I have a search results page which can show between 25 & 100 results at a time
Would like to track impressions for each results set (not clicks)
Ideally I'd have a list of each result's ID that would get saved for each pageview (as well as the page or page type the impressions came from). Then I could aggregate this by ID by day
I had originally wanted to use Google Analytics for this, however I don't think I can add data to GA in this way (even Universal Analytics custom dimensions)
But I could be wrong? Perhaps I could add data to GA in this way?
GA Events might have been an option, but this would generate a lot of events; some 25-100 for every pageview! The amount of traffic I receive might make this method impractical
Note: One of my key reasons for wanting to use GA is that it seems to filter out most bot traffic; I've also done some manual profile filtering to catch a few more bots. Rolling my own solution might mean reinventing the bot-filtering wheel, something I'm not keen on
Perhaps there is another service that could be used and provide similar bot filtering behaviour?
Related
Does Google Analytics have enough information to answer the question of how much time have my top 100 users spent on my site? I don't need their user information, I don't care about ID or name which I know it doesn't even have. Just the identification of individual users by the cookie GA uses, and a report of how much time the top 100 loyal users spent on my site.
is such a thing possible at all with GA?
From your comment on Colwin's answer:
I don't need google if I have to track this for GA, I just hoped it already has this information such as "page visit duration" on a per-user, ongoing basis. If I had to feed Google that information myself, I can feed my own database and run analytics on it. Thanks anyway.
The Google analytics sessions is
a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame. For example a single session can contain multiple page views, events, social interactions, and ecommerce transactions.
Average session duration will be calculated as
total duration of all sessions / number of sessions
I don't think this is available from GA out of the box. But you can build something like this with Custom Dimensions available within GA
This will let you setup and send custom metrics dimensions for users that you can then create reports for.
Google Analytics doesn’t allow you to out in PII but random visitor id's should be fine. You can then compare against your own database outside of GA if needed too.
This will allow tracking the same visitor even without them being logged in to your site.
Sending the custom dimensions could possibly look like this.
ga('send', 'pageview', {
'dimension5': '1234567890'
});
You get 20 free custom dimension slots with GA and 200 with GA 360 -> More info here
I think this article has what you are looking for
https://webanalyticsguy.com/2018/01/18/google-analytics-capture-client-id-reporting-purposes/
It shows how to capture the client id which is a decent way to track a specific user. And goes further to explain how to associate that with a metric, in this case the author uses PageView.
You could change this to Average Session Duration or another metric that gives you a sense of time spent.
I guess that you are looking for something like this:
http://www.analytics-ninja.com/blog/2015/02/real-time-page-google-analytics.html
You can get the counts of the users on your site. You can get the seconds they spent on your website page.
I guess this answer will be helpful too: https://qr.ae/TWpkI0
I am trying to get to a point where I can identify visitors who are generating website Goals. And identifying them via their Pardot ID-s in GA.
Do you think that's possible?
On the site every visitor gets a Pardot cookie and in that there is a readable Visitor ID which via an API query can be turned into a Pardot ID.
But how can this piece of information get stitched to the rest of the GA parameters? How to push this into GA as a custom data point so I can create a report on who are the Pardot IDs that completed a certain goal this week?
Is there any guidance you can give?
Assuming, that Pardot ID itself is not a Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in terms of Google Analytics, there are several ways to accomplish this.
You could provide this data as User ID, which helps Google Analyitcs to identify users across several browsers and devices. However, this dimension is not exposed on the reporting GUI or the reporting API. (Available dimensions and metrics can be browsed here.)
Instead, or in parallel, you could store this information in a custom dimension, which, can be used in standard or custom reports, or via the reporting API as well. There a couple of things to consider. According to the Measurement Protocoll reference, the maximum length of this field is 150 bytes. You should also decide, if this dimension is most useful for your needs and possibilities on hit, session or user level, about which you can read here.
Is it possible, and if so, how to make a "custom" counter entry in GA, which basically is a count based on database entries.
Quite hard to say without knowing your specific use case, but Google Analytics supports events. You can send custom events to Analytics on every page load. You can then think of a structure with different categories and labels where you can filter these.
If you just want to show the change of the number of entries in a table, you could also think of using a monitoring software like munin. Think about whether your data makes sense together with your other Analytics data or if you just want to show the changes over time together with your other server health parameters.
We have a site that tracks conversions through Google Analytics for redirects to an affiliate. However, not all redirected visitors convert to a sale after they leave our site. Our affiliate reports back to us weekly on who converted (and we can identify an individual user session from that report). Is there a way to get that conversion data back into Analytics? We've got a great coding team, but I just need to point them in the right direction.
Good question Jeff. If you don't mind the accuracy of the timing being off, your team could certainly just step through your site and intentionally trip the conversions.
Other than that, you may look into using a custom solution to bulk import that data using this type of API: Google Analytics for Mobile Websites
This Google Analytic server-side solution supports PERL, ASP.NET, JSP, and PHP. If you're looking for a repeatable process for batch importing GA data, this maybe a viable solution for you.
Hope this gets you going in the right direction.
I would not recommend manually 'tripping' the conversions.
There is no easy way to get the data back into Analytics. And it would depend on your reporting requirements (time lines, etc)
One way to approach this is to set a custom variable that is scoped to a visitor that would identify the visitor in an anonymous way (not personally identifiable manner, beware the privacy policy).
http://cutroni.com/blog/2011/05/05/merging-google-analytics-with-your-data-warehouse/
So when a visitor comes to the site, a custom variable would get set. This variable acts as a key to associate behavior on the site and the affiliates. Once you receive the data about which visitors converted from your affiliates associated to the non-personally-identifiable ID, you can use this to have code fire some conversion events once it recognizes on a separate visit that a visitor with certain custom variables set using the _getVisitorCustomVar()
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gaJS/gaJSApiBasicConfiguration.html
Just wondering if this this possible? I realise you could never use it to display recommendations on a page but it would be useful from an analytics point of view to see for example what other products user's who've looked at product x have also looked at.
You can use Advanced Segmentation to do this.
Advanced Segments slice Google Analytics data on the basis of sessions. Sessions are a collection of pageviews that correspond to the popular notion of a visit.
If you create an Advanced Segment for users who visited /product/x/, it will return data from all the sessions in which that page was viewed. (Similarly, you could create a segment for /product/x AND /product/y. From there, you could filter it to only include your product pages, and exclude the original products themselves.) As a result, this session-based querying is perfect for your use case.
So, yes, you could use Google Analytics API data to inform a simple recommendations engine. The only caveat I'd give is that the Google Analytics API is a little slow, so you'd want to cache the data locally in your app, rather than querying it directly on every pageload.