I'm setting up Google Analytics and KISSmetrics for around ten different services (different websites/apps with different domains), all of which share the same login/signup service. I want to be able to track our users coming from one service, going through the login/signup service, and then going back to the service they came from.
My current setup is that I have only two properties, one for staging and one for production. I fire the appropriate property using Google Tag Manager. I then filter the properties into different views based on which services the user came from.
I have never worked with Google Analytics or KISSmetrics before, but I have read about the pros/cons about using a single property and filtering, vs using separate properties. I haven't really found anyone who was in my exact situation though. I would love some advice from someone who's worked extensively with either or both services.
Using the same property for many domains brings problems big and small. There are a lot of settings at the property level. If you use one property for ten domains you will have 2 custom dimensions and metrics per domain instead of 20; you will have to be very careful if you use the data upload lest data shows up in the wrong view; you will not be able to link your webmaster tools accounts since this happens at property level. There are probably other caveats.
I would suggest a two pronged approach: first use a property per domain/service to collect data per domain to have use of all property settings. Then use another property to collect data across all services (needs to be setup for cross domain tracking); since they use the same login id you should be able to generate a user id from the login data and enable session stitching, so you can even track them across devices (you need to create a dedicated user id view for that to work).
I have nothing useful to say about Kissmetrics.
Related
On the Google Analytics account I use, we collect analytics for multiple websites. We can see users and sessions for each website, that's great.
So far, every feature of Analytics I've come across only allows me to view information from just one site at a time, but now I'd like to see multiple sites.
What we are looking for, is a way to simultaneously view the number of users and sessions of all the websites under our account. I have google searched the problem, I've messed with every single setting I can think of. No progress.
How can we do this?
You could use Data Studio for this. You can either have separate tables on one page for all of the sites you want to report, or to make it more seamless, make a data blend to get stats from multiple sites with multiple GA accounts into one table
It is impossible to create a single view for different trackers in GA.
But you can download data from different trackers to one scheduled report in Google Spreadsheets using Google Analytics Spreadsheet Add-on https://developers.google.com/analytics/solutions/google-analytics-spreadsheet-add-on
Or create one new tracker and implement on all your websites.
You need to set up cross-domain measurement.
Cross-domain measurement makes it possible for Analytics to see sessions on two related sites as a single session. This is sometimes called site linking.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034342?hl=en
I'm currently running an experiment without redirect, using Google Analytics, but I'm running in some issues.
The case
I work for a company that has two websites, with two separate brands, selling the same product. Today, we are plaining a merge of the brands, one of the reasons being the low costs of maintanance.
To see how this would affect sales, we are doing an a/b test. The test consists of changing the logo of the sites, and displaying an information about the merge of brands in the variant. The original is the website without changes.
We have some requirements to do it:
We use a CMS that has no support to the Google Analytics Experiment tag (we get some errors when we install it to the , and are unable to run it)
We need to run it through all pages of our websites. We have also a subdomain in each site, that the user is redirected to place an order.
We doesn't have time to wait for the experiment to end for itself. So, we came up with the idea to track the rejection and sales using a duplicate pageview with "/variant" in the url and in the title.
To do that, I used the Content Experiments without redirects, with the Google Tag Manager.
Configuration of the Experiment
In Google Tag Manager, I load the Content Experiment Javascript API and define the choosenVariation variable in all pages of both websites and subdirectories.
I track the "gtm.load" event, to see when the page finished loading all elements and change the DOM in three ways: changing the logo, adding the content about the merge and add an item to the main menu. All of this, through Javascript.
Along with the changes of the DOM, I add a datalayer called VirtualPageView, and pass the corresponding url with "/variant" and the title with "Variant".
When the datalayer fires, I send a new Pageview with the variant information.
The problem
The experiment is running right, but when a user gets the B variant of the experiment and procceed to a subdomain of our websites to place an order, it seems that it's somehow running another test, and happens to the user get the A variation.
We are trying to persist the original session and the client Id through the domain and subdomain, in order to the user that saw the different logo, continue in his way to order.
I saw this page about Running Experiments across Subdomains, but its about the Classic Analytics and the classic experiment, and we are using the Universal Analytics with the Content Experiment without redirects.
I don't know if my explanation was clear enough, so if someone have doubts, please ask me. I don't have a profound knowledge of Google Analytics or the Content Experiments either. So, if you have a better way to do this, please, tell me.
I came up with a solution to our problem. We agreed to use the experiment only in the pages of the main domain, so I can change the content otherwise in the pages of the subdomain:
When a user visits our main domain, through Google Tag Manager, I created a cookie that says what the result of the variation chosen for the user (0 for the original and 1 for the variation).
