How can i track a single users path through the webpage with Google Analytics?
I am not interested in who that user is, only what path the user went.
You can assign a unique value to a Visitor-level Custom Variable when a user visits the site. Then you can filter/segment based on the value that you want to examine to narrow down paths by individual. It's not entirely clear whether or not this violates Google's terms, though. You're not technically tracking an individual, you're just relating the actions of various anonymous users.
Related
I am looking to provide analytics for a website which has user generated pages (which would therefore require a unique tracking ID for each page).
Is there a limit to the amount of different pages I can track?
I have looked around documentation provided by Google on data limits but have found no information regarding this.
Thanks in advance
You can create up to 50 propertys per account.
The trackable documents should be unlimited. Only limited by pageviews per month (10 million /month).
limits and quotas
Your assumption that you need to have a different tracking ID for each user generated page is not necessarily correct. You can track the entire website using the same Google Analytics property. I assume you're worried about exposing analytics data about the page generated by user A to user B accidentally. To prevent this from happening, what you can do is configure a custom dimension in Google Analytics that records which user a page belongs to. Then, when exposing analytics data to a specific user, you can make sure to only expose data about pages that belong to that specific user.
Due to the nature of my website, it is very complex to get a proper attribution model, cross device tracking is complex but necessary.
I would like to know if it is possible to obtain somehow a users google+ userId whenever he visits my site.
I know there is a feature called UserId where I need to generate my own ID and track it upon a customers visit, but due to the nature of my website, there is very little probability they will log in prior to converting (Fact which will make every cross device interaction useless).
You cannot use a Google ID as the User ID in Google Analytics. The User ID must be private and non PII, i.e. Google must have no way to determine who that ID belongs to. Obviously if it's a Google-based ID, they would be able to tell pretty easily.
The relevant bit from the TOS is paragraph 7 :
You will not (and will not allow any third party to) use the Service
to track, collect or upload any data that personally identifies an
individual (such as a name, email address or billing information), or
other data which can be reasonably linked to such information by
Google.
I am searching for a way to track user behavior on my website. I want to know if it is possible to get a table with data looking something like this:
+------+---------------+-----------------+------+---------+
| time | ip or user_id | user_session_id | link | actions |
+------+---------------+-----------------+------+---------+
(Link - where user came from)
I want to track different user actions by sessions. Is this possible using Google Analytics or I should search other tools? My site is currently set up to track events but on my Analytics account I get only the number of events that occurred. I want to track what a specific user does on my site.
tl;dr: if you must do this use Mixpanel or similar software.
Time based dimensions are already available (date, hour, minutes and datetime). "link" would be referrer. Actions in Google Analytics are basically pageviews, events and transactions, so you have that, too.
IP and user id are a big no-gos. Storing anything that that identifies a person is a violation of Googles Terms of Service and depending on your location might be a violation of national laws.And if by user_id you mean the Google Analytics feature of the same name, Google says you may set it for logged in users and have to unset it for user that log out, so by extension that means storing it in Ga would probably be a violation of their TOS.
The GA session id is not exposed via the interface. You may read it from the cookie and store it in a custom dimension (I'm not sure if this is allowed within the TOS, on the other hand GA premium customers get this via a BigQuery export in any case, so it should be allowed).
If you simply want to tell different users apart you might simply generate a string in the UUID format and store that in a custom dimension. If you want to actually identify users (by name, adress etc), well, you are not allowed to and Google will terminate your account if they find out.
Not to mention that it completely eludes why so many people want to track individual users. You must not use GA information to target individuals, and simply looking at individual user paths will not help you (I wrote an article about that, although I do not expect that this will convince you).
Google Analytics is for technical and legal reasons not a good tool for tracking individual users, if you need to do this use a software that is made for this purpose. Mixpanel is often mentioned in that context but I'm sure there are many other solutions.
I have a website that allows people to create an account (that is the conversion I wish to track).
I wish to know where a specific person is coming from. I have google analytics installed and have set up the registration page as a goal, but the reporting tells me traffic sources as an aggregated pie chart. It doesn't report down to the user account level to say that 'person with email xyz' came from 'facebook' for example.
What custom variables or mark up would I need to add to GA to report at that detailed level, if that is at all possible?
Otherwise, I will just have to record the first http_referer in a cookie and stick it in a database during the registration process.
Any advice?
Firstly I must ask you, how actionable do you think it is to look at data at that granular of a level? Finding out what % of people who registered came from facebook or some other place is actionable, because it helps you do things like determine where to focus marketing efforts. But individual users? How is this actionable to you? (hint: it's not)
However, if you are still determined to know this, you should first note that it is against Google's ToS to record personally identifiable data both directly (recording the actual value in GA) or indirectly (e.g. - recording a unique id that you can use to tie to personal info stored within your own system). If this is something you don't want to risk, I suggest moving to another analytics tool that does not have this sort of thing in their ToS (e.g. Adobe SiteCatalyst, which costs money, or perhaps you may instead prefer to choose an "in-house" approach, like Piwik)
If you are still determined to follow through with this and hope not to get caught or whatever, Google Analytics doesn't record data like what info a visitor filled out in a form (like their email address) unless you populate that data in a custom field/dimension/metric/event to be sent along with the request. Usually you would populate this on the form "thank you" page (which is usually the same page you use as your goal url or goal event if you're popping and using an event for your goal). So you would populate the email address in one of those custom variables and then have it as a dimension to break down the http referrer by.
Our customers log in from several different computers over the course of a day, and so our unique visitor count in google analytics is really inflated. I'd like to give GA our user ids, for example, so that it could be much smarter about this stat. Is there any way to influence what GA considers a unique visitor?
Besides trickery with cookies (which I wouldn't recommend), there's no "built-in" way to better inform Google Analytics to take into account multiple computers for its Unique Visitors calculations.
However, you could set the user ID in a Custom Variable, and use that to track the number of "real" unique visitors, and the distribution within the users.
_gaq.push(["_setCustomVar", 1, "User", user_id_string ,1]);
Be sure to delete this custom variable once the user signs out, both for privacy and accuracy reasons.
GA uses two cookies __utmb and __utmc. You can try to capture and recreate those if your users authenticate or you have a way of tracking them.