I've previously used statcounter, which does a great job. I'm looking to start tracking with google analytics as well, but it seems to be way off.
I tried to figure out the cause of the discrepancy and it looks like google is counting each page view times 5,10 or sometimes even more. For example, this is a site I barely use. I accessed it at 11:00 today. Instead of showing just 1 hit from me, its showing 10 users as having gone to the site
http://screencast.com/t/GT29OKzG
Similar things are happening with my other sites as well.
Do I have some weird setting turned on?
The unusual spike on direct traffic is most likely caused by spam, lately spam like free-share-buttons and similars, have been hitting with fake direct visits along with the referral.
The usual way to stop the spam by adding a filter for the referral won't work on this case since the fake direct visits will still go through.
To stop the fake direct traffic and any form of ghost spam, referral, keyword, page... you can use a filter that includes only your valid hostnames. You can find more information about this solution here
https://stackoverflow.com/a/28354319/3197362
And more details on the fake direct traffic issue here:
http://www.ohow.co/unusual-increase-in-direct-traffic-on-ga-spam/
Hope it helps,
Related
I have a website that sells products and I'm using google analytics to know some statistics about the website. Sometimes, errors happens for various reasons and purchases doesn't go through. You then have to refresh the page and try again, then everything works. The website displays the message telling the user to refresh and try again. I'm curious how many people actually do that. My question is, is it possible to know what users do when this error happens? Do they refresh and try again? Do they close the tab or do they do something else?
The question is quite broad at this moment, but there are a couple of improvements to your measurement setup, that can help you to investigate this customer behavior.
What I would do, is to implement an event tracking to indicate, that this error has occurred. You can find details about event tracking in this guide. Although I suppose, that your users are not likely to enter the website at this page, it might be a good practice to set the non-interaction flag of the event, as it is not actually generated by a user interaction.
I'd also create tracking for page reload, either by creating an other event for this, or by adding -reload suffix to these repeated pageview URLs. You can find good resources for this on SO as well, e.g. this one.
If you have a special URL for this error page (e.g. purchase-error.html instead of purchase-success.html), it is also easy to track the exit rate specific to this page.
Besides of Google Analytics, you might also want to set up heatmap or screen recording tools to understand this behavior. Hotjar, Lucky Orange are a few examples. (No affiliation.)
Recently ran into some trouble with Google DFP that I'm hoping others have had.
We have a site that's served via SSL and it contains some Google DFP ad tags. Google DFP's debugging console shows no errors in the tags or our implementation of them. (i.e. the tags themselves are fine)
However, the ads are getting served via different methods. Some of the iframes get served as FriendlyFrames and some get served as SafeFrames. The SafeFrame ads appear correctly. The FriendlyFrame ads don't show up.
It appears that the FriendlyFrame ads are running afoul of some sort of browser security measure (likely because the pages are served via SSL).
I looked into this in the DFP docs but haven't found anything that explains how to solve the issue. There is a setForceSafeFrame method available that I've tried to use but it doesn't actually seem to do anything when I try to use it:
https://developers.google.com/doubleclick-gpt/reference#googletag.PassbackSlot_setForceSafeFrame
I've setup a test page demonstrating the issue here:
https://methnen.com/ad-test
There should be 5 separate ads on the page. If you get all of them refresh the page until you get at least one ad that doesn't show. The broken ads are being served as a FriendlyFrames.
Really hoping someone knows what the heck is going on.
FYI and possibly helpful for anyone else who might run into this at a later date:
Turns out the Ad Ops person hadn't set things up on their end to have enough inventory to fill all of the slots and there was nothing wrong with the tagging at all. The empty FriendlyFrames are apparently what DFP serves up when it decides it doesn't have anything to fill a given slot.
Try to force render all ads in SafeFrame
googletag.pubads().setForceSafeFrame(true);
More about it here https://developers.google.com/doubleclick-gpt/reference#googletag.PassbackSlot_setForceSafeFrame
So I've been working on a website for a while. GA account has been up for a couple months but I waited for the website to be finished before putting up the actual JS tag.
