I have a little domain I have been toying with for a year. I put it up on GitHub Pages and I believe I configured Google Analytics. There was no real content there, surely no visitors, and the site went down for unknown reasons at an unknown time. We do use email on this domain, hosted by Google Apps; this has been up and used continuously.
Now, while resurrecting the site and trying to configure Google Analytics, I logged into Google Analytics and I see months of history. Usage is small but very diverse with hundreds of sessions logged from all over the world, over the past year.
I cannot fathom what produced these data (believing the site to be down for this period, and it never having content anyway), and I am concerned to start using this analytics token out of concern it will continue to report spurious data.
How can I determine the source of these data? How can I zero out the account and get it report true zero usage before I start using it again?
Ryan
There could be someone using your UA-CODE or maybe even you accidently still using that code on another page, luckily, creating a new code is a breeze so you should consider creating a new code for your next project
Related
I started to notice that my Google Ads clicks wasnt 100% counting by google analytics (For exemple, during a certain period I had 300 clicks and only 100 sessions were counted as Paid Search on analytics). So I contacted Google Ads Support, they investigated and came to me with this:
Actually, your site is losing the attribution of Google Ads because of an automatic redirection of the structure in which it was developed.
When we have Google Ads linked with Google Analytics, they are talked through a parameter called GCLID. To verify this loss, follow the path I made (in several products, here is an example):
1- I accessed the link https://mywebsite.com/products/running-shoes?variant=15320930779194
2- After full site loading, I added the & gclid = Tester123 parameter to the URL (in the browser, so the final URL was https://mywebsite.com/products/running-shoes?variant=15320930779194&gclid=Tester123) and hit Enter
3- To understand if there is a redirect, the normal behavior would be for the URL to remain the same (with & gclid = Tester123 at the end), but in this case, the parameter some (and hence the assignment)
So, the campaign actually appeared (not set) in Analytics, and could be assigned to any of the other channels (Direct, Organic, ...) For this to be resolved, the site structure must stop causing this automatic redirection in the final URL of each product. With this, the results will be effectively assigned to Google Ads.
They also said that if even if I want to use manual tracking (UTMs) I would still have that problem, since the redirections would keep spoiling it.
As I use Shopify as my website platform, I checked with them and I have no redirections that are causing this problem, at least not created by me nor that their support know.
So I am lost over all this. I dont know where to start solving this problem. Google doesnt tell me what kind of redirections may cause this, I dont use any kind of redirections, and Shopify cant tell me if their code causes this problem (what I dont believe, because other shopify websites would also been suffering from this).
So can anyone give me any direction about this? What redirections may be causing this lost of data?
Thanks for your time!
One thing to note, Google Ads might have a different way of counting, there is the possibility of multiple clicks per session.
That said, you can try Google Tag Assistant, start your recording, click on one of your ads, follow that through and see the parameters being passed.
Unfortunately, it is hard to debug with limited information. The more details you can provide the better.
Check where your GA code is placed in the page code. If GA script is at the bottom of page or there are some heavy scripts above GA tracker, losses of bounced sessions can be large. I.e. user enters the page and immediately closes it. GA script doesn't have time to download.
Why user closes the page immediately?
Сlick by mistake
Slow site
And check that all your landing pages are OK and have 200 server response.
I'm very new to online analytics. I just deployed a site a few days ago, told no one, and Google Analytics is saying I have hundreds of users and sessions all over the world.
Even if events are logging from my own development, there shouldn't be so many users (and so many sessions...I'm not developing THAT vigorously.)
Also, my server logs indicate the level of activity I expect: ~0. So it's not like I'm magically getting traffic somehow. It really is nonexistent.
What could be going on? I can understand seeing a few sessions here and there, for web crawlers, but I don't understand why the numbers are so high.
Any common gotchas?
I realize this is a vague question, but I'm not sure what other information to provide, so please let me know what I can do to help.
Traffic source
First check, if traffic comes through your website (through your analytics.js library). To do this, just remove analytics.js for a while and check, if traffic is still going into Google Analytics (e.g. Realtime report).
If is still going, maybe somebody use Measurement Protocol to spam your account.
To prevent this, add, for instance, custom parameter into your call and create filtered view only for this. All without this param, throw away.
Check sessions and returning visitors
Check, if the traffic is random (usualy one pageview per session) or if the behavior of users is normal.
Custom client ID
Check if you dont play with client ID in analytics.js configuration. IF you dont have random number generator there.
Check traffic source (referal), browsers
If there is one significant, or there is some pattern in versioning (absolute randomness is pattern too)
Preventing random access through website
For every visitor who is first-time on your page, set up a cookie with current timestamp. If cookie is not older than e.g. hour or day, do not track this user. Or buffer hits and fire them later after you prove the user is real.
