I'd like to serve certain pages only in one geographical area and have Analytics compare the performance of those pages with the normal pages. Is this something I can do with Analytics?
Thanks
You could probably do it for a (extremely huge) fee with Google Analytics 360 and Google Optimize 360, which would allow you to define a GA segment as target audience for the Optimize test.
With standard GA, no. There is no backchannel that would allow you to target, in realtime, users in an A/B test based on Google Data. You would somehow need to do the geographical split yourself and pass in flags for the A/B test to GA. In your reporting you then might be able to segment properly by geography for the results. That will be a second rate solution, and I'm pretty sure you would be better of with a third-party tool.
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I'm trying to figure out if this works. Unfortunately I do not have a website to test this with. Though I've read the GA and GAds documentation I'm not sure if this is possible. So please bear with me.
Imagine a simple website that has Google Analytics (with a linked GAds account) deployed. I want to run a survey on this site users can answer if they like to. As the result of the survey the participants are assigned some ID. Lets say the result variable is called cluster and the values are A, B or C.
What I want to do now, is use this group of participants of the survey and try to target new visitors that are similar to the ones that have been assigned a C value via Google Ads.
As far as I understood the documentations this is how it could be done. Please correct me and point me in the right direction if I'm wrong.
I'm setting up a custom user dimension called Cluster in GA
I'm editing the GA code on the website to include the custom dimension that will be populated with the result of the mentioned survey
When the results come into GA, I'm creating a remarketing audience in GA called Cppl based on the custom dimension Cluster
I'm importing this Cppl remarketing audience into GAds
I'm creating a similar audience in GAds based on Cppl list
I'm publishing a campaign based on this similar audience
Does this process make sense and is it correct or am I making any mistakes?
It makes sense to me, once you have defined the segment you need in Google Analytics you can use it for remarketing in Google Ads.
I am trying to get to a point where I can identify visitors who are generating website Goals. And identifying them via their Pardot ID-s in GA.
Do you think that's possible?
On the site every visitor gets a Pardot cookie and in that there is a readable Visitor ID which via an API query can be turned into a Pardot ID.
But how can this piece of information get stitched to the rest of the GA parameters? How to push this into GA as a custom data point so I can create a report on who are the Pardot IDs that completed a certain goal this week?
Is there any guidance you can give?
Assuming, that Pardot ID itself is not a Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in terms of Google Analytics, there are several ways to accomplish this.
You could provide this data as User ID, which helps Google Analyitcs to identify users across several browsers and devices. However, this dimension is not exposed on the reporting GUI or the reporting API. (Available dimensions and metrics can be browsed here.)
Instead, or in parallel, you could store this information in a custom dimension, which, can be used in standard or custom reports, or via the reporting API as well. There a couple of things to consider. According to the Measurement Protocoll reference, the maximum length of this field is 150 bytes. You should also decide, if this dimension is most useful for your needs and possibilities on hit, session or user level, about which you can read here.
I'm trying to track the success of marketing campaigns through conversion on a portal. The portal is largely JS based and for right now we can't use URL goal tracking. Instead, I'm planning on using event-based goal conversion that can report all the variables I need. The problem is how do I connect marketing campaigns to the eventual conversion? These campaigns span SEM, email, landing pages, partnerships, etc.
My initial idea was to use a URL param to set a session-level custom variable identifying the marketing campaign that funneled the visitor, and then to compare this to goal conversion. However, I'm not sure custom variables can even be compared to goal conversions in Google Analytics -- and I'm worried that I might be over-thinking this.
I'm worried I'm way over-thinking this. If I create a custom campaign using the URL Builder, will that give me everything I want, allowing me to track campaign conversions?
Yes, I think you are over-thinking things. :-)
As long as you properly tag the campaigns using the utm variables in your destination URLs as they show you how to do in URL builder, they should allow you to see your specific goal conversions by source, medium, campaign, etc. in your GA profile. Using the new Multi-Channel funnels features you'll also be able to see how the sources of previous visits influence future conversion behavior as well.
Generate help with campaign conversion tracking here: http://blog.crazyegg.com/2011/12/02/track-conversions-google-analytics-campaigns/
Info on Multi-Channel funnels here: https://www.google.com/analytics/features/multichannel-funnels.html
Tools like Mixpanel, KISSmetrics and others support cohort analysis out of the box but I've heard that you can do this with a bit of effort in Google Analytics as well. How do you set this up if you want to track, say, the daily and weekly retention of your visitors?
Google Analytics can do a lot but retention analysis is one of it's weak points. Since it tends to focus on visits (as opposed to visitors) you'll need to configure the cookie tracking yourself using Google Analytic's custom variables. Having said that, it's not too hard to get a simple solution running quickly.
First, decide how to layout the data in Google Analytic's custom variables based on your requirements. For example, are you storing retention dates for daily, weekly or monthly tracking? Do you also want to track cohort goals? Partition this data into the available custom variable slots.
Write the cohort data to these custom variables when visitors arrive or achieve goals using Google Analytic's _setCustomVar function. Setting the fourth parameter of that function to 1 indicates you want to do visitor-level (cookie) tracking.
For each cohort you wish to analyze, create an advanced segment in Google Analytics. Using a regex expression in the condition will give you the flexibility to segment for interesting cohorts. ex: "All users whose first visit was the week before Christmas".
Analyze the results with reports by specifying a date range and the corresponding cohort-sliced advanced segments. Another option is to extract the data using the Google Analytics Data Feed Query Explorer or their API.
Once you've put in the work your new visitors will be stamped by their first visit date and nicely fall into each daily or weekly retention bucket. If you need more detail there's a full walk through on my blog:
How to do Cohort Analysis in Google Analytics.
This really interested me so I did a little research and basically you have to customize the GA javascript in the pages to upload custom variables into google.
Once you have done that you need to go to "Advance Segments in Google Analytics" and select your custom variables. Here is a detailed description on how to accomplish this:
Hacking a Cohort Analysis with Google Analytics
I have been asked to provide recommendations on "Verified Analytics" for the next iteration of my company's site. Verified to mean that when we sell ad space, it's based on a number of page-views, and the people who buy that space want a way to verify that the numbers we give them are the actual numbers we're delivering.
I have turned to The Google and the only services I can find for this sort of thing revolve around Google Analytics and the sale of a domain name. I export my analytics numbers to a PDF, have Google email the PDF to my auctioneer, and they look for signs of tampering. If no signs of tampering are found they put a little "Verified" badge on the domain auction. (Here)
Other than this, and something similar on another domain sales site, I haven't found anything like what I've been asked to find.
Currently we are using Google Analytics, however I've been also asked to recommend a replacement for that based on the ability to be verified. I'd rather just stick with Google Analytics since we also use Google for advertising.
Google analytics is a third party service, so you can't modify the stats data yourself anyway. If google is sending them the report directly there's not even scope for you to be editing the numbers so their concern is more paranoia than reasonable.
a) You can add another user in google analytics and give them report-only access. This way they can look at the stats themselves.
b) Add another hits tracking service such as http://www.hitslink.com/ and give the client access to these reports too.
Quantcast / Comscore / Compete all make estimates of site traffic based on limited amounts of data. As an ad buyer I would never take these stats as proof of anything really.
Online Audience Measurement is a term to search for - you're looking at providers like Quantcast, Comscore or Compete. These work alongside, rather than replace your current web analytics package.
Qauntcast actually measures traffic directly. You insert a tag, same as Google Analytics. Most ad agencies and advertisers accept Quantcast numbers for traffic validation.