AdSense Revenue only appearing with one dimension on certain days - google-analytics

I have an API importer that runs through each day for four different accounts (same user login). It uses the same set of dimensions and metrics for each account.
On random days, for just one account, the AdSense revenue will be 0, but pageviews will appear. When I replicate in the API explorer, I see that AdSense revenue will appear when I have only one dimension.
Two strange things:
Revenue is greater than 0 on certain days. If we hit the API at random times, it will provide the AdSense revenue with all dimensions. Other times it won't.
Adsense revenue returning with one dimension in the API explorer.
It's not the issue if the API breaking with AdSesne, because it does appear from time to time. We know it's getting revenue, just missing from the API.
Anyone seen this before? It's quite frustrating.
Thanks!

Related

Google Analytics suddenly started Sampling Data, 3k sessions for property over time period

We are using the free level of GA and have been creating reports using Custom Dimensions and Metrics since last summer.
We also use the Google Sheets Analytics add-on to post process data pulled from the API.
Overnight on 16-17 May (UK Time), our reports suddenly started showing as being sampled. Prior to that we had no sampling at all, as our reports are scheduled so I can look back through the revision history to see changes made when the scheduled reports run.
This sampling is occurring in custom reports viewed in the GA platform and in GA sheets. I've done some analysis and it appears to only occur at the point that more than one Custom Dimension is added to a report, or when the GA dimensions ga:hour or ga:dateHour are used (ga:date does not trigger sampling).
All our Custom Dimensions and Custom Metrics are set at Hit level (I've read a post where it was claimed to be due to mixing scopes on Dimensions & Metrics, but we are not doing this).
If I reduce the date range of a query (suggested as a solution on many blogs), the sampling level actually gets worse rather than better.
For the month of May we didn't even hit 4k sessions at property level. I can't find any reference anywhere to any changes being made to GA that would cause sampling to apply to our reports (change documentation, Google Blogs etc).
Is anyone else experiencing this or can anyone shed any light on why this might be happening? Given how we use GA if we can't resolve this then it's a year of work down the drain, so I'm really keen to at least know why this has suddenly happened even if ultimately nothing can be done about it.

How to fix double- (triple, quadruple...) counted pages in Google Analytics for previous months?

I have several months worth of data in Google Analytics that is currently more or less useless, because some pageviews were being counted 2 or 3 (or more?) times.
The issue as far as I can tell came from a combination of a jQuery address plugin and AddThis' adding a tracking # to URLs shared on social media.
I've removed the plugins and implemented this filter to stop Google Analytics from tracking trailing vs. non-trailing slashes as 2 or more pageviews.
It works now, but is there a good way to go back and apply the filter to previous months?
The data should be salvageable I think, since Analytics tracked the Sessions correctly, but the Pageviews and Unique Pageviews way too high.
Comparing an affected time period last year to the same (unaffected) time period this year:
Unfortunately... Once GA data is sent and processed on their servers, it can't be changed.
Although your "pages/session" and "bounce rate" are unreliable, most of the other information should still be fine, for example "device type". Even conversion rate percentages are calculated as Conversions / Users - so in most cases that won't be affected.

Why are Google Analytics Dashboard statistics changing?

Background:
I have a Google Analytics account using which I am tracking user activity for web and mobile app. After logging into your account and choosing the web property and the corresponding view, you generally see a dashboard with quick stats like Pageviews, Users, Sessions, Pages/Sessions, Avg. Session Duration, Bounce Rate and percentage of new sessions. You can change the time period (from the top right area of the Dashboard) to get the same stats for that period.
Problem:
Last week, I was interested in the three main stats: Page views, Users and Sessions for a particular day - say, day A. The dashboard showed the following stats:
Pageviews - 1,660,137
Users - 496,068
Sessions - 983,549
This report was based on 100% of sessions.
I go back to the dashboard TODAY and check the same stats for the same day A. Here's what I saw:
Pageviews - 1,660,137
Users - 511,071
Sessions - 1,005,517
This report is also based on 100% of sessions.
Nothing was changed in the tracking code for the web and mobile app. Could someone explain why I have this difference in the stats? Is this normal?
They need some time to update the system, otherwise their system would overwhelm
When you first create a profile it can take up to 48 -72 hours for it to start showing data.
After that time data will appear instantly in the Real-time reports.
Standard reports take longer to finish processing. You need to remember the amount of data that is being processed. Some of the data may appear in the standard reports after a few hours. The numbers have not completed processing for at least 24 hours, so anything you look at then will not be accurate.
When checking Google Analytics never look at todays or yesterdays numbers in the standards reports, if you want accurate information. Things get even more confusing when you consider time zones. When exactly is it yesterday? I have noticed numbers changing as far back as 48 hours. But Google Says in there documentation 24 hours. I am looking for the link in the documentation will post it when I find it.
Found it: Data Limits
Data processing latency
Processing latency is 24-48 hours. Standard accounts that send more
than 200,000 sessions per day to Google Analytics will result in the
reports being refreshed only once a day. This can delay updates to
reports and metrics for up to two days. To restore intra-day
processing, reduce the number of sessions you send to < 200,000 per
day. For Premium accounts, this limit is extended to 2 billion hits
per month.
So try doing the same thing again today but check your last day being Monday. When you check again next week the numbers should be correct.

