I am implementing Google Analytics (via GTM) on multiple ecommerce sites. I need to record transactions to the client's google analytics account as well as to our single master analytics account, which accrues data for multiple sites.
I am wondering if there will be any issues sending duplicate transaction ids to our master google analytics's account i.e. if an order is placed on two different client sites and they happen to both be the same transaction id. Would Google Analytics recognise these as two separate transactions or would one overwrite the other?
If you send two identical transaction ids to the same account Google Analytics will add the second transaction to the first and show products for both under the same transaction id (before refund data upload became available that was actually used to cancel out unwanted transations using negative values for revenue).
However internally they will be counted as two transactions (i.e. in calculations for E-Commerce-Conversionrate etc.). Also if you set a time based second dimension (hour of day, minute index or the like) or e.g. by hostname you will see that Google untangles both transactions (so they appear added up only for timeframes that encompasses both).
To avoid this I would recommend that you use an advanced filter to add the hostname to the transaction id.
Related
We have just linked our GA360 account to BigQuery but we noticed from the docs that the userId doesn't get exported. This is really annoying as one of our main use case was to join the userId with our CRM system.
Why is Google not exporting the userId ? Is there workaround ?
Thank you for your answers.
The solution is to create a User level custom dimension and pass your user's ID into that as well.
There's no restriction on exporting your custom dimensions, and these are exported to BigQuery.
Enjoy :)
How User-ID works
User-ID enables the association of one or more sessions (and the activity within those sessions) with a unique and persistent ID that you send to Analytics.
To implement User-ID, you must be able to generate your own unique IDs, consistently assign IDs to users, and include these IDs wherever you send data to Analytics.
For example, you could send the unique IDs generated by your own authentication system to Analytics as values for User-ID. Any engagement, like link clicks and page or screen navigation, that happen while a unique ID is assigned can be sent to Analytics and connected via User-ID.
In an Analytics implementation without the User-ID feature, a unique user is counted each time your content is accessed from a different device and each time there’s a new session. For example, a search on a phone one day, purchase on a laptop three days later, and request for customer service on a tablet a month after that are counted as three unique users in a standard Analytics implementation, even if all those actions took place while a user was signed in to an account. While you can collect data about each of those interactions and devices, you can’t determine their relevance to one another. You only see independent data points.
When you implement User-ID, you can identify related actions and devices and connect these seemingly independent data points. That same search on a phone, purchase on a laptop, and re-engagement on a tablet that previously looked like three unrelated actions on unrelated devices can now be understood as one user’s interactions with your business.
From Google analytics about the userid feature the user id is used in the background by google analytics to analyse your data.
If you want to analyse on the user id you can just add it as a custom dimension you will then be able to see it.
what is difference between unique referrals on Clickmeter and New users on Google Analytics? One of our vendor is using Clickmeter and we are using Google Analytics and the data doesn't match. Any suggestions on tracking unique referrals on Google Analytics?
In ClickMeter a click is unique if is human (it does NOT come from a bot/spider) and if there are no clicks on the same link from the same IP in the 30 mins before this click was made. More info here: https://blog.clickmeter.com/click-types
GA determines unique using cookies (a completely different technique). In order for Google Analytics to determine which traffic belongs to which user, a unique identifier associated with each user is sent with each hit. track all the visits to a specific website https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2992042?hl=en.
Moreover, GA analyzes all user on a specific website in the same bucket while ClickMeter performs a different count per each link. It may happen that more ClickMeter links point to the same site and a user that click two or three links together is counted as unique three times.
Please keep in mind that GA and ClickMeter are NOT the same thing and are used (together or not) for different reasons. https://blog.clickmeter.com/google-analytics-alternative
I am new to Google Analytics. I have a conversion set up, and I'd like to capture demographics for individuals who convert at e individual level. When a user converts, I'd like to pass the statistics from Google Analytics into my own database, or keep a record of the ID assigned at conversion in Google Analytics and download the data. Is this possible? I want to do analysis on who is likely to convert versus not - age, shopping habits, etc - and link these details back to the type of specific conversion.
Thoughts?
We if want to add add track users at individual level, try creating a Custom diamension and passing the userID everytime you make a GA call.
Next to view the same :- in tables that you view your analytics data, there will be this option called 'Secondary diamention', from the list that appears.. Choose the custom diamension name that you had assigned. Now you will be able to see each row with the userID along slide.
