Recording email opens as event - google-analytics

For I while I'm using img tag for tracking email opens. But now i see that every time after sending a email on a second day i have no opens. Last time - i opened my email on second day and i saw it in real time. After that i watched event report and again - 0 events for second day. Maybe You know - what can be a problem?
< img src="http://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&tid=XX-XXXXXXX-X&cid=reciepient_id&t=event&ec=email&ea=open&el=LabelName" >
Ilze

Maybe the image is cached, since it's not downloaded again you won't see it in GA. That's just one of the reasons what you are doing is a terrible idea.
The biggest reason would be because Gmail will cache images for users. So if you send this email to say 100 users, google will cache download the image once and serve to all users. So you'll see a single hit no matter how many users (or no users) open your email.
More info: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html
Google Analytics is not a good tool for mail tracking.

Related

How to speed up loading of Google Analytics 4 tracker?

I’ve been experiencing a discrepancy in terms of page views between GA4 and GA3, both installed through GTM page view event.
I notice that GA4 is much slower to send the collect request compared to GA3, literally takes 3-4 seconds more from my office connection and pc.
I think that this is the main cause of discrepancy between the two.
Is it possible to somehow speed up GA4 tracker?
I remembered Google design this feature.
Here is the reference from a blog post
One thing you might have noticed is the delay it takes for the hit to
be sent. When you load the page, you can see how the browser waits a
few seconds before dispatching the hit to GA. This is because GAv2
batches requests automatically, which, again, is a great feature
upgrade.
Link
GA4 now will send multiple event as one request. But you don't need to worry about this will lost some event if user close the browser suddenly.
Here is the article from Google
Note: When a user's device goes offline (for example, a user loses their internet connection while browsing your mobile app), Google Analytics stores event data on their device and then sends the data once their device is back online. Analytics ignores events that arrive more than 72 hours after the events are triggered.
Link

How to let know to Google Analytics that my user is still online?

We have a dashboard application that shows some realtime data. Usually use case is that user open some dashboard and let it opened several hours and looks at it during the time. Data on the dashboard are updated on the background. Google Analytics doesn't know that the dashboard page is still opened and results about realtime online users in GA are bad.
How to let know to Google Analytics that the user is still online?
I think about using GA events, but I do not know if it is the best way.
You can know it with a margin of 5 minutes:
Active users are those who have sent a hit to Analytics within the last five minutes.
Active users per page is the number of users who have sent their most recent hit from that page.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1638637?hl=en

Guidance on tracking time user have watched video stream using google analytics

I am building a site where admin will stream their desktop screen using WebRTC and site users have a button which they press and stream starts and they can view the video stream.
I want to use google analytics to track following but no idea what the best way is to approach the requirements
Note: Each site user may be a direct or via referral site.
What we want to track is:
1) How long each user have viewed the video over a timeframe 1 day, 7 day etc?
2) Users need to be tagged as per their referral
3) How long stream was watched by users of each referral.
Idea behind this so that we can contact each referral and show them their users are being active and they can advertise their products to them.

Sessions from Google Ads are not tracking by Google Analytics

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.

detect email view counter using ASP.NET

I'm creating a newsletter dynamically in my ASP.NET web app. I've made an ASP.NET page which is sent my users via email, I need to know how many times this email is viewed, what are my options? I have another page which acts as an archive for my newsletters, so I should find a way that each time my email is viewed, "numview" column in my newsletter table is increased by one, is it possible? are there any ready made tools or I should make one using code? it is easy to make one but my page is going to be viewed as an EMAIL, so I think I cannot write SQL commands, how can I solve this problem?
It will not be very easy to add tracking to normal email. but if you are loading some external webpage(of yours), inside the email (via an iframe or as an images source or so), you may try any of the following.
You can try incorporating some analytics code inside your page. So everytime when someone visits the page,the visits will be tracked. You will get a clear picture from the dashboard of the analytics provider. There are lot of providers but i think google analytics is the winner. It is free as well.
If you want to implement your own, you can have a one table which stores the pageid/url, users' IP Address, date, browser etc.. and add a record to this table on the page load event of your page.
I've made an ASP.NET page which is sent my users via email
I had a little trouble understanding this. If it's an ASP.NET page, then how can you send it to users?
Forgetting about ASP.NET for a minute, you can just send an HTML email. One trick is to have the email reference an image on your server. You could then write ASP.NET code to intercept that server request and count the number of times that happens.
However, this is not reliable because most email readers will not display images unless the user indicates images should be loaded for an email because spammers have used this technique too many times.
So, to the extend I understand the question, I do not believe there is a reliable way to accomplish this.

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