I have an Adwords campaign, it sends users to Website-1.
And there is Website-2 and I want to track whether users that came to Website-2 have ever clicked on Adwords banner leading to Website-1 or not.
I could have set third-party cookies on Website-1 corresponding user is from Adwords and then get this info on Website-2. The problem is I don't have access to Website-1.
Is there any way to gain this info? I do have access to Adwords campaign, it's Google Account, Google Analytics on Website-2, it's Google Account and Website-2 itself. In other words, I have access to everything except Website-1
You might use third-party redirect/counter, for example different ad-serving tool like AdForm, where you should be able to generate unique redirect URL in bulk for your campaign.
Disadvantages:
you loose gclid information on AdWords tracking (because of redirect) and you need to use manual UTM tagging
You need to pay ad-serving fee (few bucks for thousands of visitors) and someone to set it up
You would only know if that someone clicked AdWords Ad, not really visited (beacuse you would count before that someone landed)
In conclusion: don't do it if you don't have direct access to GA of website-1
Yes you can do this in a pretty simple way, just set up Cross Domain tracking as described here:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034342?hl=en
This will save original source information (including AdWords) wen user goes from Website-1 to Website-2. On Website-1 you need to edit Analytics code (on all pages) and add so called autoLink:
ga('create', 'UA-XXXXXXX-Y', 'auto', {'allowLinker': true});
ga('require', 'linker');
ga('linker:autoLink', ['example-2.com'] );
Make sure that on both websites youre using newest version of Google Analytics: Universal Analytics, because this will not work in older version
Related
I'm using Google Analytics to send and track a registration goal, based on a custom pageview.
Basically, every time a user registers and gets redirected to dashboard, I trigger a custom pageview using JS:
ga('send', 'pageview', {page: '/gapv/registration/success'});
The tracking works. However, when I compare the GA tracking with the number of registrations from the database of my website, the GA goal completion always shows around 10% less registrations.
I checked the tracking on various desktop browsers, all seems to be fine. Additionally, I hear that content blocking on mobile browsers gets more and more popular.
Is it possible that browser content blocker plugins might block my custom pageview from being fired? I send the pageview on DOM ready.
What else might explain the difference between my DB results and the GA goal count?
Any ideas are very welcome.
Users can opt-out from Google Analytics
Depending on where your tracking code is placed users may leave the page before the hit registers with GA (i.e. users might leave before the DOM is ready - can you move your tracking to pageload ?)
Some Ad blockers block GA, too (some claim this is especially true if you use the "advertising features")
There might be occasional javascript errors that prevent tracking (or users do not have javascript enabled at all)
As a serverside mechanism your database will be more reliable. While you may be able to bring the discrepancy down to single digits it is not likely that the numbers precisely match (even if you do server-side tracking with GA via the measurement protocol you still have to respect user opt-out).
I am using Staccato gem to fire pageview events from server side.
While on client side enabling demographic data tracking is easily added by using
ga('require', 'displayfeatures');
How can I add similar support to server side tracking?
Well, do you really need it? Demographics is collecting info about the user by Google already knowing stuff about the visitor. If I visit your site, Google get a page view for this, and Google know that it's me because of cookies and session data. It will know my gender, age and interests from Google+, Youtube and such (Only Google know for sure).
Even if you know something about the user on the server side, I'm having a hard time believing that you could transfer that knowledge to Google. If you say that this user is example#gmail.com on Youtube, Google has no way of knowing if this is true.
If you have gender and age info, you could upload this with the measurement protocol though.
Background
We have a number of websites that we maintain and we have Google AdWords Campaigns running to drive traffic to these sites.
For Example:
www.example1.co.uk
www.example2.co.uk
www.example3.co.uk
After browsing these sites, a customer will be redirected to our E-Commerce platform if they decide to make a purchase (this is where the conversion happens):
www.example-checkout.com
Current Google Analytics Setup
Our current Google Analytics Setup looks like this:
www.example1.co.uk, www.example2.co.uk, www.example3.co.uk
ga('create', 'UA-12345678-1', 'auto', {'name': 'globalTracker'});
ga('globalTracker.send', 'pageview');
ga('globalTracker.require', 'linker');
ga('globalTracker.linker:autoLink', ['example-checkout.com'], true);
www.example-checkout.com
All Pages
ga('create', 'UA-12345678-1', 'auto', {'allowLinker': true, 'name' : 'globalTracker'});
ga('globalTracker.send', 'pageview');
Checkout Page Only
The checkout/confirmation/thank you page contains additional calls to load the Google Analytics E-Commerce plugin and post the details of the transaction that has occurred.
