analytics event label is missing - google-analytics

I have problem with sending event to Google Analytics.
In some cases the event label is empty.
I can see the label in fiddler.
The category and action are always saved.
It seems as if it happens to label that are sent in low numbers.
Is there a limitation in Google analytics that it omits the label if the count to that label is relatively low and there is a lot of other traffic?
My site has a lot of traffic, millions of events per day

Once the number of data points crosses a certain threshold (depending on the report type) , GA uses sampled data to reduce the load on their servers.
To see if a report is sampled, look for a checkerboard-like icon in the upper right corner of the interface. You can click this to access a slider to increase the amount of data in a sample, but only to a certain point.
Check to see if your reports are being sampled. If so, it may well be that a label with a small number of data points gets totally overlooked and therefore shows up as zero in the sampled report.
If this is indeed your problem, you can decrease the date range until you no longer see the sampling icon.

Yes, in G4 they are now missing.
These are user fields (self made).
Also missing browser version. What a shame for Google.

Related

Google Analytics Hit Quotas

I wonder whether someone can help me please.
I have a user who under a specific property, sporadically receives the following error:
Some hits sent on 03-Jul-2018 to property ...... exceeded one or more hit quotas and were therefore not processed.
Hits can be dropped when daily or monthly hit limits are exceeded. You can view your hit volume levels in Property Settings in Analytics.
Hits can also be dropped if visitor hit limits are exceeded. This can happen when your site is incorrectly generating the visitor ID for a GA session. Contact your website administrator to check that the visitor ID generation has been correctly implemented.
They are not using the Premium account but when I look at the data for the day in question, there aren't any issues with regards to 'High Cardinality' which unless I've misunderstood I'd expect to see.
Could someone look at this please and offer some guidance where the issue may be because this area is fairly new to me.
Many thanks and kind regards
Chris
Collection limits are influenced by 2 factors:
The tracker: whether you use ga.js,gtag.js,analytics.js etc... here are the details.
The property type: whether you are using GA (10M hits / month) or GA 360 (2B hits / month).
In your case you are facing a property limit. To find out when such limits where reached, you can create a custom report using a time dimension (eg date+time) combined with the hits metric. You can also combine the hit metrics with other dimensions (country, browser, device) to see if you find any patterns as to why you're getting so many hits.
Cardinality is something else: it refers to the number of unique value combinations for your dimensions. For instance if you have 500K events where each event category is different, you'll have a Cardinality of 500K on the event category dimension. The more hits, the more likely you'll have a high cardinality, but the 2 aren't necessary related (if you send 10B events with the same category, the cardinality on the category is 1).
So focus on identifying and solving your limits/quotas issue, as it's the real issue here:
If the number of hits is legitimate (you have a huge amount of traffic), then the only options are to upgrade to GA 360 or reduce the number of hits for each session
If the number of hits is abnormally high (eg traffic is stable but hits increased dramatically), look for implementation issues, especially generic event trackers such as error tracking with tools like Google Tag Manager

Discrepancy in Google Analytics data when using segments

I'm having a tough time with Google Analytics, trying to understand why the value of metrics changes when segments are applied.
There is a standard audience overview report, which is based on 100% of sessions (no sampling) and the view is not filtered. The period is March of 2017.
Standard "All visitors" segment looks like this:
Then, there is another built-in segment called "Bounced Sessions". When I apply this segment, the "All visitors" values changes:
Amount of users increases, but the count of pageviews decreases.
Any ideas how to explain this?.. Thank you in advance!
Oki, there can be, multiple reasons. Let me explain first how these numbers are calculated, then we move on to your query.
There two types of data gathering and manipulation from google.
Pre-calculated data -- pre-aggregated tables
These are the precalculated data that Google uses to speed up the UI. Google does not specify when this is done but it can be at any point of the time. These are known as pre-aggregated tables
Data calculated on the fly
Some that you do which result in computation or manipulation falls under this category. Like using segments, creating custom reports etc.
Coming to your problem. When you apply segment, every metric that it effects will be calculated again. Thus it may result in numbers greater than you see in normal view.
Standard audience overview report is pre-aggregated at some point of the day. When you apply segment, the results will be calculated with the fresh data. Since latter is the latest, it will automatically give you increased number of the metrics. Even you can see a decrease as well, all depends on your data and user behavior.
Resolution: If you are a premium user, use Big Query. You must rely on big query for every metric as they are fresh and calculated on the fly

Unique events are greater than total events

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.

Google Analytics Event Tracking reporting inflated event values

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.

How are dynamic segments in Google Analytics retroactive?

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.

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