I added a custom parameter to my transactions. I am receiving data as when I go to Reports> Realtime>View user snapshot and click on an event I can see the parameter name and a value which is good. I can also see the value when I go to Reports>Engagement>Events and chose and event and select my parameter in the 'Events in last 30 minutes tab'. The issue comes when I go to Explore and make a Free Form with my parameter as a row or column as the column would simply show '(not set)' even though I know it is set from the before views that I mentioned
Thank you
You will see a value of “not set” for a custom dimension during the first 48 hours after you create the custom dimension.
We track search terms (e.g. michael kors handbags) entered on our site as an event (i.e. captured in eventLabel). We have a custom dimension that parse the list of product ids returned on a search page.
Example:
'michael kors handbag' returned 5 products on search page. Custom Dimension 1 parses a list of product ids: '12345, 23456, 34567, 45678, 56789'. On an event report, when I use this custom dimension 1 as a secondary dimension, no data is returned. I am seeing the two tags fired (i.e. one as an event hit and the other as a pageview hit) - I am not able to figure out why the custom dimension 1 cannot be used as a secondary dimension.
Any insight is helpful.
Thank you.
The dimension needs to be scoped at Session level, so it's available for all the hits within a session.
Probably the dimension is set at hit level, so the information doesn't persist, when you try to relate it to the event, GA cannot do it.
I've just started using google analytics, and except of a quick beginners tutorial I don't know very much :-).
I have a website with few steps in the sign-up page. In the first step the user verifies his phone number. I want to have a list of all the users phones that completed the verification step but didn't finish the registration. In order to do this I send the following events in each step:
{eventAction: 'registration phase1', 'eventLabel': userPhoneNumber}.
{eventAction: 'registration phase2', 'eventLabel': userPhoneNumber}.
{eventAction: 'registration phase3', 'eventLabel': userPhoneNumber}.
I want to create a report that shows me all the phone numbers of the users who fired the first event but didn't fire the third event. I tried to achieve this by using event advanced filters with include and exclude condition but it seems that data being shown is not correct. I also tried to do this using the Query Explorer but I couldn't find out how to do this.
You can do this by first using the Google Analytics web UI to create a segment. You can learn more about segments here.
You'd want to use "include" and "exclude" sessions or users depending on your need. The setup will look something like this, adjust the events action/category/label as you wish to match the events you want.
Save your segment and head over to the Query Explorer.
Select the appropriate property and view which you created the segment. Under the "segment" field type in the name of the segment you just created like so:
Fill in the rest of the form with the dates, dimensions/metrics that you want and you should get results according to that segment. No additional filtering needed.
Lets say for instance I have a web game on a page and the code is set so that every time the player completes a level it pushes the current level to the dataLayer:
dataLayer.push({'level': currentLevelNumber});
Does this then mean I will be able to create segment in GA to see how many people made it to each level? i.e. segment1(level = 1), segment2(level = 2) etc..
Also, what are limits of this? GA has a 500 event limit per session. Is pushing a variable part of this limit or does it have its own limit?
I tried to find this information in documentation but couldn't see it.
Essentially, you're trying to report on the levels that your users are on for a particular game.
To do this, you will need to create a user-scoped custom dimension within GA.
Then you would want to push to the datalayer whenever the user moves to another level something like:
dataLayer.push({
'level': currentLevelNumber,
'event': 'user-lvl-update',
});
Then in GTM, create datalayer variable to capture "level" and create a custom event trigger for the "user-lvl-update" event.
Then in GTM, create a GA tag for the event "Level Update" and configure it normally, but this time, check the "Enable overriding settings" checkbox, under "More settings > Custom Dimensions" click on "Add custom dimension", enter in the index number of the custom dimension you created earlier and for dimension value, put in the variable where you captured level. Trigger this tag using the "user-lvl-update" trigger.
There is a limit of 500 hits per session. A hit is a pageview, event, etc. whenever you're sending data to GA. Pushing to the datalayer doesn't count towards that
I am trying to use google universal analytics and its custom dimensions.
On one page, I want to send multiple values for one (and one only) dimension.
I tried:
ga('send', 'pageview', {'dimension1': 'grumpy cat'})
ga('send', 'pageview', {'dimension1': 'happy cat'})
When I use google API, I can get for my dimension1 all the values I just sent - so it works well.
However I think (I am not sure about it) that I should not send several times a pageview hit on the same page because it would disrupt the pageview metric.
So I tried to use a custom metric (pageview is a metric after all):
ga('send', 'metric1', {'dimension1': 'grumpy cat'})
ga('send', 'metric1', {'dimension1': 'happy cat'})
But this one doesn't work at all :(
It seems ga.('send'... only accepts pageview but it is weird (why specify pageview in the arguments if it is the only value possible?)
