Google Analytic's / Duplicate entries / Google Tag Manager - google-analytics

We have Google Analytics on our site. This site also uses Google Tag Manager (unsure whether this is causing the issue or not).
The issue is that within Google Developer on the Network tab it looks like Google Analytics is being called three times, therefore messing up the actual analytics side.
I have searched the web for this issue but most put it down to the page refreshes etc. This is not the case with ours. This happens when it is first loaded.
Each URL is different slightly. I looked through the site code hoping to find duplicate data (script for Google Analytics), sadly I haven’t. Neither have a found duplication when I 'View Source'.
At this moment in time I am puzzled as to why this is happening.
I have noted the parameters are slightly different between the three, I am thinking this is why it looks like its being called three times, why would it do this?
DP: Document location URL (The call which doesn't contain GTM, contains this)
GTM: Google Tag Manager (Two of the three
have this in the third doesn't)
CD1: ? (The call which doesn't contain GTM, contains this)
Z: Cache
Any ideas will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Clare

Most definitely possible that GA and GTM both sending page views. If you are using GTM then you should remove ALL GA code from your pages as GTM replaces all GA.

Related

google analytics is mixing up my two websites when showing reports

google analytics is mixing up my two websites when showing reports. Eg. the top 5 pages include 3 pages from one website and 2 from the other website.?? Can anyone help me, please?
I dont know what to try and I can't find a help page for google analytics
The most common way for this to happen is if your tracking code is present on the both the sites in question (it is possible spam a GA account and achieve the same effect, but as you own both the sites I do not believe this to be the case.).
I suggest:
- check the audience > technology > network > hostname report. This will tell you all the sites that your code is present on and should confirm that your code is also present on an additional site.
- check the source code of the other site. Is the code present? look for either GA code or a GTM container. If you're using GTM then check to see whether it is the same container or a different container injecting the same GA code.

checking analytics setup for page I do not own

I'm a consumer data analyst who is not very familiar to coding other than occasional encounters with HTML and Python, and I'm just starting with the coding part of Web Analytics. In particular, I need to learn about checking websites I don't own (therefore I don't have access to their Analytics accounts) for tracking info, but it has been phenomenally hard to find information on which tracking function each component of code stand for, or to what extent it is visible from the page source.
For a project, here is a page I'm trying to check for Google Analytics/Tag Manager/alternative analytics setup, and see what is exactly being tracked on it. Other than the source code, I checked it with Ghostery, which gave me this Tag Manager code page. Is it possible to check tracking info from these two (events, pageviews, URI and how many custom dimensions there is, specifically), and which part of the code includes that info (particularly URI and dimension info - the first two, I have more idea about)?
This is a page I'm also looking into. I can see that this one has Google Analytics/Tag manager, but again, I can't make sure of what is being tracked, and whether the Analytics/Tag Manager setup is looking -potentially- problematic in any way. Here is the Tag Manager page for this one that I obtained through Ghostery.
Any help would be much appreciated...
Looks like what you are looking for is Google Tag Assistant extension for google chrome: https://get.google.com/tagassistant/
you can download it from here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tag-assistant-by-google/kejbdjndbnbjgmefkgdddjlbokphdefk?hl=en
When you install it it will appear as icon on any page you visit and it will show you all GA implementations on a page:
You can select tracking ID you are interested in and it will tell you how many Page Views/events were fired for that particular tracking ID only:
Then you can select individual tracking event/page view and see all data that are being sent with that tracking request. Just Click on URLs and click the icon to put the data in table:
Here "cd" stands for Custom Dimension, so here you can clearly see 2 custom dimensions that are being tracked:
Hope this helps, good luck!

Google analytics two calls on pageview

I have implemented analytics with google tag manager on my website.
Can anybody explain,why there are two calls on Pageview?
First, one is for pageview, what this second call do?
Since the name of the page was visible (now edited out) in the image I had a look at it. There are two pageviews configured within GTM. On is configured to override the page path, that's why the two calls are different (and why you do not see duplicates in GA).
It looks like somebody tried to implement virtual pageviews (since this is a one page application without proper urls) and accidentally sends one pageview to many on the inital pageload.