Can Google Analytics show me visits by hour?

I am interested in seeing visits on my site broken down by hour - is there any way to generate a report of this in Google Analytics? It appears that all metrics are only broken down by day. Maybe I can get this information through the GA API?
Since Google Analytics was revised the currently accepted answer is no longer available. The current version of Google Analytics will let you view visitors per hour:
Go to the Reporting Tab
Select "Audience"
Select "Overview"
Select "Hourly"
If you're trying to determine total traffic by hour of the day for a given date range then you can use this custom report:
https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?type=custom_report&uid=pToP7693ReSxfSIpbqHmWg
Only a few reports have hour-by-hour data; as far as I know, they're all in the 'Visitors' section.
For example, to see Visits by hour over a period of time, click Visits, Visitor Trending, then Visitors. Then, in the top right of the report, select Graph by: (icon of a clock)
All of the reports under Visitor Trending have hour-by-hour data, except Absolute Unique Visitors.
As far as the API goes, you can check what query combinations are valid here (since there are restrictions): http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataReferenceDimensionsMetrics.html
According to that, all metrics can be viewed by an hourly dimension except Campaign metrics and Visitor (not to be confused with Visit) metrics.
You can test the query you want to run with the Google Analytics Data Feed Query Explorer
If using a (downloadable, emailable) custom report is an option, you can use the custom report described on http://salman-w.blogspot.com/2012/07/analytics-day-of-week-hour-of-day-report.html
The article tells you to do the following:
Create a custom report with flat table (I am sure it will work with explorer style reports too)
Add the dimension hour (not hour of day)
Add the metric visits, pageviews, etc
Preview

Possible Google Analytics Bug - Traffic Sources Total Visits not matching Total Visits in other reports

Has anyone else seen this issue?
As of roughly 2 weeks ago, I get conflicting figures for the Total Visits metric between the Traffic Sources report and the other reports (e.g. Visitors, Dashboard). For example, for the week of 5/9/2010 through 5/15/2010, the Dashboard and Visitors reports both say 386 Visits. The Traffic Sources report says 157 Visits, and the 4 main source types (Search, Direct, Referral, Other) sum to 157 Visits, not 386.
Any ideas? Is this a known bug, or could there be a configuration issue?
Thanks.
Well it seems that quite a few GA users have observed unaccounted-for behavior, particularly during the past couple of months.
For instance,
18 - 19 May 2010:
more than 40 different GA users posted to the GA
User Forum all regarding the same
issue: no data whatever was
recorded in their GA Accounts
during the 18th and 19th of May. No
response from Google and nothing in
the GA Blog. Several users who had
other GA accounts that were functioning normally during this period, suggested that the problem might be caused by recent changes by Google to the GATC (which was in fact recently revised)--many of those who posted on the Forum said that indeed they had recently added the latest version of the GATC to their Sites/Pages.
6 - 9 May 2010:
Over 50 GA users reported, by
posts to the GA Forum, a complete
GA outage during the period 6 - 9 May
(no data appearing in their reports
for at least one of those days). This
time a GA Team member did respond with
a one-line response "there was a
delay in reporting, no data was lost."
This post also referenced a Twitter
message 4 from GA stating the same
thing.
In addition, i've seen a half dozen, perhaps more, recent posts (past 60 days) on the GA Forum in which users reported significant discrepancies between an aggregate figure and the sum of the constituents--both sets of figures from the same Report, e.g.,
Numbers Don't add up on the Absolute Unique Visitor's Report
Search Engine drill-down visitors don't match total
Neither Post was answered (either by the GA Team or anyone else).
Finally, since it's just a matter of clicking a menu and selecting a different option, i suggest comparing the figures you recited in your question with the analogous figures for Page Views, which is probably the simplest measurement in client-side analytics ("Visits" by contrast is strongly influenced by user cookie manipulation).
Through some trial-and-error looking at every specific source, I've traced the error to one item: within the Traffic Sources reports for the affected days (the issue seems to have partially righted itself as of yesterday's data, at least for my account), the delta/error/black hole was always equal to the Google CPC Search traffic for that day.
I have no idea what's causing the issue, but at least I know how to manually attribute the numbers. Hopefully Google has fixed this...
Thank you to all who commented/answered. I appreciate it.

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