Google Analytics definitely has a problem in statistic display.
I do query with Date range 14-19 jul:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/fim4avm75ohypqs/gatrust2.png
And have 12 transactions from iOS 5.1.1 and 0 from any others versions which is very strange.
Ok, who knows, maybe there is some abnormal users behavior.
But then i do same request, but for 1 day (18 Jul):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/m0q0lvuvzu4svy5/gatrust1.png
Now there is 6 transactions shown from others versions.
I have feeling that i may meet such inconsistencies in Google Analytics in other queries,
where i just do not see exact inconsistencies proof, but feel that provided information is not logical.
Does it mean, that i can’t trust to information provided by GA?
Just use it as some... sandbox tool?
Confused.
Probably the inconsistencies are caused by Google Analytics sampling. When you have a lot of visits, Google Analytics (free plan) only takes only a part of them to show the corresponding stats.
If you look at the first of your captions, you can see in the upper right a box saying: "This report is based on 248.360 visits (8,36% of sessions)". So you are only seeing data from 8,36% of the real visits. You don't know what the other 91,64% did in that date range.
If you want reliable data with such high number of visits, Google Analytics (free) is probably not your best option. You could use Google Analytics Premium (quite expensive, but eliminates the sampling issue), other paid analytics software or some free alternative like Piwik or Open Web Analytics.
Related
I'm looking for a way to integrate all my DFP data (impressions, CTR, revenues, etc.) to my Google Analytics campaigns (and sources, medium, etc.).
From what I understand Google Analytics premium/360 has a feature which integrates with DFP data but I also see that it costs (at least) $150K/year which is a bit over my budget right now :)
It seems like a pretty common issue so I think I'm not the first one to need a functionality like that.
Otherwise what are my option to track if a specific marketing campaign is yielding the expected revenues ?
Thanks !
I've been using a SSIS Integration component to download data from Google Analytics in order to keep an historical view of some websites and track the evolution of them. Basically the metrics we track are Visits (now Sessions) and Visitros (now Users), and the dimensions are Year and Month. However, today I noticed that the data I downloaded for july had a variation on the Users metric. I heard that google analytics uses an estimation method to "calculate" some (if not all) of their metrics, could it be that after that they "adjust" the data with more acurate information? If so, is this mentioned in the documentation? (a link would be highly appreciated) Since the users are complaining that we are not delivering the real GA Data. I tried looked on the Google analytics documentation page with no luck.
Thanks for your time.
PS: Sorry for my english, it isn´t my native language
If you are using the standard version of Google Analytics (you'll know if you are paying $150k for premium), data is sampled depending on volume. Have a read of this article can-you-trust-your-google-analytics-data
I have seen very slightly differing results being returned if you repeatedly call the api with the same historical parameters repeatedly. In my case the figures only differed by 1-2 over a daily set of several thousand, but nevertheless it differed.
If you want to guarantee your results, consider upgrading to premium
Sampling could be an issue if what you are requesting is over 50,000 rows for the time period you are requesting. To avoid it you can download more often, such as daily.
But I think your issue is that there is a processing time for Google Analytics - if you are downloading at 3 am on the 1st it is probable that the processing for the previous day has not finished.
Google Analytics Premium SLA is for 4 hour data freshness, so even that would have trouble. Pragmatically you should allow 24 hours before you download data for the previous day, 48 hours for e-commerce data.
Thirdly make sure it is not Unique Visitors you are requesting, as this is dependent on the time period you are requesting.
As a Premium Google Analytics/BigQuery customer, our question is, Which data is more accurate?
I tend to want to lean toward BigQuery being more accurate because we can actually see the raw data, but we have no insight into the method Google Analyitcs is using to calculate its numbers.
I also think that a lot of it has to do with SAMPLING.
