I am setting up Google Analytics Accounts for a Product which have multiple builds as frontend for same user base.
So we have one Product called X and have:
Web Build
Mobile Web
Android App 1
iOS App 1
Android App 2
iOS App 2 6.
The main point is identical APIs and User base is used in all platforms and apps. So if we have a user John Doe he can login in any of the web or apps.
We want to extract following information from Google Analytics.
Under User ID feature want, sessions aggregations of that user around all build and apps, but identifiable. So I can know that user John login to web yesterday and used mobile app today.
Each user belong to a customer (company) in our system. So want to segregate all information based on companies.
I already have achieved point 2 by creating a custom dimension in Google Analytics and believe that's the best way to do it.
Now need suggestions from Gurus on how to acheive point 1 using Google Analytics.
Either use single account and single property for all builds and apps
If yes, then how to identify those apps and builds in sessions
If I use multiple properties/apps in GA account then how to aggregate user sessions among all?
Looking forward to hear how guys around hand or should have handled this scenario. Cheers!
This question is extremely broad, IMO any answer your going to get is going to be primarily opinion based. So here is my opinion and a little extra info to boot.
The first issue you are going to have is that there is a difference between Mobile google analytics accounts and web analytics accounts. The two do not mix. Mobile analytics accounts insert screen views with a screen name. While web accounts insert PageViews with a document location.
There is no way to analyze between two different Google analytics web properties. Unless you intend your android and ios apps to run as websites and send it like its a webpage its not going to work. You could potentially download the data into your own system or big query and analyze it there. Comparing your custom dimension to see what the users have done differently. I would wonder at the quality of the analysis you will get as there will be no real way for you to compare the data and match it up beyond using your custom dimensions user id and possibly date.
I am adding this because I am not sure what your saving in your custom dimension.
The second issue you are going to have is tracking. Google analytics TOS does not allow you to send any identifiable information to Google.
The Analytics terms of service, which all Analytics customers must adhere to, prohibits sending personally identifiable information (PII) to Analytics (such as names, social security numbers, email addresses, or any similar data), or data that permanently identifies a particular device (such as a mobile phone’s unique device identifier if such an identifier cannot be reset).
You could for example send your companies customer id for John as a user_id but user_id is an internal valuable used for internal processing this is not something you can extract out via the api.
The User ID enables the association of one or more sessions (and any
activity within those sessions) with a unique and persistent ID that
you send to Analytics.
To implement the User ID, you must be able to generate your own unique
IDs, consistently assign IDs to users, and include these IDs wherever
you send data to Analytics.
For example, you could send the unique IDs generated by your own
authentication system to Analytics as values for the User ID. Any
engagement, like link clicks and page or screen navigation, that
happen while a unique ID is assigned can be sent and connected in
Analytics via the User ID.
The best you could do would be to create a custom dimension and send that with every hit username=johnscustomerId. Which you appear to have already done. This is what I have done in the past and it works perfectly well.
Related
I'm a bit confused on how activating the use of Google Signals in GA4 affects the reporting and raw data. One thing that is obvious is that after activation the demographics data becomes available (gender, age, interests) inside GA. But what about cross-device users stitching?
On the net I saw a couple of articles which have mentioned that turning Google Signals on would affect the overall number of users in the reports (basically reduce it by identifying one user across several devices when it is possible). Does it mean that there will be cross-device users stitched under one Google Client IDs (cid)? Exploring the device overlap I could see a small segment of such users in user explorer who were registered from different devices and have same Client ID on both devices.
This also means that these joint cross-device users data would actually be exported to Google BigQuery, right? By data I mean that we would see this same cross-device user under one and same Client ID in Bigquery.
Bonus question:
How does Google Client ID is actually persisted from the previous device? Does GA4 Configuration Tag sends a dedicated request to Google server on first page load to check if there is user data (Client ID) available from other devices and assigns an old cid to this new visit if match is found in the database?
Or would we see a new cid in real time, but it would be replaced later with the cid from other device when Google renders and aggregates the data on the server side before pushing it into our GA4 account reports?
* we are not currently using any internal User ID of our own to track users across devices
I am trying to see if its possible to use Firebase to show the number of active users in real time on my shopify site. I also want to show the active users on a single product page if thats possible.
I see the Firebase example code for Presence but it looks like this only works for logged in users. How do I or is it even possible to show the real time user count ignoring whether someone is logged in or not...similar to the real time google analytics count?
The Firebase presence samples (one, two, three) all rely on the Firebase onDisconnect() handling. This method allows you to specify write/delete actions that should happen to your Firebase data on the server, once it detects that the connection to a client has been lost.
A system like this can work fine with using Firebase Authentication, but you need some way to uniquely identify each user. This can be any sufficiently random identifier, or for example the uid generate by Firebase's anonymous authentication. Both serve the same goal: authentication without identifications. That last approach is somewhat similar to how many analytics services work: they give you a unique ID when they first see you and then track you by that ID.
I'm working on the architecture for a project that includes a Android and iOS apps and a web interface with a subset of the mobile apps functionalities. The project is basically a e-commerce solution. In all three interfaces I'm using Google Analytics to track some information. However I'm having an internal discussion about the extent of the information I should send to GA. What should I store in GA and what should I store in my own server?
