After how many clicks will the Core Reporting API start to sample the click data, when using samplingLevel=LARGE?
I'm trying to retrieve data from a large account (i.e. more than 30,000 clicks/day on average) and the number of clicks doesn't always match what I can see on Google Analytics. This, however, seems to happen only on this large account, and not every day. Strangely, on those days where the click count doesn't match, transactions and revenue match what I can see in Google Analytics.
In my query, I'm only trying to retrieve the data for a given account, without applying any filter.
EDIT: If I don't retrieve data aggregated at the account level ― thus not including ga:adwordsCampaignID, ga:adwordsAdGroupID and ga:adwordsCriteriaID in the dimensions ― I can retrieve all the clicks.
EDIT2: If add the ga:deviceCategory dimension, along with ga:adwordsCampaignID, ga:adwordsAdGroupID and ga:adwordsCriteriaID I can retrieve all clicks. I'm not sure if this can help narrow down the issue.
Google Analytics has a cardinality of 50K after that you ll receive (others)
Based on the "EDIT" i can safely assume the reason is that when a click doesn't have an 'ga:adwordsCampaignID' associated with it, it ll not retrieve that click. This happened to me with custom dimensions.
EDIT: Try using the 'include-empty-rows' parameter on your query. https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/core/v3/reference#includeEmptyRows
Related
I have a website where the customer can take a quiz to find the right products. I want to track the customer's journey on the quiz, to see what they choose and where people fall off.
The quiz starts at example.com/start/ and for every step they take, the URL "expand" to e.g. example.com/start/first_step/, next step example.com/start/first_step/second_step etc.
I think I can do it with tag manager, by creating events for each step / URL. But my first issue is, that the events get to long. The other issue is, I cant figure out how to visualize the journey in either Google analytics 4 or Google data studio.
enter image description here
Does any of you have a great idea for how I can do it?
what exactly to you mean saying "the events get to long"? Do you mean the requests payload to the google analytics server?
Generally speaking, I'd recommend the following:
Create a generic event for all quiz steps
Add two parameter for the progress, one containing the steps name an one containing the index (e.g. "quiz_step_str" & "quiz_step_index")
Send the events to GA4
Visualize them using a bar chart. (https://analyticsdemystified.com/google-analytics/step-step-guide-creating-funnels-googles-data-studio/)
Additional information regarding step 2:
The parameter containing the step name can be generated using js and getting the value from the url. Just scrape the corrsponding part from it (e.g. "example.com/start/first_step/" -> "first_step").
For the parameter containing the steps' index, I recommend creating a lookup table.
I've got a strange problem.
I'm trying to pull out data from GA API.
metrics: ga:users
dimensions: ga:date,ga:source,ga:medium,ga:transactionId
After reviewing the data I can see that I have multiple transaction Id's.
Usually 5 to 7 duplicates per month - the same transaction ID is in two dates.
In Google Analytics there are no duplicates.
There are in the exported data + Query Explorer also shows duplicates.
Does anybody know why?
Thanks,
Krzysztof
First of all, do you make sure you use unique transactionIDs for each transaction? I've seen cases where the ERP makes certain transaction or orderIDs available again after an order was cancelled.
If you look at the transactionID in GA (click in on the ID itself to drill down into it) and change to Quantity or look at the product revenue for the graph line, do they occur on two different dates?
This behaviour is often seen if you forget to prevent the transaction pixel again on things like a page refresh. Another example is if they perhaps receive an email with "Click here to view your order/transaction" and it fires again on the receipt page.
This may be a possible duplicate of this question, but according to all the Google Analytics documentation I really should be able to pull my list of custom segments.
Since I have a very large list of them, it would be suboptimal for me to manually copy the segment ids over one at a time.
I'm following this walk through. Steps to reproduce:
Create a custom segment using date of first session in your Google Analytics account.
Authorize the Google Analytics guide to access your Google Analytics account.
Try their on-page query tester, and inspect whether your custom segment is there.
One thing I've already ruled out was the user that created the segment. I've manually created a segment with the same user that I'm querying the API with and it still does not show. Is there a flag I need to set somewhere to include custom segments?
Edit:
It turns out that it will list some custom segments, but not ones created with date of first session, so this is a duplicate of this question, which means that there is a bug in the Google Analytics API.
There was a bug which is now fixed. So it is now possible to list the Date of Session Segments in the Google Analytics Management API by calling the segments.list() method.
So after days of trying to solve this one I've come to the conclusion that it cannot be done as asked.
There is, however, another way to do it. For every segment set up a daily (or weekly, etc) email report to a email as a TSV. In each email body specify the name of the segment so when you're consuming the emails you can know which segment the attached TSV is for. It doesn't look like the daily reports were designed with segments in mind, since non of the metadata included in the TSV mentions which segment it is for.
