I want to aggregate page views in Google Analytics based on a sub string of the URL, but can't see a way. Details as follows
We have a bulletin that is published from our site every 14 days. The URL for each bulletin page finishes finishes with "/[bulletin_id]". As a simplified example, say there were three pages in bulletin 9 and four pages in bulletin 10, then the URLs might look like this:
/abc/9
/def/9
/ghi/9
/jkl/10
/mno/10
/pqr/10
/stu/10
We would like to see the data agregated like so:
Bulletin 9: 927 Pageviews
Bulletin 10: 1202 Pageviews
Any suggestions?
Thanks
Cheers
Brett Sh
There is no built-in facility to aggregate Pageviews via the interface (you can get at the numbers with some regex trickery, but this won't give you a nice report) and as a reporting question this would be off-topic anyway.
If you are happy with a solution that requires a bit of code (and works only for future data) you could create and send a hit scoped custom dimension that holds the bulletin name. (The mechanics of creating custom dimensions are explained rather well in documentation).
Hit scoped means it is send along with your pageview call (because you want the dimension to be attached to the pageview). As a value you pass the bulletin id (must be unique to the bulletin).
Then on all the different urls for bulletin 9 you send along the identifier for the bulletin as custom dimension (same for bulletin 10,11,n) and then create a custom report that shows the custom dimension as primary dimensions and the number of pageviews/hits as metric.
If you want to work with existing data you'd have to use an external tool (e.g. a Google Spreadsheet with some Apps script)
Related
I have a website that I built and am getting sales everyday now via "affiliate window" I was curious if it was possible to track the commission in analytics so I am able to see what pages are performing the best?
Thanks
You should look into purpose-built affiliate trackers. Voluum, Thrive, Adsbridge etc. CharlesNgo.com has a lot of info about these.
You can also use these trackers to dynamically insert user data into your landing pages, and they are a lot easier than GA to use. Example: https://charlesngo.com/how-to-insert-user-data-into-landing-pages-using-voluum-tokens/
After a clarifying comment: Yes, you can do this, although with some caveats (one of them that it might not be worth the effort unless you make a lot from your affiliate pages).
You can do data imports, and more specifically you can add data to urls (there are different kinds of data import and "content data" is one of them).
You need a dataset that contains a "key" field that is used to match external data to GA data and one or more fields with values you want to import.
Imported data is always dimensions, i.e. categorical data (that is per Documentation The interface allow to to select custom metrics, but I have not yet tried this and cannot give any guidance on how that would work). So if you try to import revenue you have the problem that new entries will not be added to existing entries, they will replace them
What I would probably do is to sort the data from the "affiliate window" into three categories (low, medium, high), and then prepare a csv file with the urls as first column and the categories as second column.
Then create a custom dimension with a name of i.e. "performance" (else you'd have to overwrite an existing dimension in GA and you probably not want that).
Both custom dimensions and data imports are created on a property level (however you can apply an import to a specific view and I would urge you to test this on a test view first). So in the property settings go to data import, new, content data. Key will be "page", Imported data will be the custom dimension you just created. Check "overwrite hit data" (else the data will not change after the first import, however note that this might make comparisons between different timeframes difficult).
Download the "schema" file (simply a template for your csv upload file in which you insert your data). Click finish.
Next go to data imports, "manage uploads" and upload the file. Processing will take a day or so (errors, if any, you will see shortly after the upload).
Then go to your content reports, select your custom dimension as secondary dimension and you will if the url in question was a low, medium or high performer.
You can automate this via the GA API, bit that's a bit beyond an SO answer.
---- (old answer)---
This is actually what campaign parameters are for. Your affiliate links should be tagged with campaign parameters, e.g.
http://example.com/?utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=[[Affliate
Name]]&utm_campaign=[[Campaign Name]]
The things in the angled brackets are placeholders, you would replace those with the name of your affiliate and the name of your campaign.
Now you can look into the aquisition reports and group by source (values for all affiliate links), by source (breakdown by affiliate name) or campaigns, or combinations thereof.
