In recent 2 days, my website's average visits duration fell from about 1:30 to 50sec in Audience>Overview window and fell from 2:00 to 1:30 in Content>Overview window. The visits duration parameters has a steady value for a long time.
The website (www.rapidtables.com) seems to function well.
Hosting server activity history graph seems normal.
All other analytics parameters (visits and pages/visit) seem normal.
Why visit duration is different in Audience>Overview and Content>Overview windows?
What could have caused the sudden drop in the duration parameter? (analytics bug / old urchin.js usage ...)?
Do you have historical data to compare to? If so, is this the first year it has happened, or do you see a dip about this time every year? If you have absolutely verified that nothing went wrong with your tracking code or your website in general, then it boils down to speculation. You just have to research the industry your site caters to and look for reasons that might have caused it. Maybe some new competitor opened shop? Maybe whatever product or service you offer is "seasonal"?
Related
There doesn't seem to be many resources available for troubleshooting Google Optimize. I've been using the software for a year now with no issues. Optimize experiments update with new session data once or twice a day. As of recently, every time new data comes through, Optimize will zero out the session data.
The session data here looks correct until I click into the experiment:
When I click into an experiment, you'll see the Experiment Sessions don't add up correctly. The experiment sessions were being tracked correctly last night, and they correctly added up to the total Collected Sessions.
Everything is tracking correctly until Google pulls in more data. I'm not sure what's causing this and I can't get support from their community or support team. Data was collecting fine a week ago. I haven't changed my experiment goals or how the tests are running. The only thing I've changed in that time is how many tests I'm running at the same time. I used to only run 1 test at a time, and I'm now running 3. None of the tested pages, or primary goals overlap. I do have some secondary goals that overlap. Any thoughts?
It looks like this was happening as a result of Google Analytics Goal Events being delayed. It can take 24-48 hours for website event data to come through.
Today we launched our first campaign on Chartboost. We added 300$ on account and started our first campaign. In less than one our we spent all the money. Then I switched campaign off but still the balance going up in negative. Can you help me why? Beacuse we didn't pay for that additional negative balance we made campaign for 290$ not 450$ ...
What can we do?
The most common reason for campaigns to go over budget is the fact that they reach their budget in the minutes before the first check that compares the spend to the budget. This can happen if you your campaign has a wide target (ie - if you are targeting the whole world for example). Campaigns that have very broad targeting (little to no usage of filtering or available targeting on the dashboard) will serve impressions very quickly and this only increases the probability of exceeding the budget.
It is also very common for CPI campaigns to continue to "Spend Money" even after the campaign has been turned off. The reason why this happens is that we attribute installs to recorded clicks up to 21 days after the click. Also, the Install is not recorded until the 1st bootup of the app. For a number of reasons this 1st bootup may not occur until a couple of days after downloading onto the device from the App Store. There is no way to "turn off installs" for clicks that have already occurred.
Hope this helps.
Background:
I have a Google Analytics account using which I am tracking user activity for web and mobile app. After logging into your account and choosing the web property and the corresponding view, you generally see a dashboard with quick stats like Pageviews, Users, Sessions, Pages/Sessions, Avg. Session Duration, Bounce Rate and percentage of new sessions. You can change the time period (from the top right area of the Dashboard) to get the same stats for that period.
Problem:
Last week, I was interested in the three main stats: Page views, Users and Sessions for a particular day - say, day A. The dashboard showed the following stats:
Pageviews - 1,660,137
Users - 496,068
Sessions - 983,549
This report was based on 100% of sessions.
I go back to the dashboard TODAY and check the same stats for the same day A. Here's what I saw:
Pageviews - 1,660,137
Users - 511,071
Sessions - 1,005,517
This report is also based on 100% of sessions.
Nothing was changed in the tracking code for the web and mobile app. Could someone explain why I have this difference in the stats? Is this normal?
They need some time to update the system, otherwise their system would overwhelm
When you first create a profile it can take up to 48 -72 hours for it to start showing data.
After that time data will appear instantly in the Real-time reports.
Standard reports take longer to finish processing. You need to remember the amount of data that is being processed. Some of the data may appear in the standard reports after a few hours. The numbers have not completed processing for at least 24 hours, so anything you look at then will not be accurate.
When checking Google Analytics never look at todays or yesterdays numbers in the standards reports, if you want accurate information. Things get even more confusing when you consider time zones. When exactly is it yesterday? I have noticed numbers changing as far back as 48 hours. But Google Says in there documentation 24 hours. I am looking for the link in the documentation will post it when I find it.
