I'm having an issue with Unique Events and Total events. I don't really understand why unique events are greater than total events (image attached: https://analytics-a-googleproductforums-com.googlegroups.com/attach/584c3c65bd24cfec/Screenshot%20at%202013-05-14%2017:00:40.png?gda=9qkpgUYAAADqfLbDOUx1KZ9vP-6pB8mH0QevsNJBCwpb2zqmxh9R_FqJw8mf6kYUxitGhb4bDE5x40jamwa1UURqDcgHarKEE-Ea7GxYMt0t6nY0uV5FIQ&view=1&part=4).
Someone can explain how this is posible?
Santiago Vázquez
Found the thing: you will see that "Unique Events" are great than "Total Events" when you look at an event category or action, put "Event Label" as a secondary dimension and the event has been triggered some times with no label input. Google Analytics hasn't the option "(not set)" for this particular dimension, so it just doesn't show you those events in the Total Events Count, but still counts as "Unique Events" all the users that executed this particular event category / action.
I am seeing this same issue in my the first view of my Custom Report as well. I don't know WHY it is showing more, but there seems to be a more accurate Custom Report drilldown for you to use. In my reports, one page shows in my Page drilldown with 30 total events but 62 Unique Events. However, when I click into the next dimension drilldown view, in other words click to narrow in on just one page, it shows that same page with 30 total events and only 29 unique events. That seems more accurate.
My dimensions drilldowns for this custom report are "Page" and then "Event Label"
Hope this helps!
I think Google Analytics is simply buggy.
They have to work on event reporting a bit more.
We are tracking events and e-commerce data to our own database, and we realised that both Google Analitics and Universal Analitics misses some events and e-commerce data.
We are trying to find the reason for this, but no luck yet.
If you have a segment applied it's probably sampling. You can confirm or deny sampling is the cause by seeing if there is a yellow background note above the graph but below the date selection on the report page. There is also a grid of filled in and not filled in circles next to the new scholar cap (also below the date selection) sometimes.
Unique events are calculated by session, while total events are determined by the main dimension.
In the example report below, I wanted to look at how many events occurred on each page. The dimension drilldown is Page, with Total Events and Unique Events as metrics.
Users can visit a page, but not send an event by that page ( 0 total events ). However, if their session includes an event, then unique events will be 1 or more.
Custom reports allow data combinations that may not be clear (not sure if someone already posted this point or if I saw it in another thread). Basically, my report should not include Unique Events to prevent this problem from happening, though this was probably the wrong way to go about this altogether.
Template: https://www.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=XafJ7KvSSf-n5KWWPyvn_g
Google has deprecated (renamed) Unique Events metric as it was seriously confusing. We are expecting to see a number of times event with unique combination of category / action and label happened per other dimensions in report. Instead GA calculated a unique combination of every dimension in the report!
Now, this metric is deprecated and renamed to legacy.
New one: Unique Events is giving expected results.
I written about why total events are higher than in my blog as too many questions.
Total Events are calculated as the total number of interactions with a tracked web page object. On the other hand, where a single user session (or visit) has one or more events, this is calculated as a single Visit w/Event, or Unique Event in the reports. For example, if one user clicks the same button on a video 5 times, the total number of events associated with the video is 5, and the number of unique events is 1.
Related
We have Google Analytics set up through Google Tag Manager on our SPA website. We are sending virtual pageview calls on every page through a custom event in a dataLayer object. And not using the standard pageview triggers that are available in the tag manager. In the same pageview hit we are sending many custom dimensions relevant to the webpage.
In the all pages report when we look at the pageview data, without any secondary dimension then the pageviews and unique pageviews numbers are expected. However, when I apply a secondary dimension I see many unique pageview numbers turn to ZERO. This error is consistent with secondary dimensions that I send in the pageview hit (like time of the hit). And also with some of out of the box dimensions (like hour index).
Without custom dimensions:
With custom dimensions sent in the pageview hit:
With hour index dimensions:
The total numbers are not changing with the addition of custom dimensions.
I'm not sure why this is happening. Can anybody please help me understand the reason behind this?
