Keep user in Real Time of Google Analytics - google-analytics

I have a website without too much interaction. It is a video player, playing videos for some hours. My problem is that this page does not have scrolling or clicking interaction, and then Real Time of Google Analytics "loses" my user after a while.
Is there any option to keep this user on Real Time counting of GA?

It's not a good idea to extend users activity in realtime view by adding lots of hits. These will skew you site's statistics. What you should do is extend the session timeout to longer than your longest video. The max is 4.5 hours. If the videos are longer you might want to send a non interaction hit abit before the session time's out. The format for such an event for universal analytics is:
ga('send', 'event', 'category', 'action', {'nonInteraction': 1});
To set the ime out look under Admin > .js tracking Info > Session Settings.

Related

Facebook ads incorrect result or google analytics?

I have implemented facebook ads which shows my website received 290 link clicks over 2 days , but in my google analytics from the day before I started ad it shows 57 users , why is it so ?
There are several reasons why there is a discrepancy between clicks on Facebook Ads (as well as on Google Ads) and Google Analytics sessions. It is a more or less known situation.
Some of these are for example that you are comparing 2 different pieces of information, such as clicks on one side and sessions or users on the other.
Clicks can include clicks on different elements or double clicks.
The session is also detected when the Analytics code on the site page is loaded, so if the user clicks on the ads and exits before the site page is loaded (for example because it loads slowly or because he didn't want to click) you will have clicks counted but not sessions.
In your case you are also talking about users, so the discrepancy is certainly higher since if the same person clicks an ads from his smartphone in the morning, then in the afternoon, then in the evening, he will have 3 clicks on Facebook Ads, in the best of cases will result in 3 sessions in Analytics but for the latter it will result in 1 user.
Adding to Michele's answer a couple of points:
Make sure your cookie banner allow Google Analytics and FB Pixel in the same way (e.g. both are loaded only after the user's acceptance), and make a test also with an AdBlock.
Try optimising your campaign for landing page view optimisation, as they will be counted only those users who click on the ads AND load the page. Maybe this will help.
Edit: be aware about the iOS14 changes that may impact this tracking as well

Why Google analytics AVG Session duration is wrong?

I'm using Google Analytics for tracking my visitors.
In recent days I started to use live support system on my website. I can see on the live support system the time the users spend on the site. Since most of my articles are longer than 1500 words, users spend a lot of time on the site.
The average session time on the live support system is over 10 minutes, but Google Analytics showing it is under 2 minutes.
I know that Google analytics is wrong. What could be the reason for this? Why does Google analytics show average session duration incorrectly?
If an user lands in your page, reads the article and leaves the website without making any interaction that sends an hit to Analytics (for example clicking on a link to change page of your website) the time on page will be 0.
Analytics calculates the average time in page based on the difference between the first and last hits occurred on that page.
Try to send events on scroll to Analytics (example 25%, 50%, ...) and you'll see that the time on page will begin to be representative.
Please refer this link https://www.studentcpu.com/2020/03/google-analytics-important-kpi-monitor.html. you will get answer for your query. In this website it is clearly explain about most of site admin misunderstood between avg session duration time and avg time on page.
Avg Session Duration -Multiple Page Avg Time-Macro view
Avg Time on Page - Single Page Time-Micro view

Google Tag Manager - Tag Firing Way too Many Times

We are having an issue with our tracking on www.x3tradesmen.com where a Google Tag Manager tag is firing way too many times and we cannot determine why...
We only have one website event tag linked to Google Analytics called Form Submit and typically we would receive between 2-10 Form Submit events per day at the most, however, recently we have noticed that the tag is firing 1000's of times sporadically and we cannot pinpoint the issue. We have also noticed that our users have drastically increased for short time periods (minutes/hours). We typically only get 40-80 users per day on our website but we saw a massive spike of around 400 users in less than one hour once.
We recently added the facebook pixel via GTM and that is really the only change that we have made and now we are seeing these issues. Does anyone know of any common reasons to why this would be behaving this way or can anyone see any major issues with our implementation of GA or GTM on our website that would cause this?
I know this information is vague, so please let me know if there is specific information that would help identify the issue.
Thanks in advance!
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I presume it is the FB pixel - Facebook automatically collects information in addition to what you have configured yourself and uses post/submit events to send them. You can disable that behaviour as per documentation and see if it makes a difference:
Automatic Configuration
The Facebook pixel will send button click and
page metadata (such as data structured according to Opengraph or
Schema.org formats) from your website to improve your ads delivery and
measurement and automate your pixel setup. To configure the Facebook
Pixel to not send this additional information, in the Facebook Pixel
Base code, add fbq('set', 'autoConfig', 'false', '')
above the init call.
I had a similar issue where suddenly additional submit events turned up in the GTM preview pane that I finally tracked down to FB, so there is a good chance that yours is the same problem.

Why can't Google Analytics record how long a user spends on your site?

Google Analytics can't tell how long bounce users (users who don't navigate past the landing page) spend on the site. But wouldn't it be possible, at least on desktop, to just record the initial time of the loading of the page, and then use javascript to record each mouse movement, each one replacing the one before, finally getting the time of the last movement, from which you'd subtract the initial load time?
Why can't Google Analytics do something like that?
Please go to Audience - > User Explorer

why track email opens as events and not as pageviews

Since a while I've been playing around with the Analytics Measurement Protocol, and also used it in some test emails as described in this article:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/email
But what puzzles me is that Google recommends to track email views as events, not as page views.
From one side I can see the point, but on the other hand in Google Analytics I get an alert stating that I have events without page views.
Can anyone answer me why it should be done that way, or what arguments are there that speak for it? Otherwise I could also just use the Measurement Protocol to send a page view.
I do not know why Google recommends this, but I rather suspect it's because you will skew some of your metrics if you use pageviews - an opened e-mail would count as a bounce, which in turn would bring down average time on site, pages per session etc. If you make opened e-Mail an event you can avoid this.

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