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
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.
User Id implementation
Hello everybody, I implemented the User Id tracking for GA4. I did it properly, I am pretty sure I am collecting it correctly because I can see User Id in Real time report and also in Add Comparison tool.
I have 3 problems about how to exploit User Id in GA4 reports
#Problem 1
I don´t figure how to exploit User Id as user_property or custom dimension in my reports. I tried to do it in the Aquisition report but the User Id column show me (not set) value everywhere. When I add comparison with the Comparision tool it shows me up all User Id numeric value in the column, against the (not set) value of the predifined column...
#Problem 2
I also tried to exploit User Id info in the Hub analysis tool but it also shows me all user id in (not set).
#Problem 3
I ended up thinking that GA4 doesnt allow to exploit User Id in it's own interface so I went through BigQuery. But I turned crazy today when I saw that in Bigquery my user_id field had been populated without any value, it shows me "null" in the table.
Could someone help me, I would just like to be able to create a report with a list of all User Id in a row (dimension) and total events count in columns (metrics). How could I do it?
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 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.
I'm looking for some general advice. The site I'm currently working on is full of duplicate content that's about to be deduplicated. But it was built that way to track different audiences visiting the pages by reporting on the URL hits.
Current Links
www.MySite.com/homeowner/painting
www.MySite.com/professional/painting
www.MySite.com/designer/painting
My concern is that at the end of the day, the person managing the analytics wants to be able to look at their report and say "We had X number of professionals visit the site." Simply deduping will elimate that.
I'm thinking Google Analytics might have a way to pass audience/tags in via the URL like this:
Example Links with Tracking
www.MySite.com/painting?tag=homeowner
www.MySite.com/painting?tag=professional
www.MySite.com/painting?tag=designer
Is this possible with Google Analytics? Does anyone have an example website using this?
I've looked into Custom Dimensions and Metrics but they seem to be overkill https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/custom-dims-mets
Custom Dimensions are not overkill, it's a reasonable idea for you to use them (because segmentation is what they are for, really).
Using a url tag has a couple of disadvantages. For one The tagged pages will appear as three distinct rows in your reports - you will be unable to get an aggregated number for www.MySite.com/painting, instead you will have three Urls (or as many as you have parameters).
Secondly, homeowner etc. are attributes that belong to a session, or even a user (if the role cannot change from visit to visit). However if you track them via url parameters they have only a hit level scope, i.e. they are recorded as a property of the viewed page, not the viewing visitor. If you record this as a session scoped variabe you need to set it only at the first pageview, and the value will be applied to all subsequent pageviews for that session.
So an easy way (example assumes you are using php) might be to use
if(isset($_GET['tag']) {
ga('send', 'pageview', {
'dimension1': "<?php echo filter_input(INPUT_GET, 'tag', FILTER_SANITIZE_ENCODED); ?>"
});
} else {
ga('send', 'pageview');
}
in your tracking code after you have created a session scoped custom dimension in your property settings ("dimension1" referring to the first custom dimension in your account, the numeric index changes for each dimension. The dimension name is only used in the reports, not the tracking code). You need to be careful not to send an empty value when the query string is not present - a session scoped custom dimension only records the last value from a session, if you send empty values you overwrite the value you recorded at the first pageview.
Alternatively you can do this without changing the tracking code at all - create a custom advanced filter to capture the value from the query string, a second to copy the value to your custom dimension and a third to remove the query string from the url. However while that's a neat trick using code is much easier.