This happens beacuse the "unique" count of pageview (or event) is associated with the first page on which it occurred, so for the second or subsequent page where the same page (or event) arose, since it is no longer unique for the current session, its value will be 0.
You can find here a comprehensive event-based explanation of this concept, but the concept is the same for page views: https://www.analyticstraps.com/eventi-totali-senza-eventi-unici/
My situation in Google Analytics is as follows:
Everytime, user clicks a particular element on my website, it is recorded as an event (call it EVENT1).
The problem is that my GA goal is to have at least three of those elements clicked per visit.
We can say that the goal is fulfilled when a user causes 3 EVENT1 events per one visit.
Is it possible to define this?
I know it is possible to track number of pages/visit. But it is not what I am looking for, as there are many pages that does not include the element which can be clicked.
I guess another way would be to use javascript and send "CLICKED 3 TIMES" event to GA. But I would like to avoid this.
Create an advanced segment of the "sequence" type. Make every step the same event. Apply the segment to see the number of visitors included in that segment.
We have a Google Analytics account set up to track downloads on certain files. When you create a report with, for example, Event Label (user) as the primary field, and Event Action (file name) as the secondary field, GA will say that the number of unique events is 168. When you add up the numbers in the unique events column, however, they add up to 322. Exporting the table as a CSV file and viewing it in Excel will also give you 322.
I should also add that there are 270 rows in the table, so for there to be 168 unique events, that would mean some user/file combinations would have 0 unique events, which doesn't make any sense.
Can anybody shed some light on why this is happening?
There is a lot of confusion with Unique Events metric. Instead of counting a number of times an event with unique combination of category/action/label happened, GA was counting unique combination of every dimension included in the report!
Finally that metric is deprecated now and renamed to Unique Events (legacy).
Instead we get a real Unique Events (new) metric which behave like expected.
More explanation in my blog post
http://www.internetrix.com.au/blog/google-analytics-unique-events-are-dead-long-live-unique-events/
In all Google Analytics custom reports, the Unique Events field actually reports the number of Visits (or sometimes a slightly higher number).
Built-in Google Analytics reports will show you the correct number of Unique Events.
It's a bug, plain and simple. I reported it to Google back in August, but it's still broken.
The number in the Google Analytics standard reports can be explained...but as Aaron pointed out, it sure looks broken. I wrote an article explaining it all:
http://www.analyticsedge.com/2014/09/misunderstood-metrics-unique-events/
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.
Are dynamic advanced segments retroactive at the session or visitor level? Can it retroactively recalculate session data or can it retroactively recalculate visitor data?
Here is an example as this is a foggy question.
Say I add an event tag to GA today. Tomorrow i run a report where the dynamic segment is for visitors who have triggered the event. The report requests unique visitors over time.
Now, if it is retroactive at the visitor level, the visitor is now tagged as having triggered the event. The report should show data going back in time (assuming these are not first time visitors). In this scenario GA will see if the visitors tagged arrived 2 days ago even though the events did not exist yet.
This answer no longer reflects up to date information.
Advanced Segments are not queried at the visitor level, and are thus not able to query data across sessions. They query particular sessions (or, visits), not visitors.
So, if you visit the site today, trigger an event, and then visit the site again tomorrow and don't trigger the event, an advanced segment for that event will be a query that says "Show me all sessions in which this event was trigger"; the former will be included and the latter excluded.
Similarly, if you do an advanced segment for a particular page, what you're saying is "Filter down to all the sessions in which this page was viewed" (this can be confusing for people who apply an advanced segment for a particular page, and the result contains more than just that page.)
However, they are dynamic and can be applied to the retroactively. In other words, the results of the advanced segmentation are not contingent on when the advanced segment itself was created. (This stands in contrasts to, say, account filters, that do not apply themselves retroactively.) They tend to be calculated on the fly; you'll notice that complex advanced segments can often take a long time to process, and tend to increase the likelihood that Google Analytics will return sampled (or, "fast access") data.
There is no way to use advanced segmentation to query across sessions.