Situation: I have used Google Tag Manager to set up Google Analytics (GA - Universal) on a multisite network. There is one GTM container, and each website has its own GA property. I used a GTM variable to reference all of the GA properties. I am able to track cross-domain sessions. In testing, I am able to follow a user's session across multiple domains under the same session / client ID.
Problem: I'm stuck with what to do next. I'd like to create some Goals and Views that track a user's journey through my sites and measure the usual stats (bounce, drop-off points conversions, etc.). However, I'm not sure where to begin. I see plenty of information on the Internet for how to set up cross-domain GA tags in GTM. However, I don't see anything out there for how to create Views and Goals for cross-domain setups. A few questions that come to mind are:
Do I create Goals in the destination site's GA account (e.g. mycheckout.com), or the site where the session begins (e.g. myproductinfo.com)?
When creating Goals, do I only use the permalink slug, or the entire link? I thought I could only add the permalink.
How does this information roll up into one report?
I found this link, but I'm not sure if it's the 'best practice'. I would greatly appreciate it if someone who has previously implemented this could provide an outline of best practices, or a link to a good tutorial on the subject.
Thanks for your help!
Chris
You need to understand GA definition of Views and Properties. Views are like database table views: you can either show the whole table or a sample of it.
To have all data collected without sampling a "Raw Data" view (no filters) should always be used. Each view has its own conversion goal definitions. So in the "Raw Data" view you can create a goal for any page tracked. If you filter a view for one domain (e.g. "confirmation.com View with appropriate filters"), only goals for this domain should be created (otherwise they will never count a conversion).
When creating goals you can define filters for the "ga:pagePath" parameter. So it depends on your GA tracking setup, what part of the URL it tracks. Go into chrome web developer toolbar and hit the "network" tab. Open your page in this tab. Then search for requests ending with "collect", these are the data trackpoints send to GA. There you can debug what URL information is sent to GA (search for the "dl" parameter within the query string parameters list).
Related
I'm a consumer data analyst who is not very familiar to coding other than occasional encounters with HTML and Python, and I'm just starting with the coding part of Web Analytics. In particular, I need to learn about checking websites I don't own (therefore I don't have access to their Analytics accounts) for tracking info, but it has been phenomenally hard to find information on which tracking function each component of code stand for, or to what extent it is visible from the page source.
For a project, here is a page I'm trying to check for Google Analytics/Tag Manager/alternative analytics setup, and see what is exactly being tracked on it. Other than the source code, I checked it with Ghostery, which gave me this Tag Manager code page. Is it possible to check tracking info from these two (events, pageviews, URI and how many custom dimensions there is, specifically), and which part of the code includes that info (particularly URI and dimension info - the first two, I have more idea about)?
This is a page I'm also looking into. I can see that this one has Google Analytics/Tag manager, but again, I can't make sure of what is being tracked, and whether the Analytics/Tag Manager setup is looking -potentially- problematic in any way. Here is the Tag Manager page for this one that I obtained through Ghostery.
Any help would be much appreciated...
Looks like what you are looking for is Google Tag Assistant extension for google chrome: https://get.google.com/tagassistant/
you can download it from here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tag-assistant-by-google/kejbdjndbnbjgmefkgdddjlbokphdefk?hl=en
When you install it it will appear as icon on any page you visit and it will show you all GA implementations on a page:
You can select tracking ID you are interested in and it will tell you how many Page Views/events were fired for that particular tracking ID only:
Then you can select individual tracking event/page view and see all data that are being sent with that tracking request. Just Click on URLs and click the icon to put the data in table:
Here "cd" stands for Custom Dimension, so here you can clearly see 2 custom dimensions that are being tracked:
Hope this helps, good luck!
I know that it might be odd, but I need your help with the google analytics set up.
Task: I need to set up brochure downloads as a goal for international students on a page https://www.cqu.edu.au/international-students/international-brochures .
In a perfect world, I would need to set up an individual goal for each type of brochure download (postgraduation, undergraduate, English courses) but I decided to start from "all brochures" to save the number of goals that I have for the view. Unfortunately, I don't have a chance to set up "events", so I have to work with goals only.
Final goal destination: Any page containing "pdf_file" in its description.
Pathway: come to International section, move to brochures, then go to brochure page (containing "pdf_file" in its description, for ex. - https://www.cqu.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/158540/2017-Undergraduate-International-Guide.pdf).
The problem: I tried to use regular expressions such as "^/__data/assets/pdf_file/." or ^/pdf_file/(.) and I can't see conversions in real time test.
However, nothing helped, and goals (even the page visit) still aren't tracking correctly. What am I doing wrong? And, if possible, how can I split goals across different brochure types?
