We're implementing Google Analytics in retail consumer kiosk software. There is no Javascript or SDKs or web pages involved - we craft a URL per Measurement Protocol and post it. We find that sometimes hits seem to just stop getting counted. If we watch the Real-Time section on the GA web site we can see that our hits continue to get posted, but over in the Behavior / Screens section the number of screen views for this device for today stops incrementing.
It's not just a "sometimes you have to wait 24 hours" thing, because Tuesday and Wednesday of last week still show zero today. If it's a rate limit, I can't see what - we're nowhere near 200k hits per day (per user, but from our point of view each kiosk is a user - we don't have any means to identify individual users); we shouldn't be hitting 500 hits per session because we send a session start (ec=Session&sc=Start) each time the user does something on the main menu and a session end (ec=Session&sc=End) each time the workflow finishes, which shouldn't ever be more than 20 screens - the default 'idle timeout' definition of a session wouldn't work well for us since a user can legitimately be working on a single screen for 10 minutes or more editing a picture whereas also a user can finish and leave and the next user in line start using the kiosk within just a few seconds; we shouldn't be sending events 'too fast' because it takes a couple seconds for a human to read the screen and reach out and touch a button.
What we observe is that some days it counts up to 340-360 and stops and some days it stays at 0 permanently. Any idea what's happening and how to fix it?
11/24: Today it went up to 352 and then stopped. This was about one hour of activity. All of this has been done with "Highest precision" selected.
12/1: Still same, counts for about one hour, to 347 screen views today, then stops incrementing.
When I look at Audience/Overview it says "Sessions 1". There should be dozens of sessions, split up by when we send (ec=Session&sc=Start). I think it must not be recognizing that as a session, it must be using the session timeout (idle), and staying all within a single session, and therefore limiting to 500 hits (we've got some events to go along with the screen views). And this is just wrong. Session should end when we say it does.
12/1: One correction, we actually do send sc=start and sc=end, with the values lower-case, as specified by Google.
My coworker did some experimenting and found that sc=start is ignored on t=event hits. It is recognized on t=pageview hits. I changed my reporting a bit to generate a fake pageview when a session starts, just so I could send the sc=start, and now the counts are accurate.
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Environment: injected Google Analytics tracking in my SharePoint Online site - all good.
Now I have been clicking pages for more than an hour and wanted to check results. I see that tracking is working (see screenshot) - at that moment there was one active user (me) and have >30 page views in a 30min time window.
Problem: reports (user and page view count) seem to be empty, but I assume that there should be at least one user and multiple page view information. Is that correct or I am misusing Google Analytics?
Update:
Pressed "Refresh Report" and Google fetched new data. Unfortunately, nothing changed and data still is empty.
This report was generated on 12/04/2019 at 16:17:25
The time of when the report was generated is not reflective of how "fresh" the data is. For the free version of GA, there is no SLA and it can take upwards of 2 days, but generally under 24 hours. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7084038?hl=en
Seeing the user in realtime doesn't mean the data for the reports are updated. You need to be patient and wait.
If you're seeing data in the real time reports then the standard reports should populate. This can take time though in my experience the latency is usually less than 1 hour. Are you looking at the standard reports in an entirely unfiltered view - might be worth checking to see if any filters are impacting your data though they should effect the real time reports as well.
Today we launched our first campaign on Chartboost. We added 300$ on account and started our first campaign. In less than one our we spent all the money. Then I switched campaign off but still the balance going up in negative. Can you help me why? Beacuse we didn't pay for that additional negative balance we made campaign for 290$ not 450$ ...
What can we do?
The most common reason for campaigns to go over budget is the fact that they reach their budget in the minutes before the first check that compares the spend to the budget. This can happen if you your campaign has a wide target (ie - if you are targeting the whole world for example). Campaigns that have very broad targeting (little to no usage of filtering or available targeting on the dashboard) will serve impressions very quickly and this only increases the probability of exceeding the budget.
It is also very common for CPI campaigns to continue to "Spend Money" even after the campaign has been turned off. The reason why this happens is that we attribute installs to recorded clicks up to 21 days after the click. Also, the Install is not recorded until the 1st bootup of the app. For a number of reasons this 1st bootup may not occur until a couple of days after downloading onto the device from the App Store. There is no way to "turn off installs" for clicks that have already occurred.
Hope this helps.
