Track returning visitors' source - google-analytics

An affiliate website sends traffic to a shop, which should compensate it for purchases up to 90 days after the first visit.
To calculate the compensation, the shop produces with GA a conversion report based on traffic source, but it seems to be excluding returning customers (which account for about 55%).
How is it possible to ensure the original traffic source gets retained for at least 90 days?

Try this report: Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversion. After that select 90 days range:
For this to work you need to have custom Conversion Segments set up properly. Check it out, i think you will find youre solution there.

Related

Google Analytics Hit Quotas

I wonder whether someone can help me please.
I have a user who under a specific property, sporadically receives the following error:
Some hits sent on 03-Jul-2018 to property ...... exceeded one or more hit quotas and were therefore not processed.
Hits can be dropped when daily or monthly hit limits are exceeded. You can view your hit volume levels in Property Settings in Analytics.
Hits can also be dropped if visitor hit limits are exceeded. This can happen when your site is incorrectly generating the visitor ID for a GA session. Contact your website administrator to check that the visitor ID generation has been correctly implemented.
They are not using the Premium account but when I look at the data for the day in question, there aren't any issues with regards to 'High Cardinality' which unless I've misunderstood I'd expect to see.
Could someone look at this please and offer some guidance where the issue may be because this area is fairly new to me.
Many thanks and kind regards
Chris
Collection limits are influenced by 2 factors:
The tracker: whether you use ga.js,gtag.js,analytics.js etc... here are the details.
The property type: whether you are using GA (10M hits / month) or GA 360 (2B hits / month).
In your case you are facing a property limit. To find out when such limits where reached, you can create a custom report using a time dimension (eg date+time) combined with the hits metric. You can also combine the hit metrics with other dimensions (country, browser, device) to see if you find any patterns as to why you're getting so many hits.
Cardinality is something else: it refers to the number of unique value combinations for your dimensions. For instance if you have 500K events where each event category is different, you'll have a Cardinality of 500K on the event category dimension. The more hits, the more likely you'll have a high cardinality, but the 2 aren't necessary related (if you send 10B events with the same category, the cardinality on the category is 1).
So focus on identifying and solving your limits/quotas issue, as it's the real issue here:
If the number of hits is legitimate (you have a huge amount of traffic), then the only options are to upgrade to GA 360 or reduce the number of hits for each session
If the number of hits is abnormally high (eg traffic is stable but hits increased dramatically), look for implementation issues, especially generic event trackers such as error tracking with tools like Google Tag Manager

Google AdWords Conversions not matching database entries

I've just set up a tool on a client site that users can use to request a quote from our client. To do this the user lands on a form page, fills in their details, submits and then lands on a thank-you page. Pretty basic.
I set this process up as a goal in Google Analytics, using the destination type goal: "begins with /thank-you" and shared that goal as a conversion in Google AdWords.
I decided to run a few Google AdWords ads to promote the tool. I also wanted to double-check the conversion data that AdWords gives you so I set the destination URL in Adwords to www.example.com/form-page?adsrc=adwords1 (2, 3, 4 etc. for each ad) and I configured the DB so that there was a column that tracked which URL the user was on when filling in the form (this would be the column I counted to get the number of conversions that came from AdWords so I could compare)
Further to this, I made sure that the initial URL parameters that the user landed on were stored in the session so that if the user browsed to other pages and came back to fill in the form later, it would still attribute the conversion to AdWords.
I tested this thoroughly on a staging and production environment and everything was working correctly.
I ran the campaign for a week and when I checked, the conversion results in the Data Base vs the ones coming from AdWords are wildly different. The DB tells me I've had 5 conversions while AdWords gives me 21.
Is there anything in the way Google uses its gclid that may be causing this issue? Or is there a problem with the way I've set up the measurement structure?
This can be caused by few things, but I think this is the GA/AdWords issue, more than your DB/session set-up.
Gclid shouldn't influence your goal, since it is used only for AdWords/Analytics interactions, Goals should not be affected in your set-up.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2938246?hl=en
Probable cause: If your goal set-up only contains "begins with /thank-you", isn't it possible, that you are counting all the sessions which reach thanks-you page? Not just AdWords?
Solution: if you need to count conversions in AdWords (for performance improvements), use AdWords conversion code at the same page, this counts only those users, who clicks an ad and reach your thank-you page in x (default 30) days. Be sure to count only unique conversions (users by cookie).
Differences between GA/AdWords conversion count:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2679221?hl=en
Google attributes conversions to the last marketing channel, where direct visits do not count as a marketing channel (if you look at their attribution flow visualization you see that the penultimate step is to check for existing campaign information for the user). So GA might overcount Adwords visits (or other campaigns) and conversely shows fewer conversions for direct visits.
On contrast your database probably records the last traffic channel without an elaborate attribution model, so it will show less campaign traffic.
Also IIRC the adwords interface records the conversion for the time of the ad click, not the actual goal conversion, so the timeframes for the conversions differ.

Google Analytics and Piwik Discrepancy

Hi guys, I was wondering if anyone have the same problem as I do. I have 2 trackers which are Google Analytics and Piwik but after sometime I found out there is a discrepancy. Please read below for more information.
Here is data for yesterday (with New Piwik Last Week v1.7.1 version then).
GGA : 14 803 visits (Unique Visistors)
Piwik : 10 254 visits (Unique Visistors)
31% discrepancy.
Question
What do i have to do to match the records? or which of the statistics is the correct ones?
Any advice would be much appreciated.
Respective to the different programs they are both correct. The difference comes in in HOW they calculate what a unique visitor is. No two stats aggregators work the same.
Google Analytics What's the difference between the 'Absolute Unique Visitor' report and the 'New vs. Returning' report?:
Absolute Unique Visitors
In this report, the question asked is: 'has this visitor visited the website prior to the active (selected) date range?' The answer is a simple yes or no. If the answer is 'yes,' the visitor is categorized under 'Prior Visitors' in our calculations; if it is no, the visitor is categorized under 'First Time Visitors.' Therefore, in your report, visitors who have returned are still only counted once.
Piwik FAQs:
How is a 'unique visitor' counted in Piwik?
Unique Visitors is the number of visitors coming to your website; Unique Visitors are determined using first party cookies.
If the visitor doesn't accept cookie (disabled, blocked or deleted cookies), a simple heuristic is used to try to match the visitor to a previous visitor with the same features (IP, resolution, browser, plugins, OS, ...).
Note that by default, Unique Visitors are available for days, weeks and months periods, but Unique Visitors is not processed for the "Year" period for performance reasons. See how to enable Unique Visitors for all date ranges.
They both use cookies to determine uniques, but both go about it calculating them in different ways. It's apples and oranges when comparing stats packages side by side.
Examine the rest of the stats beyond unique visitors. If there is a wide margin across the board, take a close look at the implementation of both.
If all is well with both implementations, then pick one and go with it for the stats. Overall trends is what you are looking for. Are the stats you want to go up going up? Are the stats you want to go down going down?

Find value of link source using advanced segment

I want to see how many transactions Facebook provides and the value of these in a webshop.
I have tried to do this in two different ways:
When I use the filter box and write facebook, i get 20 transactions from 30.000 visits.
But,
When i add an advanced segments (Include source containing facebook), I get 60 transactions from 25.000 visits.
How can i verify which one is true?
Check your tracking code for proper setup, in most cases it is a reason for this kind of trouble (use ga debugger for chrome or at least firebug's network monitoring).
Check that you're comparing the same time periods. Consider data sampling inaccuracy if you deal with a high traffic volume.
For verification purposes try to mark your facebook links with utm tags and track your visits/transactions in Campaigns report.

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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