Is it possible to export a list of all page views, with timestamps, out of google analytics?
Currently I can see page views per day, but not specific times for each view. I do see real-time data as it comes in, so I assume the time for each view is being stored.
If not, how might I go about sending that data when I report the page view in a way that will make it accessible in the dashboard?
[[UPDATE]] The Google Analytics v4 API now includes a "dateHourMinute" dimension.
Inside Google Analytics, I think the problem you will run into is that a "timestamp" includes Date, Hour, Minute, Second (and maybe millisec) and you can only drill into one secondary dimension at a time (ie: just date). An alternative method is to use the query explorer or just use the Google Analytics API.
Ad Hoc Report with query explorer
You can use the Google Analytics API Explorer: https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/query-explorer/
It will allow you to select:
A date range
Metrics: (like Users, pageviews, etc)
Dimensions: pagePath, Date, Hour, Minute (can't go to second or further, as in a timestamp, though)
Use filters to get rid of some data.
If your website gets a decent amount of traffic (> 50,000 pageviews per month), you might want to grab it 1 month (or less) at a time to avoid hitting limits/sampling effects.
#doctaj solution works. Please just note that if you are using the query-explorer for example, "dateHourMinute" dimension is considered 3 dimensions and will burn 3 spots from your available 7 or 10 dimensions that you can query. So if you need more dimensions, you need to decide which is more important to you. For example, you may want to query for the date and hour dimensions separately to drop the minutes in favour of something else.
Related
I'm looking to download hit data from a Google Analytics view for a small period of time that includes unique ID for a session and URL that was viewed. I believe I could do this going forward by setting something in Google Tag Manager to a Custom Dimension, but I was looking to avoid that (we have a good number of custom dimensions) and because I wouldn't be able to go backward.
Is it possible in the free version of GA to do something like? I picture the output being the URLs in my x-axis and my users in the y-axix with counts.
I'll be looking to take this data and do a cluster analysis to determine user behavior types.
Nope. Google Analytics does not expose a user specific id via the API or via data exports in a standard account (in GA360 you could use BigQuery to extract the client id).
You either have to set up a custom dimension (as you said this does not work for historic data), or try and use calcuated fields in Google Data Studio in the hope that if you aggregate enough different dimensions into one field you will end up with something specific per user.
In our project we stored all users event data in our database for over one year , but it's not indexed.
now we are going to use google analytics to store our analytics and analyze the report using google analytics dashboard.
but before start using google analytics , i would like to emigrate all old statics (about 2 million events) to google analytics.
for this matter i should use Measurement Protocol and it's limit allow me to transfer 2 million hits with no problem.
but i didn't succeed to know how to set the time of the event. Measurement Protocol has Queue Time but google says :
Values greater than four hours may lead to hits not being processed.
how it's possible to transfer 2 million events to google analytics with there event time ?
Thanks
You are correct you can use the measurement protocol to send events data directly to google analytics. I don't see any problem in sending 2 million events. However its not possible to set the event time longer then four hours ago.
Queue time is used to set the time that the event occurred as you can see it cant be more then four hours ago and I have found that if you do set it to four hours ago its a bit fuzzy if the data is correct or not. This feature is probably most use in mobile devices where they may go off line for a short time you can store the data then send it all once the device is online again.
So the dates will be the date that you sent the event to Google Analytics you cant back date the data to more then four hours ago. So I am not sure how much use the data will be to you when it is all inserted.
There is no way to do this, but you can make it easier on yourself.
Unfortunately, there is no way to add, remove, or otherwise edit Google Analytics hit data retrospectively, except to delete all of it. You also cannot copy, or move it between accounts, or download it all.
You are not the first to have to come to terms with this.
In this situation, we recommend to our clients that they run their new and old systems in parallel for a testing period (usually 6 months or a year), before switching off one of them.
Yes, it's difficult to let go of old data, but sometimes it has to be done.
I'm using Google Analytics API to get the number of page views for each page of my website. In order to reduce the number of api calls, I'm setting an interval for doing this and cache the data on my server. For each api call, I try to get the page views of every page on my site and update them to my database.
Is there a way to get only CHANGED DATA from a specific time stamp? For example, only page views that changed within last 2 hours.
