I'm looking to create a custom alert to notify me whenever X number of people are on the site at once. This data is already available using the Real-Time reports page. However, this does not seem possible via the Intelligence Events section. From there, I'm only able to create custom alerts based off Day, Week, or Month data. Has anybody found another area of Google Analytics that would make this type of report possible?
Google Analytics have just launched a Beta of their Real Time API which might let you do this: http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/01/google-launches-real-time-api-for-analytics-in-invite-only-beta/
You can use the real-time API for that. It's been possible for quite a few years now. You can find all the documentation for that right here. It's typical OAuth + JSON API.
You can also use a paid service. I built one, Metrics Watch. It really depends of your goal and how critical this is to your business/job. If it's critical, I would highly encourage you to look for a paid service, no matter which one.
Hope that helps!
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
Ad-Servers seem (and do) know a lot about the use who is visiting a certain webpage leveraging Behavioral and Contextual Targeting. I would love to be able to keep track of that data as well. In particular I would like to know:
age range
male/female
geographical info
I would like this information on a per request basis (not a daily summary)
What is the best way to accomplish this?
Thanks!
There are vendors who specialize in characterizing your Site's traffic. Very roughly they work by finding the closest match to your Site from among a large population of Sites in which they do in fact have detailed demographic data. To improve the matching, some of them give you a javascript snippet to insert into your Site's pages to collect user data and send it to their servers (more or less like web analytics code).
Quantcast is such vendor. The link i included will take you to their page that displays sample audience demographic reports.
Crowd Science is another.
Neither of these are free (though they might have a freemium service, i don't know.
Alexa, on the other hand, is free and offers similar data; just enter your Site's url in their textbox, then when you get the results page, select the Audience tab.
Age and Gender: Ask your users.
Geographical Info: Use GeoIP targeting.
You can try Hitwise, but it's a little on the pricey side IIRC
Doug's is a good answer, but Google Analytics now gives you this too, based on their acquisition of DoubleClick. So it's free.
Google Analytics Demographics & Interests
Note that no matter who you get this information from, the information is based on cross-site information. This is based on "third party cookies" which many users turn off (sometimes without knowing they are doing this) depending on their browser's security/privacy settings.
I have been asked to provide recommendations on "Verified Analytics" for the next iteration of my company's site. Verified to mean that when we sell ad space, it's based on a number of page-views, and the people who buy that space want a way to verify that the numbers we give them are the actual numbers we're delivering.
I have turned to The Google and the only services I can find for this sort of thing revolve around Google Analytics and the sale of a domain name. I export my analytics numbers to a PDF, have Google email the PDF to my auctioneer, and they look for signs of tampering. If no signs of tampering are found they put a little "Verified" badge on the domain auction. (Here)
Other than this, and something similar on another domain sales site, I haven't found anything like what I've been asked to find.
Currently we are using Google Analytics, however I've been also asked to recommend a replacement for that based on the ability to be verified. I'd rather just stick with Google Analytics since we also use Google for advertising.
Google analytics is a third party service, so you can't modify the stats data yourself anyway. If google is sending them the report directly there's not even scope for you to be editing the numbers so their concern is more paranoia than reasonable.
a) You can add another user in google analytics and give them report-only access. This way they can look at the stats themselves.
b) Add another hits tracking service such as http://www.hitslink.com/ and give the client access to these reports too.
Quantcast / Comscore / Compete all make estimates of site traffic based on limited amounts of data. As an ad buyer I would never take these stats as proof of anything really.
Online Audience Measurement is a term to search for - you're looking at providers like Quantcast, Comscore or Compete. These work alongside, rather than replace your current web analytics package.
Qauntcast actually measures traffic directly. You insert a tag, same as Google Analytics. Most ad agencies and advertisers accept Quantcast numbers for traffic validation.
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I'm trying to determine why an enterprise wouldn't want to use Google Analytics.
Here are the main reasons I've seen mentioned:
Inability to track clients that have Javascript disabled.
Lack of ownership of the statistics - Google owns the data.
Most of the web clients with Javascript disabled will probably be bots/spiders. This data is interesting, but probably not very useful.
As for the ownership issue, this is a bit paranoid IMO.
What am I missing here? When is Google Analytics not good enough?
Here are my findings from additional research:
Google Analytics is limited to 5 million page views per month - source
If a web site generates more than 5 million pageviews per month it will need linked to an active AdWords account to avoid interruption of service.
Lack of / slow technical support
All Google support is handled through email and response times can take a week or more. Commercial analytics products often have much faster & personalized support.
Inability to track files (PDF's, Images, etc.)
GA relies on Javascript and files lack the ability to execute Javascript. The workaround to this problem is to tag the link, but this won't track requests that go directly to the file.
Limited ability to customize
This is a selling point that I see pushed by commercial analytics tools (WebTrends). However it's never explained what customizations are denied by GA but allowed by WebTrends.
The Google Analytics EULA does not allow you to track individual users by identifying them. So if you wanted to add a custom variable for username to track how many times each user logs in, then you would be in a gray zone if not outright violating the EULA.
I use Google Analytics on about 10 sites right now and it's a great tool. In addition to all the analytics stats, you can tie it in with AdSense and it becomes a marketing/revenue tool and not just "wow look at all these cool user stats". If there was a way to track by user ID in certain circumstances (e.g. if user's agreed to it, or if they work for the company that owns the site) then I would have no issues.
Besides, it's free and all you have to do is add JavaScript to the files, so give it a try and see what you think after a few months.
One reason that was, surprisingly, not posted:
timing / speed of reaction
It takes at least 4 hours (up to 24) for GA to update your data.