However tracking the commission you pay out via Google Analytics is probably not a good idea, at least from the point of view of your affiliates - JavaScript based tracking is not necessarily accurate enough to track billable services (some people have js disabled or opted out of GA or use adblockers that block tracking etc).
Yes it's possible. You can use sub-id's and fill them with unique visitor data (Google Analytics Used ID). Once an affiliate sale is tracked in an affiliate network, you'll get the sub-id that generated the sale. You can now push that sale to google analytics and let google analytics match the visitor data with their data, showing you the full visitor reports (including landingpage info etc.). You need developer skills to get this working with your affiliate networks but there are complete easy to use tools that does the trick for you such as Ivanhoe.io and Coincrack.
I want to create a Google Analytics segment for our users who view at least a certain number of pages on our site. From what I can tell (please correct me if I'm wrong) this is easy to do if you don't care about what kind of page they view: you create a filter for the segment that checks to see if Unique Pageviews is greater than some value such as 4. However our site has a whole bunch of pages that I don't really care if someone reads (our "about page" for example). So what I'm trying to do is create a segment of how many people view at least X pages of what we call "Learning Content" (basically two specific page types on our site). How can I segment the users who read a certain amount of learning content?
Two types of pages fit into our definition of learning content. The first one has a URL matching a regex that sort of looks like /learning_content_1/.* and the second matches regex /learning_content_2/.*. I've already created a content group for learning content that correctly identifies these two content groups. However I wasn't able to find any way to filter a segment based on how many unique pageviews (or even just pageviews) come from a specific content grouping. Is this even possible? If not, how might I work around that?
The research I've done so far: Google Analytics: How to segment by many groups of pages was somewhat helpful but didn't address the question of how to create an actual GA segment based on pageview information for a content grouping or content group.
The only way I can think of handling this, is by associating a specific custom event that gets triggered on this page. Then you can create a segment that matches users who have that event category:
and total events greater than 4:
It's a workaround, and it doesn't work if you are tracking other events, but maybe that works for you?
There are a lot of very good articles and answers out there that explain (in detail) why we get spam referrals messing up Analytics data. Example results: how to automatically stop spam traffic in google analytics
What I want is a definitive solution...
If you only manage one analytics account, it would not be unreasonable to manually filter suspect domains, but even this is not sustainable. If you, like me, manage over 30 accounts and counting, it gets ridiculous. What is the long term solution?
Analytics data is important for making business decisions.
Is there some service that, like antivirus software, keeps updating its 'definitions' and constantly filters spam traffic?
How can we fight back?
And how can/is it already automated in a one-click solution?
You can try these 2 options to decrease referral spam:
Option 1 - Filter bots
Mark "Bot Filtering" option on on your Google Analytics View Settings. You will need to do it to all of your views
And also create a filter to exclude referral sources. To do this, create a new filter with options:
Filter Type: Custom
Exclude
Filter Field: Campaign Source
Filter Pattern: youporn-forum.uni.me|free-share-buttons.com|Get-Free-Traffic-Now.com|event-tracking.com|darodar.com
--> Also add other spam sources that you have
You can reuse the filter to multiple views.
And its also recommended to not apply these filters in your main view. Instead, create a copy of main view and use it to analyse your data.
Its not a permanent solution (you will need to add new spam sources from time to time).
Option 2 - Segment real users
You can also create a segment to filter only users that visited at least one page (it will filter spams):
Create a new segment
Advanced > Conditions
Filter | Sessions | Include
Screen Views | per session | > | 0
Then, when you are analyzing your data, use this segment to see only real users.
