I'm trying to troubleshoot two destination goals that are exactly the same, except for one uses an "exact match" & relative url (/contact/) and the other uses "begins with" & fully-resolved url (http://www.example.com/contact/).
The exact match isn't returning any results, whereas the begins with recorded 400 conversions within the same 7-day period. I'm not 100% sure, but I'm guessing it has to do with the fact that "exact match" is much stricter than "begins with", and I know that if you have query strings in the URL, it won't trigger an "exact match" goal. Is this correct? Or is there something else that I'm missing?
This leads me to the question - do UTMs count as query strings that fail to trigger "exact match" goals? i.e. if I set up a destination goal with "exact match" /contact/ and sent traffic there via a UTM www.example.com/contact/?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=examplevideo, would that trigger the goal?
An "exact match" goal needs to precisely match the URL. If there's any difference, the goal won't be triggered.
I tend to use the Begins With and Regular Expression options, moreso the latter because I'm familiar with regex. If the goal page is /contact/, a match pattern of:
^/contact/
...will match any page that begins with /contact/ regardless of what comes after it.
Related
Trying to create a simple segment to excludes a referral source retrospectively (a spam site called trafficbot.link) from all analytics views.
I can:
…set Traffic Sources > Source > contains / starts with / exactly matches, and it will correctly show ONLY the spam/fake accesses (the percentage of users and sessions on the right is refreshed in real time).
I can't:
…do it the other way around, i.e. use does not contain / does not exactly match / is not one of.
The total stays stuck on 100% of sessions.
Am I missing something obvious?
I note this answer which has no input other than from the original questioner, suggesting Google say it's "not possible" to exclude existing requests - surely it is? Isn't that the whole point of segments? How are you supposed to filter out spam otherwise?
(I'm aware analytics filters isn't retrospective.)
You are talking about segments but the link you entered refers to filters.
Anyway, retroactively you can apply a segment to see the data without the spam one, you can use an advanced segment, choose conditions and exclude sessions that contain for example browser size equal to (not set).
https://www.fortop.it/journal/tieni-lontano-lo-spam-dai-dati-google-analytics/
I have a website on which the URLs are translated depending on the language chosen by the user.
Now, I need to set up conversion goals in GA, however I'm not sure how to do it in my case. Let's say I want to track registrations via About us page. The goal(s) would look like this:
(EN)
/
/about-us
/registration
/dashboard
(DE)
/
/über-uns
/registrierung
/dashboard
As you see, steps 2 and 3 differ in terms of language used. BUT, this still is the same goal.
How do I handle this in GA? I would prefer to have single statistic for this, instead of separating both language versions.
I know that I could set up custom pageviews but this seems like an overkill. Is there a simpler way to achieve what I need?
Thank you!
If you do not need a funnel you can send an event with a language agnostic identifier along with the pageview and make an event goal. This is only marginally simpler that custom pagenames in your tracking calls, but at least you get to keep the original urls.
As an alternative to goals altogether you could set up a hit-scoped custom metric that is incremented on each of your destination urls. This works well if you only need the raw numbers (but you cannot use this in Google Adwords the way you export goals to Adwords, so it's less useful if you do paid advertising).
You can try using RegEx (regular expressions) then, If " registration / registrierung " is your goal the use following as:
registration|registrierung
For setting up make sure you select - Regular Expression at
Destination type in Goal details.
The PIPE b/w would mean - OR - in Regex
You can apply this to goal funnels as well.
Do you want to include step 1? I would leave exclude it from the goal funnel
These regxes below would work in a funnel but the they assume that there could be other params added. If you want exact match e.g. change .* to $ But then you could miss urls with tracking params e.g. in each step.
Second step: ^\/(about-us|über-uns).*
Third step: ^\/(registration|registrierung).*
Goal page: ^\/dashboard.*
I've set up goals in Google Universal Analytics:
Destination: URL matches regex /secure/common/callback.*?success\=true
But when I look at a custom segment against the same data the numbers are way off.
Goals yesterday:
2,040. But if I go into the default reporting view "audience" and create a custom segment with the same regular expression the numbers are way off /secure/common/callback.*?success\=true
860 visitor from 630 unique visitors.
Conceivably, if a person orders more than once (highly unlikely) visits could be higher but it's rare.
Anyway, goals suggest we had 2,040 goal completions. I know from looking at our database that we had less than half that.
Am I interpreting goals wrong here?
I'm not getting the right results returned for a goal I have set up. The goal says the last 7 days have 92 goal conversions, when it should be 400+.
When a user completes a subscription purchase, they land on a confirmation page. We have several subdomains that the user can be coming from as well as the potential for a reference appended to the URL. So, I have the goal set up as a regular expression like this:
.*/insider/confirm.*
If, for example, the user pays and then is directed to the following page, shouldn't the goal be recorded?
test.com/insider/confirm?ref=2343
As I can't see anything wrong with the regular expression, although very greedy, the goals should be captured with the above example URL and goal setup.
Have you recently set this goal up? A thing with goals are that they aren't historically applicable to your data. They start collecting data from the point where you set it up.
Have you tried using the above regexp in the "All pages"-report under "Behavior"? Enter it into the filter pattern and there you can see exactly what pages your regexp would capture.
I am running into a strange issue with the goal funnel that I set up for my Shopify store.
I used the following URL for step 3, which corresponds to the customer choosing whether they'll use a guest checkout or if they'll create a new account:
/account/login/*
I used the wildcard because Shopify appends that URL with a unique ID.
Problem is, when I look at the Funnel Visualization report, I am seeing a lot of exits from step 2 (view cart), and the exit URLs are all of the type "/account/login/0f53d3781dcdf4feie6a3", which actually means they didn't actually drop from the funnel, they went to step 3, and should have been captured.
Any idea why this is happening? Did I just set things up incorrectly?
Thanks in advance!
Lukas
Google Analytics does not use wildcards, it uses regular expressions (not all regexp features are supported, though).
if you want to you regular expressions in your funnel steps the
matchtype for the destination url needs to be set to regular
expression, too.
The star character (asterisk) means "match any number of the preceding character". So "/account/login/*" would match e.g. "/account/login//" or "/account/login/////" but not "/account/login/0f53d3781dcdf4feie6a3"
You should be okay if you use the "any" character which is "." (dot), so your regexp for the funnel step would like this:
/account/login/.*
(match anything that includes the phrase "/account/login/" and has an abritrary number of abritrary characters after that). Or you might try to craft a regexp that matches only valid session ids (personally I would not bother).
You are facing this issue due to problem in Regex. Due to improper Regex, pages which should have been counted in Step 3 are appearing as exit pages in Step 2. Let me explain in detail.
The Regex you have applied is-"/account/login/*". Here * at the end means it Match zero or more of the previous items. Means it will track URLs like "/account/login//","/account/login",
and "/account/login///". But in your case URLs are different as it is being appended by Unique ID.So existing Regex will not track what you are intending to.
To solve your problem i'd recommend you to use this Regex- /account/login/.*
I believe that this should work as a dot,means get any character and a star means repeat the last character zero or more times.This means that the dot could match any letter in the alphabet, any digit, any number. And the star right after it matches the ability of the dot to match any single character, and keep on going. So this Regex will match all the URLs you are intending to track, even with random Unique IDs.
Hope i have answered your query.
Do let me know if this works for you.