When you calculate something simple like Total Pageviews for a single page, the Google Analytics numbers line up to BigQuery within .00001%:
sum(case when regexp_match(hits.page.pagepath,r'(?i:/contact.aspx)') and hits.type = "page" then 1 else 0 end) as total_pageviews
When you calculate something more complex like Unique Pageviews for a single page, Google Analytics numbers are 5% greater than BigQuery. Note that it is sampling by the max 1 Million:
count(distinct (case when regexp_match(hits.page.pagepath,r'(?i:/contact.aspx)') and hits.type = "page" then concat(fullvisitorid, string(visitid)) end), 1000000) as unique_pageviews
I would love to know what others think or what the Google Developers themselves can explain.
If you are a premium customer I am assuming that's because you have a large website with a lot of data. The Google Analytics API will sample your data if there's too much of it. This is something you can try and prevent by putting the sampling level up. Even with the sampling level set to high precision you will still get sampled data back from the API.
Check the Json coming back from the API, it will tell you if your data is being sampled.
Big Query wont sample your data, there is a way for premium customers to use the API with out sampling data but I think you have to contact Google about setting that up.
The bigger point in Big Queries favor is that you aren't limited to 7 dimensions and 10 metrics like you are with the Google Analytics API.
Note: I am not a Google Developer but I am a Google Developer Expert for Google Analytics.
I am a big fan of BigQuery. I have also used Google Analytics quite a lot. So the question is about where the data is more accurate.
Well, the answer to such a question is always: "data is more accurate, the closer it is to where it originates". BigQuery is an underlying storage of all of Google's data. This is where data is collected, indexed, and then made accessible through a SQL interface.
Google Analytics is a tool that was developed with a lot of free accounts in mind. To support free accounts, GA needed to scale well. To scale, companies optimize on storage by pre-aggregating data.
So you are really comparing two things: pre-summarized/pre-aggregated data (GA) and raw accumulated data (BigQuery). Which would you trust?
Now, it sounds like there is also a 2nd question: "how to get accurate aggregates from BigQuery?" BigQuery is full on ANSI incompatible SQL that is hard to remember for ad-hoc queries. You are better off connecting a BI tool on top of BigQuery, so that you can explore data in a consistent manner (i.e. same threshold/rounding).
I am looking for a way, how can I grab some statistics from Google Universal Analytics to my site? Is there any way to display users statistics on site, grabbing from Analytics like below?
Example:
Users today: 10
Week: 70
Month:270
Total: 1500
I found a couple of information from Google, but was not suitable to this topic. All finding results were about old Google Analytics( without upgrading to Universal) and were displaying all statistic results, including Charts.
You can us the Google analytics API to get the stats you are looking for. You will probably end up doing 3 different requests, because of the fact that the request is made by dates. You will have a problem getting the correct count for Today and yesterday, because the Google Analytics data hasn't finished processing yet it normally takes 24 - 48 hours for the numbers to be correct.
Becouse of the fact that you are only looking to see your own data I recommend you look into using service account for authentication.
I have come across quite a peculiar issue. In one of my Google Analytics accounts, I have it linked together with two different Adwords account. All good so far.
The issue is that one of the Adwords accounts is in dollars (which cannot be changed), and the other one in my local currency. Looking at my Google Analytics reports, I am currently seeing the Adwords cost as my local currency for both, which is totally wrong.
Let me give an example:
$1 is, let's say, roughly worth 10 in my local currency.
So, given that I spend $150 in my Adwords account, it would show up as 150SEK in my GA-reports (SEK being my local currency). It should in fact be 1500 since the Adwords spend is in dollars, and there is no conversion done between the two systems with a mismatching currency.
Does anyone know how I can see the correct spend inside my Google Analytics account, seeing as the two Adwords accounts are using different currencies; SEK and dollars?
As far as I know, it imports the value only and will show the currency selected in Analytics. The 150 comes from AdWords, SEK is the currency in Analytics, so it'd show 150SEK.
Not many references in other help forums (I was trying to find some discussion that would help confirm my guess :) but I found this little snippet which mentions that the currency and timezone must match.
GA supports multi-currency however it is only for e-commerce metrics. You could upload data using the Cost Data Upload but "This feature is intended for non-Google paid campaigns. To import Google AdWords data, link your Google AdWords and Google Analytics accounts." All in all you cannot have cost data for two currencies in one view, however you could link the one account to a separate view (with the correct currency setting)