I'm trying to set up some Google Analytics Content Experiments as mentioned here:
Google Analytics Content Experiments A/B testing server-side code without page refresh
I haven't gotten it working quite yet, and I keep needing to tweak my code and try out different things. Then I deploy to a testing server (to avoid the localhost problem with GA) and then use an online proxy website to visit the testing server (since my office IP is filtered out of my GA account). But then I need to wait roughly 3 hours before I see whether GACE graphs any visits.
Is it true that Google Analytics Content Experiments graphs are updated on something like a 3 hour delay?
Is there a way to see results sooner (to make my iterative tweaking/testing less time-consuming)?
The real-time feature (in beta) is very useful when it comes to testing this sort of thing.
Unfortunately it only supports page view. Events are not supported.
(you have to be admin on the account to see it)
http://analytics.blogspot.fr/2011/09/whats-happening-on-your-site-right-now.html
Related
I have a little domain I have been toying with for a year. I put it up on GitHub Pages and I believe I configured Google Analytics. There was no real content there, surely no visitors, and the site went down for unknown reasons at an unknown time. We do use email on this domain, hosted by Google Apps; this has been up and used continuously.
Now, while resurrecting the site and trying to configure Google Analytics, I logged into Google Analytics and I see months of history. Usage is small but very diverse with hundreds of sessions logged from all over the world, over the past year.
I cannot fathom what produced these data (believing the site to be down for this period, and it never having content anyway), and I am concerned to start using this analytics token out of concern it will continue to report spurious data.
How can I determine the source of these data? How can I zero out the account and get it report true zero usage before I start using it again?
Ryan
There could be someone using your UA-CODE or maybe even you accidently still using that code on another page, luckily, creating a new code is a breeze so you should consider creating a new code for your next project
We have been using Google analytics for awhile now. It has been great for both live traffic and historical reporting.
Suddenly on Sept 5 our reporting shows zero traffic (using the standard reporting overview tab).
This seems really strange as you can see there is near constant traffic in the real-time tab.
Has anybody else experienced this problem when integrating Google analytics? We had a filter that only traffic from our main domain (app.domain.com) would show. Even after removing this we get nothing in the reports.
Check the filters on that profile. Go into Admin on the top right and check the Filters tab on the profile.
Filters are not applied to real time data.
So what you're seeing here is data being filtered out from the profile, but still showing up in the real time.
This could be a few different things
A temporary glitch by Google - this happened to me (which is how I got to this page). I could see traffic in the real time view but nothing in reports. To fix: be patient - this resolved itself after about 12 hours.
profile issue - you may have a profile set up that has filters which are blocking more traffic than you were expecting. To fix: Try setting up a separate profile (if you don't have one already) that has no filters applied. Remember- profile filters work by stripping or manipulating traffic before they reach your reports. The answer above is incorrect- the real time view does take filters in to account. You can easily test this making a filter change and you'll see it take affect in the real time view
tag has dropped off your pages To fix: if you're using GTM you should be able to check this. Or if not check HTML page source on one of your pages you know is getting traffic
finally - you may not getting any traffic :)
How (im)precise is Google Analytics actually? I've been using Google Analytics for years now on a pretty well visited web site (800k+ visits per month).
Now I decided to log every page request in a database table, and I'm tracking the user-agent of the request. I have also eliminated bot requests (googlebot, bingbot and many more...)
What I found out is that I have almost more than double requests to a page than Google Analytics pageviews is willing to admit.
E.g. GA shows 137 pageviews to a specific URL, but I tracked even 255!
Google Analytics is VERY precise. It's not very accurate though. And that's the difference you're seeing since you're not looking into trends but instead at absolute numbers.
Start by reading this post by Avinash:
Reflections: Accuracy, Precision & Predictive Analytics
Bots are everywhere these days and a lot of times disguised as real user agents. You should come up with a testing to make sure client have both javascript and cookies enabled. In that case he'll be tracked by Google Analytics.
Besides that that some users might have adBlocks extensions that block Google Analytics. This is fairly uncommon but depending on the public can be more common. Tech savvy users have a higher chance to use a plugin that blocks GA, thus IT blogs might be hit by this harder than an average site.
The best way to test the real accuracy of Google Analytics ignoring user agents without javascript, cookies and that block GA tracking is to track the users on your site using GA as well. You can do that in Google Analytics using the LocalRemoteServerMode.
Add the following line at the end of your GATC (GA Tracking Code):
_gaq.push(['_setLocalGifPath', 'http://mysite.com/__utm.gif']);
_gaq.push(['_setLocalRemoteServerMode']);
Make sure to replace http://mysite.com/__utm.gif with a path on the same domain as your website and that respond a gif. Use a lightweight gif, like the one GA uses.
Then you can get the logs of access to this gif and see in their parameters the urls visited. You'll need to do some extra processing but you'll be using the same framework GA uses to collect data and thus will measure more efficiently GA precision.
More Info:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/methods/gaJSApiUrchin#_gat.GA_Tracker_._setLocalGifPath
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/
I have a web app that I deployed in AppHarbor with Google Analytics. Development is still ongoing and I test it very often live to checkout for example stuffs I did with the CSS, etc.
Everything is working fine but I'd like to know how many times I am accessing the website apart from the rest of the visitors who visits it. When checking the reports in Google Analytics it only shows me the ISPs of the visitors. I'll need something more drilled down like an IP address, but this seems to go against Google Analytic's policy and I do not know if this is even possible still.
Like right now I have 72 visits. But I have been testing so a lot of those could just be me. Would be good to know the actual visitor count.
I know this is probably a little late but you can set a filter to ingore your own traffic from reports. Here is how you do it.
In addition for adding a deprecated variable and using filters, you can build the code so that it only prints the tracking code if e.g. an identifier cookie is not found. Other common option is a URL parameter.
You can then set this cookie for your browser and be excluded from traffic.