Background:
I have a Google Analytics account using which I am tracking user activity for web and mobile app. After logging into your account and choosing the web property and the corresponding view, you generally see a dashboard with quick stats like Pageviews, Users, Sessions, Pages/Sessions, Avg. Session Duration, Bounce Rate and percentage of new sessions. You can change the time period (from the top right area of the Dashboard) to get the same stats for that period.
Problem:
Last week, I was interested in the three main stats: Page views, Users and Sessions for a particular day - say, day A. The dashboard showed the following stats:
Pageviews - 1,660,137
Users - 496,068
Sessions - 983,549
This report was based on 100% of sessions.
I go back to the dashboard TODAY and check the same stats for the same day A. Here's what I saw:
Pageviews - 1,660,137
Users - 511,071
Sessions - 1,005,517
This report is also based on 100% of sessions.
Nothing was changed in the tracking code for the web and mobile app. Could someone explain why I have this difference in the stats? Is this normal?
They need some time to update the system, otherwise their system would overwhelm
When you first create a profile it can take up to 48 -72 hours for it to start showing data.
After that time data will appear instantly in the Real-time reports.
Standard reports take longer to finish processing. You need to remember the amount of data that is being processed. Some of the data may appear in the standard reports after a few hours. The numbers have not completed processing for at least 24 hours, so anything you look at then will not be accurate.
When checking Google Analytics never look at todays or yesterdays numbers in the standards reports, if you want accurate information. Things get even more confusing when you consider time zones. When exactly is it yesterday? I have noticed numbers changing as far back as 48 hours. But Google Says in there documentation 24 hours. I am looking for the link in the documentation will post it when I find it.
Found it: Data Limits
Data processing latency
Processing latency is 24-48 hours. Standard accounts that send more
than 200,000 sessions per day to Google Analytics will result in the
reports being refreshed only once a day. This can delay updates to
reports and metrics for up to two days. To restore intra-day
processing, reduce the number of sessions you send to < 200,000 per
day. For Premium accounts, this limit is extended to 2 billion hits
per month.
So try doing the same thing again today but check your last day being Monday. When you check again next week the numbers should be correct.
I am trying to setup a notification to occur when:
The current amount of Users, today is greater than that of the previous day's.
For instance.. If yesterday shows as having 500 users and today, at 5 o'clock PM, there are 501 users... Is there anyway to send out a single notification as soon as the threshold is broken... and not for every single new user after that threshold?
Closest thing would be a custom alert (via intelligence events->custom alerts or admin->tools and assets->custom alerts).
If you set this up as a daily alert it will be sent only once per day. I have never tested this with absolute numbers (only with "increases by %" as condition), but since the option is offered in the interface I guess it should work.
I am using Google Web Analytics Online Tool to monitor visits on my site.
What bugs me is that often I see that records contain the folloowing entries:
Page Visits: 1.00
Average Visit Duration: 00:00:00
Bounce Rate: 100%
What does that mean?
If the visitor comes to my site it should stay at least couple of seconds until he leaves?
Could that mean that something is wrong with accessing my site (I had similar problems before, but I am convinced I fixed them since I am not getting any errors when I try to access my site from different computers.)
When a visitor comes to your page google analytics sets a cookie where a timestamp is stored. When the user visits a second page in your site Google compares the stored timestamp to the actual time and calculates visits duration from the difference between the two. If all your visitors have bounced there is no second data point to compare the stored value to and google is unable to compute a duration.
A common workaround is to set a javascript timeout and trigger an event after ten seconds or so (with the "interaction" flag in the event set to true, see Google Analytics event tracking docs for details). The assumption is that somebody who looks for more than ten seconds at you page is not actually a bounce (I think that since "bounce rate" has so hugely negative connotations people try to avoid high bounce rates even at the price of introducing bad data; you should realize that "bounce rate" simply means that there are not enough data points to say anything meaningful about those particular visitors).
Personally I do not like that approach because it means to redefine inaction of a visitor as action. A better idea (IMO) is to implement a meaningful interaction point - like a "read more" link that loads content via ajax or something like it - and track that via event tracking or virtual page view.
Event tracking guide:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/eventTrackerGuide
Short Update: With Universal Analytics the technical details have changed (i.e. there are no longer cookies with timestamps, all information is processed on the GA servers). So the first paragraph is no longer up to date, however the rest of the answer is still valid.
I'm having a similar issue, i monitor those placements and recently found out the traffic is hardly getting to my site, recent experiment showed that those are placements triggered via clicks from GDN, but people have not even reached my page, were blocked by pop-up blocker or other similar software