GA Updated to UA however old tracking code is in use - google-analytics

I have a website which has their Google Analytics updated to the Universal Analytics (from the Upgrade Center) however all this while they have been using the Classical Analytics tracking code on the site till date. So that means the implementation is old however, the Analytics end is upgraded to the latest version.
I needed the SO community to comment on the below questions if the tracking code is updated to UA (via GTM - PageView tag)
Will there be any impacts in terms of the way Google collects data?
Will the bounce rate change, avg. session time change?

when you update a GA account to Universal Analytics the tracking code stays the same, you don't need to change it.
If you change the UA don't forget that the data in your old one will not be displayed together.
If you do not change the UA the basic data will still be collected the same way, so your pageviews average number, the bounce rate and session time should stay the same.
What changes is that using Universal Analytics you will have custom dimension and custom metrics instead of custom vars, Enhanced Ecommerce and more complex data. You can see more here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2790010?hl=en

Related

Is there a common list of areas to check while comparing GTM and analytics.js data in Google Analytics?

I have a website where we're working on migrating from analytics.js to GTM, so we've created a new temporary property for verifying that GTM is working as per expectations. The existing analytics.js code sends data to an older property.
I see a lot of cases where many users simply don't appear in the GTM tracking data, and we've also done multiple pageview audits to confirm if all pages are tagged properly. There's always a gap of 10-15% in the user comparison, and 20-25% in the pageview comparison.
Has anyone worked on any similar situation where GTM tracking shows lesser data than normal analytics.js tracking?

Some Google Analytics 4 conversions reported via Firebase are missing in Google Ads

Many of the conversions that my Firebase web app reports to my Google Analytics 4 property aren't showing up in Google Ads.
I have a single-page web app that uses the Firebase Analytics JS API to report custom events for a Google Analytics 4 property, including two events that have been marked as conversions in the Google Analytics "Conversions" page. All of the events reported by the app appear as expected in Google Analytics.
The GA4 property is linked with a Google Ads account that has auto-tagging enabled. I've imported the conversion events using the Ads site with a Count setting of "Every" (rather than "One"), but less than half of new ad-derived conversions are shown in Ads. For example, Analytics reports 55 occurrences of a conversion event two days ago, but Ads reports only 20 occurrences of the event for the same day.
I've used the Google Analytics Debugger extension to confirm that events contain a tid parameter with the GA4 property ID and a dl parameter that preserves the URL's gclid query parameter (using this approach). I've also used BigQuery to view the underlying Analytics events, and I can see that their page_location parameters preserve the gclid parameter and that they have correct value and currency parameters (e.g. 0.5 and "USD").
Are there other factors that affect whether GA4 events are correctly displayed in Google Ads? I'm confused by the way that some, but not all, events are showing up in Ads. I had a call with Google Ads support this morning but they aren't trained in diagnosing conversion-reporting issues.
Are the conversion events not showing up at all, or just not showing up after a couple of days? If it's the former, it's possible that there is a delay before the conversion reporting makes it to Google Ads and gets reported to the console.
As for inspecting the BigQuery conversion events for the correct tracking data, make sure to use the events_ table rather than the events_intraday tables as the summary tables more accurately reflect the count for events logged that day.
Beyond that it looks like your setup is correct since some conversion events are already being reported, but just in case here is a link to the Google Ads help center on all the steps required to make sure the Google Analytics 4 property used by Firebase is correctly linked to Google Ads.

Google Analytics not displaying accurate data for all pages report

I am tracking analytics through a Google Analytics - Universal Analytics tag implemented through GTM.
I've noticed recently that there may have been an issue with the setup of this which has resulted in a large amount of data missing (a few months worth) - specifically there is a lack of data in the site content > all pages report. Some data was recorded in June 2018 before recording appears to have stopped, however it appears this data is incorrect with very high page readings that are not reflected by the timeline in the audience overview report.
What's strange is that goals have still been recorded, including form submission and calls (these were also set up through GTM), also the audience overview has recorded data for the last six months.
I have added the analytics tag again making sure to have the correct property ID and have verified that it is firing via preview mode and via the real-time report in Analytics.
I'm confused how sessions and goals have been recorded if analytics may have been incorrectly installed and what may have occurred for there to be a black hole in the data?
If there is a lack of data in the site content report it means that on some pages from your site, either GTM is not firing (thus not firing GA) or there are some filters in your GA trigger in GTM which do not load the tag on all pages.
If you can provide some URL's which you think should be in the site content report, but are missing, we can check how GA is installed.

Google Analytics with GTM; is it possible that data will be duplicated?

I'm fairly new to Google Tag Manager, in the past I've just fired events straight to Google Analytics. What I'm wondering is this; is it possible that, if you use Google Analytics alongside Google Analytics tags in GTM, can you get duplicate data in Google Analytics?
For instance, let's say I have a Pageview tag in GTM, as well as GA on the webpage as normal. Would this count as two pageviews? (ie. one from standard GA, one from the GTM tag)
I've looked around for an answer, but maybe it's just a stupid question!
If both track to the same property you'd get two pageviews in that Ga property.
However there is a good chance that both pageviews would end up in different sessions; GTM creates a random name for the Google Analytics tracker, while the tracker within the page would track to the standard tracker (t0; read about naming trackers here), unless configured otherwise.
IMO it is not a good idea to mix GTM and inline trackers with the same property, since it's hard to be sure that both use the same configuration. And yes, your pageview will be counted twice.

Conversions in GA stopped being attributed to UTMs when we switched to Google Tag Manager

Previously, we had implemented Traditional e-commerce analytics (_gaq) using _trackTrans, _addItem, etc. We had several years of data in GA that correlated conversions with our Ad campaigns, based on UTM source, campaign, medium.
When switching over to Google Tag Manager, we did the following things:
• Removed the _gaq code related to e-commerce (transactions & addItem)
• Kept the rest of the GA code related to page tracking, events, and custom variables
• Implemented the Google Tag Manager javascript + a GTM data layer that included our new E-commerce information (Google Tag Manager data layer)
• Configured a "Tag" in GTM for "Order Completed" for Google Analytics, set to Universal Analytics (Configured with our UA- property identifier, etc.). Tag type= Universal Analytics; Tracking ID= our GA environment, Track Type = "Page View" , Enable enhanced e-commerce feature = true, Use data layer = True; Fire on "Order completed"
Upon switching over, we indeed see E-commerce numbers come through, but there's something off about the recording of these conversions correctly back to the campaigns. It appears that while some are attributed back, not all conversions are counted correctly as being from the ad campaign they originated from.
What went wrong here? After thorough reading of the GTM documentation, we were led to believe that it would "just work" but it appears that GTM and GA don't know how to communicate with each other regarding UTM information, and as a result GA tracks conversions but fails to attribute them to right session (that is, ITS session information that contains the correct UTM for that user).
We found a very scant amount of information about this on the internet-- but some people suggest setting all the UTMs are "Variables" in GTM, and then passing them as fields in the Tag firing back to GA. Is that necessary? It seems like these two technologies should work together with less friction.
Please advise.

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