This is ok for me personally in most of the cases, but when reacting fast is crucial (news sites, one-off events, etc.) you may want to employ some other solution (Mint comes to mind, but it's not the only one out there of course).
Thought I'd add my two pence worth to this thread, as this a topic close to my heart and one I've debated with colleagues for years. We've used webtrends in house for as long as i can remember, back to version 4 of the log analyzer (how different things were back then!). Since Google Analytics came along, we've started to come under increasing pressure from certain parts of our business to switch, as 'it does everything we need form an analytics tool'
Well, true in many senses it does, especially these days. But I championed the integration of our CRM and web analytics tools back in 2006, and as our business isn't e-commerce (the 'conversion' happens offline, sometimes months after the visitor acquisition) we need to integrate in this way to get a true picture of campaign effectiveness, and notion of ROI.
All of this means, we need access to the raw data, need to be able to join visitor records on sessionID etc, without this access we'd be screwed. I'd love it if we could roll without it, but the current requirements mean we can't, so this alone is a HUGE reason why Google analytics is not good enough.
Over and out
For tracking desktop software or creating a whitelabel solution there are better solutions.
For white label an integration based analytics, i use MixPanel. For Desktop Software, i use Deskmetrics
Google Analytics does not work well with mobile phones. While the iPhone and the Palm may be supported, many of the existing handsets do not support the javascript that Google uses.
If you're based in the UK, then theoretically you could be breaking the Data Protection Act by using Analytics.
If information about your users (like which web pages they're looking at) goes "outside the European Economic Area" and onto Google's servers in the US, then you're breaking the DPA.
Pretty obscure, but you did ask :)
Piwik avoids the problem because you host it on your own servers.
Lack of ownership of the statistics - Google owns the data.
... As for the ownership issue, this is a
bit paranoid IMO.
One problem with it is that we can't even access the raw data. We had a use case this week where we wanted a visitor map for an executive presentation. We needed to get more flexible with how the visitor map is displayed (wanted to view the map in Google Earth plug-in). In GA, you can't. You take what they give you. You can see a map of how many visits came from each city, but you can't export a data file of cities and number of visits, to run the data through other tools. So, paranoia aside, there are significant limitations on what you can accomplish with GA.
However this is not a problem if you use Urchin, the self-hosted version of GA: you can export the data and do what you want with it. (And the exported data is richer than the web server log's, as it includes some analysis already.)
Since Piwik is open source, and pluggable, I imagine you could enhance the visitor map plug-in any way you wanted to. And export whatever data you want.
Whether this limitation affects you depends on your needs, obviously.
Update: I've now looked at the GA Data Export API, and it turns out that things you cannot do through the UI (as you can with Urchin), you can do with this API. It does look like you can export the visit data I was talking about, via a feed (although there are daily traffic caps on those requests). So sprinkle salt heavily on what I wrote above.
A couple more points that I've come across:
GA doesn't let you dig beyond full-day statistics; I would often like the ability to investigate whether a traffic dip the previous day was caused by the design update I did at 1pm or the soccer match on TV at 8pm.
GA doesn't offer a workaround for traffic spikes caused by DDoS attacks, Slashdotting etc. When I'm looking at a GA visitor graph of 2009, all I can see is the 2-million-pageview-spike on October 16th, pushing the entire rest of the year down flat against the horizontal axis of the graph. To get a meaningful graph, GA should offer the ability to trim or exclude outlying data points, or the ability to limit/bracket the graph window itself
GA doesn't have an event monitoring client (think Reinvigorate's Snoop tool)
While GA is very user-friendly, I've found it's not as granular as some of the other stats programs (or maybe I'm not looking in the right places). Before the marketing monkeys I work with began pushing GA, we were very satisfied with AWStats. The sheer scope of the data helped us on several occasions hone sites to better suit their audience. While GA is very shiny and laid out well, I personally still prefer the raw numbers like I used to get through AWStats.
Slow data processing speed - Can be as low as 15-30 mins for page views, but may be up to 48 for eCommerce
EULA is limiting in some cases
You won't own or have any control of the data. Google's engineers might use it (anonymously) for testing
Anything more complex requires customization - Downloads and such care of no issue, but there are limits
Cross domain tracking by linker is faulty at best
Visit based - Proper tools are based on Visitor level, GA works on Visit based reporting mostly
Limited number of custom vars used at one time (5)
No tech support, if you're realistic
Usually when there is a downtime notice, it's already gone
API limitations (4 dimensions and 10 metrics at one time, not all can be used together in addition to that)
I have many more, but at the end of the day it is a good tool for it's price.
From the non-technical point, I think the most important is that some enterprise has the high level data security policy. All of the data should be controlled and managed by themselves.
If you use the Google analytics,the data is stored in google's server. For some special enterprise, like insurance, financial company. The policy should be followed.
I would NOT go with server logs. In fact I have them disabled on my server. Why you ask me?
For the simple reason that everytime you hit my server that stupid logging program makes an entry in the physical log file on my HDD. So if my server gets 100,000 hits in a day that's 100,000 time a HDD write operation happens.
You think that's cool? Well it's not. It's slowing your server down, specially if the log file is huge.
Why would someone even consider doing that to their server? Specially when we're working so hard to minify javascript, css and make image files 2 KB smaller!
Please do yourself a favor don't log directly on your server.
At least Google Analytics logs it on Google's server so my server's healthier.
I wouldn't use it for any of my sites, because you're forcing the user to accept your proprietary JavaScript code in their browser, which is bad. Also, giving your data is Google is a really bad idea.
See Piwiki for something you can run yourself as in free software, eliminating both of the problems.