I'm reasonably new to google analytics. The site I am trying to analyse though is very big and has a lot of dynamic content.
To try and make my job easier I've made a filter to mash all the times users viewed their own profiles into one number rather than counting each one seperately. The trouble is...I can't check if I've done this filter right as it is working as a new copy of the analytics for my
page, it didn't take the old data with it and I will have to wait until tomorrow for it to fill with a days's worth of data.
What I wonder is, is the anyway to make filters that take pre-existing data with them and merely change it? Or are filters doomed purely to filter incoming
data and what has gone before is untouchable?
Related
I want to use Firebase Analytics in my website in order to get some statistics for the visitors of each page (I don't want to track user journey in the site). I wanted to define multiple data streams (one for each url) in my google analytics dashboard, but then it warned me with the following message:
In most cases, a single web stream will meet your measurement needs. Using multiple web streams to measure different pages or sites in a single user’s journey may lead to inconsistent results.
in my case-where I want to see the statistics of my site based on its pages (urls)-should I define multiple data streams?
As the message says, it is not necessary to split based on the path in the web site.
You can in the Google Analytics console instead filter based on that path. This gives you the best of both worlds, as you can show stats for a specific path, but also for the site in its entirety.
I ended up using separate data streams in a similar situation where we had a multilingual site with a domain-per-language. The analytics dashboard lets you separate the data by domain, but the tools are bulky and don't seem available everywhere.
In short, creating a separate stream for data that is always going to be viewed separately can be a real convenience, even if it's not "the right way".
The main caveat from the data-streams documentation seems to be that you can miscount data. For instance, a user switching from the English site to the French site will be counted as a visitor on each rather than as a single visit. As long as you're aware of the data implications, you should be okay.
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
This seems really basic but i am struggling with it
We have a client who runs a travel website.
They have a few different search bars eg Flights, Hotels, Carhire.
I am trying to track the performance of each... "What % of people completed a sale that ran a Flight search." Same for Hotel, and for Car hire
Any ideas for the best way to get this info in GA?
Many thanks
There are a few ways to get this information, each with their pros and cons. The options that I see immediately available are segments and goals.
Segments are great because they are retrospective and generally more flexible, with the ability to be changed if you find your criteria isn't quite right. You create here, and specify sessions that go through search results pages etc:
Then you can create another segment for booking confirmation page, and any other intermediary steps that you'd like to report on. The main con of segments is that you can only pull in 4 at a time, but if you have more you can pull them 4 at a time and copy+paste the data into an excel sheet or google sheet. Segments can also be pulled via the Core Reporting Api and DataStudio which makes them great for automating into dashboards.
Goals are cool because they pull into the default reports, and basically track sessions through a particular page, event or sequence. The main con I see and the reason is that I don't use them is that they only start tracking fro mthe time you create them , and if you change the configuration it does not impact historical data, so your data can get messed up quickly if you don't have sandbox GA views or sandbox goals for your testing before putting it into a dedicated goal slot. You can also only have 10 or 20 goals depending on your plan, so once data is tracked against that goal you can't remove or clear it.
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.
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.