Preventing an iframe on the same domain from triggering a page exit in Google Analytics

I am working on a third party website that contains a web application embedded in an iframe on the home page. This iframe is hosted on the same same sub/domain.
Currently page views are being tracked with _trackPageview. Due to a requirement by marketing both pages use the same Google account Id.
Since the iFrame was implemented the marketing department has noticed that the bounce rate has dropped to almost nothing. I suspect that this is because Google is interpreting the pageView event on the iframe as the visitor hitting another page on the website.
Just for additional information, the domain of the _gaq object is being set to "none" for both the container page and iframe.
Does Google provide a mechanism by which you can trigger PageView in such a way that it isn't interpreted as subsequent pageview in this scenario? (I know that trackEvent has a noninteraction property to deal with this?)
Am I better off just disabling the PageView for the default iframe page?
Does Google provide a mechanism - apparently yes, but probably not for your use case.
The field documentation for Universal Analytics describes the non-interaction field thusly:
Specifies that a hit be considered non-interactive.
So in UA this does no seem limited to events but to apply to all hits (which would include pageviews). I want to point out that I have no tested it and that it seems counterintutive, so it might simply be that the documentation is incomplete/wrong here.
However as you are using "classical" Analytics this does not apply to you. Since upgrading the code is a good idea in any case you might want to push for an update to Universal Analytics (this piqued my curiosity so I will test this over the next few days and update this answer with the results - maybe you want to wait until then, or simply test it yourself).
It's possible, but not 100% clear to me that disabling the PageView event on the iframe will prevent your users from registering a page exit (the pageview may get recorded regardless). You can try removing that event and see if it works.
But a better way may be to implement a custom filter on a new View excluding traffic to that specific class of iframes. Make sure you keep your old View (or create a new one with further filters) to make sure you're capturing those iframe views, if you think that's necessary.

How to run Google Experiment within Google Tag Manager

I have been trying to get this to work for sometime and there seems to be very little information on how this works.
First, I would like to say that I tried the below method to get it working, so please read this before posting a solution.
What I tried:
I added the google analytics experiment code in a custom HTML block and had it fire only of the original page as stated by google. This doesn't work and seems to create a loop for users. A white page appears when users get to the experiment pages.
Does anyone know how to get this to work? Much appreciated
The Javascript versions of Google Content Experiments are not actually supported in GTM at the moment (they have do do either redirects or change the site on the fly and since it's hard to say in advance at which point during page load the tags fire, and it which order, this does not work very well - in the very best case the original page would load completely before the visitor is redirected to a variation).
The features page for GTM lists A/b testing tags as "coming soon" but does so since at least a year ago, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
However you can do variations serverside (you'd have to implement your own logic to display the proper variation to each users) and pass and experiment id and the variation number to GA via GTM. I do not think there is another (reliable) way to do this, at least not yet. If you need to do it with javascript you should add the experiment scripts to the page code instead of deploying them via tag managemement.
Having said that, there are descriptions for hacking around the GTM limitations using the Experiments Javascript API and some jQuery (here is one). When Google says that something is "not supported" it might just mean they didn't want to test all possible edge cases and err on the safe side. So you if you absolutely have to use GTM for Content Experiments you would have to test if something like this would work for you.
I hope that I understand your problem well. If yes, you can use Google Optimize instead of Google Experiment. The Google Optimize works with Google Tag Manager by default.
Here's what worked for me
For the pages in the Experiment, I implemented Google Analytics the "old fashioned way" with analytics.js instead of GTM.
I tested (with Realtime analytics) this and the Experiment page and the Google Tag Pages both report data.
I did post asking if there might be conflicts from ths.
It's possible to modify the Google Tag Manager (GTM) snippet to run synchronously by removing the j.async=true; line and placing it at the top of your page, immediately after the opening <head> element. Like so:
<!-- Google Tag Manager -->
<script>(function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':
new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],
j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.src=
'//www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);
})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-XXXX');</script>
<!-- End Google Tag Manager -->
You can also retain support for users without Javascript by inserting the <iframe> part of the code in the original location specified by GTM (after your opening <body> element).
<noscript><iframe src="//www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-XXXX"
height="0" width="0" style="display:none;visibility:hidden"></iframe</noscript>
It's then possible to insert the Google Analytics Experiments code as a Custom HTML tag in GTM. Just make sure you check the 'support document.write()' checkbox.
Just don't forget to update GTM-XXXX with your container ID.

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