How to remove an e-commerce transaction? - asp.net

I have implemented google analytics ecommerce tracking in my website. But there was a mistake while passing parameters to google analytics. My order get tracked but product sku code is not set.
Its a dummy order that i dont want show in any google analytics report.
Can you suggest how can i delete this order from google analytics?

I am afraid you cannot remove data from GA once it has been collected.
What you can do is:
hide it: create an Advanced segment, the transaction remains in your GA profile but at least it is not included in the reports.
make a copy: copy the profile and delete the old one (it means you lose historical data)

There is one more option:
1.- You could create a new transaction with the same amount in money, but with a negative sign. For example, if you have recored a transaction for 1,000 dollars, you could recreate it with a "-1000.00" amount. Doing this would "cancell" the wrong transaction.
Important: This will only work when the user sees a long period of time, including the wrong transaction and the fix.

Julien is right. You cannot remove the data.
There're a couple more options in addition to Julien's suggestions though
You can go to "Filters" option of the view and try to see if you can filter it out. Luckily, ecommerce transactions have their own category that can help you narrow down the variable you need to use. (screenshot attached)
Go a little more advanced than filters and use "Data Import" where you import the ecommerce transactions via a spreadsheet thereby overwriting the transactions for that day. So, what you would essentially do is take all the real transactions of ecommerce from your ecommerce application, export them to CSV and then upload it into GA without the test transaction.
Lastly, a tip: create a test profile for things like this.

One of the answers hinted at data imports (but in a way that would probably not have worked). Universal Analytics actually introduced a way to refund transactions (effectively canceling them out) via data imports. However this only works if the data was collected via enhanced e-commerce tracking. As per documentation:
In order to process refunds you need to have collected transaction
data with the ec.js plugin
With standard e-commcerce-tracking Omar Gonzales' answer is still the only working option (I'd like to add the additonal caveat that the negative transaction might be attributed to the wrong channel, so make sure to look at the source/medium/campaign data for the transaction you want to cancel out and supply that data via utm parameters).

Related

How to restore some Google analytics data?

Based on erroneous setup some Google Analytics data were wrongly attributed: Organic channel and all of according metrics were added to the Direct channel. Some means all data for certain time range.
What is the way to restore these data as clear as possible into the organic channel?
Sorry to all: forgot to mention: i'm on ga360.
There is no way. In the free GA version you cannot change data that is already collected at all.
In GA 360 you can change data by overwriting it with a datasource in query time mode. However you cannot change the attribution for direct hits (you would need a utm_id in you destination urls to overwrite campaign and medium, see campaign data import).
You can't modify historical data in Google Analytics, just set a note to remember the issue in those timeframe.

Is it possible to selectively delete data (specifi page URLs) from Google Analytics?

I'm pretty sure the answer to this question is "no", but I would like to get a definitive answer from an official source, and also understand what my alternative options might be.
Long story short, my app has old data in it that used to include user email addresses as a GET parameter. Those URLs are showing up as unique page view URLs in Google analytics, like this:
I don't want to be recording email addresses in my Google Analytics account (for privacy reasons), and I have fixed the code that was causing this in the first place, but I also want to delete or scrub the old data that currently exists in Google Analytics.
From everything I've read, it doesn't sound like this is possible without completely deleting the property, maybe even the account?
To be clear, I am NOT interested in creating new views that don't include URLs with email parameters in them, or otherwise change the view and not the data. The data needs to be gone and be completely inaccessible to anyone with access to this Google Analytics account.
Here are the options I've come up with:
Delete the property and start over. I'm pretty sure this will
actually delete the collected data, but it's not clear to me if I
would have to actually delete the account itself to achieve that.
Set the data retention time to the lowest possible value (looks like 14 months right now) and wait 14 months for it to go away https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7667196?hl=en
Perform some kind of magic to get in contact with an actual human at Google who could help me scrub or remove this data.
Does this sound right? Are there options I'm missing? If there's a way to do this through a Google API that would not be a problem.
If this is still a relevant issue. GoogleAnalytics provides a way to delete some data. Universal Analytics https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9450800?hl=en and GA4 https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9940393?hl=en&ref_topic=2919631
You are right: changing the data, that you have collected, and Google Analytics have already processed, is not possible. You have the option to make changes during processing with various filters, e.g. Search-and-replace filters, but as it is written in this official support article:
Like all filters, search-and-replace filters only apply to hits
collected after you've applied the filter to the view (filters cannot
change historical data).
Regarding you suggested options:
Deleting a view or property will result in a permanent loss of data after a 35 days period of waiting time. (While this could be undone.) So unless the requirement of scrubbing the collected PII is more important than having your historical data, this should not be a way to go. The same applies to deleting the whole account, so it would be enough to delete affected properties or views.
From the article you have linked as well, you can see, that data retention is about removing user and event level data, and it will not affect the data in aggregated reports. My understanding is, that an already created, page level report will keep showing the page with an email address:
Keep in mind that standard aggregated Google Analytics reporting is
not affected.
I hope these references help you to evaluate your options. Sorry for not being able to come up with a solution, but the basic concept is, as highlighted in this Google article:
Once Analytics processes the data, it’s stored in a database where it can’t be changed

How to include custom segments in the list of segments when querying the Google Analytics API?

