Background:
I have a Google Analytics account using which I am tracking user activity for web and mobile app. After logging into your account and choosing the web property and the corresponding view, you generally see a dashboard with quick stats like Pageviews, Users, Sessions, Pages/Sessions, Avg. Session Duration, Bounce Rate and percentage of new sessions. You can change the time period (from the top right area of the Dashboard) to get the same stats for that period.
Problem:
Last week, I was interested in the three main stats: Page views, Users and Sessions for a particular day - say, day A. The dashboard showed the following stats:
Pageviews - 1,660,137
Users - 496,068
Sessions - 983,549
This report was based on 100% of sessions.
I go back to the dashboard TODAY and check the same stats for the same day A. Here's what I saw:
Pageviews - 1,660,137
Users - 511,071
Sessions - 1,005,517
This report is also based on 100% of sessions.
Nothing was changed in the tracking code for the web and mobile app. Could someone explain why I have this difference in the stats? Is this normal?
They need some time to update the system, otherwise their system would overwhelm
When you first create a profile it can take up to 48 -72 hours for it to start showing data.
After that time data will appear instantly in the Real-time reports.
Standard reports take longer to finish processing. You need to remember the amount of data that is being processed. Some of the data may appear in the standard reports after a few hours. The numbers have not completed processing for at least 24 hours, so anything you look at then will not be accurate.
When checking Google Analytics never look at todays or yesterdays numbers in the standards reports, if you want accurate information. Things get even more confusing when you consider time zones. When exactly is it yesterday? I have noticed numbers changing as far back as 48 hours. But Google Says in there documentation 24 hours. I am looking for the link in the documentation will post it when I find it.
Found it: Data Limits
Data processing latency
Processing latency is 24-48 hours. Standard accounts that send more
than 200,000 sessions per day to Google Analytics will result in the
reports being refreshed only once a day. This can delay updates to
reports and metrics for up to two days. To restore intra-day
processing, reduce the number of sessions you send to < 200,000 per
day. For Premium accounts, this limit is extended to 2 billion hits
per month.
So try doing the same thing again today but check your last day being Monday. When you check again next week the numbers should be correct.
Related
I'm trying to report conversions to Google Analytics from the server side of an app after a payment is successfully processed. I'm using the Measurement Protocol from the devguides. https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/
The problem is that it successfully shows the goal hits on the real time conversions report, but this are not showed in the normal conversions report as goal completions.
Is there any difference between 'goal hit' and 'goal completion' I'm missing? Or is there any delay on the data that makes into the regular conversions report?
There is a delay. Per documentation it's 24-48 hours (4 hours on a 360 account), although usually the data shows up somewhat faster.
Documentation:
Processing latency is 24-48 hours. Standard accounts that send more
than 200,000 sessions per day to Analytics will result in the reports
being refreshed only once a day. This can delay updates to reports and
metrics for up to two days. To restore intra-day processing, reduce
the number of sessions your account sends to < 200,000 per day. For
Analytics 360 accounts, this limit is extended to 2 billion hits per
month.
I used to think there was long delays in data showing up in GA reports as well, until I discovered a small bug in the GA system in regards to time zones. The system automatically selects the date for you on the reports, but if you live in a time zone like Australia or The Philippines, these can be out of sync, and therefore, the most recent data doesn't show up.
I now always set the date to "Today" or to the last few days, and I find all data comes through within minutes, not hours.
I can see traffics in realtime stream, there are active users on my site.
But I can't see visitor information in standard report.
My site was set up long times ago, and previously data collecting works fine, so it shouldn't be the 'new property not display data within 24 hours' issue.
I did modify my property yesterday, I've added 'referral exclusion' item, and deleted few minutes later.
There're no filters in my view anymore.
No hits collected mostly like happen after I've done item 4(change property).
How can I fix this issue, any ideas?
Did you check your monthly quota? (admin > property settings > property hit volume > last month).
In the free version of GA you've 10 million hits per month per property.(https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/limits-quotas).
Moreover if you send more than 200,000 sessions per day to Analytics will result in the reports being refreshed only once a day. This can delay updates to reports and metrics for up to two days.
