I have two views on my website in Google Analytics. Currently, the two have the exact same filters applied to them (I can't yet create a new filter on this account to apply to my test view). I would expect that with the same filters, the two views would report exactly the same data. However, when I compare the views, the session and user counts vary between the two views.
Metrics from May 29 - June 5
View #1:
Sessions: 3708
Users: 2691
View #2:
Sessions: 3338
Users: 1821
I am somewhat alarmed by the difference in users between the two views. Again, I know that different views typically have different filters applied to them, but these two views have the exact same filters applied.
Any idea why I might be seeing this discrepancy?
Related
I have a number of different product pages and i'm interested in seeing how many users view each product more than 5 times. I understand I can do this for one of them with a segment and sequence, but I have too many pages that i'm interested in tracking. Could I do this with a custom metric? Maybe a calculated metric in analytics or data studio?
there's no reasonable way to do that because Google Analytics metrics are reported in an aggregated way and there's no way to introduce some custom conditions like 'if metric X is greater than N for specific user' other than segments.
the only way is to implement custom tracking that would watch for the number of page views for a particular page/product and then send data to analytics when a specific number of page views is reached.
I've got an app that has a /restaurants URL, which lists restaurants.
Each restaurants has a URL like: /restaurants/
So, GA reports pages views like:
/restaurants
/restaurants/1234
/restaurants/3456
This means that when I view the "Behavior Flow" tab in GA, there are hundreds of little boxes for each individual restaurant. It would be more informative (in some cases) to lump all 'restaurant' pages together.
However -- I do not want to do away with the granular URL identifiers for each different restaurant all together, because that it is useful in some other reporting.
So, should I be passing some different data with each page view? Should I use events? Ideally, this is a change to the code that is reporting data so that I don't have to add some configuration change to every view that uses this data.
I'd suggest to use Content Grouping, which can be set on View level. In your case, use rule definition for creating a page group of restaurants, which can be later used as a dimension in your reports. E.g. create a page group Restaurants, and define a rule for Page containing /restaurants/
This way, you won't need to alter basic data collection, and you'll still access per restaurant details in Page reports.
However, if you'd have more than 5 of these content groups, you might consider a different logic for grouping.
To anonymously analyze users flow and engagement I want to use the ClientID, as identifier of each user, as a value of a custom dimension. I have two questions regarding this idea:
How many values can be associated to a custom dimension? This will determine the feasibility of this approach or not.
Is there any other approach to track individually, yet anonymously, users activity?
I'm not aware of a limit though for custom dimension length. But storing userId, sessionId customerId and timestamps for all hits in custom dimensions is not all that unusual these days. Here is a link to a post by Simo Ahava's post Improve Data Collection With Four Custom Dimensions on how to set it all up in google tag manager.
For hit based custom dimension you can store as many values as there are hits. The problem is not storage, the problem is that the interface will not show more than 50 000 rows with distinct values (any additional value will go into a row labeled "other"). Also some of the reports (namely demographics) will not work with very small segments.
I cannot think of any other way to track users individually (and if you are interested in opinions, I blogged about how I do not understand why people want to do this). The interface is not very well suited for this kind of "atomic" information, so I think the approach is more useful for API integrations that can properly visualize information on a per user basis.
I am new in dealing with GTM /GA / Enhanced Ecommerce tracking and seeking some advice on best practices. We will soon be implementing multiple sites (each having different locale) below is the example of the sites domain structure : www.mysite.com/uk- UK
www.mysite.com/de- german
www.mysite.com/in - india
Here is the approach that i think will work out best...i am planning to set one GTM Account since parent company is same (mysite) but different GTM containers (one for each country) We will be using same GA account for all the countries and all the variable/triggers/events for GA will be setup in their respective container.I will be implementing Enhanced Ecommerce via dataLayer (GTM) and for each purchase, i will be prefixing order id with 2 digit country code i.e uk12345, de35535 etc.
How can i make sure that the GA events can be tracked separately for each country as well so that while looking at the reports, user should be able to track user for individual sites and even roll up the reports for the entire company.
Any best practices. screenshots explanations will b appreciated.
TIA
I would recommend having just one GTM container, pointing to one GA property.
This is much simpler to maintain and manage.
You can then creates views for each of your countries, using filters on subdirectories (Filter Type: Predefined, Include only, traffic to subdirectories, that are equal to, "/in/" for instance). You can create a view with no filters, on top of it, for global reporting.
This also allows you to give users different access rights for each country, if you want an analyst to have access to only one country for instance.
You don't need to prefix the country code to each order number, the "Page" dimension in GA will give you the page from which the order have been passed, that should be including "/in/" or "/uk/".
In our case, we have multiple domains for our different countries (oursite.com.ng, oursite.ci, oursite.ma, etc.), one GA property per country, and one unique GTM containers pointing to the different GA properties thanks to a lookup variable in GTM.
But I ended up copying the GA property settings 14 times (for our 14 countries), it would have been much better to do it only once.
Plus, to report cross-country, we had to use the API to avoid downloading and combining 14 reports every time.
We manage a large collection of websites that each fit into a couple of dozen categories. Some of the categories have hundreds of sites in them. The largest of which is over 800 sites. I would like to set up my Google Analytics account structure to facilitate easily reporting on individual sites, categories, and overall enterprise wide traffic.
For example, let's say our categories are food, sports, and politics each with 300 sites. I will need to be able to report on the number of site visits for each individual website, aggregate numbers for all food sites, all sports sites, and all political sites, and aggregate numbers for all 900 sites combined.
To get the overall numbers (all sites/categories combined) it seems easy enough to create a rollup account and use that tracking code along with another tracking code on each page. Where I'm struggling is how to get the category-wide numbers and the site-level numbers. I've thought about two approaches:
Create a custom dimension for category and then build custom reports keyed off the custom dimension. This would allow me to group the accounts however I see fit as long as the custom dimension is reported to the rollup account.
Create multiple properties for each category and associate each with a "lead" site for that category. This would require site-level reports being based on hostname or something similar.
It seems the limiting factor is each account cannot have more than 50 views. Following Google's advice to always keep an unfiltered view of your data plus views for whatever filters are desired means I will need dozens of accounts unless there is some creative approach I haven't thought about.
Any suggestions on how to best setup the accounts, properties and views to facilitate the site-level, category-level and enterprise-wide reports?