I have been searching around to find out anything that needs to be taken into consideration when upgrading to Universal Analytics.
I found this post:
Google Analytics - Upgrading to Async Code
He explains that if you are not doing anything advanced you should be ok. We have lots of event tracking in place that we would like to keep the same. We also have some Custom Variables I could do without and/or deal with in Custom Dimensions.
Other than that we have a fairly basic setup.
We do have a "keep alive" event in place also that helps determine an accurate time on site.
Another really important question has everything to do with being able to transistion from Classic analytics to Universal. Is this possible? I found an article that said it wasn't but that article was a couple months old and not sure if its still true.
Thoughts?
Universal Analytics is Google's newest tracking code. It is currently in beta phase, so you may want to hold off on it, depending on your resources... In principle it works more or less the same way as the async code. Here are the major points about it:
The syntax is different. All config/tracking is done by making a call to ga()
Some of the "config" arguments for things have been moved to the GA interface. For example, names and scope for custom variables are no longer passed as arguments on-page. They are now done within the GA interface. Actually to be more accurate, custom variables no longer exist. Google now has custom dimensions and metrics as a replacement. Custom dimensions are the closest translation to custom variables (they are pretty much the same in principle). Custom metrics are some kind of mix between dimensions and events.
Google currently does NOT offer a way to upgrade your profile(s)/account(s) to Universal Analytics style. In order to use Universal Analytics, you have to create a new account or profile. If you want to try Universal Analytics out, Google currently recommends implementing it along side the traditional or async version you already have implemented.
Google has not currently officially stated when or if they will provide a means to migrate existing profiles, though I personally think they eventually will, since preserving historical data and reducing time and costs associated with migrating is a huge concern to everybody.
In addition to #Crayon-Violent's answer, be aware that the current Core Reporting API (v3) doesn't support retrieving custom dimension/metric data.
This month Google anounced that classical analytics properties can be upgraded to Universal without any data loss.
Universal Analytics is a set of technological innovations that improve
the way data is collected and processed in Google Analytics. The
Universal Analytics Upgrade is a process you can use to upgrade all of
your classic Google Analytics properties into Universal Analytics
properties without losing any data or changing your account settings.
All Google Analytics properties will soon be required to use Universal
Analytics. Any properties that don’t follow the upgrade process will
be auto-transferred to Universal Analytics in the future.
You can upgrade your analytics property from analytics admin panel. https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/upgrade/
In case of upgrade problems you can refer to Google group:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ua-upgrade
I recently inherited a project loaded with Google Analytics and I had never worked with them before. The code migration to Universal Analytics was straightforward with the exception of moving from Custom Vars to Dimensions. Google's documentation does little to highlight this.
After some digging around I found a couple of things that I think may help others that are migrating:
1) Set up or edit custom dimensions & metrics
Note that when you set up the Dimensions you are provided with code snippets that you can copy & paste into your project.
2) How to use the code to send custom dimensions & metrics
This docmentation will help you understand the provided code snippets and learn how to better work with them.
I hope this info spares others some of the pain that I experienced going through this.
I've created a plugin like jQuery Migrate to backward compatibilty of eventTracking and other features.
Allow developers to migrate old methods _gaq.push() to ga() object.
https://github.com/empiricompany/universal-analytics-migrate
Related
I wish to use the results of the Google translation that results from right clicking on a web page in Chrome, as opposed to using the API. These results I will use as part of a web language learning tool. I have read this page: https://cloud.google.com/translate/attribution about adding a logo, and have also read the HTML markup requirements at https://cloud.google.com/translate/markup.
My question is as these terms and conditions pages are referring to the API, do they also apply to using the translation results of using the Chrome menu item? I could use the API but this is much simpler for my temporary need.
Yes, when you're using the Google Translate Tool in a page by using the right-click, you can see that it send a request to the Google Translate API.
In definition, you have to add Google Attribution.
I guess for a personal website or non-commercial use it might not be that big of an issue but still, it will avoid future ones.
I have a small blog on Symfony 4. I need to add views to the articles. Decided to use Google Analytics. But I did not find the normal documentation how to connect Google Analytics to the symfony 4.
In general, you simply have to append a script tag that is provided in Google Analytics' web interface. See either this or this answer on the help resource. Perhaps, that would be the best option for you, since you just have a simple blog. The script should probably be added in your base template, or the layout so that it renders just above the closing </body> tag.
Another option would be setting up a server-to-server interaction with GA. There are several bundles for that: one, two. But most probably you won't need that.
You can simply put the script in your default base layout like the conventional base.html.twig. If you want to minimize the interaction with the layout you can create a Twig function that returns the Tracking ID stored in parameters.yml, either use bundle that provides extra features for interaction with your server, have a look for GoogleAnalyticsBundle which is still maintained by a symfony core developer.
I am in charge of several Google Analytics accounts and basically, I'm just looking for a systematic way of working with multiple accounts at once instead of making manual edits. For example, I created a new filter and I need to add it to a bunch of accounts. Instead of doing that manually for all of them I would like to have a way to do it for all of them at once.
I know this is possible with Analytics API but that would require me to actually learn the API and program some functionality which I have no time for right now. I need an existing solution.
My research led me to Analytics Edge and Analytics Canvas and not much else. Are there any other tools for editing multiple Google accounts?
I am starting with Google Analytics and found custom variables very useful (using Classic Analytics now).
Exploring the panel I do see a section for custom variables under the non-real-time section. However, if I head to the real-time section, there is no evidence that custom vars are going to appear there (i.e. they can only be seen under the non-real-time section).
Checking the documentation does not clarify this as it does talk about custom vars but does not specify if they appear or not under the Real-Time section. Anyone knows?
It would be impossible for the documentation to list everything that is not the case, so if something is not documented and not visible in the interface it's in most cases safe to assume that it is not there.
However Google has documented what is visible in the real time reports and there is no report for custom vars.
I'm new to Google map api. My goal is to overlay a series of transparent PNGs over a map over a timespan.
I'm wondering if a purely javascript approach to this is a good start, or if it would be not too hard to do some code behind in asp.net
Also, I'm curious if either google map Api v2.x or v3.x is better suited to this task
You will need to do it in Javascript, unless you want to reload the page every second or so. (Which is a horrible idea).
You might as well use the latest version of the Google Maps API.
I recommend avoiding v3 for live sites until its syntax is more stable.
While it's a Google Labs project, Google's policy is that they can make changes to the syntax that will break existing pages with only a few months notice in the discussion group. A while ago they changed the names of all the get_ and set_ methods, and changed some of the event names.
Once the API goes out of Labs and into Beta you can expect Google to take care to preserve backward compatibility whenever they make syntax changes. If you use v3 for a live site while it's still in Labs you'll need to monitor the discussion group for announcements of changes that might break your page.