I am trying to track the number of email opens of a mailing.
This mailing is not personalised, so each receiver will get exactly the same email contents.
So far I have found out that I can add a tracking pixel in the mailing, which will send data to GA that a user opened the mail (images were loaded).
Example code:
<img src=”http://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&tid=UA-XXXXXX-X
&cid=EmailOpenTest&t=event&ec=email&ea=open&el=EmailOpenTest
&cs=newsletter&cm=email&cn=Email&cm1=1″ />
'tid' will be our custom tracking ID.
This all works, as when this link is opened the total number of hits increases.
But my question relates to parameter 'cid'. For testing purposes, I have set this here to "EmailOpenTest". But this should be a random/unique ID per user actually. But as the mailing is not personalised, I wonder if it would be possible to track individual users?
Does this mean I have to include javascript in the mail? Would that even work in all email clients? Or are there other options?
All suggestions are welcome.
Assumption: you are using a mail client like Mail Chimp
Assign a unique id to every email on the email list. lets say this unique id is uid
Create a custom dimension in GA, lets name it as Client Mail Id with index say 1
Create the same pixel just like you have created above in the OP.
Add a custom Dimension in the hit as
http://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&tid=UA-XXXXXX-X
&cid=EmailOpenTest&t=event&ec=email&ea=open&el=EmailOpenTest
&cs=newsletter&cm=email&cn=Email&cm1=1&cd1=uid
In place of uid, you actually need to pass the mail list unique id for that email
How it will work
Once the user sends this hit, your unique id will be recorded in custom dimension 1.
Generate a custom report in GA with event category=email & event action=open and add a dimension custom dimension 1.
All the id's displayed there have actually opened the email ;)
PS: It's tried and tested, so won't cause any issue. Also if you don't want to use custom dimensions, you can also send this id in event label or event value
PPS: In any mail client, getting unique value for that email is pretty easy. You can actiually use its position number or add another column for the unique id, then grab that id win the template
The cid is the clientId, an identifier that is used to aggregate pageviews into sessions, and sessions into unique users.
The way to use that in email-tracking would be to capture the client id when a user subscribes to your newsletter and then insert it into the email links. Since your mails are not personalized this will not work.
If you use a random ID you will not be able to link the request from the mail to an existing user. So one way to deal with the problem would be to ignore it - using a constant userId would still give you an event count (the unique events metric might be a little of if users click the link multiple times within a session lifetime).
If for some reason you absolutely need to track these as different users you can set up a redirect - do not send data to ga directly from your mail, instead call a script on your server that inserts a random clientId and then sends the data to Google.
Related
Essentially I've noticed that when a user's primary email is updated on their google account, their calendar ID will also change (e.g. ID will change from john#company.com to john_new#company.com).
This is a problem because I work on an application that relies on the calendar ID being a stable identifier for users. For example, lets say user A at a company schedules an event to their calendar through my application. We'll save metadata related to that event in our own database along with user A's calendar ID to denote that the event was scheduled to that calendar. This is important because we use this information to ensure that only users with write access to this calendar ID can edit this event from our application (important for security purposes).
Lets say user A gets their primary email updated, which causes their calendar ID to also change. Now, when I query the CalendarList endpoint to get a list of user A's calendars, I get back the new calendar ID, which makes my application think that user A should not have access to edit the event they just scheduled since that event was scheduled to a calendar ID that user A no longer has access to.
Is there a way around a problem like this? I can't find an endpoint that will return user A's "archived" calendar ID in addition to their new one. More deeply, I don't understand why their calendar ID changes as it feels like IDs should be stable identifiers...
In this case, by testing and working with the calendar API and Google Workspace it's a fact that the Calendar ID will always be the email address of the user account it’s associated with. I wish there was actual documentation but this is only from testing that I have verified this. There are other threads that explain the same, in this case with your situation you should modify your app in a way that the CalendarID is not based in a stable ID, as this depends on your email address.
We have been registering user ids, and when we go to Audience->User Explorer, the users are all there, each with their activity measures. But we can't find a way to filter some users out of our custom reports.
We do ga('set', 'userId', 'xxxx-xxxx'); but we didn't create any custom dimension. We just told GA specific user-IDs for each.
We haven't been able to set up a segment, as we can't find the id in the filter. Neither in report filter.
We could go the the user and delete all their data. But that is not our point, and we need to keep this data as well. Ideally we would segment our users, but we can't use this filter in the segment definition.
If you want to segment user by userID, you need to create a custom dimension of which you can access. The clientId is not accessible as a dimension to segment on.
I am trying to fetch "Email Performance Report" from the platform
using API to analyze the KPI's like CTR etc by type of the email
(newsletter,email marketing etc).
I went through the documentation, however I didn't find endpoint from
which I can fetch the same.
