I am trying to send data about screenview in my account Google Analytics, using measurement protocol.
But i don't see data in the Real Time reports.
string request:
http://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&tid=UA-55175445-4&cid=666&t=screenview&an=HelloWorld
where is a problem?
I had same problem and apparently if you're using mobile app version of analytics you have to send application name (an) and application id (aid), otherwise the hit is ignored.
Here are some bullets you might want to consider.
1) Make sure that you are using google universal. (How?)
2) For new google analytics accounts it will take up to 48 hours until you can start using the measurement protocol.
3) Make sure you are setting the User-Agent with the request
4) Make sure cid is a random UUID (version 4) as described in http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4122.txt
Related
In My android application I am trying to achieve a page Where I want to show Some Graphs for Stats of App to Users Like Active Users , Avg Time Spent by all users who use the app, Global map indicating Users from which Country with Intensity or more
To what I know Firebase Analytics Provides such details but I think its only for Admin , That is only the people that have access to the project can view it
Is there a possibility of Bringing those Analytics Graphs , Data , Stats into the App to and Show the User ? I am trying to achieve this in Kotlin for a Android App.
Any Indicator or Clear Resource to read abt Would also be helpful With slight info on the part I am trying to Achieve.
Thanks in Advance
I believe you could achieve this by using the Google Analytics 4 Measurement Protocol API. The Measurement Protocol API allows developers to make HTTP requests to send events directly to Google Analytics servers. This allows you to measure how users interact with your business from any HTTP-enabled environment. Notably, this makes it easy to measure interactions that happen server-to-server.
You can use the Measurement Protocol on the following:
Tie online to offline behavior.
Measure interactions both client-side and server-side.
Send events that happen outside standard user-interaction (e.g. offline conversions).
You can go to this documentation for more information.
We are trying to migrate from Universal Analytics to GA4. The issue we are having is that GA4 requires a client_id field which we cannot get in a desktop application (C++). Is it possible to get client_id without a browser? and without being an IOS or Android app?
Just generate a unique id for each user, that's it. That's exactly what GA does on web. Same applies for GUA. I wonder how you were tracking users without setting client id for UA. Were you tracking them?
Another thing is that despite all the fuss around GA4, it is an unfinished product. Even though Google recommends it, the professionals who actually work with GA's data recommend to either not use it and give it another year or two or implement it very shallowly in parallel with existing tracking just to have some semblance of historical data in it when it's time to switch.
Finally, if you're tracking a desktop app, you likely use the measurement protocol rather directly, so you mind find this useful: https://firebase.google.com/codelabs/firebase_mp#2
Is it possible to use GA4 Measurement Protocol to send events to Google Analytics and view and analyze them in the GA dashboard without using gtag.js or any other front-end script? The use case would be that some events are being sent to my server and I will just push these events to GA through the API.
One thing that makes me think is that the official Measurement Protocol API say:
In order for an event to be valid, it must have a client_id that has already been used to send an event from gtag.js. You will need to capture this ID client-side and include it in your call to the measurement protocol. In send an event to your property, we use "client_id" as the client_id. You will need to replace this with a real client_id that comes from gtag.js.
(https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/ga4/verify-implementation?client_type=gtag)
That suggests that only events that have a valid client_id that originate from gtag.js will be counted.
I did some experimenting with randomly generated client_ids and what I discovered was that I was able to see my events in the Realtime section of the GA4 console (the Event count by Event name section), but all the other sections would be empty and the Users in last 30 min section would always show 0.
Can someone please explain to me why it's zero and if such a use case is valid at all? Thanks
tl;dr
You can use any value in client_id, as long as it uniquely identifies the user (we use a GUID/UUID), but it seems like you also need to send a value in user_id. We use the same value for both.
Also, you need to add the 'engagement_time_msec' parameter to get any user metrics to register.
Longer answer:
We're trying to do the same, i.e. send all events to the GA4 Measurement Protocol from the server, so that it is not dependent on the current user's GDPR cookie settings.
