I'm trying to figure out "automatic referrals" (without me providing the link)
I see some sources in the referrals section (Acquisition -> All traffic -> referrals) like t.co and bunch of weird websites I don't have any connection to them
Or some websites I do know that link to me but with no UTM or something (the link is "clean" to my landing page)
Having said all that - some sources I DO want to know if clicks came from - don't appear on the referral - and when I test it (and look at real time data to verify it's me) I get it as (direct)
I understand I can make a UTM but I'm trying to figure out why sometimes it works and sometimes not...
From the comment I posted:
t.co is from twitter, it's their link shortner. The other websites could be referral spam (something that has been popping up more and more recently). Here is a good article on this. As far as other referrers, are you sure that you're actually coming from that domain? When you visit from there check in your dev console and see what document.referrer
There are a few reasons that the referrer could be empty (coming from an app, secure page, etc.). Best way to check this sort of thing is to see what is passed on the page to Google's servers (Google's debugger is a good starting place).
Related
So, I've started working for a company, lets call it XYZ, doing marketing in general and helping form their SEO strategy and get a handle on how well their website is performing. They have a Wordpress website that is managed by an outside firm, and a Mailchimp newsletter that goes out monthly.
The direct traffic in Google Analytics is super high. I found that they had a Shopify store at one point, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't properly done and was causing the GA tag to fire wrong, resulting in a lot of self-referrals.
Our newsletter went out recently, and we saw a spike in traffic. Much more traffic than the Mailchimp Analytics can account for. Digging into the analytics, it looks like bot traffic. Quincy, Washington, Cheyenne, Wyoming and others. We aren't near these areas nor do we do business in these areas, and each city had a high number of hits, more than is normal. So probably bots, so far so good.
Here is the mystery I am trying to solve, and I hope I can get this explained correctly.
I checked the analytics after our most recent newsletter (an rss feed type with a template maid in Mailchimp) I saw a spike in traffic, which was the bot traffic I mentioned earlier. This bot traffic hit a webpage that doesn't exist on our domain. as an example
xyz.com/5-things-for-a-list-article/Here
The traffic was all trying to get to a URL structured like the one above.
The actual URL for the post would look like this in the example
xyz.com/5-things-for-a-list-article/
The extra word at the end of the traffic hitting a 404 page is the first word from the article.
The link in the newsletter shows a snippet of the post.
Digging into the history of the site and the newsletter this happens, (albeit not as much as this most recent time and not all the time) with a lot of posts that are shared in the newsletter. I look at the day the newsletter goes out, there is some amount of traffic to the 404 page, and the link path is the actual URL to the post, but with the first word of the article tacked on the end.
What is happening here? Are bots crawling the newsletter and getting the URL links wrong?
I will also add that our website is a WordPress install that uses the DIVI theme or plugin or whatever it is. At first I thought it was to blame because the URL with the high surge of traffic was going to a custom post type created by DIVI, but regular posts have had it happen as well. THe only connection I have found so far is the bots hit a 404 page that has the URL of an item in the RSS feed to our newsletter.
Anyone that can shed some light, I would greatly appreciate you.
My guess is that there is an error in the Mailchimp template, where there is no space between the url and the first word in the source of the email so "https://example.com/page/ abc ..." is seen in email clients as "https://example.com/page/abc ..."
It would have helped if you had shown the example source from the email and the code used to construct the URL, as I've had to go for a best guess at reverse engineering the likely cause.
I started to notice that my Google Ads clicks wasnt 100% counting by google analytics (For exemple, during a certain period I had 300 clicks and only 100 sessions were counted as Paid Search on analytics). So I contacted Google Ads Support, they investigated and came to me with this:
Actually, your site is losing the attribution of Google Ads because of an automatic redirection of the structure in which it was developed.
When we have Google Ads linked with Google Analytics, they are talked through a parameter called GCLID. To verify this loss, follow the path I made (in several products, here is an example):
1- I accessed the link https://mywebsite.com/products/running-shoes?variant=15320930779194
2- After full site loading, I added the & gclid = Tester123 parameter to the URL (in the browser, so the final URL was https://mywebsite.com/products/running-shoes?variant=15320930779194&gclid=Tester123) and hit Enter
3- To understand if there is a redirect, the normal behavior would be for the URL to remain the same (with & gclid = Tester123 at the end), but in this case, the parameter some (and hence the assignment)
So, the campaign actually appeared (not set) in Analytics, and could be assigned to any of the other channels (Direct, Organic, ...) For this to be resolved, the site structure must stop causing this automatic redirection in the final URL of each product. With this, the results will be effectively assigned to Google Ads.
They also said that if even if I want to use manual tracking (UTMs) I would still have that problem, since the redirections would keep spoiling it.
As I use Shopify as my website platform, I checked with them and I have no redirections that are causing this problem, at least not created by me nor that their support know.
So I am lost over all this. I dont know where to start solving this problem. Google doesnt tell me what kind of redirections may cause this, I dont use any kind of redirections, and Shopify cant tell me if their code causes this problem (what I dont believe, because other shopify websites would also been suffering from this).
So can anyone give me any direction about this? What redirections may be causing this lost of data?
Thanks for your time!
One thing to note, Google Ads might have a different way of counting, there is the possibility of multiple clicks per session.
That said, you can try Google Tag Assistant, start your recording, click on one of your ads, follow that through and see the parameters being passed.
Unfortunately, it is hard to debug with limited information. The more details you can provide the better.
