I know that it might be odd, but I need your help with the google analytics set up.
Task: I need to set up brochure downloads as a goal for international students on a page https://www.cqu.edu.au/international-students/international-brochures .
In a perfect world, I would need to set up an individual goal for each type of brochure download (postgraduation, undergraduate, English courses) but I decided to start from "all brochures" to save the number of goals that I have for the view. Unfortunately, I don't have a chance to set up "events", so I have to work with goals only.
Final goal destination: Any page containing "pdf_file" in its description.
Pathway: come to International section, move to brochures, then go to brochure page (containing "pdf_file" in its description, for ex. - https://www.cqu.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/158540/2017-Undergraduate-International-Guide.pdf).
The problem: I tried to use regular expressions such as "^/__data/assets/pdf_file/." or ^/pdf_file/(.) and I can't see conversions in real time test.
However, nothing helped, and goals (even the page visit) still aren't tracking correctly. What am I doing wrong? And, if possible, how can I split goals across different brochure types?
Many thanks,
Kirill
You are on the right track. You just need one Goal. The problem you have is that after clicking a pdf document you are being redirected to a PDF viewer iframe. This is a PDF view "page" with no Google analytics tracking code whatsoever.If you use are using destination goals the only way this will work is by having installed the Google Analytics (GA) tracking code at the "final destination page".
One way to track pdf "views" is by creating a short url for each one, hence you will be able to track or check how many of them have views.
Another way is to create an onclick event within each link. But this is only possible if you can setup the events in GA. Creating this kind of event tracking will allow you to set up labels for each pdf's name to be able to identify or track each one of them.
Related
I'm a consumer data analyst who is not very familiar to coding other than occasional encounters with HTML and Python, and I'm just starting with the coding part of Web Analytics. In particular, I need to learn about checking websites I don't own (therefore I don't have access to their Analytics accounts) for tracking info, but it has been phenomenally hard to find information on which tracking function each component of code stand for, or to what extent it is visible from the page source.
For a project, here is a page I'm trying to check for Google Analytics/Tag Manager/alternative analytics setup, and see what is exactly being tracked on it. Other than the source code, I checked it with Ghostery, which gave me this Tag Manager code page. Is it possible to check tracking info from these two (events, pageviews, URI and how many custom dimensions there is, specifically), and which part of the code includes that info (particularly URI and dimension info - the first two, I have more idea about)?
This is a page I'm also looking into. I can see that this one has Google Analytics/Tag manager, but again, I can't make sure of what is being tracked, and whether the Analytics/Tag Manager setup is looking -potentially- problematic in any way. Here is the Tag Manager page for this one that I obtained through Ghostery.
Any help would be much appreciated...
Looks like what you are looking for is Google Tag Assistant extension for google chrome: https://get.google.com/tagassistant/
you can download it from here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tag-assistant-by-google/kejbdjndbnbjgmefkgdddjlbokphdefk?hl=en
When you install it it will appear as icon on any page you visit and it will show you all GA implementations on a page:
You can select tracking ID you are interested in and it will tell you how many Page Views/events were fired for that particular tracking ID only:
Then you can select individual tracking event/page view and see all data that are being sent with that tracking request. Just Click on URLs and click the icon to put the data in table:
Here "cd" stands for Custom Dimension, so here you can clearly see 2 custom dimensions that are being tracked:
Hope this helps, good luck!
Situation: I have used Google Tag Manager to set up Google Analytics (GA - Universal) on a multisite network. There is one GTM container, and each website has its own GA property. I used a GTM variable to reference all of the GA properties. I am able to track cross-domain sessions. In testing, I am able to follow a user's session across multiple domains under the same session / client ID.
Problem: I'm stuck with what to do next. I'd like to create some Goals and Views that track a user's journey through my sites and measure the usual stats (bounce, drop-off points conversions, etc.). However, I'm not sure where to begin. I see plenty of information on the Internet for how to set up cross-domain GA tags in GTM. However, I don't see anything out there for how to create Views and Goals for cross-domain setups. A few questions that come to mind are:
Do I create Goals in the destination site's GA account (e.g. mycheckout.com), or the site where the session begins (e.g. myproductinfo.com)?
When creating Goals, do I only use the permalink slug, or the entire link? I thought I could only add the permalink.
How does this information roll up into one report?
I found this link, but I'm not sure if it's the 'best practice'. I would greatly appreciate it if someone who has previously implemented this could provide an outline of best practices, or a link to a good tutorial on the subject.
Thanks for your help!
Chris
You need to understand GA definition of Views and Properties. Views are like database table views: you can either show the whole table or a sample of it.
To have all data collected without sampling a "Raw Data" view (no filters) should always be used. Each view has its own conversion goal definitions. So in the "Raw Data" view you can create a goal for any page tracked. If you filter a view for one domain (e.g. "confirmation.com View with appropriate filters"), only goals for this domain should be created (otherwise they will never count a conversion).
When creating goals you can define filters for the "ga:pagePath" parameter. So it depends on your GA tracking setup, what part of the URL it tracks. Go into chrome web developer toolbar and hit the "network" tab. Open your page in this tab. Then search for requests ending with "collect", these are the data trackpoints send to GA. There you can debug what URL information is sent to GA (search for the "dl" parameter within the query string parameters list).