We currently do this for a Universal Analytics property with no issues, but it seems that Google is trying to prevent this in future, by restricting the scope of the Measurement Protocol in GA4, whilst forcing everyone to move to it by July 1st 2023. See the documentation at https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/ga4#full_server-to-server, where it states:
While it is possible to send events to Google Analytics solely with
measurement protocol, only partial reporting may be available. The
purpose of measurement protocol is to augment existing events
collected via gtag, GTM, or Firebase.
We have something working with GA4, in that the events are being registered on the GA4 property correctly, using a client id that is just a GUID/UUID that we define in our own site cookies. So, any value can be used in the client id, as long as it uniquely identifies the user. The same value is used to populate the user_id parameter.
When sending events, the realtime event details were showing on the GA4 dashboard, but user metrics were not until we also populated the 'engagement_time_msec' parameter, as described in https://stackoverflow.com/a/71482548/7205473
We still have issues with things like getting the user location and the platform details, which previously were automatically populated by passing the IP address and the User Agent, but which seem to no longer work in GA4.
We were also passing page load timing events through the Measurement Protocol, but again, these features seem to have been removed in GA4.
It is possible to use GA4 directly without gtag.ja or the Firebase SDK. Its not supported, so it takes some work. We have this working in a desktop app reasonably well. There a couple things that need to be done.
As stated elsewhere the "engagement_time_msec" param must be set using the "_et" parameter. This is the number of milliseconds between now and the previous event.
The client id "cid" has a specific format; it should be:
"randomNumbers(10).unixTimeStamp()"
The session id "sid" format is:
"randomNumbers(10)"
The "_z" parameter needs to be set. I think this is a cache buster. Looking deep into the gtag.js code it is a url safe base64 encoding of "CCD", which always results in the value "ccd.v9b"
The page hash parameter "_p" can be set to this; not totally sure its correct but it works.
"randomString(3).randomString(3)"
Set the "User-Agent" HTTP request header in whatever framework/lib you are using. GA4 uses this to determine many things including Operating System. You will need to create a fake user agent based on the local device information. This is what we use for a Windows 11 x64:
"myco.testapp/4.0.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)"
The IP will be taken fromn the web request which is where the geolocation data comes from.
Since a full working example is worth 1,000 words of documentation; here is a "test" event with a parameter "animal=dog":
https://www.google-analytics.com/g/collect?cid=0078745494.1659679529&_et=364&_p=pfJ.Aev&seg=1&sid=2678664821&tid=G-???&ul=en&v=2&_z=ccd.v9b&en=test&ep.animal=dog
It's possible to extract outgoing GA4 request from a GTM container debug/preview view and map any GA4 (automatically collected and custom) event.
Example page_view request URL:
https://www.google-analytics.com/g/collect?v=2&tid=G-XXXXXXXXXX>m=3oes1i1&_p=1545013558&_dbg=1&cid=P%2FdJWyULMwcT21TMrzn7pZdlNt%2FxtttGVqGUmqNYbhc%3D.1669722847&ul=nl-nl&sr=2560x1440&uaa=x86&uab=64&uafvl=Not_A%2520Brand%3B99.0.0.0%7CGoogle%2520Chrome%3B109.0.5414.75%7CChromium%3B109.0.5414.75&uamb=0&uam=&uap=Windows&uapv=10.0.0&uaw=0&_s=1&_uip=XXX.XXX.XXX.X&sid=1674235261&sct=1&dl=https%3A%2F%2FXXXXXXXXXX.com%2F%3Fgtm_debug%3D1674235654105&dr=https%3A%2F%2Ftagassistant.google.com%2F&dt=OM%20test&jscid=XXXXXXXXXX.1669722847&seg=1&en=page_view
Tip: use Postman to analyse and experiment with parameters
regardless of the platform used to make a call the Measurement Protocol, you should use a client id generated by gtag.js, or the app ID if using Firebase.