When this user goes to our subdomain to place an order, still via GTM I check the cookie to see its value. If its equal to 1 (a variation), I change the logo and the menu, according to our previous configuration, and I send a virtual pageview to help us check the data.
Until now, this is working properly.
I'd like to track screenviews in my website, is this possible or are screenviews just meant to be used on apps? If so, how can I do it? Let me give you an overview of my situation.
I am restructuring a web site. Some of the pages that used to live under differents urls are now living under the same, with a hash id to denote the particular area of the page the user is in. So, for example, http://www.example.com/topics/topicA, http://www.example.com/problems/topicA and http://www.example.com/equations/topicA, are now in http://www.example.com/topics/topicA#content, http://www.example.com/topics/topicA#problems and http://www.example.com/topics/topicA#equations.
Now, I'd like to keep track of users visiting these areas. My initial idea was send a page view when the url is loaded and send a screenview each time the user clicks on the button to change the area of the page (i.e. #content, #problemas or #equations). For doing so, I used something like ga('send', 'screenview', {'screenName': 'content',});. As I couldn't see the screenviews in reports, I played a bit, setting the app name, the app id, the installer id etc before sending the screenview, for example:
ga('set', {
'appName': 'myAppName',
'appId': 'myAppId',
'appVersion': '1.0',
'appInstallerId': 'myInstallerId'
});
ga('send', 'screenview', {'screenName': 'content',});
So I can't see the screenviews in the real time reports (though I can see the page views). I can't see them in the regular reports either. I decided to create custom reports with dimensions Page and Screen name. There, I see sometimes screenviews are tracked (I think it happens when I set the appid etc before sending it, but not sure about this point).
Are screen views adecuate for tracking this behaviour or should I use just events, as I'm not on an app at all (just a responsive website)?
By the way, I am using Drupal 7 but that shouldn't make a difference.
Thanks in advance for your time and I hope I am making my question clear enhough.
Technically speaking its probably possible to send both pageviews and screenviews to the same Google Analytics web property.
The problem you will have is seeing the information. The way the Website is set up its either application or web account, Screenviews or pageviews. The reports are different, and you cant swap between them.
So you could send screenviews to a web site web property but you would never be able to analyse it on the website you would have to use the API to rip the data out. That and you would be analyzing apples and cars. Screenviews and pageviews are different they cant be analysed together.
Because of this web property's should be kept separate one for application (screenviews) one for web sites (pageviwes).
You should in my opinion do this using events.
+1 for an interesting question that made me think :)
Is possible, actually in BigQuery you can reach both data and see how this interact, both will have the same schema and will be stored in the same dataset(it is linked the raw data view). Even in the same sessions, you can send pageview and screen views having funny results.
But there is some important consideration when you implement this.
You need 2 different views, one Web View and One App View. Both views will let you access to different information and is not possible on the web interface of Google Analytics to access to both info at the same time. Not sure if with the API you can access to both info at the same time, I think that is totally possible
In the App View, you will able to see only information of screenview, events and ecommerce.Is also mandatory the App Name parameter on this hits.
In the Web View, you will able to see only the pageview reports,events and events.
The ecommerce info and events will be reachable from both views, there is no way to know if this comes from a web or an app ( technically). So is tricky to read this kind of reports in that case.
Sessions can experiment stranges behaviors. As example gosht sessions coming from the screen view with no page view, sending events.
Taking this into consideration, as Dalmto says, the best to you is use events or sent virtualpage view.
Mixing pageview and screen view is not recommended by Google but is totally possible.This kind of implementations is only useful when you have an embed web-app and a webpage on the same server and you want to have it all on the same dataset, if this case apply, is highly recommended to add a custom dimension to filter the app info on the web view and the web info on the app view and keep both worlds separated.
As the last point, your code is working, I can see the screen info on the desktop property. But not be able to see it in the web view.
I have one website and 2 blogs. Everything is working for years and till recently we were ok with setup.
I am promoting one of the blog pages on Twitter,Facebook,LinkedIn. I can see conversions on main property but I cant tell how many conversions were from each of the sources. I just can see blog page as a source. When i switch to blog property in GA i can see segmented traffic by sources but ofc no conversions (goals are defined only on the main site)
I am reading for tracking goals from multiple properties but it only confuses me more and more. Is this possible to pass data from one property to another and be able to see what I want to see (segmentation by sources and conversions) ?