ga('create', 'UA-12345678-1', 'auto', {'allowLinker': true, 'name' : 'globalTracker'});
ga('globalTracker.send', 'pageview');
ga('globalTracker.require', 'ecommerce', 'ecommerce.js');
ga('globalTracker.ecommerce:addTransaction', {
'id': '${transactionID}',
'affiliation': '${affiliation}',
'revenue': '${revenue}',
'shipping': '${shipping}',
'tax': '${tax}'
});
ga('globalTracker.ecommerce:send');
What Works
The E-Commerce tracking code appears to work and conversions are recorded. In Google Analytics we can see that we received traffic/clicks from our AdWords campaigns which suggests that the _ga cookie is being correctly passed cross-domain from www.example1.co.uk to www.example-checkout.com (in fact I have verified this using the Chrome Developer Tools / Google Analytics Debugger Plugin).
Problem
The problem is that the conversions are never attributed to the AdWords Campaign & AdGroup. The source of the conversion is always a referral (E.g. from www.example1.co.uk).
What am I missing? I want to see the conversions attributed to the AdWords campaign. I.e. in the "Acquisition -> Campaigns" section of Google Analytics.
Any pointers are greatly appreciated.
You do not mention that you use any decorator functions (i.e. functions that add the ga parameter to outgoing links, forms etc.) and allowLinker does not do this automatically. So it should be not possible that cross domain tracking works at all (i.e. both domains will be tracked but on changing the domain the user will start a new tracking session). (UPDATE: Sorry, I did not see the autolinker plugin in the code, so ignore this paragraph).
Plus you need to add both domains to the referrer exclusion list in the property settings (this will remove the referrer no matter what, so make sure that the client id is passed on before you do that).
Unless you have used decorators without saying so in the question this is most likely your problem. Look into the outgoing urls if the ga parameter is appended when switching domains and make sure that the ga code on the other domain does actually receive the parameter (i.e. if there are redirects make sure they retain the parameter).
I have some problems with the google analytics not working on production, I have made some fixes and used some plugins to check that the information sent to google is ok, but the problem is I cannot test properly on my sandbox since I do not have the credentials for the analytics account used on production instance. I will not have access to that account and I do not want to create a dummy account linked to my sandbox because I cannot have my sandbox address indexed by google. Is there any way to install a local server that emulates GA? Or a way to create a GA account and prevent it from indexing my sandbox address? I have found the urchin software that would have given me the possibility to install a local sandbox, but this was discontinued by google and I was not able to find it anywhere.
If by "indexing" you mean "becoming a part of the Google search index an appearing in result pages", that is not in any way related to analytics. If you have a problem that your pages Urls show up in GA (which really is the whole point of Analytics) you can programmatically pass dummy urls to the tracker:
ga('send', {
'hitType': 'pageview',
'page': '/home' // pass a virtual adress here per page
});
That way your sites structure will not be recognizable in GA (however this will make testing more difficult).
If at all possible you should have Google Tag Manager installed on the live page. GTM has a preview mode that allows you to directly in the live site without affecting other users (tags are only visible to visitors with the preview cookie).
As for emulating locally, no, not really. If you still use asynchronous tracking (ga.js) you can use setlocalGifPath and _setLocalServerMode to have the tracking data send to your own server, but that will not give you the interface - it just means you can create a log file with the google parameters that you have to parse yourself.
Universal Analytics does not (to my knowledge) have corresponding methods (they are a remnant from urchin days when people wanted to reprocess their data locally. As you've said urchin is now defunct and it would have been too expensive for a bit of local testing in any case).
We currently have 2 domains: domain1.com and domain2.com. Both domains receive traffic from a single google adwords account. We would like to see all of the analytics for both domains (including adwords impressions, click, cost, etc). Previously, domain1.com, had analytics setup and was pulling the adwords just fine. I followed google's guide to cross-domain tracking here (http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55503) and it seems to be tracking everything just fine except adwords. In the adwords section I am only seeing visits, while impressions/clicks/cost/ctr/cpc are all zero. Any idea what I'm doing wrong / missing?
If you have set up the profiles with the option to pull data from the same AdWords account then you should see duplicate data in both of them. One possible problem you might have if you've only just set up the new profile is that it can take up to 24 hours before the AdWords data is imported.