From there it's trivial. Connect to the email address using an IMAP client once a day and update the numbers.
Note that the daily email only contains the numbers for that day (not a specified range), so you'll need to first generate the report one time with the historical data to load in.
While hacky, one nice thing about this approach is that it keeps your reports in sync with your (faked through email) api code (provided you match the column headings in the TSV). So, if for example, a new filter is included into a report, the new daily fields will continue to update.
Unfortunately though, the past data won't be reflected in the change.
Obviously this isn't great, but if you are monitoring daily cohorts it's the best you've got if you need to stay with Google Analytics. I have raised this as a bug to the Google Analytics developers, but I haven't heard back as to whether or not they plan to fix it.
Our application needs to gather usage data through the Measurement Protocol of Google Analytics.
We can successfully send "appview" hits to the Google Analytics server, and get a proper response by it (a GIF image). The appview hits appear on the GA Dashboard, along with the country of origin, session duration, etc.
We also have several custom dimensions and metrics that we want track for each hit. We have set those up in the GA Admin panel with the correct scope, index and active state. We have 3 Hit-scoped dimensions, 3 User-leveled dimensions and 1 Hit-scoped metric, all set to Active state.
We send the dimensions and metrics as described in the docs at
Custom Dimensions / Metrics
attached to the hits they apply for, like so:
...&cm1*=3 <--for the metric
and
...&cd6*=15 <--for the dimensions (some dimensions have numeric values, others are text)
The problem is that those metrics and dimensions don't show up in our custom reports: the reports always say "There is no data for this view.". For example, we have a report that has one dimension and one metric, without any filters, set to "Any view". It doesn't matter if the Type of the report is Explorer, Flat Table or Map Overlay, it never shows anything.
There have been several days since the hits were received and appeared in the dashboard, but the reports are still empty. So scratch out any processing lag.
We tried sending "event" hits instead of "appview" hits - again, the hits show up in the Dashboard, but the reports are empty.
We cannot get any useful insights without using dimensions and metrics - so there is no way to get by without this.
Because of reasons too long to describe, we cannot use any of the Google-provided Analytics libraries.
Is there anything else we need to do to see data in those reports?
When using the measurement protocol you need to that the profile is not set to exclude bot and spiders.
Go to the google analytics website under the admin and the settings under the profile in question.
Beyond that check the realtime reports you should see the hits coming in. You will need to wait 24 -48 hours for data to appear in the standard reports due to data processing lag.
Suppose I have 65 people that register on January 1, 2012.
I want to find out how many of those 65 people returned to the site that same week. (More generally, if n people signup on date A, I want to be able to find out how many of those n people return in a given date range.)
Is there a way to do this using Google Analytics? If so, how? I am currently getting the user's username for each page hit.
If you only need to track people who sign in then you don't need to get very fancy. You can copy the relevant user attributes, such as sign up date, from your DB to GA using events or session level custom variables.
But if you want to track everyone, including those who don't sign up, then you'll need to use visitor level custom variables (GA cookies).
I explain how to set this up in detail in this post so I'll just highlight the key points here:
First, decide how to layout the data in Google Analytic's custom variables based on your requirements. For example, are you storing retention dates for daily, weekly or monthly tracking? Do you also want to track cohort goals? Partition this data into the available custom variable slots.
Write the cohort data to these custom variables when visitors arrive or achieve goals using Google Analytic's _setCustomVar function. Setting the fourth parameter of that function to 1 indicates you want to do visitor-level (cookie) tracking.
For each cohort you wish to analyze, create an advanced segment in Google Analytics. Using a regex expression in the condition will give you the flexibility to segment for interesting cohorts. ex: "All users whose first visit was the week before Christmas".
Analyze the results with reports by specifying a date range and the corresponding cohort-sliced advanced segments. Another option is to extract the data using the Google Analytics Data Feed Query Explorer or their API.
Once you've put in the work your new visitors will be stamped by their first visit date and nicely fall into each daily or weekly retention bucket. This is what it might look like if you were tracking weekly retention, for example:
This is not a full solution, but here are some points on how I would approach this problem with the help of Google Analytics:
You have to make sure that you somehow store the registration date of each user, either in your database or in a cookie. Then have a look at Google Analytics Event Tracking. You could for example set up a new category based on the registration date. On every page load in your page, you then have to set up this event tracking call, for example like:
_trackEvent("returns", "2012-01-01", "UserId:123123123")
This way you will receive all page views for users that registered on that particular date. To add a date range in this, you have to make sure that these events only get fired for the number of dates after the signup (e.g. 7 days).
After your date range, you will be able to see how many page views and how many users returned - you even know which users came back.