Anyway, if you have some new hints or information from your analysis, we should help you better. This is still like reading a magic sphere :-)
We have been using Google analytics for awhile now. It has been great for both live traffic and historical reporting.
Suddenly on Sept 5 our reporting shows zero traffic (using the standard reporting overview tab).
This seems really strange as you can see there is near constant traffic in the real-time tab.
Has anybody else experienced this problem when integrating Google analytics? We had a filter that only traffic from our main domain (app.domain.com) would show. Even after removing this we get nothing in the reports.
Check the filters on that profile. Go into Admin on the top right and check the Filters tab on the profile.
Filters are not applied to real time data.
So what you're seeing here is data being filtered out from the profile, but still showing up in the real time.
This could be a few different things
A temporary glitch by Google - this happened to me (which is how I got to this page). I could see traffic in the real time view but nothing in reports. To fix: be patient - this resolved itself after about 12 hours.
profile issue - you may have a profile set up that has filters which are blocking more traffic than you were expecting. To fix: Try setting up a separate profile (if you don't have one already) that has no filters applied. Remember- profile filters work by stripping or manipulating traffic before they reach your reports. The answer above is incorrect- the real time view does take filters in to account. You can easily test this making a filter change and you'll see it take affect in the real time view
tag has dropped off your pages To fix: if you're using GTM you should be able to check this. Or if not check HTML page source on one of your pages you know is getting traffic
finally - you may not getting any traffic :)
I'm trying to set up some Google Analytics Content Experiments as mentioned here:
Google Analytics Content Experiments A/B testing server-side code without page refresh
I haven't gotten it working quite yet, and I keep needing to tweak my code and try out different things. Then I deploy to a testing server (to avoid the localhost problem with GA) and then use an online proxy website to visit the testing server (since my office IP is filtered out of my GA account). But then I need to wait roughly 3 hours before I see whether GACE graphs any visits.
Is it true that Google Analytics Content Experiments graphs are updated on something like a 3 hour delay?
Is there a way to see results sooner (to make my iterative tweaking/testing less time-consuming)?
The real-time feature (in beta) is very useful when it comes to testing this sort of thing.
Unfortunately it only supports page view. Events are not supported.
(you have to be admin on the account to see it)
http://analytics.blogspot.fr/2011/09/whats-happening-on-your-site-right-now.html
I'm using both on a site and getting very different numbers from each. Why is this?
The discrepancy is also mentioned in a Quora answer (Which is better, Facebook Insights or Google Analytics?)
Footnote: if you decide to use both, do not report them side-by-side,
and never expect them to match. Trying to explain the differences will
drive you mad.
Could someone explain?
This problem is quite common, and very hard to explain to clients why numbers do not reconcile amongst different analytics platforms.
Firstly, I believe that because there are remote connections to google or facebook some user sessions will get lost (What happens when they hit stop on the Browser page before the .js downloads for instance).
Secondly I believe ad blocking software may stop the file from being downloaded therefore the session is not captured.
Most hosting providers will have their own analytics platform with your hosting package. This is what I rely on as a true indicator for actual page views etc. These are usually generated directly from your web server logs so they are more accurate. Sadly I've never seen one of these packages have as many features as google or facebook.
There are tons of possible reasons. They might identify returning visitors in a different way or users might block scripts from a specific domain (e.g. *.facebook.com but not *.google.com). In general, ignore the discrepancy. Just pick one solution and use it. You'll always have visitors blocking all such scripts or just one or two specific trackers. The only (almost) 100% accurate way to do it, would be using local scripts, but even those could be blocked. You could as well look at open source solutions such as Piwik
Different web analytics products use diferent methods to track data on the site.
These differences between them is the reason why is hard do do a side-by-side comparison.
On the two links bellow you can find more info about that:
Why does Google Analytics report different values than some other web analytics solutions?
Using Google Analytics & Facebook Domain Insights to Track Social Actions on Your Website
In addition to the notes above, I also wanted to mention Google samples data when there are large volumes & dimensions. This may be a contributing factor.
Facebook reports on clicks and Analytics reports on pageviews.
The amount of pageviews might be less than the amount of clicks for a number of reasons:
There are filters on your Analytics that are blocking the pageviews from being recorded
The user left the page before the Analytics code could be recorded
Or the ads being clicked by bots and the Analytics isnt recording them
This seems to be a big problem with Facebook ads. I run a number of campaigns with facebook and I only see 30-50% of the reported traffic actually make it to the site. I cant believe this is due to only the first two reasons.
I have gone into more details on my blog http://www.bradtollefsen.com/facebook-ads-adding/