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.
Related
My event counts between GA4 and UA are different. They are not drastically different (maybe about 10%) but the numbers are still off. If the tags and triggers are all the same in GTM, shouldn't the event counts be identical? what would cause it to be 10% off or is this normal??
First of all, it has at this point become agreed upon that GA4's pre-baked reports are less than reliable. We now suggest avoiding using pre-cooked reports in GA4 and instead either use the Explorer, or export the data and use something else entirely (preferably) if you have the resources for it.
Secondly, make sure you don't have Google Signals enabled since this changes thresholding/sampling logic. Also, switch to device-only reporting, it will help with thresholding. More on it here. It's important that the Signals are never enabled. It looks like the thresholding logic won't be fixed even if you disable them after enabling. Some report the thresholding reduce after you give it some months. Some claim it's due to Signals affecting the data and then the data can't be restored.
Event Properties Cardinality. Here's more about it. Despite what Google claims, GA4 is still full of bugs and unpleasant features. One of it would be the cardinality of your eps' values. Keep it low. Otherwise, sampling kicks in hard and you end up seeing a large percentage of your events as Other(Other). Even when you don't use the high cardinality dimension in your report.
Data retention. See the limitations on it here. Yep, no more free access to old data for your precious ad-hoc YoY analysis, so if you're counting old events, no luck. UA will show them to you, but GA4 wipes them. GA4 tries to still maintain the pre-cooked aggregated reports, but now you can't drill into them as you used to in UA, and they're not accurate anyway.
These are generic suggestions. More debugging would have to be done on your side to find out exactly what datapoints at what times aren't being counted. Data exports to BQ would help narrowing it down. But at this moment, the general consensus among analysts is that we shouldn't compare GA4's data to that of UA. I personally don't agree with that consensus, since it's always good to know the difference, but that has become almost an industry standard today.
I posted a finding to this thread.
had the same issue with purchase events being different for UA vs. GA4.
Universal Analytics was always showing higher numbers and the triggers were exactly the same.
Then I enabled data export to BigQuery and it turned out that GA4 shows only those transactions in the GA4 UI that have a value for the field user_pseudo_id (you only see this field in the BigQuery data export). There were transactions where the field was null and apparently these dont show up in the UI.
I would recommend looking at raw event in BigQuery, the data export is for free as long as you dont go crazy with ETLs and queries.
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
I would like to compare some data between a 3rd party analytics tool and GA.
Now I would love to see the IP addresses that Ga is receiving however it seems that they do not reveal this information, fine, however, I cannot find a way to use the flat table in the GA custom report to show me the following if possible;
Full Date Time (Seems as though they don't want you to have this either)
Browser Version
Browser Width & Height
Page (from the hit)
And I would like this data not to be grouped by the metric, this way I can see that if the same user has hit a page 3 times it isn't grouped.
If anyone can help please let me know. If the question is poorly phrased please let me know.
Thanks,
Connor.
This requires some work, and it will allow the breakdown only for future hits, not for hits that are already collected.
To view individual hits you need to create a hit based dimension that is unique per hit. Unless your page has an amazing amount of traffic a timestamp in milliseconds (e.g. new Date().getTime()) will be sufficient (for your report you might want to format that in a nice way). So in the admin section of your GA property you go to custom definitions, create a hit scoped custom dimension, and then modify your pagecode to send the timestamp to that dimension. Hit scoped means it is attached to the pageview (or other interacton hit) it is sent with.
If you want to break down your report by user you need the clientid (clientid is how Google recognizes that hits belong to the same user). Again, send it as a custom dimension.
This does not tell you how many sessions the user had (there is no session identifier in GA). If you need to know that you can create a session scoped custom dimension and send a random number along ("session scope" means that GA only stores the last value in a session, so you don't need to maintain a session id over multiple pageviews, since the last value will be set for all hits within the session). The number of different sessions ids per client id then tells you the number of sessions per user.
The takeaway is that GA only shows aggregated data, and if you want to defeat this mechanism you need to throw data at it that cannot be aggregated further. You might run into other constraints (i.e. there is a limited number of rows per report).
I would look for some feedback on tracking user activity on an commerce website using th google analytics commerce capabilities.
I can't fully understand those 3 parts :
Adding an item (ecommerce:addItem) : obviously when some user add a thing to the cart
Adding a Transaction (ecommerce:addTransaction) : that's where I'm very confused
Sending the data (ecommerce:send) : that's obvious
Can those 3 event append at a different moment ? in what manner ?
What would be a real-world use case that would make you use execute ecommerce:addTransaction and ecommerce:send at a different moment ?
This thing makes me wonder a lot, and I'd like to have some experienced feedback on this as you tend to easily break your stats if something is not done week enough
Thanks in advance
EDIT
So the main purpose right here is to get stats for the pending orders (you add stuff to your cart), and the complete orders (you paid for the things you added).
Right now I only send it all when the order is complete, and things are working pretty good in analytics, but I just don't know anything about the ones that did not complete.
This question was a lack of knowledge.
Simple ecommerce plugin has nothing to do with the enhanced ecommerce plugin
You won't track that much with the first one, except the checkouts. A plain, one order at a time, revenue value.
If you want a deep insight on your users behaviors (when i say deep, I mean it), You have to go for the second one.
We might be able to debate over the unusefullness of the first one; and the fact that its existence in itself compared to the second is completely misleading, as when you first get in, as usual with google, you get flooded by an endless documentation
ecommerce:addItem does not add items to a cart; it adds items to a transaction (with "conventional" ecommcerce tracking there is no cart tracking, you'd have to use enhanced ecommerce tracking. Actually your title refers to enhanced ("ec:") and your question to conventional ecommerce ("ecommerce:") tracking).
So ecommerce:addTransaction starts a transaction; here goes the stuff that affects the transaction as a whole, like transaction id, tax on the total purchase or shipping costs.
Now that you have started the transaction you can add items to it that are associated via the transaction id.
Finally the ecommerce:send command tells Universal Analytics that the transaction should be processed on the server. "send" is actuall a misnomer; addItem and addTransaction do already send data to the server (they each create an request to the tracking server and thus count towards your hit quota).
The reason for this is, as far as I can tell, that the information is transmitted via url parameters (you call the Google Analytics endpoint which returns an transparent pixel). The maximum length for an url request is limited (actual limits depend on browser and browser version).
So the transaction is broken up into multiple parts not because you want to execute the commands at different moments but so it can be transmitted via Url parameters without being truncated. The send command merely tells that you are now finished adding new parts to the transaction and the data can now be processed.
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.