I have created a goal in GA based on a virtual pageview:
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/actionOne']);
Im almost sure that goal is counted each time user generates pageview (not unique), am I right?
If yes - how to make it unique, not each time trigerred by user.
Thanks
I agree with #Eike, just see is this useful to you.https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/gaTrackingCustomVariables.
Use EventTracking for this purpose. Events unlike counversions can be counted numerous times. To see related data, set up a goal based on this event, then created a specific segment that would include only those visits (or visitors - depending on your needs) that converted.
Related
I have an event that triggers from my tag manager every time someone clicks a certain URL link. This event appears to be tracking properly in GA. However, I am attempting to create a filtered view that excludes traffic that triggers this event. When I use the Filter Verification I get:
"This filter would not have changed your data. Either the filter configuration is incorrect, or the set of sampled data is too small."
Indeed it does not change my data. I am using the event label as the field field/pattern if that makes a difference. Any suggestions?
Ok, there are issues with this question. But first, the answer is: filters aren't meant to remove more than particular hits. They aren't meant to remove sessions or users. Only hits. But there's a hackaround.
Now, more points:
You don't exclude "traffic". Traffic is not precise enough to be useful here. You have to decide what you want to exclude: an event, a session or a user. Or something inbetween, but then you need to define it properly.
A session in Google's understanding is really a bit different from what it seems like. It is custom to believe that a session is a series of interactional events with less than 30 minutes (configurable) inbetween. Not quite. If your source changes, that's a new session. Bear with me.
You... can hack around it if you really need to. By "painting" users or sessions. You do it by setting a specific custom dimension (user- or session-level) and then delete all events that have that custom dimension set using a view filter. The CD will be backfilled, so the filter should clean stuff close to how you expect it to do.
However! GA is... a little bit odd with how they record sessions and users. There may occur a situation when you end up having users or sessions with no events in them. However, if you find this issue at play, you still can export the data to BQ and query it properly. You may find that export cleaner.
Lets say I wish to track
User action - game he played - which area he stays - his house number.
If I were to track these event actions in Tabular format, it would look like:
UserId|Game|Area|House|Timestamp so on.
Then I can always run SQL queries if I want to answer few business queries. Like
1. In a given day/week, who is the most active User
2. Which game is most-played?
3. Which area plays most events
4. Which user from which area are the most active
Whats the best way to capture this using Google analytics? Will custom dimensions be useful. Or GA is not suitable for this kind of insight?
Thanks.
First of all, the house number is too precise, it would be against GA's ToS.
In GA everything is captured in "hits", you can think of this as one "row" of data.
Let's look at what you wanted to find out:
Most Active User? - This depends on how you determine "Active". Is it the longest Session durations? Tried most games? Most logins? Most sessions? To track a user, you'd need a User ID tracked.
Which game is played the most? - Again, what is played the most? Longest time in game? Most "start" games? This would require you to know the Game that was played and when someone started playing
Which area is most active? -This would go back to the definition of active, the region information is needed along with the active definition
Which users are most active in an area? Same as above, the user would need to be identified and area
To determine which Custom Dimensions (CDs) you want, let's look at the example data points you want to track and try to determine the scope and if it already exists as a standard dimension:
User ID - this is obviously related to the user, makes sense to be user-scoped
Game - This is a tougher CD. I would think that in a single session, users can play multiple games, thus I'd think you'd want this to be hit-scoped.
Area - GA already provides this based on the ISP
Timestamp - GA already provides time dimensions
From above, we can determine that you need to create two CDs, one to track User ID, the other to track the Game.
You can also look into using the userid feature in GA for cross-device tracking.
I would like to compare some data between a 3rd party analytics tool and GA.
Now I would love to see the IP addresses that Ga is receiving however it seems that they do not reveal this information, fine, however, I cannot find a way to use the flat table in the GA custom report to show me the following if possible;
Full Date Time (Seems as though they don't want you to have this either)
Browser Version
Browser Width & Height
Page (from the hit)
And I would like this data not to be grouped by the metric, this way I can see that if the same user has hit a page 3 times it isn't grouped.