Many thanks,
Kirill
You are on the right track. You just need one Goal. The problem you have is that after clicking a pdf document you are being redirected to a PDF viewer iframe. This is a PDF view "page" with no Google analytics tracking code whatsoever.If you use are using destination goals the only way this will work is by having installed the Google Analytics (GA) tracking code at the "final destination page".
One way to track pdf "views" is by creating a short url for each one, hence you will be able to track or check how many of them have views.
Another way is to create an onclick event within each link. But this is only possible if you can setup the events in GA. Creating this kind of event tracking will allow you to set up labels for each pdf's name to be able to identify or track each one of them.
I have one website and 2 blogs. Everything is working for years and till recently we were ok with setup.
I am promoting one of the blog pages on Twitter,Facebook,LinkedIn. I can see conversions on main property but I cant tell how many conversions were from each of the sources. I just can see blog page as a source. When i switch to blog property in GA i can see segmented traffic by sources but ofc no conversions (goals are defined only on the main site)
I am reading for tracking goals from multiple properties but it only confuses me more and more. Is this possible to pass data from one property to another and be able to see what I want to see (segmentation by sources and conversions) ?
I am new to Google Analytics, and when I walked through the setup process, there was a lot of explanation about Social settings. I suspect this is new. Google has put in fields for you to track traffic to your blogs that comes in from your other social presence(s).
You'll want to identify your profile URLs for Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook so that it can break it down for you correctly.
They state:
If you leave the Web Property Prefix blank, you'll see Activities data for the domain you are tracking with Google Analytics (e.g. example.com). If you also wish to see Activities data for properties such as your YouTube channel, enter your prefixes here; for example, youtube.com/example. Make your prefix as specific as possible (i.e. do not simply enter youtube.com). Activities data is only shown for properties from which your domain has received hits.
Source: Google Analytics Social Settings: Web Property Prefix Help
Site A gives their affiliates an interactive component (traffic map based on Google Maps), which they in turn put on their sites (Site B) in an iframe. The component is dynamic, doesn't change the URL of parent site, and has an id for each affiliate site.
What I would like to do is track the displays of the component. (Price of using Google Maps for the component depends on number of views).
At the moment the component is in <iframe src="http://SiteA.com/q?cp=43.520,18.910,10&cm=1"></iframe>.
I have looked at the other topics but didn't found a solution to that problem. I would really appreciate any help, I had no experience with cross-site tracking yet.
You as siteA owner want to count number of displays of iframe on other sites, correct?
The basic way to do it is logs analysis — every time your server returns page http://SiteA.com/q?cp=43.520,18.910,10&cm=1 or similar it adds an entry to your server's log files. The can be count when. There is a number of solutions for analyzing log data. Some of them opensource and free, other are paid services. For exmaple: http://awstats.sourceforge.net/
There is other ways to count it, but it's probably easiest way of all.
I'm creating a shareable widget, for anyone to copy onto their website. The shareable piece of code is an frame that points to the actual widget that lives on our hosted site (i.e. ourdomain.com). If we ever want to tweak the actual widget, we can do so in one place, with no effect on the iframes pointing to it from other sites we have no control over.
I tried the approach of cross domain tracking. While I was analyzing the results, I observed that the path of the shared widget code (not on our domain) appears within the content view in GA. This runs counter to a response from my previous post "if it is being inserted into many domains you are going to need to set up multiple GA accounts and use different account numbers per user."
Correct me if I am wrong: Any tracking code using our unique account id will appear in our GA by default, no matter where it's hosted, whether the code is implementing cross domain tracking or not.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Analytics/thread?tid=6af5b4c3e30c71be&hl=en
Since any page that hosts GA tracking code shows up in our content view, I could locate where the widget is being viewed by simply looking for all pages whose name did not include ourdomain.com. Of course this includes proxy servers as well, but I was going to also include a custom variable so I could implement a filter based on the custom variable.
So explain to me where this breaks down or what I'm missing here. Is there some amount of data I am losing here because the GA cookie is not in fact being utilized? Give me a good reason why I should put in the effort to fully implement cross domain tracking, including the necessary P3P implementation on our server for IE visitors.
As a sidenote, I am considering adding GA tracking code with an event tracker within the widget itself to track when people actually USE the widget (as distinct from the when the widget is loaded). I understand that by not implementing cross domain tracking I would not be able to obtain any data about the visitor, only whether the widget was acted upon or not.
As the referring site is the primary bit of information we need,
I'm going to pass the referrer in the URL that loads the iframe content
and then overide the referrer within the tracking code
_gaq.push(['_setReferrerOverride',ht_referrer]);
as documented here:
http://www.prusak.com/google-analytics-referrer-override/
This way, I don't need to inject tracking code into my widget, just some JavaScript that adds the referrer to the URL that loads the iframe.
Wish me luck.