I think it would be a kind of filters (if any) but I could not find it from the documentation here https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/core/v3/reference#filters
You could add a filter for ga:dateHour so that it comes back in the last two hours. But the problem is that it takes Google around 4 hours to process the data. So you wouldn't get anything back for two hours ago.
If you want to see data that is that new you have to use the Realtime api https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/realtime/v3/
What exactly is your query currently? If you do ga:date, ga:dateHour, ga:pagepath, ga:pageviews The results will all be returned in one query (not counting next pages), thats a log way to the 10,000 queries per day limit.
On a side note. What do you mean by changed? Nothing is going to change in data previously processed.
Suppose I have 65 people that register on January 1, 2012.
I want to find out how many of those 65 people returned to the site that same week. (More generally, if n people signup on date A, I want to be able to find out how many of those n people return in a given date range.)
Is there a way to do this using Google Analytics? If so, how? I am currently getting the user's username for each page hit.
If you only need to track people who sign in then you don't need to get very fancy. You can copy the relevant user attributes, such as sign up date, from your DB to GA using events or session level custom variables.
But if you want to track everyone, including those who don't sign up, then you'll need to use visitor level custom variables (GA cookies).
I explain how to set this up in detail in this post so I'll just highlight the key points here:
First, decide how to layout the data in Google Analytic's custom variables based on your requirements. For example, are you storing retention dates for daily, weekly or monthly tracking? Do you also want to track cohort goals? Partition this data into the available custom variable slots.
Write the cohort data to these custom variables when visitors arrive or achieve goals using Google Analytic's _setCustomVar function. Setting the fourth parameter of that function to 1 indicates you want to do visitor-level (cookie) tracking.
For each cohort you wish to analyze, create an advanced segment in Google Analytics. Using a regex expression in the condition will give you the flexibility to segment for interesting cohorts. ex: "All users whose first visit was the week before Christmas".
Analyze the results with reports by specifying a date range and the corresponding cohort-sliced advanced segments. Another option is to extract the data using the Google Analytics Data Feed Query Explorer or their API.
Once you've put in the work your new visitors will be stamped by their first visit date and nicely fall into each daily or weekly retention bucket. This is what it might look like if you were tracking weekly retention, for example:
This is not a full solution, but here are some points on how I would approach this problem with the help of Google Analytics:
You have to make sure that you somehow store the registration date of each user, either in your database or in a cookie. Then have a look at Google Analytics Event Tracking. You could for example set up a new category based on the registration date. On every page load in your page, you then have to set up this event tracking call, for example like:
_trackEvent("returns", "2012-01-01", "UserId:123123123")
This way you will receive all page views for users that registered on that particular date. To add a date range in this, you have to make sure that these events only get fired for the number of dates after the signup (e.g. 7 days).
After your date range, you will be able to see how many page views and how many users returned - you even know which users came back.
I am interested in seeing visits on my site broken down by hour - is there any way to generate a report of this in Google Analytics? It appears that all metrics are only broken down by day. Maybe I can get this information through the GA API?
Since Google Analytics was revised the currently accepted answer is no longer available. The current version of Google Analytics will let you view visitors per hour:
Go to the Reporting Tab
Select "Audience"
Select "Overview"
Select "Hourly"
If you're trying to determine total traffic by hour of the day for a given date range then you can use this custom report:
https://www.google.com/analytics/web/permalink?type=custom_report&uid=pToP7693ReSxfSIpbqHmWg
Only a few reports have hour-by-hour data; as far as I know, they're all in the 'Visitors' section.
For example, to see Visits by hour over a period of time, click Visits, Visitor Trending, then Visitors. Then, in the top right of the report, select Graph by: (icon of a clock)
All of the reports under Visitor Trending have hour-by-hour data, except Absolute Unique Visitors.
As far as the API goes, you can check what query combinations are valid here (since there are restrictions): http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataReferenceDimensionsMetrics.html
According to that, all metrics can be viewed by an hourly dimension except Campaign metrics and Visitor (not to be confused with Visit) metrics.
You can test the query you want to run with the Google Analytics Data Feed Query Explorer
If using a (downloadable, emailable) custom report is an option, you can use the custom report described on http://salman-w.blogspot.com/2012/07/analytics-day-of-week-hour-of-day-report.html
The article tells you to do the following:
Create a custom report with flat table (I am sure it will work with explorer style reports too)
Add the dimension hour (not hour of day)
Add the metric visits, pageviews, etc
Preview