(https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1070983?hl=en)
Maybe one of these conditions is the cause of the issue.
Before Tuesday, March 14th, we saw the data lag in Google Analytics at approximately 1-2 hours. (It was never immediate.) You can see this effect on the Conversions > Ecommerce > Overview page if you search by date and select "today" to "today" (1 day's worth of data)
As of Tuesday, March 14th, we started seeing the lag for this overview report anywhere from 8-12 hours, with an inconsistent aggregation time. For example, it is now 4 PM here on the east coast (EDT), and here is a screenshot of our GA overview tab (I have obscured the revenue number for our privacy). As you can see, there are no numbers after 6:00 AM.
We saw this same effect yesterday (about 8-10 hour lag), and the following day the overview report seemed to fix itself (catch up with all of the aggregated data).
Now, what's more interesting, is that if we either A) Add a "Secondary Dimension" or B) use a "Custom Report", we can see all our data near real-time. For example, if I switch into the Ecommerce > Sales Performance report, then add a Secondary Dimension of "Hour of Day", I can see all my data through 2 PM today (about a 2 hour lag as it is now 4:22 pm as I am writing this)
[
Note that to replicate this I sorted the "Hour by day" column by descending order (showing most recent first.)
Our questions are:
(1) Does anyone know why searching by Secondary Dimension or Custom Report shows us the data in more real-time than just looking at the overview report?
(2) Can anyone else confirm that what used to be a 2-3 hour delay now appears as if it is a 8-12 hour delay, starting on or around March 14th (possibly a few days earlier, this is the first day we can remember seeing this effect)
We are using Universal Analytics (with Enhanced E-commerce) implemented via the newer analytics.js. We are NOT using the older ga.js (we moved away from that about a year ago.)
We are not a GA 360 customer, just a regular free account.
From Google Analytics Help Center article.
Processing latency is 24-48 hours. Standard accounts that send more than 200,000 sessions per day to Analytics will result in the reports being refreshed only once a day. This can delay updates to reports and metrics for up to two days. To restore intra-day processing, reduce the number of sessions your account sends to < 200,000 per day. For Analytics 360 accounts, this limit is extended to 2 billion hits per month.
What it means is that for Standard accounts up to 48h delay is normal, if you have more data it can take more if you have less data it can be faster.
Regarding your observation that certain reports load faster than others this is linked to the design of Google Analytics Backends. Google will generate pre-aggregated tables with common reports to speed up consult and that sometimes can takes longer to process. Other non-common reports can't be answered by aggregated reports so it can be responded by a different backend that already has fresher data. So it is considered normal to see different levels of freshness in different reports.
Google Analytics 360 has fresher data of course.
This other table from the HC article highlights some of the differences and has more info.
I'm currently integrating support for google analytics in my c++ project. I'm still learning how to use the analytics interface, but I can foresee a few potential issues that I may have with debugging.
I'm currently only able to see the "Event Category" and "Event Action" fields for any events in real time. Is there a way to see "Event Labels" and "Event Values"?
I've only been using the analytics interface for a few hours. How long does it take for events to transfer from Real Time to archived events that can be found in the "Behavior" panel? Currently, I'm not seeing any events in the "Behavior" panel, but there are events in the "Real-Time" panel.
If you click an entry in the event category column in realtime view it will give you a breakdown to action and label for that category.
Processing latency is documented here:
Data processing latency Processing latency is 24-48 hours. Standard
accounts that send more than 200,000 sessions per day to Analytics
will result in the reports being refreshed only once a day. This can
delay updates to reports and metrics for up to two days. To restore
intra-day processing, reduce the number of sessions your account sends
to < 200,000 per day. For Analytics 360 accounts, this limit is
extended to 2 billion hits per month.
Most of the time the data will show up a lot quicker (in some of my accounts the data turns up within the hour; anecdotally I'd say it depends to some extent on the account size/number of hits. Also for a Premium/360 account guaranteed processing latency is 4 hours). But if you need to rely on it for any business criticall purpose you'd better go for the documented number.
For your title question how to "best" debug, I'd probably start by installing some kind of proxy that allows to inspect the actual request. This will allow you to better track down the cause of the error, if any.
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.