Let me give you some examples.
Session tracking is clearly something that belong to GA.
ProductDetailViews. Sounds like something that should go into GA, specially considering the enhanced e-commerce module.
Shared item. When a user shares some content over a social network, should I store that information on GA or in my own server? I'm inclined to GA but it becomes more ambiguos.
Do you see my point? Can someone share a general rule or recommendation on what should be saved in GA and what should be saved on the projects own server?
Thanks
For those examples I would generally send all the hits to Google Analytics. Here are a few reasons:
Preventing data silos. You want all of your data in one place and Google provides you with a database reachable via the API where you can keep all your data organised in one place. This is important when you are considering measuring performance, as you want to avoid duplication of conversions or traffic hits
Useage of Google Analytics advanced segments. With all your data in GA, you will be able to create advanced segments for analysis. But the real power is if you are using AdWords or retargeting, as you can send those Advanced Segments to AdWords, and target those users around the web with your custom data
Single point of reference for users All analytics are inaccurate, but you want to make sure they are inaccurate to the same degree. Using GA keeps all your data on the same playing field
Usability and Freedom of information Its easier to serve up your data to users within the GA interface as people are more likely to know how to navigate that than your database. You can also use the GA API to pull out any data you need to push into other visualisation tools.
User session merging With your data and userID tracking in GA, you may be able to track users as they arrive via mobile to desktop and back again, over multiple sessions.
What you need to avoid putting in to Google Analytics is personal info such as names, email address etc. There are against the TOS. But you can capture a unique userID, and match that outside of the tool later.
we have events listing website and events from different organizers are grouped (by URL), like -
www.site.com/organizer/event1
www.site.com/organizer/event2
www.site.com/organizer/event3
etc. How to give an organizer an access only to his/her part of the site's Google Analytics?
Easy way -
An organizer registers in Google Analytics
An organizer creates a counter in Google Analytics
An organizer sets this counter in his/her profile on our website.
We add this counter to our Google Analytics code on www.site.com/organizer/* pages
He/she clicks on some link in the profile and sees the GA stat only for own events.
The way I want it:
He/she clicks on some link in the profile and sees the GA stat only for own events.
Is this possible with some API to separate statistics for www.site.com/organizer/* and share a private link to it with organizer?
After reading your comments in another answer (which is basically just a copy of the comment I left on your question). I have changed my recommendation left in comment, think you should use the Google Analytics API for this.
Since you want to give others access to your own data I suggest you use a service account. You will need to do this in a server sided programing language, say PHP or C#.
Every night run a job that will extract the data you want though the Core reporting API. Store it in the database then create a page that will then display only the data you want to the different people. You will only need to run your job once per day as the data for previous days will never change. Wait at least 24 hours to get the data as data hasn't completed processing for 24 hours.
I am not sure what language plan on using but these tutorials should get you started: Google Service Account with PHP or Google Analytics API Authentication with C#
I would create different profile views with filters to include only the subset of data for the subpages.
This way, you can add a specific user access rights to that specific profile only, so they can only view that profile when they log in.
Create an include only filter which filters on Request URI: /organizer/event1, /organizer/event2, /organizer/event3 etc.
The docs describe the clientId as:
This anonymously identifies a particular user, device, or browser instance.
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/parameters#cid
It can be used to send server side hits to analytics while still tying them to a particular user.
There is also a feature in closed beta called userId, which you will be able to pass once a user has authenticated: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/user-id
userId is fairly self-explanatory. However, UA also allows you to pass your own clientid if you choose to. For developing CRM type tools, can one just associate the clientid with a user in the same way that you would with a userid? The goal is primarily to be able to track offline interactions and connect them with visitors in Analytics.
maembe,
clientID is a random number generated by Google Analytics, and keep in mind it's always required and its value should always be a random UUID (version 4) (you could technically use your own, but I am not sure how practical and reliable this would be). Most importantly, you can easily access it with predefined get function (see documentation).
For your needs, this is exactly what you should do -- if someone sings ups, store ClientID in your CRM and then if there is any offline purchase, record the transactions with measurement protocol using the stored clientID. Google Analytics will then make the link (attribution) with that visitor and you will see this in your reports. Also, take advantage of newly available custom metrics and dimensions which can store pretty much anything you want (think of customer segmentation etc.). Beware of storing PII though.
Hope this helps :)
I am curious how UserID is going to work, it might change everything, but for now, I wouldn't rely on it as there is very little information available.
This Analytics support page now states the differences between Client ID and User ID - https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6205850?hl=en#clientid-userid
Essentially client IDs represent unauthenticated users, and are automatically randomly generated.
User IDs represent authenticated users, and must be set manually.
It's worth noting that user IDs cannot be things like an email address, or other data that would allow Google to identify the user
You will not upload any data that allows Google to personally identify an individual (such as certain names, Social Security Numbers, email addresses, or any similar data), or data that permanently identifies a particular device (such as a unique device identifier if such an identifier cannot be reset).
If you upload any data that allows Google to personally identify an individual, your Google Analytics account can be terminated, and you may lose your Google Analytics data.
Taken from: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/policy
I'd imagine User ID is designed to differentiate the behavior of an authenticated user. here