cookie she won't be recognized as a recurring user and GA will be unable to segment her out. The longer the interval between the event and the transaction the less likey it is that the GA cookie is still present.
So even with a technically correct query it might be that you won't get the data you need.
I would look for some feedback on tracking user activity on an commerce website using th google analytics commerce capabilities.
I can't fully understand those 3 parts :
Adding an item (ecommerce:addItem) : obviously when some user add a thing to the cart
Adding a Transaction (ecommerce:addTransaction) : that's where I'm very confused
Sending the data (ecommerce:send) : that's obvious
Can those 3 event append at a different moment ? in what manner ?
What would be a real-world use case that would make you use execute ecommerce:addTransaction and ecommerce:send at a different moment ?
This thing makes me wonder a lot, and I'd like to have some experienced feedback on this as you tend to easily break your stats if something is not done week enough
Thanks in advance
EDIT
So the main purpose right here is to get stats for the pending orders (you add stuff to your cart), and the complete orders (you paid for the things you added).
Right now I only send it all when the order is complete, and things are working pretty good in analytics, but I just don't know anything about the ones that did not complete.
This question was a lack of knowledge.
Simple ecommerce plugin has nothing to do with the enhanced ecommerce plugin
You won't track that much with the first one, except the checkouts. A plain, one order at a time, revenue value.
If you want a deep insight on your users behaviors (when i say deep, I mean it), You have to go for the second one.
We might be able to debate over the unusefullness of the first one; and the fact that its existence in itself compared to the second is completely misleading, as when you first get in, as usual with google, you get flooded by an endless documentation
ecommerce:addItem does not add items to a cart; it adds items to a transaction (with "conventional" ecommcerce tracking there is no cart tracking, you'd have to use enhanced ecommerce tracking. Actually your title refers to enhanced ("ec:") and your question to conventional ecommerce ("ecommerce:") tracking).
So ecommerce:addTransaction starts a transaction; here goes the stuff that affects the transaction as a whole, like transaction id, tax on the total purchase or shipping costs.
Now that you have started the transaction you can add items to it that are associated via the transaction id.
Finally the ecommerce:send command tells Universal Analytics that the transaction should be processed on the server. "send" is actuall a misnomer; addItem and addTransaction do already send data to the server (they each create an request to the tracking server and thus count towards your hit quota).
The reason for this is, as far as I can tell, that the information is transmitted via url parameters (you call the Google Analytics endpoint which returns an transparent pixel). The maximum length for an url request is limited (actual limits depend on browser and browser version).
So the transaction is broken up into multiple parts not because you want to execute the commands at different moments but so it can be transmitted via Url parameters without being truncated. The send command merely tells that you are now finished adding new parts to the transaction and the data can now be processed.