How should I handle analytics.js with a premium Google Analytics account? - google-analytics

I have a client that runs a number of sites and I manage some of them. They are a large company so they have had a premium Google Analytics account for some time, likely because another project requested it and it was upgraded across the board.
Enter me, one project we are working on is improving the data we track in GA. Step one of my plan was to upgrade to analytics.js & the new universal tracking code and to add ecommerce tracking. Seemed simple enough, I've already done it for other clients.
Well I just discovered that premium account can not use the new universal tracking code. Insane move by Google IMO, I don't understand who signed off on giving free accounts a feature that premium accounts don't have access to but alas it is what it is. Source: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/upgrade/
I'm wondering what the best course of action is. Ideas:
Use the "old" method using ga.js--annoying because I'll have to rewrite everything once Google turns on support for premium accounts, I enjoy double the billable hours but would rather be more efficient
Downgrade part of the account--huge headaches here too, presumably whoever wanted premium to begin with will continue wanting it. Don't think I can seperate out only my projects without losing all past data.
Something else that will solve my problem? I'm hoping there's a plan I've overlooked.

Have you thought about implementing Google Tag Manager? By using GTM, you could
create a new universal analytics (analytics.js) account
create a google tag manager account
create a staging environment and add GTM to that
add both your ga.js and analytics.js accounts to GTM
QA and push to production
When analytics.js comes out of beta and is enabled for premium, simply do the migration and move your ga.js tracking code over to the analytic.js tags you've already setup.
I've written about the benefits of using dual-tagging using google tag manager in a blog post, but I think it's your best bet for not having to redo your implementation.

Related

Prestashop GA4 integration

I have question regarding integration Google Analytics 4 into Prestashop. My company has setup some years ago Universal Analytics. Now that Google forces everyone to slowly migrate to Google Analytics 4 I was tasked to do it.
I have created GA4 property, inserted gtag into site's code and connected it to the existing UA tag on the site. Everything is working fine, user's data is here except for revenue. Do I need to manually add everywhere custom events as in this documentation? https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/ga4/ecommerce?client_type=gtag
I know that they are Prestashop modules for this but they are paid and because of this aren't a option. Also current Google Analytics module don't support GA4
Yes, the url you posted describes ecommerce implementation through gtag. If that's what you're doing, then yes, to get revenue, products, transactions and the rest of EEC-related data, you'll have to implement it as described there.
Most of people choose to implement GA4 through GTM since it's much easier to manage and maintain there. But if the intention is to have tracking with the front-end team, then direct use of gtag may be justified.

How can Google Analytics be used to track the different websites within a homegrown CMS?

I own and operate my own Content Management System (CMS) web application targeted at a specific type of customer (schools). Each customer wants to track the traffic to their own website. Of course, I could ask them to each create their own Google Analytics account and then provide me with the tracking ID so that my CMS can embed the correct code onto their pages. But I was wondering if there was a better way ... something more automated, and something that involves less work on their part.
I was thinking that for each customer, I could use the Google Analytics APIs to automatically create a new Property with the appropriate filter and then give the customer "Read & Analyze" permissions for that property. The problem with that is that I'm limited to creating 50 properties under my account.
Any other ideas? I'm just wondering if I'm missing some feature of GA that is specifically designed for this scenario.
Thanks,
Rajeev
Asking each user to create their own analytics account is the correct solution. Then they should just give your cms the id, and then your cms should include the correct analytics javascript code. It's the way all other cms systems supports Google Analytics

Google Analytics Demo

I'm trying to find a web site/resource that has a working demo of Google Analytics to use.
As I have no website etc to be able to link my Analytics account to, I have no way of reviewing/learning to use Google Analytics.
Is anyone aware of such a demo available to the public?
Are you're asking for is a site where you can see GA working?
Years ago I set up 3 unusual but extremely effective GA learning sites mainly for myself (so they are crude).
I still use 2 of them today with Real Time reporting and Chrome extensions dataSlayer & WASP.
They accept your own Web Property ID (UA-xxxxx.yy) and save it in a cookie so the data goes into your own account.
Captures data to be sent to GA.
It's currently at http://cyclonal.com.
It still uses Classic GA (_gaq) - any offers to upgrade it to Universal gladly accepted
I also cloned a site used by the GA Dev team's (with permission)
It tested almost every feature of GA at the time.
Which is at http://cyclonal.com/g (has a history of the site link in the footer)
Finally, and probably what you may want to clone/create yourself, is a free form version of the concepts behind the above sites at http://cyclonal.com/sandbox/codeExec
Let me know if that works for you.
Google team released a Google Analytics demo account: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6367342?hl=en#access You can start "playing" with this account to get familiarized with google analytics api!

Google Analytics Dashboard for Different Sites

I have a small multitenant application and I want to use google analytics to track the different minitenants. Tutorials on this topic seem to be pretty scarce, but I was wondering how I would go about
1) Rendering the dashboard for each 'site'
2) Allowing the creation of new sites for google analytic 'sites' automatically.
Using a 'global' Google account.
Any help would be very much appreciated.
For building dashboards to report on the analytics of your various sites/properties I would recommend using the Embed API to get started quickly. But since you stated you are interested in also managing Google Analytics properties programmatically. It might be useful go through the quick start guide for the language and application type of your choice. Python Service account or a PHP Web App, the list goes on.
But if you need to actually provision new accounts for each end user there is also the Google Analytics Provisioning API. There are restrictions on who is allowed to use that API, namely you need to be AdWords Channel Partner.

Can I use ga.js in one page and analytics.js in others and consolidate the results?

I have a website that has a landing page built and hosted on a website development platform (Wix). I have no control over the code, and to use Google Analytics I can only input the Property code and it's automatically implemented. The thing is that they still use ga.js, and the rest of my website, hosted in my own server, uses analytics.js.
I thought about using different properties, but then I wouldn't have the data all in one place.
Is it possible to consolidate the data? If not, what is the best way to deal with it?
Thanks.
==== [EDIT] New info.
Thanks MarkeD and Marcel Dumont. Using ga.js with another property seems to be the way to go, but there's another issue. The landing page in Wix is the www subdomain, and when the user goes to my server it goes to another subdomain, so I'd have to add "pageTracker._setDomainName('mydomain.com');" to the Wix page tracking code, which can't be done.
Any new ideas?
Thanks again.
Afraid that out-of-the-box there is no satisfiable solution for your issue.
You cannot use the old and new method within one profile, and there is no method to consolidate data across two profiles.
Even if you would put in a lot of efforts use the APIs to manually query and consolidate both profile data into your own Database/Dataware house you would still face problems with the inability to add visitor/visit data together.
As workaround, why not run old-style GA next to your Universal Analytics on the rest of the website? not ideal to use old-style, but at least that will give you overall data.
The old ga.js will still send data to a Universal Analytics property, so you could run both into the same account, once it is upgraded to Universal Analytics.
Google reference on upgrading from ga.js and analytics.js
Note that the reference states if you have ga.js and analytics.js on the page, it will double count. (i.e. data is sent with both)
So I would put the same UA code on your Wix as your ga.js main website, and use as normal. The data will be a bit more flaky as the sessions are calculated slightly differently under the two scripts, but when Wix finally upgrades to ga.js that should sort itself out.

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