I've implemented GA on our b2b site. It's strictly internal but we'd like to track behaviors of users to see if some of the sections on the site are relevant. So, it's working, but say you have
www.blahblah.com and you want to also track
www.blahblah.com/edit
www.blahblah.com/askquestion
Do you set up a filter for this? I did try it and not sure if it's working quite yet. Any info/advice would be greatly appreciated. I am brand new to GA.
Thanks
Not quite sure what you are asking.
If you want to know about metrics for the individual pages you'd go to to the Aquisition->Page Content reports. Overview will give you, well, an overview (you can use the filter box to look at the metrics for any specific Url), Content Drilldown will display a view structured by url hierarchy.
If you're after user behaviour you can create segments. If you want to know if somebody vistited the homepage and, after that, the /edit page you'd got to advanced segments (the arrow above the "Explorer" Tab in most views, click "create new segment", choose "sequence" from the advanced tab, choose page as dimension and "/" to filter for as step one, "/edit" as filter value for page two, enter a name for the segment and click save. Now you'll get all reports only for visitors who have visited those two pages, starting with the homepage.
There are a number of predefined segments, you should try them to see what they can do. You need a pretty good understanding of metrics and dimensions in GA to get the full value from segments, but the simple stuff (e.g. analyze differences between marketing channels) is already pretty useful.
So, for page performance seek out reports with page metrics and use filters. To analyze user behavior use segments which apply to most of the GA reports.
Hope that helps, if not you might to explain more specifically what you want to see in your reports.
You can create separate custom report for individual sections and drilldown by almost all the GA provided dimensions. please reffer the sampel provided.
Please access this URL in your browser as this is a predefined custom report which does the same thing you want. This will get saved under custom reports. You need to edit the custom report and give your own path/section insted of "/services/" under filters section
Been using internal site search with Google Analytics and while I love the ability to see what my users are searching for, I am having a really hard time figuring out what search terms lead to which pages.
When I search on both the nextPagePath and searchKeyword dimensions while filtering on the search results page at the current path, the nextPagePath is always the search results page even when I know it shouldn't be (when tracking my own obscure searches). The same goes for using the searchDestinationPage dimension. I can't get any data that shows a jump from a search results page to another page on the site.
Here's a cleaned up example of my api query.
dimensions=ga:searchKeyword,ga:nextPagePath&metrics=ga:pageviews&filters=ga:previousPagePath=#dosearch
When I use the standard Analytics UI and look at the Destination Pages list under Content->Site Search->Destination pages, I only have 25 or so, all of which are just the variations on the base search-result page URL.
Do I need additional tracking code on my search results pages? Custom variables? A different query through the API?
I can see the tracking requests going out from both the search results and the pages selected from the results.
I found a couple of questions in the Analytics forums that ask this same question, but none of them had anything resembling a working solution.
I would bet you are not using the proper dimensions in the API
See https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/core/dimsmets/internalsearch
ga:searchDestinationPage is probably what you wanted when using ga:nextPagePath
I am setting up a website for students of a school, which must include a schedule page which will show a calendar with events populated by feeds from various teachers' calendars. After trying out a variety of scripts and tools made for showing calendars, I finally hit upon a very shoddy, hacked-together way of doing it, and I want to know if theres any specific things wrong with my implementation.
My requirements from this calendar are posted in a previous question
This is how my implementation is gonna work:
The teachers make their schedules in their own calendar programs and make those feeds available in the iCal format. A common Google account for the school subcribes to all these calendars, and so gets read only access to ALL the teacher's schedules in school.
Google Calendar has a feature that lets you select some of your calendars, and then get the html code for an iframe to embed on your website, so that visitors to the site can see what events are coming up. When I experimented around with the options in the Google 'Configurator', I found that by simply including certain codes in the url called for the iframe contents, you could change which calendars were visible. These codes, or calendar ids, are clearly displayed in the settings for each calendar. Thus, my final solution is thus:
For every student, there is a record stating which courses he has taken, and hence which calendars he should be shown. With some SQL magic, I can retrieve the calendar ids from a pre-prepared database of all the calendar ids, and then generate the correct url for the iframe using php, and display it.
I hope that wasn't too convoluted to understand. Now can anyone tell me if there are any inherent security flaws or bad programming practices etc in this. Something about the whole idea of dynamically generating urls, using iframes, using a common google account etc just screams 'Mistake!'. Can someone tell me if this is an ok way to go about it, or is there some problem with it?
Actually, I think your solution has the potential to be very secure. Using a single google account to collect the read-only calendars into one place is just an organizational shortcut. As long as the calendars themselves are read-only, your single account contains nothing that isn't already public.
Generating URLs is perfectly reasonable, as long as you are combining strings that you've sanitized beforehand. Since your database can only get calendar IDs from your aggregation google account, you know that potentially malicious users can't cause arbitrary characters to end up in your synthesized URLs.
The biggest problem you'll probably run into is that the google embedded calendar iframe only allows up to ten calendar feeds.
The most likely security vulnerability you'll face is the security of all of the teachers' google calendars.
By default, google calendars accept "invitations" and post them as events. You might find that anyone can "invite" a teacher's calendar to prank events and those prank events will then show up on student calendars.