I'm fairly new to Google Analytics and im building a membership base site. GA seems to be very good at describing visits and user behavior, but I want to customize it so that it also tracks track the number of user registrations and the number of users that upgraded their membership. I simply want to build a counter for those two fields and I was wondering what is the best approach?
My best guess is event tracking. Every time the user registers or upgrades their membership, i'll paste in the necessary js to register that as an event. I have never done this before so I'm not sure what's the best approach. Thank you
You need to make some custom tags :) This should get you started:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/gaTrackingCustomVariables
This should also help:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/#EventHandlers
Case 1: If all that you need to do is maintain counter, event would be a good approach, you can refer the link mentioned by #Ryan Brodie. Also, storing the counter in the table can be an option :P.
Case 2: If you want to maintain the counter + study the visitor behavior of various categories of users you can opt for Custom Variables.Now say your website offers users the ability to login, you can use a custom variable scoped to the session level for user login status. In that way, you can segment visits by those from logged in members versus anonymous visitors. For more details visit
this link
Related
I have asked this question several times over on the GA forum, but no result. So maybe you guys can help...
I have set up google analytics with userIds on various pages of a site, with the aim of identifying exactly which pages are looked at by which users. So, sending GA the string
ga('create', 'UA-39536320-1', {'userId': '1001'});
means GA keeps track of all accesses by user 1001, and I can then (in theory) track all pages looked at by this user.
Trouble is, GA reporting seems to offer no out-of-the-box way of doing this. Indeed, some of the reporting features supposedly enabled by GA with userIds just don't seem to be available (eg coverage; user engagement; etc).
Am I the only one trying to do this? Seems other people have achieved a similar result using custom variables; do I have to do that, and give up on GA userIds?
The userId feature can be used in conjunction with a user id enabled view (profile) to analyze cross device sessions.
As pointed out by DalmTo it is possible to use custom dimensions to track any non PII information about a user. This article here gives a good example combining sending user scoped custom dimensions along with imported CRM user data to analyze and segments users for remarketing purposes.
I currently have website (vb.net) that uses google analytics and it has been working fine. What i want to do is turn off GA when the employees of my company log in and turn in on when the clients use it. Each login has a unique id so the first thing that i thought of was to just check the id and add/remove the GA code depending on who logs in. I'm not sure if doing this will affect the stats in any way. Are there other ways to achieve this? Thanks
Depending on your use case, it could be better to utilize this data by placing it within a custom variable, saying if the member is an employee or a regular user. Within the reporting you could then segment the traffic based on value. In most cases this will be the better option as you won't have an inflated drop off rate at the login screen.
If you're still needing to abort the calls, you have a few options:
Add the JavaScript window['ga-disable-UA-#######-##'] = true; on the page. This will need to be done before you call the normal Google Analytics code.
Add logic to fire or not include the entire Google Analytics code block if the user is within a certain group or has a certain ID. This will obviously depend on what language you're developing in.
I've released a mobile app (Android) which I track using Google Analytics. As my experience with Google Analytics is little, I did some mistakes by not knowing when to use events versus virtual pageviews.
My app has a login and a signup screen and I'd like to track the conversion rate of users signing up for an account. The app tracks the page views (/Account/Login and /Account/Create Account) and the actual login and account creation as individual events (Category: Account, Action:Logged In and Account Created).
So here's my problem: In order to do a nice funnel analysis, I should have created virtual pageviews instead of events if the user logs in or creates an account. Though I can create a goal based on events it will not tell me the drop off rates in the individual steps the user takes. Only the funnel visualization can do this AFAIK.
Is there a way to automatically create page views using custom filters in Google Analytics? I've tried to setup a filter like this:
Field A -> Extract A Event Category Account
Field B -> Extract B Event Action (Account Created|Logged In)
Output To -> Constructor Request URI /Account/$B1
Field A Required Yes
Field B Required Yes
Override Output Field Yes
Case Sensitive No
However, that doesn't seem to work. I do not see any additional page views or any other changes. Any suggestions?
(Of course I could release an update to the app and I will probably also do this soon, but the above solution would help me with my experiments right now - without having to alter the source code every time I have "a new idea" how to improve the analytics data)
Unfortunately I've found that it's impossible to achieve this without updating the mobile clients. However, moving forward I will take a closer look at Google Tag Manager which allows much greater flexibility.
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.
Does anyone with DotNetNuke have experience with downloadable content with a shopping cart?
There is a client using CatalooK as their shopping cart. They sell user manuals for a range of car models (one car has multiple user manuals in different languages) but did some test and this is we found so far:
If we have all the downloadable manuals users in the ‘All Users’ role will have access to all the downloadable content by anyone
When a user registers (either from the Login page, or through purchasing a product from the cart), a user account is automatically created for them and are assigned the role as ‘Registered Users’. This solves the problem of having all users access to the content – can just change the permission for the downloadable items to only display for 'Registered User' only
However, anyone can register themselves on the website and automatically be assigned a ‘Registered Users’ role, therefore getting access to the manuals without having paid for them
A step further would be to require the manual adding of user accounts to a new role called ‘Downloads’ which would be the only users within the 'Downloads’ role to have access to the downloadable manuals
Problem here is, if a user purchases 1 downloadable item and they are added to the ‘Downloads’ role, they will also be given access to all of the other downloadable manuals – as they are in the same role
So I guess the workable solution would be to create a new role for every car model to allow people in each car model role access to the downloads – which would also mean manually adding the role of every group purchased to that user’s accounts.
Anyone have any experience or alternatives to this to make it more automated and secure?
Basically no body has access to the downloads unless you have purchased the products.
Upon purchasing some shopping carts send you an email with a unique link to the downloadable so they can access it that way. In your situation you also want them to be able to see the documents on the site at anytime after purchasing them, which makes sense.
Catalook has a 'Your Orders' module, does that show you the document or electronic item you purchased? That might be an option.
But worst case, I guess you can implement your 1 role per product. Sounds like a lot of work though! Or, do some custom :]coding.
Based on your situation the cart I use the most DNNspot (mine) - it would be similar to Catalook. Where you would need to create a role per product. Or use the orders module to show your previous orders which would link to your document you bought.
How good is your SQL? You could use the core DNN 'reports module' If you analyze the database and orders table - with a little bit of SQL you could setup a custom Report and maybe solve this.
This is very interesting an challenging. probably, this is not supported by catalook store module by default. If you are looking to implement a new simple module, there are some simple solutions to this.
Using personalization: you can use dnn's personalization provider to store user products. initially empty, and as user purchases the products, you can add comma separated list of productid to maintain it smartly. check that values back to validate downloads
Using custom user profile property and use it in same way as [1] above
Email option suggested by #Ryan is good option when you want to allow users to download manually only via email links. But again, you will still need to validate if a user is allowed to download that product or not that you can achieve via the above suggestions.
Let me know if you need more help with this, I have good experience to deal with catalook specific small modules for such extensions.
Happy coding