Check where your GA code is placed in the page code. If GA script is at the bottom of page or there are some heavy scripts above GA tracker, losses of bounced sessions can be large. I.e. user enters the page and immediately closes it. GA script doesn't have time to download.
Why user closes the page immediately?
Сlick by mistake
Slow site
And check that all your landing pages are OK and have 200 server response.
Recently I've been experiencing a large amount of (what I think is) ghost traffic.
I need help in creating a filter to exclude this traffic from my Google Analytics.
URL's are showing up that have other websites appended to them.
Almost all articles I've read mention including only relevant hostnames but this doesn't seem to apply to my situation.
Here you can see the URL's with other random website addresses.(overworlf.com/evite.com/shmoop.com and many others)
Here is a screenshot of the hostnames none of them are out of the ordinary. I suspect this ghost traffic is using my main domain looking at the huge amount of users.
Posted the same question at stackexchange, someone there was able to help me
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/118666/94264
"Almost all the analytics spammers insert data into your stats by pinging the GA tracker directly with fake data. They never visit your site and they usually just guess at the tracking id without knowing website host name associated with it. They won't send a host name, so it wouldn't appear in that report. See How to fight off Google Analytics referrer spammers?
That appears not be the case here. In this case these appear to be actual hits to your website. I tried one of those "top active pages" and it gives a 404 error. It looks like your 404 template has the GA tricking snippet installed on it. I don't think that is best practice. You could try taking the snippet off your 404 page. Then if you did get actual hits to such URLs, GA wouldn't count them as pages."
This can happen when there are search and replace or advanced filters. Are there filters on your view that alter the Request URI?
EDITED AFTER IT WAS CONFIRMED THAT THERE WERE NO FILTERS:
Typically, tracking 404 pages is best practice (referring to your other post).
I don't believe that removing the tracking from that page will help anyway. Like the other poster mentioned, these hits are sent from bots most of the time and they never actually land on your site. The hit is sent directly to your property with an http call. It bypasses the site completely, so whether there is a 404 page or not, the hit will show up in GA.
Adding an exclusion filter to exclude traffic with a page path (not hostname) ending in ".com"
I have two websites, website A and website B, the website A is a hotsite that is linked to website B, where the sales happen.
We need to know how the user got the website A and turned into a customer in website B(it means he bought something), so we can mesure the good sources to invest.
as the developer, I have access to these two websites source-code and can implement any google-analytic tag on them.
Thanks,
Jonathan
Web browsers generally send a referrer header, which contains the URL of the page which linked to the current page.
You can access this in the HTTP requests made to site B, and track sessions differently when the first page load is referred by site A. You can also access a document.referrer property in JavaScript, and use it to manipulate your analytics.
The correct way to implement this in Google Analytics is to configure the trackers so that they work cross-domain.
This will allow you to see all the information about where the converting visits originally came from and their path to purchase.
If you don’t use cross-domain tracking or you have it improperly configured, you’ll end up with meaningless data that shows self-referrers in the visit reports and a lack of proper attribution towards your conversion points. As a visitor moves from your primary domain to the other, they will start a brand new session in Google Analytics.
...
If a visitor clicks an ad or performs and organic search and ends up viewing a page on the www.3rdpartycheckout.com after viewing pages on www.primarydomain.com, you lose ALL data about how that user arrived and the complete picture of what they did. If they end up converting, you will only know that they came from www.primarydomain.com (which is not helpful at all).
http://www.blastam.com/blog/index.php/2011/02/google-analytics-cross-domain-tracking/
Have the landing page on website B look at the referrer tag and if its website A then use a separate Google Analytics instance on website B for all sessions that were sourced from website A.
Is there a way to test the url you're entering in a step, to see if Google Analytics will recognize it?
What I'd like to do is provide some web page or some web service with a URL, and get a pass or fail. It passes if Google Analytics recognizes a page hit to the url.
Let me give some context.
We've been having issues with our goal funnel steps in Google Analytics. The instructions on adding steps say not to use the domain.
e.g.
DO NOT use : http://www.mysite.com/step1.html
INSTEAD use: /step1.html
Our custom CRM uses friendly urls and as a result GA is having a hard time picking up on them. So we've experimented with changing around url we've placed in the step, however we've got to wait a day to see if the new url we've provided is going to work! Hence why we're looking for something quicker.
OK- so what you're doing is futzing around with the friendly URLs to see what's being tracked (so you can distinguish one URL from another), but you don't want to have to wait?
There are a few Firefox plugins which report on on-page GA (WASP & Observepoint), but the Firebug Net panel is as good as anything.
The other option is to pass a 'virtual URL' to GA in the _trackPageview, rather than depend on the friendly URL - maybe something like this
_trackPageview("/goal1/step1")
although I'd attempt to have the virtual URL (it's really just the path) named more like the actual steps in the process.
What I'd like to do is provide some web page or some web service with a URL, and get a pass or fail. It passes if Google Analytics recognizes a page hit to the url.
This would be a waste of time for someone to make, so you won't find it; it's a waste of time to make it because all that anyone needs to do to see if the page is being tracked by google analytics or not is to look at their 'content -> top content' report to see if the page is listed or not.
One can also go to the page with Firefox, and using the Firebug addon on can see if a call for the _utf.gif image is made, or not, and confirm that the ga account id's are correct, which would mean that GA is receiving the data, but this does not tell you if the data is making it past your ga profile filters. The only way to determine that the page is tracked and that the tracked page view is available in your profile is to check your content reports.