On our website we are transitioning from the old ga.js over to analytics.js.
I've been able to successfully transition most of the code over to the new trackers and send page views, transactions, and events. However, when my marketing team is creating links for their campaigns that include UTM params and those params don't appear to be translating into our analytics dashboard. The source and medium don't seem to be correctly translating even though the UTM variables are in the URLs.
I feel like I've searched everything out and can't seem to find what I need. How do I process UTM params with analytics.js?
Related
I have hunted around a bit and only found how to setup the site search parameter in a site's admin section. This is not what I want. Also looked through some Google Search Console videos - no go.
Given a URL, https://somesite.com/redirect/?redirect=https://gofundme.com/somecampaign/.
As some background, what I have setup here is a simple page that says "Loading..." and is used for external links I want to track analytics on, from platforms that I may not have access to the link's analytics. For example: https://gofundme.com/somecampaign.
Rather than having a redirect setup on the page itself, I injected custom JavaScript through Google Tag Manager that records analytics data in Google Universal Analytics (anyone want to recommend how to do this in G4A?) then performs the redirect.
My question is, in Google Analytics, how do I setup a custom report where the query string parameter = redirect and/or the specific page URL?
Thanks.
Our email marketer is sending email from GetResponse with a tracking code generated from another tool,
but we can't see if the users are coming from the email source.
Is it possible, because it is with tracking code generated from other tool, GA to mark it as direct traffic and is there a way to know it is coming from the email campaign? Also, I am not sure it is tracking it at all, becouse I don't see much traffic in the landing page. The GA is fired, I checked!
The tracking code includes the main domain and it redirects to a specific page.
Example: tracking.ourdomain.com/aff_c?offer_id=46&aff_id=76
You have to check in Landing Pages report (or All pages report), filtering by aff_id, if there are any sessions.
To track in correct mode the source you have to use UTMs parameters. You can build your URL with UTM parameters using this tool. It allows you to easily add campaign parameters to URLs so you can track Custom Campaigns in Google Analytics. Then you can find those sessions in source / medium report.
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.
I'm having issues with tracking the UTM parameters in Google Analytics on an iframe.
My website is embedded in an iframe on http://www.blokker.be/inuwkot and http://www.blokker.be/danstonkot. The visitors go straight to the two links (either dutch or french). No visitors go straight to my own domain.
In the overview page form analytics I can view the amount of visitors/views but not the UTM parameters. I can only see it's a referal.
Any ideas on how to get the UTM url's working in the iframe so I can see where my visitors come from?
Since your frame content is located on a different domain you can not track url parameters from the hosting page without support from the domain owners - they would either have to append the parameters to the frame url, or send a message using the postMessage interface which allows cross-domain communication between pages and embedded frames.
So the page has to send the information to the frame, you cannot simply access it (for security reasons). If the owners of the blokker.be domain do not support that then you are out of luck.
How (im)precise is Google Analytics actually? I've been using Google Analytics for years now on a pretty well visited web site (800k+ visits per month).
Now I decided to log every page request in a database table, and I'm tracking the user-agent of the request. I have also eliminated bot requests (googlebot, bingbot and many more...)
What I found out is that I have almost more than double requests to a page than Google Analytics pageviews is willing to admit.
E.g. GA shows 137 pageviews to a specific URL, but I tracked even 255!
Google Analytics is VERY precise. It's not very accurate though. And that's the difference you're seeing since you're not looking into trends but instead at absolute numbers.
Start by reading this post by Avinash:
Reflections: Accuracy, Precision & Predictive Analytics
Bots are everywhere these days and a lot of times disguised as real user agents. You should come up with a testing to make sure client have both javascript and cookies enabled. In that case he'll be tracked by Google Analytics.
Besides that that some users might have adBlocks extensions that block Google Analytics. This is fairly uncommon but depending on the public can be more common. Tech savvy users have a higher chance to use a plugin that blocks GA, thus IT blogs might be hit by this harder than an average site.
The best way to test the real accuracy of Google Analytics ignoring user agents without javascript, cookies and that block GA tracking is to track the users on your site using GA as well. You can do that in Google Analytics using the LocalRemoteServerMode.
Add the following line at the end of your GATC (GA Tracking Code):
_gaq.push(['_setLocalGifPath', 'http://mysite.com/__utm.gif']);
_gaq.push(['_setLocalRemoteServerMode']);
Make sure to replace http://mysite.com/__utm.gif with a path on the same domain as your website and that respond a gif. Use a lightweight gif, like the one GA uses.
Then you can get the logs of access to this gif and see in their parameters the urls visited. You'll need to do some extra processing but you'll be using the same framework GA uses to collect data and thus will measure more efficiently GA precision.
More Info:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/methods/gaJSApiUrchin#_gat.GA_Tracker_._setLocalGifPath