For some reason PowerBI does not accept GA4 as a connection, so my data is stuck in GA4.
PowerBI does support Universal Analytics (UA), but I cannot find a way to convert my GA property.
Is there a way to do this or should I start over again and create a new property as UA?
PowerBI currently doesn't support GA4 as a destination because the underlying api is not product ready yet. See the response in the microsoft power BI community here: https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Desktop/Power-BI-Google-Analytics/td-p/1679530
For information about the api's and their current state:
This is a link to the api documentation the plugin is using (for universal analytics): https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/core/v4
This is a link to the api documentation of GA4 (which is still in beta): https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/data/v1
Regarding a solution for your issue:
In GA4 is it possible to export data to big query, which can be processed there and imported to PowerBI: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/desktop-connect-bigquery
The export only works from the moment you enable it, so it is not possible to access the data this way before the enablement.
Second option is using data studio to connect to your GA4 data to be able to access the data you have measured before.
First off as everyone says you cant change the type of your Google analytics account if it was created as UA then its UA if it was created as GA4 then its GA4. There is also no way to exxport data.
Now lets look at the underlying cause of your problem Google analytics connector in Power BI Desktop rely on the Google Analytics Core Reporting API this API is used to extract data from Google Analytics UA accounts. There is a very big difference between the underlying data structure of a UA account and a GA4 account they are not completable in any way shape or form.
Thats why the Google analytics team is currently developing the Google analytics data api This api has the ability to connect to Google analytics GA4 accounts and extract data. At the time this post was created Power BI Google Analytics The Google analytics data api had just been released and was still in alpha test phase as you can see from the change log this API is still under development. I haven't checked but it looks like it may even be out of beta now. (TBH I am not really sure of the exact date it was released publicly as I have been in the alpha test group for a long time.)
However that being said a lot of the client libraries used by this api are still under development as well Google .Net Client library for Google Analytics Data API for example is still in beta. At the time that post was written i am almost 100% sure the client library had not been released.
This means that any power bi connector is probably not going to be released until both the API and the client library are considered stable. I know the team is working hard on the API and I Haven't seen any breaking changes in a very long time.
So to the user who added a bounty to this looking for an updated answer.
IMO I don't think you have long to wait before everything is stable enough for applications like the Power BI to start appearing that support GA4. That is assuming that someone creates one.
You can't covert GA4 to UA (or UA to GA4).
In your case you can create a new UA Property and start to track in it:
I was checking GA Measurement Protocol to send data to GA from backend.Which is working fine.Url i am using is:
https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?tid=UA-XXXXXXX-1&v=1&cid=9350&dp=home&t=pageview
(Please replace UA-XXXXXXX-1 with your own tracking id.)
Now i have a website which is GA enabled using javascript way.I checked in Chrome inspect that it sends information to google through url:
https://stats.g.doubleclick.net/__utm.gif?utmwv=5.6.5dc&utms=4&utmn=1588741400&............
I can use this url too to send information to google from backend. What's special and new in Measurement Protocol because using this url too i can send data to google for analytics purposes?
I need to send data from backend to GA so please guide.
The measurement protocol is now the "backbone" for data collection for Universal Analytics for all versions (web, mobile etc). Unlike the gif-method it is well documented and it can be called from every device/programming language that can send http requests (it will still return a transparent gif, though).
The main reason for using the measurement protocol is that everything else is deprecated and Google has announced that support for older tracking methods will be dropped. It looks like your second example uses an older version of the Analytics tracking code, current versions send their calls to the https://www.google-analytics.com/collect endpoint. You should not invest a lot of effort in developing solutions based on deprecated technology, especially if it offers no advantages over the current versions.
Google measurement protocol is very useful when implementing distributed solution of a service like restful APIs.
The client is not known by the server, each client world wide can call the rest API so no javascript code is possible to be injected at the client.
Measurement protocol enabled us to track which kind of devices are calling our API, how many requests per endpoint, etc...