Found it: Data Limits
Data processing latency
Processing latency is 24-48 hours. Standard accounts that send more
than 200,000 sessions per day to Google Analytics will result in the
reports being refreshed only once a day. This can delay updates to
reports and metrics for up to two days. To restore intra-day
processing, reduce the number of sessions you send to < 200,000 per
day. For Premium accounts, this limit is extended to 2 billion hits
per month.
So try doing the same thing again today but check your last day being Monday. When you check again next week the numbers should be correct.
I am using Google Web Analytics Online Tool to monitor visits on my site.
What bugs me is that often I see that records contain the folloowing entries:
Page Visits: 1.00
Average Visit Duration: 00:00:00
Bounce Rate: 100%
What does that mean?
If the visitor comes to my site it should stay at least couple of seconds until he leaves?
Could that mean that something is wrong with accessing my site (I had similar problems before, but I am convinced I fixed them since I am not getting any errors when I try to access my site from different computers.)
When a visitor comes to your page google analytics sets a cookie where a timestamp is stored. When the user visits a second page in your site Google compares the stored timestamp to the actual time and calculates visits duration from the difference between the two. If all your visitors have bounced there is no second data point to compare the stored value to and google is unable to compute a duration.
A common workaround is to set a javascript timeout and trigger an event after ten seconds or so (with the "interaction" flag in the event set to true, see Google Analytics event tracking docs for details). The assumption is that somebody who looks for more than ten seconds at you page is not actually a bounce (I think that since "bounce rate" has so hugely negative connotations people try to avoid high bounce rates even at the price of introducing bad data; you should realize that "bounce rate" simply means that there are not enough data points to say anything meaningful about those particular visitors).
Personally I do not like that approach because it means to redefine inaction of a visitor as action. A better idea (IMO) is to implement a meaningful interaction point - like a "read more" link that loads content via ajax or something like it - and track that via event tracking or virtual page view.
Event tracking guide:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/eventTrackerGuide
Short Update: With Universal Analytics the technical details have changed (i.e. there are no longer cookies with timestamps, all information is processed on the GA servers). So the first paragraph is no longer up to date, however the rest of the answer is still valid.
I'm having a similar issue, i monitor those placements and recently found out the traffic is hardly getting to my site, recent experiment showed that those are placements triggered via clicks from GDN, but people have not even reached my page, were blocked by pop-up blocker or other similar software
Has anyone else seen this issue?
As of roughly 2 weeks ago, I get conflicting figures for the Total Visits metric between the Traffic Sources report and the other reports (e.g. Visitors, Dashboard). For example, for the week of 5/9/2010 through 5/15/2010, the Dashboard and Visitors reports both say 386 Visits. The Traffic Sources report says 157 Visits, and the 4 main source types (Search, Direct, Referral, Other) sum to 157 Visits, not 386.
Any ideas? Is this a known bug, or could there be a configuration issue?
Thanks.
Well it seems that quite a few GA users have observed unaccounted-for behavior, particularly during the past couple of months.
For instance,
18 - 19 May 2010:
more than 40 different GA users posted to the GA
User Forum all regarding the same
issue: no data whatever was
recorded in their GA Accounts
during the 18th and 19th of May. No
response from Google and nothing in
the GA Blog. Several users who had
other GA accounts that were functioning normally during this period, suggested that the problem might be caused by recent changes by Google to the GATC (which was in fact recently revised)--many of those who posted on the Forum said that indeed they had recently added the latest version of the GATC to their Sites/Pages.
6 - 9 May 2010:
Over 50 GA users reported, by
posts to the GA Forum, a complete
GA outage during the period 6 - 9 May
(no data appearing in their reports
for at least one of those days). This
time a GA Team member did respond with
a one-line response "there was a
delay in reporting, no data was lost."
This post also referenced a Twitter
message 4 from GA stating the same
thing.
In addition, i've seen a half dozen, perhaps more, recent posts (past 60 days) on the GA Forum in which users reported significant discrepancies between an aggregate figure and the sum of the constituents--both sets of figures from the same Report, e.g.,
Numbers Don't add up on the Absolute Unique Visitor's Report
Search Engine drill-down visitors don't match total
Neither Post was answered (either by the GA Team or anyone else).
Finally, since it's just a matter of clicking a menu and selecting a different option, i suggest comparing the figures you recited in your question with the analogous figures for Page Views, which is probably the simplest measurement in client-side analytics ("Visits" by contrast is strongly influenced by user cookie manipulation).
Through some trial-and-error looking at every specific source, I've traced the error to one item: within the Traffic Sources reports for the affected days (the issue seems to have partially righted itself as of yesterday's data, at least for my account), the delta/error/black hole was always equal to the Google CPC Search traffic for that day.
I have no idea what's causing the issue, but at least I know how to manually attribute the numbers. Hopefully Google has fixed this...
Thank you to all who commented/answered. I appreciate it.