Does someone know how long Google will store the data from the Analytics/Adwords etc. accounts? Can't find it anywhere, and also can't believe they will store it like forever. It would be nice to see in 30 years for example, how many visitors I had in 2010.
Google usually won't delete your account or the data within your account. However, there are exceptions:
Google may close down your whole Google account if you severely violate the terms of service. This might even happen by accident. See complaints on google help forum.
Regarding AdWords, Google started to delete unused entities in March 2015. ("we’ll only delete entities that never accrued impressions and have been removed for more than 100 days.")
There is no guarantee that Google will store your data lifelong (who knows if internet or Google still exists in 30 years?), but is highly unlikely that Google will delete it. I have seen AdWords account that haven't been used since 2005 and still all data has been there.
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I've been working with Google Analytics, and while I have all the necessary settings in the right configuration to collect demographic information, I'm not seeing anything. Other information (active users, geographic info) is showing up as I'd expect, so it's not that everything is broken. What I'm wondering is if there is a way to test the demographic data collection, to ensure that it's not just that users are blocking that data (it is a very low traffic site). Other tips are also appreciated in case I'm missing something else that could be causing this to happen. Thanks very much for your attention!
Seeing the demographics data in the reports takes a lot of hits, because they are based on a sample of total sessions.
Anyway, you can check if you have activated them by looking in the browser network if you are also sending hits to doubleclick as well as Google Analytics.
I would like to add a "what other people are doing" section to my react website, which shows the currently most interesting sections of my website using google analytics. This means I would need fetch the most popular pages every 30 minutes from google analytics from within my pages backend, presumably using the realtime api, because I know that the reporting of the reporting API can be up to 24 hours out of date.
But unfortunately, the realtime API seams to only be able to track users that are using the page currently, and there doesn't seam to be a way to distinguish which actual page there on.
Basically what I need is a way to figure out how many individual people (not just people refreshing over and over again) have visited a certain section of my page in the last 30 minutes. Google analytics seams to be the way to go but I'm open to any other solution, as long as it can be used from within the aws cloud.
What you need to remember is that the Google Analytics website also uses the Google Analytics API. If something you want to see can be done on the website for the most part you can also do it with the api, with the exception of a few of the calculated metrics which can be a bit tricky to duplicate with the API.
The reporting of the Google analytics Reporting API takes between 24 - 48 hours to process your data until that time your data will not be completed processing so the numbers will not be correct.
The google analytics real-time api would be an option but the data is limited into how long it stays around as well is what dimensions and metrics you can actually view as they are only giving you access to what they are sure has completed processing.
An issue with both of these solutions would be the quota, every view on google analytics is only allowed to make 10k requests per day. You will need to ensure that you stay within this so if you are only requesting data every thirty minutes around the clock you should be able to keep this to around 48 calls but its wroth noteing.
IMO Google analytics is not suited for this task you should keep a running count on your own website store it in the database and use that.
We are using Google Ads and facebook Ads to promote our website and using Google analytics (GA) to track.
We created a test FB ad like link to our website, i.e., having FB like UTM params in the link.
( ?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Paid&utm_campaign=Test )
When we did a test with 10 users all coming by clicking that link, GA is showing 10 users in realtime reports. We further checked the source of those users, it properly showed as "Facebook / Paid".
However, after 7 mins realtime shows the same user's source as "direct" instead of "Facebook / Paid".
Can someone help me understand why GA is treating those users in realtime as "Direct" after sometime.
Note: I haven't changed any code related to session timeouts.
Real time report does not give accurate information, especially for the source and medium. It is a known fact so there is no solution. You have to wait for the data to appear in the actual report.
From documentation
[...] As a result, you'll see traffic and conversions incorrectly attributed to a Source of (direct). You'll only see this in Real-Time reports; in standard reports, traffic and conversions will be attributed correctly
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1638635?hl=en&ref_topic=1638563
I just started at a company and the new web host hasn't been sharing data to google analytics so there is no info at all for the past 6 months in my analytics account. They just put in the tracking code last friday. Is there anyway to see data in google that is not there??
No, of course not. You cannot see something that isn't there. And you couldn't even recreate the data even if you had it from other sources, since Google does not allow to import historical data.
However you might have alternatives - your webserver should keep a logfile, and you can analyze this with programs like Awstats or similar (free or commercial) software packages. This is really old school (log file analysis was the way to go before cloud based javascript trackers became common) and the results will not quite match data collected via Google Analytics, but it should give you at least a broad idea what was going on on your site.
I'm using both on a site and getting very different numbers from each. Why is this?
The discrepancy is also mentioned in a Quora answer (Which is better, Facebook Insights or Google Analytics?)
Footnote: if you decide to use both, do not report them side-by-side,
and never expect them to match. Trying to explain the differences will
drive you mad.
Could someone explain?
This problem is quite common, and very hard to explain to clients why numbers do not reconcile amongst different analytics platforms.
Firstly, I believe that because there are remote connections to google or facebook some user sessions will get lost (What happens when they hit stop on the Browser page before the .js downloads for instance).
Secondly I believe ad blocking software may stop the file from being downloaded therefore the session is not captured.
Most hosting providers will have their own analytics platform with your hosting package. This is what I rely on as a true indicator for actual page views etc. These are usually generated directly from your web server logs so they are more accurate. Sadly I've never seen one of these packages have as many features as google or facebook.
There are tons of possible reasons. They might identify returning visitors in a different way or users might block scripts from a specific domain (e.g. *.facebook.com but not *.google.com). In general, ignore the discrepancy. Just pick one solution and use it. You'll always have visitors blocking all such scripts or just one or two specific trackers. The only (almost) 100% accurate way to do it, would be using local scripts, but even those could be blocked. You could as well look at open source solutions such as Piwik
Different web analytics products use diferent methods to track data on the site.
These differences between them is the reason why is hard do do a side-by-side comparison.
On the two links bellow you can find more info about that:
Why does Google Analytics report different values than some other web analytics solutions?
Using Google Analytics & Facebook Domain Insights to Track Social Actions on Your Website
In addition to the notes above, I also wanted to mention Google samples data when there are large volumes & dimensions. This may be a contributing factor.
Facebook reports on clicks and Analytics reports on pageviews.
The amount of pageviews might be less than the amount of clicks for a number of reasons:
There are filters on your Analytics that are blocking the pageviews from being recorded
The user left the page before the Analytics code could be recorded
Or the ads being clicked by bots and the Analytics isnt recording them
This seems to be a big problem with Facebook ads. I run a number of campaigns with facebook and I only see 30-50% of the reported traffic actually make it to the site. I cant believe this is due to only the first two reasons.
I have gone into more details on my blog http://www.bradtollefsen.com/facebook-ads-adding/