I currently have more than 50 microsites on my main websites. That is I have one main top level domain and I have more than 50 microsites (and growing) in subfolders on that domain.
Previously I used separate GA web properties for the separate microsites (different GA tracking ID's), which worked fine and I was able to track each sites' activity well. However, I talked to a GA staffer over email and he told me I should switch to using a singular GA web property and use multiple profiles to segment the data by subfolder/microsite. That seemed logical for a lot of reasons, tracking users over the entirety of the website in one GA session being the main one.
Anyway, I have one subfolder which houses an array of microsites, numbering almost 40 right now. I don't necessarily need to have a profile for each one of these sites but there are a couple of important ones that I need to report on individually and on a regular basis I'd like to see how traffic to the other individual sites are doing.
So my question: Is there a way in a single profile to segment data to 40+ (and growing) microsites and see month to month stats on each site? Is there a way I can load a profile dashboard with the stats (Visits/pageviews) from each microsite? Is segmenting the data even what I should be looking at? How would you, a more advanced GA user, tackle this problem?
Many thanks for your input!
jimdo (http://www.jimdo.com) offers a Google Analytics based statistics tool for their DIY website creator. They put hundreds of the (usually low traffic) sites in one profile, set a custom var with a unique ID per site and query the results via the Google API, segmented by site id (at least that is what one of their founders told during a web analytics conference a few months ago). Given that the solution works for a couple of million of client sites (their claim is to host 7 million websites for their clients) segmentation based on a unique site id seems a pretty solid idea.
Updated: As custom vars are deprecated with Universal Analytics you'd now use a custom dimension instead if a custom var. Apart from that the approach should still work.
Related
I want to use Firebase Analytics in my website in order to get some statistics for the visitors of each page (I don't want to track user journey in the site). I wanted to define multiple data streams (one for each url) in my google analytics dashboard, but then it warned me with the following message:
In most cases, a single web stream will meet your measurement needs. Using multiple web streams to measure different pages or sites in a single user’s journey may lead to inconsistent results.
in my case-where I want to see the statistics of my site based on its pages (urls)-should I define multiple data streams?
As the message says, it is not necessary to split based on the path in the web site.
You can in the Google Analytics console instead filter based on that path. This gives you the best of both worlds, as you can show stats for a specific path, but also for the site in its entirety.
I ended up using separate data streams in a similar situation where we had a multilingual site with a domain-per-language. The analytics dashboard lets you separate the data by domain, but the tools are bulky and don't seem available everywhere.
In short, creating a separate stream for data that is always going to be viewed separately can be a real convenience, even if it's not "the right way".
The main caveat from the data-streams documentation seems to be that you can miscount data. For instance, a user switching from the English site to the French site will be counted as a visitor on each rather than as a single visit. As long as you're aware of the data implications, you should be okay.
i have a question as it comes to the GA account structure when you want to track multilanguge sites.
What the Google Analytics account should look like if you have your site under domain.com, and you have sites for multiple countries that are in the catalogues of the main domain like - domain.com/us , domain.com/au, domain.com/ru and so on. Of course i want to track the overall performance of sites and also every site separetely. In this case there should be one property with a non filtered viev with all the contry catalogues (just no filters), and mutiple vievs for every country? Only one tracker needed to track it properly?
Hope i have described it clearly, please help
Regards
I am new in dealing with GTM /GA / Enhanced Ecommerce tracking and seeking some advice on best practices. We will soon be implementing multiple sites (each having different locale) below is the example of the sites domain structure : www.mysite.com/uk- UK
www.mysite.com/de- german
www.mysite.com/in - india
Here is the approach that i think will work out best...i am planning to set one GTM Account since parent company is same (mysite) but different GTM containers (one for each country) We will be using same GA account for all the countries and all the variable/triggers/events for GA will be setup in their respective container.I will be implementing Enhanced Ecommerce via dataLayer (GTM) and for each purchase, i will be prefixing order id with 2 digit country code i.e uk12345, de35535 etc.
How can i make sure that the GA events can be tracked separately for each country as well so that while looking at the reports, user should be able to track user for individual sites and even roll up the reports for the entire company.
Any best practices. screenshots explanations will b appreciated.
TIA
I would recommend having just one GTM container, pointing to one GA property.
This is much simpler to maintain and manage.
You can then creates views for each of your countries, using filters on subdirectories (Filter Type: Predefined, Include only, traffic to subdirectories, that are equal to, "/in/" for instance). You can create a view with no filters, on top of it, for global reporting.
This also allows you to give users different access rights for each country, if you want an analyst to have access to only one country for instance.
You don't need to prefix the country code to each order number, the "Page" dimension in GA will give you the page from which the order have been passed, that should be including "/in/" or "/uk/".
In our case, we have multiple domains for our different countries (oursite.com.ng, oursite.ci, oursite.ma, etc.), one GA property per country, and one unique GTM containers pointing to the different GA properties thanks to a lookup variable in GTM.
But I ended up copying the GA property settings 14 times (for our 14 countries), it would have been much better to do it only once.
Plus, to report cross-country, we had to use the API to avoid downloading and combining 14 reports every time.
I would like to create a small sidebar on each page of my website that contains related/popular pages with perhaps the top five pages users visit after reading the current page.
I could track and record user movements across the site myself and build the list that way, but as my site already uses Google Analytics and I know the data is there I'd rather access that if all possible.
The trouble is that I don't have the faintest idea whether it is possible or not.
