I'm looking to get information about users sessions from google analytics. Things like:
date of visit
referral
device type
exit page
browser
time on site
etc.
However, Analytics API seems to only offer this data as totals, and not per user. So I can't know how much a specific user stayed on the website for example.
The final result I'm looking for is to tie this data from analytics with the user id from our CRM platform using the google UUID saved in cookie.
Is it possible to retrieve this data from Analytics or you can only access it with Analytics 360?
User level data is not available in standard GA (except in a limited fashion via the User Explorer report which cannot be exported). You'd need to store user id or client id in a custom dimension (you must not store personally identifiable data in GA, even in hashed form, so take care what you use as user id) and then select this as first dimension when you export the data. Obviously this does not help you with data that's already been collected.
Related
I'm new when using google analytics for App and it make me quite confused, I have several question that I want to ask:
Is Google Analytics still track unique users? some of source that I read say no but and some say yes I'm quite confused about this
Let say if I want to search a Unique users can I use User Type dimension with users metric to get the right value for new users (Not with session but users)
for question number 2, let say it have New Users and Returning Users as user Type dimension and users have a metric and from google analytics itself give an explanation such as this:
Users who have initiated at least one session during the date range. Learn more about how Analytics calculates the number of users.
Can someone help me to understand this? I'm already using it for 2 weeks and still confused with this
By default, Google Analytics track unique users by setting an unique id (clientId) in device memory (a cookie in web tracking). This method isn't accurate because cleaning a cookie or device cache would reset clientId, causing the tool to identify a new user in the next session. To avoid it you can collect User Id, a built-in dimension specific to user tracking.
We have just linked our GA360 account to BigQuery but we noticed from the docs that the userId doesn't get exported. This is really annoying as one of our main use case was to join the userId with our CRM system.
Why is Google not exporting the userId ? Is there workaround ?
Thank you for your answers.
The solution is to create a User level custom dimension and pass your user's ID into that as well.
There's no restriction on exporting your custom dimensions, and these are exported to BigQuery.
Enjoy :)
How User-ID works
User-ID enables the association of one or more sessions (and the activity within those sessions) with a unique and persistent ID that you send to Analytics.
To implement 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 User-ID. Any engagement, like link clicks and page or screen navigation, that happen while a unique ID is assigned can be sent to Analytics and connected via User-ID.
In an Analytics implementation without the User-ID feature, a unique user is counted each time your content is accessed from a different device and each time there’s a new session. For example, a search on a phone one day, purchase on a laptop three days later, and request for customer service on a tablet a month after that are counted as three unique users in a standard Analytics implementation, even if all those actions took place while a user was signed in to an account. While you can collect data about each of those interactions and devices, you can’t determine their relevance to one another. You only see independent data points.
When you implement User-ID, you can identify related actions and devices and connect these seemingly independent data points. That same search on a phone, purchase on a laptop, and re-engagement on a tablet that previously looked like three unrelated actions on unrelated devices can now be understood as one user’s interactions with your business.
From Google analytics about the userid feature the user id is used in the background by google analytics to analyse your data.
If you want to analyse on the user id you can just add it as a custom dimension you will then be able to see it.
Where does google get this data from and is it possible to manually obtain this data on my own website without it (assuming it is in some kind of cookie/user-agent string/identifier/etc)?
Google gets its data from the 3rd Party double click cookie.
Here is a bit more detail from the Google Analytics documentation
If you are looking to get similar data - you can purchase it from services like Comscore but you would need to get something to identify your users against their database.
Why don't you want to use cookie/ user-agent?
My personal perspective is that even if users block cookies- then some data is better than no data.
When a user logged in their google account, then google analytics collect demographic information like age, gender for that user.
There are also other sources for collecting demographic data along with google account information like:
Third-party double click cookie,
Android advertising ID,
IOS Identifier for advertisers.