If anyone can help please let me know. If the question is poorly phrased please let me know.
Thanks,
Connor.
This requires some work, and it will allow the breakdown only for future hits, not for hits that are already collected.
To view individual hits you need to create a hit based dimension that is unique per hit. Unless your page has an amazing amount of traffic a timestamp in milliseconds (e.g. new Date().getTime()) will be sufficient (for your report you might want to format that in a nice way). So in the admin section of your GA property you go to custom definitions, create a hit scoped custom dimension, and then modify your pagecode to send the timestamp to that dimension. Hit scoped means it is attached to the pageview (or other interacton hit) it is sent with.
If you want to break down your report by user you need the clientid (clientid is how Google recognizes that hits belong to the same user). Again, send it as a custom dimension.
This does not tell you how many sessions the user had (there is no session identifier in GA). If you need to know that you can create a session scoped custom dimension and send a random number along ("session scope" means that GA only stores the last value in a session, so you don't need to maintain a session id over multiple pageviews, since the last value will be set for all hits within the session). The number of different sessions ids per client id then tells you the number of sessions per user.
The takeaway is that GA only shows aggregated data, and if you want to defeat this mechanism you need to throw data at it that cannot be aggregated further. You might run into other constraints (i.e. there is a limited number of rows per report).
We recently released two typefaces on our website for free (albeit suggesting an optional donation). I decided we should track downloads through Google Analytics using the event feature, so we ended up adding the corresponding JS snippet to the download form (on submit), something akin to this:
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Typeface', 'Download', 'Typeface #1', parseInt($('input[name=amount]').val(), 10) || 0]);
I also decided we might as well use GA to keep track of donations, so as you might have noticed the optional donation amount is being sent as the event value argument. There's already a browser-side numeric-only verification, and it will set it to 0 in case it's empty (NaN), so we're completely sure it's always an integer (required type for the argument).
I configured two different goals (one for each typeface) in our GA profile, using the two different events as their respective conditions, as recommended by every howto I've been reading about this subject.
However, some of the reported data appears to be somewhat inflated. According to GA there's been, as of now, 455 unique events out of 550 total events, which seems to be okay, but apparently it's worth a value of over a million dollars. And, believe me on this, we have not received such a huge amount, at least just yet.
According to GA: Event Value is the total value of an event or set of events. It is calculated by multiplying the per-event value by the number of times the event occurred.
I assumed I could set individual values to different instances of the same event, even GA documentation leads me to believe so with their examples, so I don't really understand why it's being reported as such an inflated total value.
Is there something wrong with my assumption? Is this the correct approach to what I'm trying to accomplish? should I just forget about keeping track of donations using this method and resort to using the e-commerce feature instead as I've also been reading about?
I'm not checking for any verification of a donation successfully completing, so I'm left with an estimate and I'm okay with that. Maybe someone jokingly wrote off some exaggerated amount then never completed the donation process?
Your assumption is right : you could set individual values to each event and "the report adds the total values based on each event count" (as explain in doc).
The main problem with your approach is the one you mentioned : you count the donation at form validation, before its confirmation and even before you told your visitor that the donation must be made via PayPal. So yes : some people probably wrote off some exaggerated amount or simply not complete the donation process.
I recommend you to use e-commerce tracking after the PayPal payment to avoid unconfirmed donation tracking and the lack of deduplication using goals values to monitor amounts.
Is there a way to find out the number or % of returning users (who come to the website every month) via google analytics?
In other words, I am trying to find out the number of users returning every month to the website (at least for 6 months) not just simply returning once or twice.
the short answer is yes. See this post for more details
The longer answer is to use a custom variable that is scoped at the visitor level
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingCustomVariables.html
that would be populated as 'Repeat Visit' depending on the session number data extracted from the utma visitor cookies:
http://blog.vkistudios.com/index.cfm/2010/8/31/GA-Basics-The-Structure-of-Cookie-Values