I'm using "Reporting google Analitics API" and I can’t find information about what the last “end date” with data in Analytics is.
For example, let's suppose you want to retrive the last month’s data.
When do you have to perform the query?
The first day of the current month?
...or the second one?
...or maybe the third one?
And only another question: are the returned data for days in pacific time?
Google Analytics API is supposed to have access to the same data you have in the interface.
Google says that data can take up to 24h to process. The time it takes to really update the data depends on the type and size of the account. Small accounts are updated multiple times a day and can have data available in just a few hours. Once you reach 1M hits a month you are moved to a different mode where the data on your account is updated only once a day. Google Analytics Premium customers have updates more often even for large ammounts of traffic.
There's no way to tell through the API what is exactly the time of the last hit processed. You can query the data for today by the hour and see for yourself though.
Usually you don't care and just want to make sure that the data you're querying has been fully processed for that day.
So if you query data for yesterday there's a chance it has not being completely updated, for example if it's midnight the data for yesterday is just a couple minutes ago and probably haven't been completely processed yet. The safest bet in this case is to query data for 2 days ago.
So if today is 2012-06-15 and you want to get 1 month of data a safe approach is to query data with start-date=2012-05-13 and end-date=2012-06-13. This will most of the time give you data for days that have been fully processed, but it's not 100% safe as well. Google Analytics have had outages in the past where data took longer than that to process, these are not usual though. When you get the data out it's really hard to tell just for the API if the data for those days have been fully processed or not, using the 2 days ago isea you just make it more likely that it is.
The days are aggregate following your timezone settings configured on the Google Analytics profile.
Related
I work for a non-profit that needs to see how our fundraising efforts are going in 'real-time'.
We look at results in blocks of about a half hour - so we need to report on how we finished the last 24 hours or so and also where we're at in the current half-hour. We're accomplishing this through google analytics, as we have multiple fundraising streams all pointing to a common GA account.
I have tried using datastudio to report against the GA API, but that connector does not seem to refresh at a reliable rate - someitmes it'll pull fresh data within a minute, sometimes it can take twenty minutes to report on recent transactions. I believe the 'real-time' API could be used to get fresher GA data, but as far as I can tell, that will only report 'live' data, and not prior/historical data (say from four hours ago). Does anyone know what API I could use if any to pull all data historical through current datetime?
I apologize if this request is vague, but I'm just looking for a conceptual approach at this point to get the freshest data - preferably in one fell swoop (API call). There is more complexity post-data intake (I have to then compare it to goals we've set for each half-hour, amongst other nuances to the transacitons themselves), so i wanted to start with this fundamental piece/question.
Thanks!
Given the context provided, I believe that the API solution would not be feasible. Among other reasons:
The real time API only offers a limited amount of dimensions and metrics. For example, e-commerce data is not available.
https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/dimensions-metrics-explorer/
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/reporting/realtime/dimsmets
The Standard intraday processing SLA for the Core Reporting API is < 24 hours for standard properties. The processing occurs on a best effort basis. Meaning that an hourly availability can occur from time to time but can not be guaranteed.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7084038?hl=en
As an alternative approach to the API solution, you could consider the use of an App + Web property which would allow you to stream event data in real time to BigQuery. However, this solution has some cost implications and would introduce you to a new tracking paradigm.
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/app-web/tag-guide
https://support.google.com/firebase/answer/6318765?hl=en
https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/getting-started-with-google-analytics-app-web/
We are having some issues pulling yesterday's Google Analytics data from BigQuery. Can anyone explain at what point a previous day's GA data is finalized?
There is some explanation here of the intraday tables, but it's not very clear:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3437719?hl=en
To get previous day data do you need to need to use the intraday tables at all? Do you have access to the fully processed dataset at 8am local time? Or is it 8 hours after the current day UTC+14:00 (etc)?
I had a similar question and asked their support, this is the reply:
"According to this Google Analytics documentation , it states that '1 file will be exported each day that contains the previous day’s data, and 3 files will be exported each day that contain the current day's data'. In such, the minimum time that the data from Google Analytics to be exported to BigQuery was 8 hours. Although Google Analytics can be linked to BigQuery, the availability of data depends on how it was served by Google Analytics 360."
