Hello I just want to ask if how long will the shopping behavior analysis updates it's data and how am i going to check if im tracking the correct amount of data. Thanks
Maybe 30mins lag for me. it might be different depending on traffic volume. If you're not seeing data, I've found there are a number of quirks in setting the tracking up, depending on your approach.
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My event counts between GA4 and UA are different. They are not drastically different (maybe about 10%) but the numbers are still off. If the tags and triggers are all the same in GTM, shouldn't the event counts be identical? what would cause it to be 10% off or is this normal??
First of all, it has at this point become agreed upon that GA4's pre-baked reports are less than reliable. We now suggest avoiding using pre-cooked reports in GA4 and instead either use the Explorer, or export the data and use something else entirely (preferably) if you have the resources for it.
Secondly, make sure you don't have Google Signals enabled since this changes thresholding/sampling logic. Also, switch to device-only reporting, it will help with thresholding. More on it here. It's important that the Signals are never enabled. It looks like the thresholding logic won't be fixed even if you disable them after enabling. Some report the thresholding reduce after you give it some months. Some claim it's due to Signals affecting the data and then the data can't be restored.
Event Properties Cardinality. Here's more about it. Despite what Google claims, GA4 is still full of bugs and unpleasant features. One of it would be the cardinality of your eps' values. Keep it low. Otherwise, sampling kicks in hard and you end up seeing a large percentage of your events as Other(Other). Even when you don't use the high cardinality dimension in your report.
Data retention. See the limitations on it here. Yep, no more free access to old data for your precious ad-hoc YoY analysis, so if you're counting old events, no luck. UA will show them to you, but GA4 wipes them. GA4 tries to still maintain the pre-cooked aggregated reports, but now you can't drill into them as you used to in UA, and they're not accurate anyway.
These are generic suggestions. More debugging would have to be done on your side to find out exactly what datapoints at what times aren't being counted. Data exports to BQ would help narrowing it down. But at this moment, the general consensus among analysts is that we shouldn't compare GA4's data to that of UA. I personally don't agree with that consensus, since it's always good to know the difference, but that has become almost an industry standard today.
I posted a finding to this thread.
had the same issue with purchase events being different for UA vs. GA4.
Universal Analytics was always showing higher numbers and the triggers were exactly the same.
Then I enabled data export to BigQuery and it turned out that GA4 shows only those transactions in the GA4 UI that have a value for the field user_pseudo_id (you only see this field in the BigQuery data export). There were transactions where the field was null and apparently these dont show up in the UI.
I would recommend looking at raw event in BigQuery, the data export is for free as long as you dont go crazy with ETLs and queries.
Hopefully someone is able to shed some insight here as I'm running out of ideas. When I look at a single day's transaction count in the Ecommerce Overview section vs. the Sales Performance section, I am seeing different numbers.
Initially, I wanted to chalk it up to sampled data but both reports claim to be based on 100% of sessions. The thing I find odd is that the shield next to the report name is green (unsampled) for the Ecommerce Overview and it is yellow (sampled) for the Sales Performance.
Perhaps it is a bug in GA where the shield is yellow but claims to be based on 100% of sessions? I've attached screenshots of the two reports below.
Thanks in advance for any insight offered.
This could be due to duplicate transactions (2 transaction being sent with same ID).
One way to check for that is creating custom report with ‘transactions id‘ as a dimension and transactions as a metric and then sort by transactions metric.
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).
Considering doing some relatively large scale event tracking on my website.
I estimate this would create up to 6 million new events per month in Google Analytics.
My questions are, would all of this extra data that I'm now hanging onto:
a) Slow down GA UI performance
and
b) Increase the amount of data sampling
Notes:
I have noticed that GA seems to be taking longer to retrieve results for longer timelines for my website lately, but I don't know if it has to do with the increased amount of event tracking I've been doing lately or not – it may be that GA is fighting for resources as it matures and as more and more people collect more and more data...
Finally, one might guess that adding events may only slow down reporting on events, but this isn't necessarily so is it?
Drewdavid,
The amount of data being loaded will influence the speed of GA performance, but nothing really dramatic I would say. I am running a website/app with 15+ million events per month and even though all the reporting is automated via API, every now and then we need to find something specific and use the regular GA UI.
More than speed I would be worried about sampling. That's the reason we automated the reporting in the first place as there are some ways how you can eliminate it (with some limitations. See this post for instance that describes using Analytics Canvas, one my of favorite tools (am not affiliated in any way :-).
Also, let me ask what would be the purpose of your events? Think twice if you would actually use them later on...
Slow down GA UI performance
Standard Reports are precompiled and will display as usual. Reports that are generated ad hoc (because you apply filters, segments etc.) will take a little longer, but not so much that it hurts.
Increase the amount of data sampling
If by "sampling" you mean throwing away raw data, Google does not do that (I actually have that in writing from a Google representative). However the reports might not be able to resolve all data points (e.g. you get Top 10 Keywords and everything else is lumped under "other").
However those events will count towards you data limit which is ten million interaction hits (pageviews, events, transactions, any single product in a transaction, user timings and possibly others). Google will not drop data or close your account without warning (again, I have that in writing from a Google Sales Manager) but they reserve to right to either force you to collect less interaction hits or to close your account some time after they issued a warning (actually they will ask you to upgrade to Premium first, but chances are you don't want to spend that much money).
Google is pretty lenient when it comes to violations of the data limit but other peoples leniency is not a good basis for a reliable service, so you want to make sure that you stay withing the limits.
I'm currently researching a solution to monitor the performance of specific sections of a page. For example, you have a simple page with 2 images with links to other pages. You are driving lots of traffic to this page and you are experimenting with different contents on that page.
6 months after, you want to see which section of the page performed better with what kind of specific imges.
Let's imagine you require a report that should tell you the following: on average, the first spot performs better, but last week the image was bad and that's why you had less conversion from that spot.
I'd like to use such a system on a high-traffic homepage of an eCommerce website, in order to better monitor the usage of the selling spots.
I was thinking to use Google Analytics events with a positioning scheme (splitting the website in columns and rows, giving to each cell an identification ID such as a1 for column a, row 1) and keeping a local datawarehouse of creatives (images, promotions etc.), but apparently, after 10.000.000 hits per month, Analytics is recommending the premium version which is quite pricey (12k USD per month, 1 year upfront payment).
I was thinking about PIWIK as an alternative, but there is no event tracking there - or am I missing anything?
Looking forward to hearing your input on this matter.
You're better off with a provider like Optimizely for this use case. Still gonna be expensive, but it'll more quickly get you the information you need to make decisions.
We normally use multi variation tests or A/B tests to measure the success of user interfaces. Google Analytics have this feature and it is free.
This links maybe useful
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDWTMOC_Dp4
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1745147?hl=en