I've got a problem matching shopify data with google analytics data. The numbers were more than a few hundred dollars off, so I figured it was a bigger problem than the normal problems.
I exported the shopify sales and the sales counted in google analytics. The values and quanities of orders were the same, but the dates were different. In GA, it was saying a sale was on 3/6/2015, but shopify had it as 3/16/2015. I checked with the client and they had received that order on the 16th. So somehow GA had the time 10 days off. And this is happening on many orders, but not all.
Have you seen this before? And how is shopify sending an incorrect date to GA/how is GA reading an incorrect date?
I'm not sure what more information to give here. I checked the implementations and everything seemed normal.
in the addTrans and addItem calls you're passing the data to, there is no formally passed date. GA related the instance of the addTrans to whatever time it was received.
what % of orders would you say are being dated incorrectly?
Related
We are using the free level of GA and have been creating reports using Custom Dimensions and Metrics since last summer.
We also use the Google Sheets Analytics add-on to post process data pulled from the API.
Overnight on 16-17 May (UK Time), our reports suddenly started showing as being sampled. Prior to that we had no sampling at all, as our reports are scheduled so I can look back through the revision history to see changes made when the scheduled reports run.
This sampling is occurring in custom reports viewed in the GA platform and in GA sheets. I've done some analysis and it appears to only occur at the point that more than one Custom Dimension is added to a report, or when the GA dimensions ga:hour or ga:dateHour are used (ga:date does not trigger sampling).
All our Custom Dimensions and Custom Metrics are set at Hit level (I've read a post where it was claimed to be due to mixing scopes on Dimensions & Metrics, but we are not doing this).
If I reduce the date range of a query (suggested as a solution on many blogs), the sampling level actually gets worse rather than better.
For the month of May we didn't even hit 4k sessions at property level. I can't find any reference anywhere to any changes being made to GA that would cause sampling to apply to our reports (change documentation, Google Blogs etc).
Is anyone else experiencing this or can anyone shed any light on why this might be happening? Given how we use GA if we can't resolve this then it's a year of work down the drain, so I'm really keen to at least know why this has suddenly happened even if ultimately nothing can be done about it.
I build application which pull sales data from Amazon and push it to Google Analytics.
I'm "hitting" transaction to Analytics and it's all works fine, the problem is that in Amazon the sales data updated after 48 hours (maximum) so I need to pull the report two days later.
Does anyone know if there's a way to send the date of the transaction? Can't find it in the Measurement Protocol API.
Thank you all, Peace and love :)
Not really. You have the queue time parameter (offset between current time and time the data was tracked), but as it says in the documentation:
Values greater than four hours may lead to hits not being processed.
"May" indicates that this is not a completely fixed limit but I'm pretty sure that 48 hours are not covered (Philipp Walton, a Google engineer who frequents SO once mentioned that the queue time limit is somehow related to timezones and rollover between days, so I'd guess that two days are way to long).
Apart from that there is as of yet no way to set a date for a hit.
You can try posting a Custom Dimension for each event you send, where the dimension is formatted to the date-time:-
e.g.
&t=event&cd1=20170423081321&cm1=24 etc
Only problem is: when you generate a GA custom report, the values are accumulated per day. If anyone knows how to get round that, would love to hear it!
In our project we stored all users event data in our database for over one year , but it's not indexed.
now we are going to use google analytics to store our analytics and analyze the report using google analytics dashboard.
but before start using google analytics , i would like to emigrate all old statics (about 2 million events) to google analytics.
for this matter i should use Measurement Protocol and it's limit allow me to transfer 2 million hits with no problem.
but i didn't succeed to know how to set the time of the event. Measurement Protocol has Queue Time but google says :
Values greater than four hours may lead to hits not being processed.
how it's possible to transfer 2 million events to google analytics with there event time ?
Thanks
You are correct you can use the measurement protocol to send events data directly to google analytics. I don't see any problem in sending 2 million events. However its not possible to set the event time longer then four hours ago.
Queue time is used to set the time that the event occurred as you can see it cant be more then four hours ago and I have found that if you do set it to four hours ago its a bit fuzzy if the data is correct or not. This feature is probably most use in mobile devices where they may go off line for a short time you can store the data then send it all once the device is online again.
So the dates will be the date that you sent the event to Google Analytics you cant back date the data to more then four hours ago. So I am not sure how much use the data will be to you when it is all inserted.
There is no way to do this, but you can make it easier on yourself.
Unfortunately, there is no way to add, remove, or otherwise edit Google Analytics hit data retrospectively, except to delete all of it. You also cannot copy, or move it between accounts, or download it all.
You are not the first to have to come to terms with this.
In this situation, we recommend to our clients that they run their new and old systems in parallel for a testing period (usually 6 months or a year), before switching off one of them.
Yes, it's difficult to let go of old data, but sometimes it has to be done.
I have several months worth of data in Google Analytics that is currently more or less useless, because some pageviews were being counted 2 or 3 (or more?) times.
The issue as far as I can tell came from a combination of a jQuery address plugin and AddThis' adding a tracking # to URLs shared on social media.
I've removed the plugins and implemented this filter to stop Google Analytics from tracking trailing vs. non-trailing slashes as 2 or more pageviews.
It works now, but is there a good way to go back and apply the filter to previous months?
The data should be salvageable I think, since Analytics tracked the Sessions correctly, but the Pageviews and Unique Pageviews way too high.
Comparing an affected time period last year to the same (unaffected) time period this year:
Unfortunately... Once GA data is sent and processed on their servers, it can't be changed.
Although your "pages/session" and "bounce rate" are unreliable, most of the other information should still be fine, for example "device type". Even conversion rate percentages are calculated as Conversions / Users - so in most cases that won't be affected.
I've been using a SSIS Integration component to download data from Google Analytics in order to keep an historical view of some websites and track the evolution of them. Basically the metrics we track are Visits (now Sessions) and Visitros (now Users), and the dimensions are Year and Month. However, today I noticed that the data I downloaded for july had a variation on the Users metric. I heard that google analytics uses an estimation method to "calculate" some (if not all) of their metrics, could it be that after that they "adjust" the data with more acurate information? If so, is this mentioned in the documentation? (a link would be highly appreciated) Since the users are complaining that we are not delivering the real GA Data. I tried looked on the Google analytics documentation page with no luck.
Thanks for your time.
PS: Sorry for my english, it isn´t my native language
If you are using the standard version of Google Analytics (you'll know if you are paying $150k for premium), data is sampled depending on volume. Have a read of this article can-you-trust-your-google-analytics-data
I have seen very slightly differing results being returned if you repeatedly call the api with the same historical parameters repeatedly. In my case the figures only differed by 1-2 over a daily set of several thousand, but nevertheless it differed.
If you want to guarantee your results, consider upgrading to premium
Sampling could be an issue if what you are requesting is over 50,000 rows for the time period you are requesting. To avoid it you can download more often, such as daily.
But I think your issue is that there is a processing time for Google Analytics - if you are downloading at 3 am on the 1st it is probable that the processing for the previous day has not finished.
Google Analytics Premium SLA is for 4 hour data freshness, so even that would have trouble. Pragmatically you should allow 24 hours before you download data for the previous day, 48 hours for e-commerce data.
Thirdly make sure it is not Unique Visitors you are requesting, as this is dependent on the time period you are requesting.