Add user ID to your tracking script
The first step to your question is to add the user ID to your tracking. If you have some way to identify users on your website (ie: through email marketing tool, your CRM, etc), then you should set up user ID tracking. Here is the Google Dev article about that:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/cookies-user-id?hl=en
However, basically... you just have to add this to your tracking script (replacing the 'create' line you currently have, replacing "USER_ID" with the user ID your system gives them.
ga('create', 'UA-XXXXX-Y', { 'userId': USER_ID });
In addition, I usually include this UserID as a custom dimension, so that I can view it in Google Analytics and other reports. To do this, first set up a custom dimension for your ID, as a "User-level" dimension. Then just add this after your user ID is available (assuming this is your first custom dimension):
ga('set', 'dimension1', USER_ID);
Connect User ID to Demographics
Unfortunately, the demographics information that Google Analytics provides (under "Audience") is not compatible with custom dimensions (like userID). So, the API only allows you to pull the audience data in aggregate (ie: connected to City, number of users, pageviews of those types of people... etc). If this works for you, check out the GA Query Explorer (below) to try out different combinations of dimensions & metrics to drill down as deep as you can and maximize the information you gain from this demographic info.
Connect Google Analytics Data to Your Database
In order to connect GA data to your database in an automated fashion, you will need to set up some kind of scheduled process that runs a query off of the Google Analytics API. To explore what combinations of metrics and stuff are available, I'd suggest checking out the Google Analytics API Explorer and the Google Analytics API reference material. What I did was set up an SSIS package (using SSIS GoogleAnalyticsSource) as the data source, which made it fairly easy. Then just scheduled that to run daily, populating the data I want into my database.
Alternatively, you could download less complicated reports directly from Google Analytics and import them into your database with something like SQL Server Management Studio.
I'm using Google Analytics with an ecommerce site and the data is being sent to GA, which is cool, and I'm looking in the Conversions > Ecommerce > Transactions section. When I click on a Transaction ID to view it, it doesn't show the individual items that I know where in that transaction but it shows the revenue. But then I noticed that further down the line, there are other Transaction ID's that when I open up, display the individual item or product info without any revenue tied to it.
It's like the data that is part of addItem is completely separate from addTransaction, even when looking at the reporting results. I assumed that the transaction was a parent element and all of the items purchased within that transaction were child elements and it would display/report that way.
Is there a way to mesh these together so that I can view the transaction ID with all of it's child items?
It sounds like you are only using ecommerce:addItem in you site code, when you also need to specify the total in an ecommerce:addTransaction tag.
If you only call ecommerce:addItem, Google will automatically create a blank transaction (with no total amount) based on the transaction_id required in addItem.
From Google's documentation:
Note: While most implementations will send both transaction and item data, you can send transactions without items, and items without transactions. If you send an item hit without a transaction, a transaction hit with only the ID will be sent automatically.
Transactions are not just the automatic sum of Items because some charges (like tax, shipping, or even "gift-wrap" for example) might need to be added to the total at the transaction level, but don't correspond to individual items.
As long as you ensure you fire both ecommerce:addItem calls and ecommerce:addTransaction calls using the same transaction id before you fire ga('ecommerce:send');, everything should show up in Google Analytics the way you are hoping.
We're using Google Analytics to track transactions, products, browser data, etc on our shopping cart. I am interested in pushing some data to GA prior to completing the transaction. Normally I push data to GA on the success/order confirmation page.
My Question: If I push custom variables to Google Analytics prior to completing an order, will GA be able to associate that session with my completed transaction - allowing me to cross reference my custom variables with the transaction IDs?
Background: We use an address validation service and sometimes the address that the validation service submits to us isn't correct. It can "over correct" and completely strip vital details from certain addresses. Happens less than 1% of the time but when that is multiplied against 1000 - 2000 orders a day it can really become a problem for our fulfillment department. Yes, we have reported this to the address validation service and they tell us they are investigating it. I plan to use jQuery to grab the form data in the billing and shipping fields and when the user fills out all necessary fields, do a push to GA.
Yeah, you should be able to set a session-level custom variable (a unique id or any other value that isn't PII) prior to the transaction, and then create a custom report in GA that looks at that custom variable against the transaction Id. Because it's a session-level variable, it will associate anything that happens for that session.
More info on session-level variables here - Custom Variables - Web Tracking (ga.js)