In the meantime, the website is being HTTP password restricted (basic authentication) so it isn't even accessible unless you know the user/pwd combination.
To my surprise, I realized today that GA has logged several hundred views to the root of my website. Paths are mostly things like:
/
/?from=http://social-widget.xyz/
/?from=http://www.traffic2cash.xyz/
Bounce% and exit% both at 100% for all of them.
I realize this looks like referral spam, and there are ways to prevent it. Came across this upon googling:
http://botcrawl.com/block-social-widget-xyz-referral-spam-in-google-analytics/
My question is: how can GA log anything anyway when no tag is up and the website isn't even accessible?
Thank you very much in advance
Because it's spam. They hit Google Analytics directly with random GA codes and don't even go through your website.
GA can't tell if these are real hits (from website visits) or fake hits (from spam bots who hit GA directly calling the same ode as they would if on the website). Though arguably they should do more about this.
Massively annoying - particularly when first starting out as this can be a heavy proportion of your "traffic".
It's easy to set up a filter rule is to catch a lot of this by filtering on hostname. As they are randomly hitting GA and don't even know what website they are hitting GA for, they don't usually set this correctly. Real traffic should only come from yourwebsitedomain.com so add a filter for that.
STRONG piece of advice: abandon the default UA-########-1 tracking code of your new website -- simply do not use it!
Create a second and third property on the Admin screen, then use the tracking code for the third property. You will immediately see a lot less spam. No filters or segments necessary!
If you want the whole sad story about spam visits in GA, I have been maintaining the Definitive Guide article for over a year now:
http://help.analyticsedge.com/spam-filter/definitive-guide-to-removing-google-analytics-spam/
I'm not a really advanced Analytics user, so I've been trying to Google this, but haven't come up with a great answer. My analytics says 95% of my site visits to my blog today have come from site38.social-buttons.com and yesterday it was another subdomain of the same site. I visited social-buttons.com, but am unfamiliar with it, and have never deliberately put that code into my Wordpress site. I do have some plug-ins installed, which are "Subscribe / Connect / Follow Widget", which displays my social media links, and also "Really simple Facebook Twitter share buttons", which puts the like links on my posts.
My questions are, how are people finding my site through social-buttons.com? And are these quality hits?
Thanks, I appreciate any info!
This kind of visits are called Ghost Referrer Spam since they never reach your site. They use a GA weakness to make a fake visit and get a record in your data.
They do it to get traffic, people get curious to see who is visiting them and click on the link.
This specific Referrer Spam is nasty because it make multiple visits at the same time, is related to the number of the subdomain so if it says site38... it hits with 38 visits, I've also have many of these, here is a screenshot I took:
In my case is a different simple-share-buttons.com but is the same thing.
The easiest way to stop it is by making a filter for each spammer in your GA. Check this article to find more detailed information http://www.ohow.co/block-social-buttons-simple-share-buttons-referral/
As an alternative, you can make a more general filter to take care once and for all of all the Spammers by making a list of Valid Hostnames, this is more advanced and you have to be more careful. You can find more information about this solution here https://stackoverflow.com/a/28354319/3197362
It's actually referral spam. Take a look at this https://www.mooresoftwareservices.com/Web-Commerce/social-buttons-com-referrer-spam
So unfortunately they are not good quality hits.
What people are doing is basically taking the UA-XXXXXX code that you normally get with analytics, and they are generating calls against it. This is skewing my analytics stats. On top of that, in Google WebMaster tools, it's also causing this:
It looks like somehow these pages, with my code on or at least with the generated code on, is making Google Webmaster tools think I have lots of 404's. This can't possibly be good for my rankings.
Anyone know if there is anything you can do to stop this?
Try making async call from your server end using CURL.That way you will never expose your GA code.
I have not implemented it, but it might work as per theory
Since you can filter by custom dimensions you can set a "token" in a custom dimension on every page and filter out any traffic in your view settings that does not include the token.
Obviously this will not help against people who use the code from your website (unless you also implement shahmanthan9s suggestion - which is a lot of work but will give you cleaner data), but it will work against drive-by shooters who randomly select UAIDs to send data to (which is the situation you refer to in your comment).