A site I work with recently saw a doubling of it's direct traffic as recorded in Google Analytics. There doesn't seem to be a obvious external reason for the increase (like some promotion or something) so I'm looking into a possible technical reason.
When loading the homepage and monitoring Real Time Traffic Sources, I see two hits in rapid succession each time I reload the page.
However I'm using the GA debugger extension in Chrome and it's only showing the two expected function calls: ga('create') and ga('send', 'pageview').
The site has other event tracking set up but each event is wrapped in an event listener in JS so they aren't firing automatically. And if they were they should show up in the GA debugger anyway
So I'm at a loss. I can't think of why this is happening, let alone just for direct traffic as opposed to other sources. Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks!
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 had set up my Google Tag to track clicks on spans with certain IDs, the events are firing according to WASP extension, but they are not showing up in my Google Analytics account.
Here is my trigger:
My Tag:
WASP in action:
GA displays pageview only:
Code is installed properly
Sorry if this seems pretty obvious, but in Real Time you should be on the Events tab, and it seems you are looking in the Content tab. Events are never displayed there.
While the configuration looks to be correct, remember that events won't show up in your standard reports until the data is processed, which takes about 24 hours. As long as the hit is showing up in your Real-Time reports, then you shouldn't have any issues.
Can you please post full HTTP request? For instance from Charles Web Debugging Proxy of Live HTTP Headers extension or anything simillar.
What you post seems to be correct as #nyuen says!
When I access the page of certain communities of Stackoverflow, it often occurs that for about a minute my computer gets a very high loading and I can't even scroll the page with the mouse. Recently I read at the bottom of the screen that it was waiting for google.analytics.com in that time period.
Is this a normal phenomenon to be expected or could I do something to avoid
that inconvenience?
You can opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics or download a number of add-ons that block network requests for the script, but I highly doubt that would solve your problem.
Google Analytics is loaded asynchronously, so it doesn't block other scripts or affect the performance of anything else on the page while it's being downloaded.
There may be times where the connection is slow or for whatever reason it takes a while for your browser to download the script from google-analytics.com, but if you page is responding slowly and you happen to see that it's waiting for google-analytics.com at the bottom, those two things are likely not related.
What's far more likely is that whatever is causing the request for the Google Analytics script to be slow is also causing the rest of the page to be slow. In other words Google Analytics is not the root of your problem, it's another symptom.
In either case, you can try blocking it just to be sure. Sometimes web developers implement Google Analytics incorrectly...
I am facing really weird problem related to event tracking. We have implemented google analytics standard code and event tracking for one website and that site is uploaded on online version of test staging sever (not live yet for public).
Google Analytics shows data for pageviews but not showing for event tracking. I looked at code and seems that its working fine.
Anybody has clue what is happening ? Please advise me
I'd check to make sure the __utm.gif tracking pixel request for the event is being made. Things to check:
Javascript errors when the event is triggered.
Verify __utm.gif via the network tab in Firebug or Chrome Dev tools, or Fiddler, or ga_debug.js
If your'e following a link right after the event is triggered, you may have to add a delay to allow time for the image request to be processed.
A code snippet showing your _trackEvent code might be helpful.
Looking at your comments, it is difficult for us to review and answer. Is it possible for your ti share the URL in which you have incorporated the event tracking.
However, possible reasons could be:
* a silly error in JS.
* proper closer of tags.
* need to set up goals as well (not mandatory though).
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 :)