I've been looking into offline tracking of google analytics goals. I want to implement this in a similar way to how call tracking companies do and I'm guessing the GCLID is the answer.
If I store the GCLID of every visitor that comes to our website in the database alongside some info about their session and then identify their session at a later date as one that produced an offline goal, can I then generate a goal from that?
My thinking is that if I had a button in our CRM system that when I click it opens up an invisible iframe that links to mysite.com/goalurl.html?gclid=xxx then analytics on that page would track a goal on that page but attribute it to the original click that the other user made on our PPC advert. Theoretically I could do this 10 times in a row for 10 different sessions and they would all be tracked as if the 10 original owners of those GCLIDs has visited the goal page, right?
Am i missing something here? Would this not work because Google would spot that they all came from the same IP address, or because I would have the same GA cookie on my machine? Or does Gogole not care about any of that?
Any help would really be appreciated.
I am not sure if it works with the gclid but would also be interested in the answer.
Besides that, a possible solution is to store the Analytics client ID in your own database and, whenever there is a conversion, sending that conversion data (referencing the recorded client ID) directly from your server to Analytics by using the Measurement Protocol.
Exactly this topic is a case study in the book "Google Analytics Breakthrough: From Zero to Business Impact".
Related
We are implementing a native analytics system and want to apply the same tracking principles Google Analytics uses. We've figured everything out but one thing:
Every time I refresh a page with an url that has utm-parameters attached to it, Google Analytics somehow figures out that it's not actually a visit but the same page that gets refreshed and shows only one visit in its dashboard from that particular source.
Is anybody aware how GA specifically does that so I can replicate it in our system?
I know that I can use
performance.navigation.type
in my JS script, but it doesn't give me desired results.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Attribution in GA happens on the Google servers, so JavaScript will be of limited use. Basically since a reload means that the user has the same client id and no change in the channel (source, medium and campaign are the same as in the previous visit) the existing session will be continued (a change of campaign/source information would trigger a new Google Analytics session).
Google has a very nice chart that explains how campaign information and traffic source information is processed.
On a website with affiliate links, where there is no programmatic access to the conversion logs, I treat it as offline conversions.
My Setup
Online
A user visit my website, see the affiliated ad and a promotion view hit is being sent.
When the user clicks the ad, a promotion click hit is being sent and the user is redirected to another page on my site.
On the "redirection page", an product view hit is being sent, and the user is being redirected to the affiliation link, passing his Google Analytics clientId.
Offline
Once a week I download the stats from the affiliate program, which looks something like:
clientId visits conversions revenue
4444444444.3333333333 1 0 $0
1234567890.1234567890 1 1 $16.40
Then I use the Measurement Protocol to send offline events:
For each line of visit, I send a product click hit.
For each line of conversion, I send a product purchase hit.
My Problem
The conversion shows up on the eCommerce report:
Because the offline hits are being sent after the original session is already closed, a new session is opened which doesn't contain the info about the user.
So I can't see the conversion on the demographic report, for example:
Optional Solution?
I'm thinking of using the user-id feature of Google Analytics.
Even though the users are not identified, I can identify them by their clientId.
Sure, this is not what Google intended when they introduced that feature, but I believe it will solve my issue. I'm just not sure about the negatives.
My Questions
Any feedback on my setup?
Why is it even necessary to pass the clientId after the session is closed? what kind of information is being shared between the real session and the offline hit?
Is it a bad idea to pass the clientId as a userId to Google Analytics? Why?
Relevant Articles
A Comprehensive Guide to Tracking Offline Interactions in Google Analytics using the Measurement Protocol
Google Universal Analytics isn’t Linking Offline and Online User Properly
We were able to link offline action through as you did with measurement protocol but the problem is that those sessions are not included in demographic and age report.
Rather looking those report I used them to do segmented analysis E.g. pages they have look at, sources they used to come also I used it with attribution model to understand best channels to drive more conversions.
Yes you can use CID as a user ID but I haven't tried it with offline tracking. Share the result with us.
Can you set up alerts in Google Analytics to flag potential PII/NPI such as name, email address, billing address, billing details etc.? If so, how?
First I have do say I do not understand the downvote(s). For example I have seen applications with user logins where a full name was part of the page title - combined with time based dimensions that gave profile that say which user looked at what page at what time, and that would be clearly illegal. Even worse I have seen a case where security tokens were transmitted to GA that allowed access to secured resources. So clearly accidental transmission of PII to Google Analytics is a real thing.
Unfortunately there is not much you can do about it. You can either do a custom report with relevant dimensions and have it sent to you for a manual audit, or pull them via the API and have them programmatically examined via regular expressions that look for patterns like e-mail addresses etc. But by the time you can do that it is already to late, the data will already be permanently recorded in the GA property.
You have to stop this before the data is collected - if at all possible already in the website (via form validation etc), or use Google Tag Manager with custom javascript variables with validation rules, or filters in the analytics view (the latter being cumbersome and not very promising for this purpose).
The good news is that GA will not suddendly start to track PII on it's own. So you only need to check if your GA account tracks PII when you set up the account. Collect a few days data, validate that everything is okay, make changes as necessary and after all flaws are straightened out copy the view to start data collection from scratch and drop the old view if it contains PII.
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.
Is there a tool to capture actual user experience on a my website. I would like to capture things like customerid, which button they clicked, information in their cookie, query string etc. etc. etc. Is there a tool that I can plug into my website that would provide this information for a web page and dump into nice columns in sql server table? I would like to be able to …
go through the logs.
Pick a particular log entry
Zoom into that log entry and look into more detailed information like querystring, cookie data etc.
Be able to capture all the information on what user was doing on that page when the exception happened.
Is it possible? Is there a tool out there for this?
Thanks.
This article describes using Google In-Page Analytics to generate heat maps for where users click on your web pages but this is aggregated rather than for specific users. In addition to the normal hits GA records for a page you can also add custom hits based on client-side interactions using a technique similar to tracking outbound links. We used this with the GA Funnel to track progress through a sign-up form.
Having ELMAH installed is unbelievably useful for a wide range of reasons and will be well worth configuring if you haven't already.
I found WebLog Expert to be very handy for analysing the IIS logs at an aggregate level.
I'm not aware of any one product that does all three elements and none specifically well at the per user level.