Within GA, is it possible to segment metrics into ranges?
For example -
Average Page load time > 2s
Average Page load time 2 - 4s
Average Page load time < 4s
Or is this only doable with further processing in excel/sheets?
Edit -
Specifically, I am looking to build a report that looks at average load time and the effects on conversion, bounce rate, AOV, etc. for the site and for specific pages.
Short answer is no. The longer answer is that you could try the following two things:
Filter the report as this will allow you to define ranges:
screenshot
Implement your own user timing logic and set a time-format custom metric
Just keep in mind that if you did go for #2 that you'd be setting a hit-scope custom metric so when you come to use it in a segment you'll be forced to look at sessions/users who had a page load time within a session or group of sessions with your given thresholds.
If you had a specific business question in mind it may be more appropriate for me to provide a solution to that as it may be different...
Related
I would love to understand what I'm looking at - why are the numbers different in this report when I add a segment?
This is the report without any segmentation:
This is the same report with the Mobile Traffic segment:
There two methods that Google uses to identify the number of users.
Calculation 1: Pre-calculated data
This calculation relies only on the number of sessions in the given date range and the time of each session. (This is determined by technology managed on the device, like a web browser, and is often referred to as the client-side time.) Because the result of this calculation can be added to the pre-aggregated data tables, Analytics can reference the table to quickly retrieve and serve this data in a report, including when you change the date range.
Calculation 2: Data calculated on the fly
Calculation 2 is based on the way you assign, collect, and store persistent data about your traffic. There are many solutions you can implement to customize this, but the most common way this data is going to be assigned and stored is through cookies managed via a web browser.
Adding a segment will force GA to calculate the data on the fly and that's why you are seeing a difference in the numbers.
Are you using GA free or 360? and the time range you are using is same in both reports?
You can also have a look into the Google article https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2992042?hl=en
You are victim of sampling:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2637192?hl=en
Sampling applies when:
you customize the reports
the number of sessions for the report time range exceeds 500K (GA) or 100M (GA 360)
The consequence is that:
the report will be based on a subset of the data (the % depends on the total number of sessions)
therefore your report data won't be as accurate as usual
What you can do to reduce sampling:
increase sample size in UI (will only decrease sampling to a certain extend, but in most cases won't completely remove sampling)
reduce time range
create filtered views so your reports contain the data you need and you don't have to customize them
I'm trying to detect anomalies in google analytics events like page views or custom events.
I tested the custom alert feature from google itself. The period for those alerts are per day, week or month. What I'm looking for is a realtime detection. It would be useful to define rules for alerts like a maximum divergence between two points in time. For example [now, now - 15 minutes] or [now, now - 24 hours] or [now, now - 7 days]. Some solutions provide alerts when fixed threshold got passed (like observe.io). But thats not very helpful for highly fluctuating numbers that depend on weekday and daytime (like page views).
I would be thankful for any tips how to detect anomalies in GA in realtime.
I agree thereshold solutions is not a good idea for detect anomalies in time series. Because they generally are set by the user, rather than learned, which can be a time consuming and difficult process when monitoring many data streams.
Moreover, they need to be adjusted as the environment changes, so manual real-time maintenance is needed.
Besides, since they don’t take temporal sequences into account, simple thresholds cannot identify pattern changes that take place within the range. I recommend you use methods for anomaly detection in time series or change point detection.
You can googling about this topics and you'll find several algorithms. For realtime analisys, i also can recommend softwares like MOA (http://moa.cms.waikato.ac.nz/) and Numenta (https://numenta.com/).
In Google Analytics, how can I get a single number that is a change between two periods?
For example, I have a bounce rate in December that is 28%. I have a bounce rate in Januaray that is 22%. How can I get a widget on the page to just show -6%.
What you're referring to is known as a "calculated metric", and currently there's no way to do this in Google Analytics (outside of the built-in calculated metrics like ga:percentNewUsers).
The best way to do this right now is to make two queries to the API and write some code that does the calculation yourself.
Since you mentioned having a widget on the page that displays this data, you might look into the Embed API to do the queries
I'm currently trying to figure out what percentage of my hourly views have a Visit Duration of 00:00:00.
It's easy enough to create an Advanced Segment for views of '0 seconds' and compare that to my total views - what I'd like to know is: can you combine these two segments, to create a parameter which is '#total-views / #0-sec-views'? And, if so, how?
In other words, how can I define my own parameter which tells me how many of my views lasted for 0 seconds?
Thanks, J
Zetland, just select both segments:
your custom segment for 0s visits
pre-defined segment for All Visits
Tick both and you should see the comparison, even with percentage difference right in the table below the chart.
One more suggestion: 0s visit is a very unusual segment, as it tracks visits that didn't include more than 2 pageviews (hence the time-difference couldn't be measured). I would suggest using Bounce Visits or Non-converters (or anything similar).
Hope this helps!
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