Not all spammers are blocked by Google Analytics (only up to 75% of bots can be blocked by google analytics). By adopting the following steps you can automate removing referrer spam:
Go to Acquisition>all traffic >refferals and a new window will be opened which shows sources from where your website get traffic
In this step select all website who have 0 or 100 % bounce rate and copy it and make a regular expression .the method for making expression is given below
Use "\." (escaped dot) between every part of the domain and use "|" (pipe) symbol to separate every link. E.g. consider your blog hits by two spammy URLs "ads123.abc59055xxb896.comtom" and "dd54.xy789z.usjpa" then we made following resultant expression:
"ads123\.abc59055xxb896\.comtom|dd54\.xy789z\.usjpa"
if you have any trouble in making regular expression then click here to see the complete process
Select the add filter option in admin tab and select include and paste the whole expression in the expression field and click on save
Say I have two pages on a site called “Page 1” and “Page 10”. I'd like to be able to see the paths visitors take to get from “Page 1” to “Page 10” with full URLs intact. Many of the URLs (including those for “Page 1” and “Page 10”) will include query strings that are important.
Is this possible? If so, how?
Try using behavior flow reports. The report basically shows you how visitors click through your website. There are a lot of ways to customize the report, with which you will need to play around to really answer your question. By default, the behavior flow focuses on entry and exit points of visitors, regardless how many times they hit the different subpages in between. However, I'm sure you can set appropriate filters and settings to answer your question.
I use two methods for tracking where people have been on my website:
Track and store the information in my own SQL database. (details below)
Lead Forensics (paid subscription, but you can do a trial).
For tracking and storing my own data, I record unique visitors based upon the IP Address they're connecting from and then have a separate table that records all page views that links back to the unique visitor table.
Lead Forensics data simply allows me to link up those unique visitors with actual companies that have viewed my website.
Doing it yourself means you don't have to rely on Google working for your records to work, and in my experience Google Analytics tends to round numbers so you don't get a true indication of numbers, and also you can remove bots and website trawlers from your data by tracking the user agent string.
As a somewhat ugly hack you could use transaction tracking. If you use the same transaction id multiple times subsequent products will be added to the existing data. So assign an ID at the start of the visits and on each page record a transaction with the current page url as product name (and the ID as transaction id). This will give you the complete path per user (I am frankly not to sure how this is useful - at some point you probably want aggregated data. Plus each transaction and product counts towards your quota for interaction counts, so on a large site you might run over the 10mio hits limit).
you can do it programatically
have a MAP in the backend which stores the userId (assuming u would have given a unique ID at the time of login to each user) with a list of Strings(each string being URL visited by that user)
whenever the user hits another URL from Page 1(and only from page1, check it using JS), send a POST request to backend with the new URL in its data section.
In the backend, check if the URL is of Page 10 and if not, add this URL as a string into the MAP for that corresponding user
Finally, when the user clicks on the Page 10 URL, you know the URLs in the way from Page 1 to Page 10 and so use them.
Though if I consider JS and I have not misunderstood your question, we can get the previous URL from request header information using document.referrer.
Are you trying to do it from 'Google Tag Manager'? I am not sure whether you are trying to trace the URLS in clientside or server side?
I have a (Symfony based) website. I would LIKE to analyize the site traffic using Google Analytics. My site is divided into several (i.e. N) categories, each of which may have 0 to M sub categories.
Schematically, the taxonomy of the site breaks down into something like this:
N major categories
Each major category may have 0 to M sub categories
further nesting is possible, but I have just kept it simple for the purpose of illustration.
I need to know which sections of the website are genererating more traffic, so that I can concentrate my efforts on those sections. My question is:
Is there anyway to identify the data that is being generated from the different sections of my site?.
Put another way, is there a code or 'tag' that I can generate dynamically (in each page that is being monitored) and pass to GA, so that I can identify which section of the website the traffic came from?
The documentation I found on google about this topic was not very useful (atleast it did not answer this question).
You can pass a uri to _trackPageview that would permit you to log the request in whatever format you'd like, including however your user's requesting the page.
Remove/replace the original call to pageTracker._trackPageview with the following:
pageTracker._trackPageview('/topcategory/subcategory');
You'd just need to plug in the topcategory and subcategory info. If the info is available in the URL you could parse it out using js on the fly.