Remember that the Google Analytics Reporting API is not real-time it can take between 24 - 48 hours for the data to finish processing and be in the API for you to request.
The Realtime Google Analytics api is real time but the data is only about 5 minutes old and its very limited to the dimensions and metrics you can request.
Quota, with either of those APIs you are limited to 10,000 requests per day per profile / view. I have no idea how many pages there are on your site or how may users are on your site but this could quickly blow out this NON extendable quota.
Options: Except that its not realtime data and use the reporting api every night run a request against the api get everything for two days ago then show your users on your site data that's two days old. Store the data in the database then you are showing them data on in your DB and wont have an issue with the quota as you only requested it once.
But this isn't exactly what you want as its not showing a users activity over the site. TBH I am not sure you can exactly use Google Analytics to track a user as the data is user non specific.
If you don't want to get involved with learning the API and develop this from the ground up, check out EmbeddedAnalytics (disclaimer: I created the service). We could provide such a widget.
You may find This Article useful. It provides the necessary query to find the "next page visited" using the page of interest as a filter. Ultimately your query would look like this:
https://www.googleapis.com/analytics/v3/data/ga?ids=ga%3Aabc&start-date=30daysAgo&end-date=yesterday&metrics=ga%3Apageviews&dimensions=ga%3ApreviousPagePath%2Cga%3AnextPagePath&sort=-ga%3Apageviews&filters=ga%3ApreviousPagePath%3D%40pricing
The query above will give you the "Next Page" along with pageviews assuming the "previous" page contains the word "pricing".
We could easily build such report widget for you:
You would insert a javascript source code snippet into your page. The javascript would pass the page url to our server and we would return the next "most popular pages visited".
The pages could be "linkified" so that someone could click the link to go to that page.
We already have caching mechanism in place. So each pageview would not require a new query to google (making it quicker and also staying away from the API quota that was mentioned above). For pages that are hardly ever looked at (e.g. less than once a week), we could make "on-demand" calls to get the statistics.
In my experience with the API, the lag in the API is only a couple hours. It may be longer for larger sites.
Please let me know if you are interested in such widget and I can work with you.
After being stumped by an earlier quesiton: SO google-analytics-domain-data-without-filtering
I've been experimenting with a very basic analytics system of my own.
MySQL table:
hit_id, subsite_id, timestamp, ip, url
The subsite_id let's me drill down to a folder (as explained in the previous question).
I can now get the following metrics:
Page Views - Grouped by subsite_id and date
Unique Page Views - Grouped by subsite_id, date, url, IP (not nesecarily how Google does it!)
The usual "most visited page", "likely time to visit" etc etc.
I've now compared my data to that in Google Analytics and found that Google has lower values each metric. Ie, my own setup is counting more hits than Google.
So I've started discounting IP's from various web crawlers, Google, Yahoo & Dotbot so far.
Short Questions:
Is it worth me collating a list of
all major crawlers to discount, is
any list likely to change regularly?
Are there any other obvious filters
that Google will be applying to GA
data?
What other data would you
collect that might be of use further
down the line?
What variables does
Google use to work out entrance
search keywords to a site?
The data is only going to used internally for our own "subsite ranking system", but I would like to show my users some basic data (page views, most popular pages etc) for their reference.
Lots of people block Google Analytics for privacy reasons.
Under-reporting by the client-side rig versus server-side eems to be the usual outcome of these comparisons.
Here's how i've tried to reconcile the disparity when i've come across these studies:
Data Sources recorded in server-side collection but not client-side:
hits from
mobile devices that don't support javascript (this is probably a
significant source of disparity
between the two collection
techniques--e.g., Jan 07 comScore
study showed that 19% of UK
Internet Users access the Internet
from a mobile device)
hits from spiders, bots (which you
mentioned already)
Data Sources/Events that server-side collection tends to record with greater fidelity (much less false negatives) compared with javascript page tags:
hits from users behind firewalls,
particularly corporate
firewalls--firewalls block page tag,
plus some are configured to
reject/delete cookies.
hits from users who have disabled
javascript in their browsers--five
percent, according to the W3C
Data
hits from users who exit the page
before it loads. Again, this is a
larger source of disparity than you
might think. The most
frequently-cited study to
support this was conducted by Stone
Temple Consulting, which showed that
the difference in unique visitor
traffic between two identical sites
configured with the same web
analytics system, but which differed
only in that the js tracking code was
placed at the bottom of the pages
in one site, and at the top of
the pages in the other--was 4.3%
FWIW, here's the scheme i use to remove/identify spiders, bots, etc.:
monitor requests for our
robots.txt file: then of course filter all other requests from same
IP address + user agent (not all
spiders will request robots.txt of
course, but with miniscule error,
any request for this resource is
probably a bot.
compare user agent and ip addresses
against published lists: iab.net and
user-agents.org publish the two
lists that seem to be the most
widely used for this purpose
pattern analysis: nothing sophisticated here;
we look at (i) page views as a
function of time (i.e., clicking a
lot of links with 200 msec on each
page is probative); (ii) the path by
which the 'user' traverses out Site,
is it systematic and complete or
nearly so (like following a
back-tracking algorithm); and (iii)
precisely-timed visits (e.g., 3 am
each day).
Biggest reasons are users have to have JavaScript enabled and load the entire page as the code is often in the footer. Awstars, other serverside solutions like yours will get everything. Plus, analytics does a real good job identifying bots and scrapers.