I am new to Google Analytics. I have a conversion set up, and I'd like to capture demographics for individuals who convert at e individual level. When a user converts, I'd like to pass the statistics from Google Analytics into my own database, or keep a record of the ID assigned at conversion in Google Analytics and download the data. Is this possible? I want to do analysis on who is likely to convert versus not - age, shopping habits, etc - and link these details back to the type of specific conversion.
Thoughts?
We if want to add add track users at individual level, try creating a Custom diamension and passing the userID everytime you make a GA call.
Next to view the same :- in tables that you view your analytics data, there will be this option called 'Secondary diamention', from the list that appears.. Choose the custom diamension name that you had assigned. Now you will be able to see each row with the userID along slide.
Add user ID to your tracking script
The first step to your question is to add the user ID to your tracking. If you have some way to identify users on your website (ie: through email marketing tool, your CRM, etc), then you should set up user ID tracking. Here is the Google Dev article about that:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/cookies-user-id?hl=en
However, basically... you just have to add this to your tracking script (replacing the 'create' line you currently have, replacing "USER_ID" with the user ID your system gives them.
ga('create', 'UA-XXXXX-Y', { 'userId': USER_ID });
In addition, I usually include this UserID as a custom dimension, so that I can view it in Google Analytics and other reports. To do this, first set up a custom dimension for your ID, as a "User-level" dimension. Then just add this after your user ID is available (assuming this is your first custom dimension):
ga('set', 'dimension1', USER_ID);
Connect User ID to Demographics
Unfortunately, the demographics information that Google Analytics provides (under "Audience") is not compatible with custom dimensions (like userID). So, the API only allows you to pull the audience data in aggregate (ie: connected to City, number of users, pageviews of those types of people... etc). If this works for you, check out the GA Query Explorer (below) to try out different combinations of dimensions & metrics to drill down as deep as you can and maximize the information you gain from this demographic info.
Connect Google Analytics Data to Your Database
In order to connect GA data to your database in an automated fashion, you will need to set up some kind of scheduled process that runs a query off of the Google Analytics API. To explore what combinations of metrics and stuff are available, I'd suggest checking out the Google Analytics API Explorer and the Google Analytics API reference material. What I did was set up an SSIS package (using SSIS GoogleAnalyticsSource) as the data source, which made it fairly easy. Then just scheduled that to run daily, populating the data I want into my database.
Alternatively, you could download less complicated reports directly from Google Analytics and import them into your database with something like SQL Server Management Studio.
Is it possible to use a single google analytics account, in particular, e-commerce, for more than user? I fact, I need it to be used for as a lot of users. What I want in a nutshell is this:
The users come to my web site and provide me their e-commerce data in json or any other format somehow. I have a google analytics, so I take that e-commerce data and send to google analytics. And then show them the reports for their data from google analytics by google analytics API (I guess it's reports API?)
The question is not whether or not it is profitable, makes sense, etc. The question is, can I use my, single google analytics account to achieve what I've described above?
Yes you can. Since you need to keep the users apart in a way that does not allow them to look into other users data you can use a single account for up to 50 users, since this is how many data views you can have per account (view permissions can be set at account level)1. Filter the view by hostname (or whatever) to record only the current users data per view.
If you do not need the interface (i.e. if you want to query GA via the api and build custom dashboards) you can have even more - simply store in unique id per user and use that to filter the data before displaying it in a dashboard. So as far as that part of the question is concerned you are safe.
Where things probably start to fall apart is data collection. Is looks like you want to do some sort of batch processing of accumuluated e-commerce data. Since you cannot send a timestamp for a user interaction all dates within GA will be off. Plus you have data limits (I'm thinking of max interactions per minute that you can send), so your insertion process might be not very efficient. It would probably be better to create something on top of the measuremnt protocol that allows your clients to send data in realtime.
1 To make this a little clearer, you can set up 50 entities whith different access permissions. Of course every view can have as many users a you like, but they will all see the same data.