I need to set up a new goal in Google Analytics which will be executed when 1 unique visitor views 2 different articles.
For example, I have a thousands of different articles:
/page/article_water.html
/page/article_google_analytics.html
....
....
...
/page/article_another_one.html
So, a Google Analytics URL-pattern of this page will looks like this:
./page/article_..html
The thing is, that I need to catch up 2 views of different articles with similar URL.
Have no idea how to do that, Google didn't help me.
Alexander, what you cou do is to check whether the articles were seen on your backend and if so, send an event to Google Analytics that will trigger the goal completion (event-based goal).
Or try setting up two different goals and then create a segment that will filter those users/visitors. Could work as well.
Related
I manage an internal website and we recently implemented campaign tracking for our emails and homepage links to see where traffic comes from.
I set up the URLs using the Google URL builder.
The data we're receiving is very bloated. We ran a test URL with 8 people, and we received 129 "views", with an average of 9 views per day for over a month. No one clicked this link after the first day.
Our average session times were about 30 minutes, which is very strange.
My questions are:
how does google track campaigns? If you use a tracking URL, does the cookie track views for any organic views after that?
Is there a tool we can use to only track first time visits using a campaign URL?
Admittedly, I'm fairly new to Google Analytics, but no one on our marketing analytics team was able to help.
Since you used the Google URL builder I don't think you have made any mistakes there. However I strongly think that the bloated data is due to Bot traffic in your account. And yes, the bot traffic does increase average session duration.
So here's a set of steps I'll suggest:
1) Create 3 views in Google Analytics (It is a best practice):
Unfiltered, Master, Test
2) Check for Langauage spam and weird referrals in your report.
3) Add filters to "Test" view to remove these bots & spam referrals. You'll need to write a regular expression for each of these filters. Also make sure you have enabled "bot filtering" in view settings for master & test view. (I am leaving Unfiltered view as it is our data backup in case if anything goes wrong.)
4) Check your traffic for next few days and try doing the URL test again and see the results.
5) If the results in Test View are correct, then apply the same filters to "Master" view.
I hope this helps.
There are a lot of very good articles and answers out there that explain (in detail) why we get spam referrals messing up Analytics data. Example results: how to automatically stop spam traffic in google analytics
What I want is a definitive solution...
If you only manage one analytics account, it would not be unreasonable to manually filter suspect domains, but even this is not sustainable. If you, like me, manage over 30 accounts and counting, it gets ridiculous. What is the long term solution?
Analytics data is important for making business decisions.
Is there some service that, like antivirus software, keeps updating its 'definitions' and constantly filters spam traffic?
How can we fight back?
And how can/is it already automated in a one-click solution?
You can try these 2 options to decrease referral spam:
Option 1 - Filter bots
Mark "Bot Filtering" option on on your Google Analytics View Settings. You will need to do it to all of your views
And also create a filter to exclude referral sources. To do this, create a new filter with options:
Filter Type: Custom
Exclude
Filter Field: Campaign Source
Filter Pattern: youporn-forum.uni.me|free-share-buttons.com|Get-Free-Traffic-Now.com|event-tracking.com|darodar.com
--> Also add other spam sources that you have
You can reuse the filter to multiple views.
And its also recommended to not apply these filters in your main view. Instead, create a copy of main view and use it to analyse your data.
Its not a permanent solution (you will need to add new spam sources from time to time).
Option 2 - Segment real users
You can also create a segment to filter only users that visited at least one page (it will filter spams):
Create a new segment
Advanced > Conditions
Filter | Sessions | Include
Screen Views | per session | > | 0
Then, when you are analyzing your data, use this segment to see only real users.
Not all spammers are blocked by Google Analytics (only up to 75% of bots can be blocked by google analytics). By adopting the following steps you can automate removing referrer spam:
Go to Acquisition>all traffic >refferals and a new window will be opened which shows sources from where your website get traffic
In this step select all website who have 0 or 100 % bounce rate and copy it and make a regular expression .the method for making expression is given below
Use "\." (escaped dot) between every part of the domain and use "|" (pipe) symbol to separate every link. E.g. consider your blog hits by two spammy URLs "ads123.abc59055xxb896.comtom" and "dd54.xy789z.usjpa" then we made following resultant expression:
"ads123\.abc59055xxb896\.comtom|dd54\.xy789z\.usjpa"
if you have any trouble in making regular expression then click here to see the complete process
Select the add filter option in admin tab and select include and paste the whole expression in the expression field and click on save
I'm still fairly new to Google Analytics but I want to achieve the following table using the query explorer.
source | # first touches | customers with source as first touch | avg customer life-cycle value
I have tried the following query
metrics: ga:sessions
dimensions: ga:source
But I don't really know how I can access the first touch data.
First touch means the first time a person visited your site. Also known as first interaction.
Is this even possible by just using google Analytics?
Edit: Maybe there is a way to link an id to the Google Analytics data?
I'm not a GA expert but I think this approach would be the best.
Use custom variables and/or dimensions to link a user id to for an referrer for example.
You could also try and save it into your own database if it's acceptable.
This is how we solved it once at my company.
I have a (Symfony based) website. I would LIKE to analyize the site traffic using Google Analytics. My site is divided into several (i.e. N) categories, each of which may have 0 to M sub categories.
Schematically, the taxonomy of the site breaks down into something like this:
N major categories
Each major category may have 0 to M sub categories
further nesting is possible, but I have just kept it simple for the purpose of illustration.
I need to know which sections of the website are genererating more traffic, so that I can concentrate my efforts on those sections. My question is:
Is there anyway to identify the data that is being generated from the different sections of my site?.
Put another way, is there a code or 'tag' that I can generate dynamically (in each page that is being monitored) and pass to GA, so that I can identify which section of the website the traffic came from?
The documentation I found on google about this topic was not very useful (atleast it did not answer this question).
You can pass a uri to _trackPageview that would permit you to log the request in whatever format you'd like, including however your user's requesting the page.
Remove/replace the original call to pageTracker._trackPageview with the following:
pageTracker._trackPageview('/topcategory/subcategory');
You'd just need to plug in the topcategory and subcategory info. If the info is available in the URL you could parse it out using js on the fly.
Currently using Google Analytics as a supplement to our paid tracking software, but neither of them are giving us exactly what we need.
I have a list of about 60 or so urls (out of about 1500) on the site that I wish to setup a monthly report for that can be emailed to multiple recipients. I can't seem to figure out how to create a report showing just the hits on these 60 urls, I can apply advanced filters on the content page but those disappear after a while and sometimes error out when adding too many URL's.
Is there a method I'm missing in Google Analytics to achieve this goal or am I better running an SSIS package to pull the URL's from the API and formatting a document that way?
Yeah, advanced filters are not really designed for this kind of thing.
Here are some things which may work for you:
Try setting up a new GA Profile with an Include filter to filter only the URLs that you want to report on. You can use a regular expression to identify the 60 URLs. Then these will be the only URLs tracked in that particular profile.
Try setting up an Advanced Segment to select the Pages using a very long "OR" filter.
You could set up a new GA account and log the URLs into that account with additional tracking code. This is not really recommended as the 2 accounts will share tracking cookies.
Use Excellent Analytics to pull down data into Excel for the URLs in question using the GA Export API.