This may be a possible duplicate of this question, but according to all the Google Analytics documentation I really should be able to pull my list of custom segments.
Since I have a very large list of them, it would be suboptimal for me to manually copy the segment ids over one at a time.
I'm following this walk through. Steps to reproduce:
Create a custom segment using date of first session in your Google Analytics account.
Authorize the Google Analytics guide to access your Google Analytics account.
Try their on-page query tester, and inspect whether your custom segment is there.
One thing I've already ruled out was the user that created the segment. I've manually created a segment with the same user that I'm querying the API with and it still does not show. Is there a flag I need to set somewhere to include custom segments?
Edit:
It turns out that it will list some custom segments, but not ones created with date of first session, so this is a duplicate of this question, which means that there is a bug in the Google Analytics API.
There was a bug which is now fixed. So it is now possible to list the Date of Session Segments in the Google Analytics Management API by calling the segments.list() method.
So after days of trying to solve this one I've come to the conclusion that it cannot be done as asked.
There is, however, another way to do it. For every segment set up a daily (or weekly, etc) email report to a email as a TSV. In each email body specify the name of the segment so when you're consuming the emails you can know which segment the attached TSV is for. It doesn't look like the daily reports were designed with segments in mind, since non of the metadata included in the TSV mentions which segment it is for.
From there it's trivial. Connect to the email address using an IMAP client once a day and update the numbers.
Note that the daily email only contains the numbers for that day (not a specified range), so you'll need to first generate the report one time with the historical data to load in.
While hacky, one nice thing about this approach is that it keeps your reports in sync with your (faked through email) api code (provided you match the column headings in the TSV). So, if for example, a new filter is included into a report, the new daily fields will continue to update.
Unfortunately though, the past data won't be reflected in the change.
Obviously this isn't great, but if you are monitoring daily cohorts it's the best you've got if you need to stay with Google Analytics. I have raised this as a bug to the Google Analytics developers, but I haven't heard back as to whether or not they plan to fix it.

Google Analytics Ecommerce / Difference between 'ec:addItem', 'ec:addTransaction' and 'ec:send'

I would look for some feedback on tracking user activity on an commerce website using th google analytics commerce capabilities.
I can't fully understand those 3 parts :
Adding an item (ecommerce:addItem) : obviously when some user add a thing to the cart
Adding a Transaction (ecommerce:addTransaction) : that's where I'm very confused
Sending the data (ecommerce:send) : that's obvious
Can those 3 event append at a different moment ? in what manner ?
What would be a real-world use case that would make you use execute ecommerce:addTransaction and ecommerce:send at a different moment ?
This thing makes me wonder a lot, and I'd like to have some experienced feedback on this as you tend to easily break your stats if something is not done week enough
Thanks in advance
EDIT
So the main purpose right here is to get stats for the pending orders (you add stuff to your cart), and the complete orders (you paid for the things you added).
Right now I only send it all when the order is complete, and things are working pretty good in analytics, but I just don't know anything about the ones that did not complete.
This question was a lack of knowledge.
Simple ecommerce plugin has nothing to do with the enhanced ecommerce plugin
You won't track that much with the first one, except the checkouts. A plain, one order at a time, revenue value.
If you want a deep insight on your users behaviors (when i say deep, I mean it), You have to go for the second one.
We might be able to debate over the unusefullness of the first one; and the fact that its existence in itself compared to the second is completely misleading, as when you first get in, as usual with google, you get flooded by an endless documentation
ecommerce:addItem does not add items to a cart; it adds items to a transaction (with "conventional" ecommcerce tracking there is no cart tracking, you'd have to use enhanced ecommerce tracking. Actually your title refers to enhanced ("ec:") and your question to conventional ecommerce ("ecommerce:") tracking).
So ecommerce:addTransaction starts a transaction; here goes the stuff that affects the transaction as a whole, like transaction id, tax on the total purchase or shipping costs.
Now that you have started the transaction you can add items to it that are associated via the transaction id.
Finally the ecommerce:send command tells Universal Analytics that the transaction should be processed on the server. "send" is actuall a misnomer; addItem and addTransaction do already send data to the server (they each create an request to the tracking server and thus count towards your hit quota).
The reason for this is, as far as I can tell, that the information is transmitted via url parameters (you call the Google Analytics endpoint which returns an transparent pixel). The maximum length for an url request is limited (actual limits depend on browser and browser version).
So the transaction is broken up into multiple parts not because you want to execute the commands at different moments but so it can be transmitted via Url parameters without being truncated. The send command merely tells that you are now finished adding new parts to the transaction and the data can now be processed.

Google Analytics update a counter based on entries in databse

Is it possible, and if so, how to make a "custom" counter entry in GA, which basically is a count based on database entries.
Quite hard to say without knowing your specific use case, but Google Analytics supports events. You can send custom events to Analytics on every page load. You can then think of a structure with different categories and labels where you can filter these.
If you just want to show the change of the number of entries in a table, you could also think of using a monitoring software like munin. Think about whether your data makes sense together with your other Analytics data or if you just want to show the changes over time together with your other server health parameters.

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