I am new to Google Analytics, and when I walked through the setup process, there was a lot of explanation about Social settings. I suspect this is new. Google has put in fields for you to track traffic to your blogs that comes in from your other social presence(s).
You'll want to identify your profile URLs for Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook so that it can break it down for you correctly.
They state:
If you leave the Web Property Prefix blank, you'll see Activities data for the domain you are tracking with Google Analytics (e.g. example.com). If you also wish to see Activities data for properties such as your YouTube channel, enter your prefixes here; for example, youtube.com/example. Make your prefix as specific as possible (i.e. do not simply enter youtube.com). Activities data is only shown for properties from which your domain has received hits.
Source: Google Analytics Social Settings: Web Property Prefix Help
I'm using the Google Analytics Flex API to record data from a Flex application.
As I understand it, Google Analytics has a 3-tier hierarchy: An Account can contain one or more Properties, each of which can contain one or more Profiles. A UA code is associated with a Property, and Filters can be used to record specific traffic to a specific Profile.
The application lives on 5 different server environments (development, staging, live, etc) and we need to separate the data from the different environments.
Note that the server environments do not live within the same domain name. For example, staging is at staging.x.com, but the live version is at www.y.com. But I want them all to share the same UA code, so we are tracking them as 5 different Profiles.
So I have one Property with multiple Profiles. I set up a Filter for each Profile saying "Include only traffic form the domains that are equal to" and the particular hostname for that server environment.
The "Default URL" for the Property is set to the hostname of the default Profile, which is the live environment.
We set up that configuration yesterday, and today there is no data in any of our Profiles. We had data the day before (before doing the reconfiguration). I am confident that the tracking code in the client app is sending the hits to GA, since I can see them in Chrome debug mode, and the client app wasn't changed between the day before yesterday and yesterday. The only thing that changed was the configuration of the Property and the Profiles.
So obviously I'm missing something about Property and Profile configuration. Some specific questions:
Am I understanding Filters correctly? Is it somehow applying the Filter to the entire Property? It seemed like the Filters were at the Profile level.
Does the "Default URL" for the Property have an effect on which hits are recorded? What exactly is it used for?
Is there some restriction on how the Profiles within a Property can be affiliated? For example, do they have to belong to the same domain name? I thought not, but maybe I'm wrong?
Any other suggestions?
Obviously, I can experiment with the configuration and see what happens. But I have to wait until the next day to see the effects of each change. Thanks for helping.
Am I understanding Filters correctly? Is it somehow applying the
Filter to the entire Property? It seemed like the Filters were at the
Profile level.
Yes Filters are always applied at the profile level.
Does the "Default URL" for the Property have an effect on which hits
are recorded? What exactly is it used for?
The "Default URL" has no effect on data collection or filtering at all. It's only used to create links from the page reports back to your site. So when you see the top page being /index.html and you click the little link beside it it will take you to "Default URL"/index.html . So you might break that specific feature if the url doesn't exist on you domain. But for the sake of reporting it's completely fine to use a different url.
Is there some restriction on how the Profiles within a Property can be
affiliated? For example, do they have to belong to the same domain
name? I thought not, but maybe I'm wrong?
No, the Profiles inside a Web Property don't need to share the same domain name. It's perfectly fine to have multiple profiles filtered by hostname and it's completely fine and normal to have a global profile with data from multiple hostnames. In that last case the data may be a little off unless you implement Cross Domain Tracking.
Any other suggestions?
It seems that you have a very good understanding of how things work in GA. One thing that you might have missed and #jk commented about is that you should always have an unfiltered profile on you Web Property to avoid losing data due to bad filters.
Another thing to notice is that in the past I had problems with the predefined domain filters. It seems they were being aplied to the wrong field inside Google Analytics. I think they were being applied to the "Visitor ISP Organization". For that reason I never use predefined filters. So if you are using predefined filters you might consider changing them to Custom Include fields, select the "Hostname" metric and enter the domain you want to filter as a RegExp. I believe this bug should be fixed by now, but you never know, I just lost confidence in the predefined filters on that day.
If you acidentaly used 2 include filters in a profile that filter on the hostname but with different values chances are they are canceling each other. So you might want to go into each profile and check if they only contain one include filter each.
eg:
Include only trafic from x.com
Include only trafic from y.com
This will result in a profile with no data.
Another thing to notice is that filters don't apply to retroactive data. So if you apply a filter today to a profile it will only filter data from now on. Data that has already been processed will be elft untouched. There's no way to change data that has been added to a profile, nor to add retroactive data to a new profile.
Other than that you are probably good.