i have a question as it comes to the GA account structure when you want to track multilanguge sites.
What the Google Analytics account should look like if you have your site under domain.com, and you have sites for multiple countries that are in the catalogues of the main domain like - domain.com/us , domain.com/au, domain.com/ru and so on. Of course i want to track the overall performance of sites and also every site separetely. In this case there should be one property with a non filtered viev with all the contry catalogues (just no filters), and mutiple vievs for every country? Only one tracker needed to track it properly?
Hope i have described it clearly, please help
Regards
Related
I currently manage quite a few Google Analytics accounts for different websites and am trying to work out how to remove certain Anayltics spam from these accounts. I have previously added filters like excluding Russia visitors as the businesses are local UK based but I am now getting a lot of traffic from:
Language - not set
&
Page - sharebutton.to
If i was to exlucde the above would that get rid of any actual visitors as well as spam or will it get rid of 100% spam?
If someone could help with this that would be brilliant.
Many Thanks
Paul
Filters based on countries or the name of the spam are not efficient because both can be easily changed by the spammers.
Also, it isn't possible to filter the (not set) entries in Analytics, this label is added after the visit is recorded when Analytics doesn't find a value for that dimension.
Instead what you should use
One hostname filter, this will help prevent the majority of the spam, whether it shows as referral, page, language, etc. and independently of the name used by the spammer.
A source filter for the sneaky crawlers which are far less frequent.
Here you will find detailed instructions on how to create the hostname filter and other measures you can take to prevent fake traffic.
I manage an internal website and we recently implemented campaign tracking for our emails and homepage links to see where traffic comes from.
I set up the URLs using the Google URL builder.
The data we're receiving is very bloated. We ran a test URL with 8 people, and we received 129 "views", with an average of 9 views per day for over a month. No one clicked this link after the first day.
Our average session times were about 30 minutes, which is very strange.
My questions are:
how does google track campaigns? If you use a tracking URL, does the cookie track views for any organic views after that?
Is there a tool we can use to only track first time visits using a campaign URL?
Admittedly, I'm fairly new to Google Analytics, but no one on our marketing analytics team was able to help.
Since you used the Google URL builder I don't think you have made any mistakes there. However I strongly think that the bloated data is due to Bot traffic in your account. And yes, the bot traffic does increase average session duration.
So here's a set of steps I'll suggest:
1) Create 3 views in Google Analytics (It is a best practice):
Unfiltered, Master, Test
2) Check for Langauage spam and weird referrals in your report.
3) Add filters to "Test" view to remove these bots & spam referrals. You'll need to write a regular expression for each of these filters. Also make sure you have enabled "bot filtering" in view settings for master & test view. (I am leaving Unfiltered view as it is our data backup in case if anything goes wrong.)
4) Check your traffic for next few days and try doing the URL test again and see the results.
5) If the results in Test View are correct, then apply the same filters to "Master" view.
I hope this helps.
I am implementing cross domain tracking for a client. We will be using Universal Analytics with Google Tag Manager.
Let's say the client has three domains: example.com, example.de and example.se. We would like to have a master account that tracks everything, but we would also like to be able to drill down and see a single domains stats. Perhaps this already exists without any customization but I have been unable to find anything on how though.
What I can see there are two ways to go about:
Create a filter that automatically appends the domain to the tracked data. So instead of /about in my view, I would get example.com/about and example.se/about. But how would this work with event tracking? Is it possible to get a report the way the client want's?
Use custom variables and dimensions. This way I could set up a variable for Domain and send in before tracking the data. But will it be sufficient to get the reports wanted?
Appreciate any help.
Thank you,
Bjorn
Hostname ist already tracked, you can set it as second dimension to break down pageviews etc. by domain (works with events, too). However that is really cumbersome and most people follow the route you have outlined in Point 1. (Google suggest that themselves in their filter documentation) - however you'd still need hostname set as second dimension to break down by domain in the events report (or you create custom reports filtered by hostname for events for each domain).
Or you create segments based on hostname (since you can compare up to for segments that would allow you to compare the overall performance and domain performance).
Plus of course you can create additional views filtered by hostname and add the domain name only in the rollup-profile for all domains.
So there are several ways to do this somehow okay-ish, but nothing really better than the solutions you already came up with yourself.
I currently have more than 50 microsites on my main websites. That is I have one main top level domain and I have more than 50 microsites (and growing) in subfolders on that domain.
Previously I used separate GA web properties for the separate microsites (different GA tracking ID's), which worked fine and I was able to track each sites' activity well. However, I talked to a GA staffer over email and he told me I should switch to using a singular GA web property and use multiple profiles to segment the data by subfolder/microsite. That seemed logical for a lot of reasons, tracking users over the entirety of the website in one GA session being the main one.
Anyway, I have one subfolder which houses an array of microsites, numbering almost 40 right now. I don't necessarily need to have a profile for each one of these sites but there are a couple of important ones that I need to report on individually and on a regular basis I'd like to see how traffic to the other individual sites are doing.
So my question: Is there a way in a single profile to segment data to 40+ (and growing) microsites and see month to month stats on each site? Is there a way I can load a profile dashboard with the stats (Visits/pageviews) from each microsite? Is segmenting the data even what I should be looking at? How would you, a more advanced GA user, tackle this problem?
Many thanks for your input!
jimdo (http://www.jimdo.com) offers a Google Analytics based statistics tool for their DIY website creator. They put hundreds of the (usually low traffic) sites in one profile, set a custom var with a unique ID per site and query the results via the Google API, segmented by site id (at least that is what one of their founders told during a web analytics conference a few months ago). Given that the solution works for a couple of million of client sites (their claim is to host 7 million websites for their clients) segmentation based on a unique site id seems a pretty solid idea.
Updated: As custom vars are deprecated with Universal Analytics you'd now use a custom dimension instead if a custom var. Apart from that the approach should still work.
Trying to set up Google Analytics to track two language versions of the same site: example.com and example.com.mx. Right now, we have it setup under two different profiles, each with the standard (different numbers) tracking code. That method doesn't seem to track the sites correctly.
My question: is this the correct implementation for the example.com, example.com.mx scenario or does it need to be setup as suggested be Google in the link below?
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55503
Thanks in advance for any input...
It all depends on whether you have many visitors visiting both sites - if you use different webproperty IDs (UA-XXXXXXX-Y and UA-XXXXXXX-Z), a user visiting both will be counted as 2 unique visitors, 2 visits, so your unique Visitor count will be inflated.
That is because GA uses first party cookies only for identifying unique visitors, so the cookie is unique to the domain.
If you don't care about Unique Visitor duplication, you can use 2 different webproperty ids, and even just one and separate the sites with profile-level filters.
If you do want to see both sites as only one entity, you should use _setDomainName.
Have a look at http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingSite.html for implementation advice.