How can I solve my problem? Is it just a syntax issue, is it not possible with custom dimension / custom metric? Can I actually use pageview to do it? Should I use custom events instead of that?
Thank you!
* edit *
I actually found out that I may use an event with a label like:
ga('send', 'event', 'cat', 'view', 'grumpy')
ga('send', 'event', 'cat', 'view', 'happy')
(If anyone can confirm it or have comments I would be happy with that)
I had a similar problem a while back. The thing is, you cannot push multiple values to a single custom variable (dimension or metric) in both Google Analytics (GA) and Universal Analytics (UA). What happens when you push more than one value to a custom variable, dimension, or metric for a single page (or session or user, depending upon the scope of the custom variable, dimension or metric, if you're using UA) is that the last reported value is the only one that is recorded. The last value overrides the previously set value. So, you have tried to record two pageviews with 2 different values for your custom variable (or dimension).
In your case, say a person loads a search results page after having included two categories, grumpy cat and happy cat, and you want to record both of them in a custom variable or dimension by reporting the variable (or dimension) twice, and if you send them in the order you mentioned,
ga('send', 'pageview', {'dimension1': 'grumpy cat'});
ga('send', 'pageview', {'dimension1': 'happy cat'});
you are simply recording two different pageviews (which will skew your reports in innumerable ways, depending on the number or categories you may have). For example, if a person visits more than 5 categories, you will have duplicate pageviews, and your time on page will be drastically reduced, as according to UA (or GA) these pageviews (except for the last one) would have lasted for less than one second.
Also, any events you wanted to link to those custom variables (or dimensions), would only be linked to the last pushed pageview or custom variable (or dimension). As an example, if you had an event tracking set up to identify how many people interacted with the search results, and if you then wanted to filter by category (dimension1 in your case now), to know how many people interacted with the page when dimension1 equals grumpy cat you would get 0, as the events would have only been recorded for the pageview with ddimension1 equal to happy cat because that was the page which GA (or UA) thinks the user had been viewing when firing the event, and that page only had dimension1 set to happy cat. Since those two calls are async, you would actually never be able to know if the events were sent to the pageview you think it went to, even as I explained.
The better way to record this type of data would be to use url-encoded category names, space separated, and a space appended to the end of the list also. As an example, you must send the pageview as,
ga('send','pageview',{'dimension1':'grumpy-cat happy-cat '});
or better, as,
ga('set',{'dimension1':'grumpy-cat happy-cat '});
ga('send','pageview');
Note the space at the end also. This extra space allows you to filter any report based on the custom variable using the reg-ex <categoryName>\s. As an example, to find out how many people viewed a page with category Grumpy Cat, you will filter your report such that the dimension1 matches regex grumpy\-cat\s. I have escaped the - character in regex using \-, and \s stands for a whitespace character. The good thing is, such a report will fetch you all pageviews (or whatever you want to look at), those with only the grumpy cat as category name, as well as those pages which have grumpy cat in the categories to which a page belongs.
A way to add subcategories is to send dimensions as cat1 cat1-subcat1 cat1-subcat2 cat2 cat2-subcat1 so that the regex cat1\s will take care of all category level pages, whereas the regex cat1 will take care of all pages which have category cat1 or which have a subcategory belonging to cat1.
Hope that helps. :)
On a side note, using events for views of a page containing a category is not a nice way of recording it. Because, if you assign dimensions (and this is one of the reasons why custom dimensions were introduced, as different sites have different categories and Google can't name all), your events will also carry the dimensions of the page and it helps a lot to identify which categories are in need of what, by simply segmenting your reports by, in your case, dimension1. For example, you will get to know which category has highest SEO visits and which has the best conversion rates, and stuff. Happy analysing! :)
As it's already stated previously, you can not push multiple values at once. However, this is just an indication the approach to collect events data is not right, that is this is not a page view event anymore. My case was different, but the solution breaks down as follows:
You have multiple values to push into UA at once, say cat's features such as white, grumpy, hungry
Now, you actually realise that this is not a page view event, but rather yet another dimension - cat views/conditions/features - name it whatever you like;
You create a custom event in your GTM, called 'cat-condition';
You create a new tag in GTM collecting cats condition;
You create that custom dimension in GA and GTM, and every time you have to record cats condition you do something similar to the following (extremely simplified code sample)
['white', 'grumpy', 'hungry'].forEach(condition =>
dataLayer.push({event: 'cat-condition', condition})
)
Code snippet assumes you have GTM container configure on the page to enable dataLayer.
Finally, create a custom report in GA to deal with cat conditions. Surely, you can push more details with every single cat's condition to be able to relate it with the page details etc, but this way you have quite a flexible solution with the data being normalised right from the beginning.