Does anyone know if there is a way to get this information?
There is no endpoint to query reports directly. However, the good news is, that the “things” that make up an “Email Performance Report”, namely: email delivery, bounce, open and click are available to query via the API.
This means that you have to build the report yourself, but you can fetch the dataset to work on.
These “things” are called activity types (activity measured on a Lead) and can be fetched by querying against the Get Lead Activities endpoint, which is also mentioned as the Query in the API docs.
It sits at the GET /rest/v1/activities.json url and you have to pass a nextPageToken and the activityTypeIds as query parameters.
The nextPageToken indicates a datetime. Activities after that date will be returned by the call. To obtain one, you have to make a call to GET /rest/v1/activities/pagingtoken.json, where you have to specify the earliest datetime to retrieve activities from. See more about Paging Tokens.
To figure out the value of activityTypeIds, you first need to get the internal Ids of the activity types you are interested in. In order to do so, you have to query the GET /rest/v1/activities/types.json endpoint and look for the activity types with names like Send Email, Email Delivered, Email Bounced, Unsubscribe Email, Open Email and Click Email. (I don't know if these Ids are changing from instance to instance, but in ours these are from #6 to #11).
Once you have all of these bits at hand, you can make your request like that:
GET https://<INSTANCE_ID>.mktorest.com/rest/v1/activities.json?activityTypeIds=<TYPE_ID>&nextPageToken=<NEXTPAGE_TOKEN>&access_token=<ACCESS_TOKEN>
The result it gives is an array with items like below. Items can be filtered to specific email based on the primaryAttributeValue property and processed further accordingly.
{
"id":7370416,
"marketoGUID":"7170506",
"leadId":291305,
"activityDate":"2017-12-17T00:00:00Z",
"activityTypeId":11,// #11 = `Click Email`
"campaignId":1790,
"primaryAttributeValueId":1638,
"primaryAttributeValue":"EMAIL_NAME",// Name of the Email as seen in Marketo
"attributes":[
// …
]
}
I have been tasked with using Google Analytics to report of use of a desktop app so we can see which parts of the program are being used and how heavily, and potentially also see which companies are using which parts of the program (each company has a unique companyID). Ideally I'd like to be able to look at correlations (e.g., How many users who use report A also use process B?)
I currently have my program set to fire off a call to analytics. I've set it up to use the event tracking, but I'm open to app/screen tracking or something else if something would work better. I'm passing values like
v=1
&t=event // Event hit type
&tid=UA-XXXXX-Y // our ID; real code has valid value here
&cid=12345 // CustomerID
&ec=JobFinancialReport // Event Category
&ea=Run // Event Action
&el=Manager // Event label
&ev=7 // Event value
What I can't figure out is how in Google Analytics to set up reports that would show me something like:
CustomerID Category Label Total Hits Unique Users
12345 JobFinancialReport Manager 27 2
12345 MarketingReport1 Manager 6 4
I'm totally new to analytics so pardon my ignorance if I have some key misconception here. I've searched Googles sites and other questions here, but I may be wording my question incorrectly so I'm not finding something that's there. This is only one example; in some cases we might want to see how broadly each customer is using the program; in other cases we'd want to take the customerID out and just see how much a particular report is being used overall. Appreciate any guidance. Thanks.
The "cid" parameter is the client id, the value that is used to stitch single interactions into sessions and users.
The first problem that comes to mind with your setup is that the client id is not exposed in the user interface (with the single exception of the user explorer report) or the API.
You would need to implement this via a custom dimension (probably user scope, since it probably will never change for a given user) where you pass in the client id (you still need the cid parameter).
Then you could create a custom report (or create a report in Google Data Studio) with the custom value as primary dimension and your selected metric.
If you want to report "Unique Users" you would probably need to create a cid per logged-in user (if all users of the app have the same cid then you will always have but a single user reported). You should then probably create a second custom dimension for the company id, so you can segment your reports by company.
you can use custom reports in google analytics to get your desired output. here is how to create custom reports https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1151300?hl=en
Can I use client ID as a dimension in my reports? Client ID does not appear as a dimension in the Dimensions and Metrics Explorer, but I believe I can create a custom dimension that will store the Client ID. My end goal is to have a row per customer/date+time containing the incidents associated with the particular customer at the particular time, e.g. page visits, particular events etc
Once you've created the custom dimension in GA, you can start tracking it via analytics.js with the following code:
ga(function(tracker) {
// Assumes dimension is at index 1.
tracker.set('dimension1', tracker.get('clientId'));
});
I found that the google analytics will NOT save your custom dimension if it matches the value of "client id" (even if that id isn't actually PII). However, if you alter the "client id" to become a different value, it will save properly.
Here are the guidelines about what you are allowed to send