But based on experience, it's really a minimum time. Sometimes there are delays of 4-5 hours.
My team has been pressing Google's support for providing SLA's for BigQuery dump, so they updated the documentation:
This feature is not governed by a service-level agreement (SLA).
In practice we are experiencing regular delays anywhere between 2 to 12 hours.
I build application which pull sales data from Amazon and push it to Google Analytics.
I'm "hitting" transaction to Analytics and it's all works fine, the problem is that in Amazon the sales data updated after 48 hours (maximum) so I need to pull the report two days later.
Does anyone know if there's a way to send the date of the transaction? Can't find it in the Measurement Protocol API.
Thank you all, Peace and love :)
Not really. You have the queue time parameter (offset between current time and time the data was tracked), but as it says in the documentation:
Values greater than four hours may lead to hits not being processed.
"May" indicates that this is not a completely fixed limit but I'm pretty sure that 48 hours are not covered (Philipp Walton, a Google engineer who frequents SO once mentioned that the queue time limit is somehow related to timezones and rollover between days, so I'd guess that two days are way to long).
Apart from that there is as of yet no way to set a date for a hit.
You can try posting a Custom Dimension for each event you send, where the dimension is formatted to the date-time:-
e.g.
&t=event&cd1=20170423081321&cm1=24 etc
Only problem is: when you generate a GA custom report, the values are accumulated per day. If anyone knows how to get round that, would love to hear it!
In our project we stored all users event data in our database for over one year , but it's not indexed.
now we are going to use google analytics to store our analytics and analyze the report using google analytics dashboard.
but before start using google analytics , i would like to emigrate all old statics (about 2 million events) to google analytics.
for this matter i should use Measurement Protocol and it's limit allow me to transfer 2 million hits with no problem.
but i didn't succeed to know how to set the time of the event. Measurement Protocol has Queue Time but google says :
Values greater than four hours may lead to hits not being processed.
how it's possible to transfer 2 million events to google analytics with there event time ?
Thanks
You are correct you can use the measurement protocol to send events data directly to google analytics. I don't see any problem in sending 2 million events. However its not possible to set the event time longer then four hours ago.
Queue time is used to set the time that the event occurred as you can see it cant be more then four hours ago and I have found that if you do set it to four hours ago its a bit fuzzy if the data is correct or not. This feature is probably most use in mobile devices where they may go off line for a short time you can store the data then send it all once the device is online again.
So the dates will be the date that you sent the event to Google Analytics you cant back date the data to more then four hours ago. So I am not sure how much use the data will be to you when it is all inserted.
There is no way to do this, but you can make it easier on yourself.
Unfortunately, there is no way to add, remove, or otherwise edit Google Analytics hit data retrospectively, except to delete all of it. You also cannot copy, or move it between accounts, or download it all.
You are not the first to have to come to terms with this.
In this situation, we recommend to our clients that they run their new and old systems in parallel for a testing period (usually 6 months or a year), before switching off one of them.
Yes, it's difficult to let go of old data, but sometimes it has to be done.
I've been using a SSIS Integration component to download data from Google Analytics in order to keep an historical view of some websites and track the evolution of them. Basically the metrics we track are Visits (now Sessions) and Visitros (now Users), and the dimensions are Year and Month. However, today I noticed that the data I downloaded for july had a variation on the Users metric. I heard that google analytics uses an estimation method to "calculate" some (if not all) of their metrics, could it be that after that they "adjust" the data with more acurate information? If so, is this mentioned in the documentation? (a link would be highly appreciated) Since the users are complaining that we are not delivering the real GA Data. I tried looked on the Google analytics documentation page with no luck.
Thanks for your time.
PS: Sorry for my english, it isn´t my native language
If you are using the standard version of Google Analytics (you'll know if you are paying $150k for premium), data is sampled depending on volume. Have a read of this article can-you-trust-your-google-analytics-data
I have seen very slightly differing results being returned if you repeatedly call the api with the same historical parameters repeatedly. In my case the figures only differed by 1-2 over a daily set of several thousand, but nevertheless it differed.
If you want to guarantee your results, consider upgrading to premium
Sampling could be an issue if what you are requesting is over 50,000 rows for the time period you are requesting. To avoid it you can download more often, such as daily.
But I think your issue is that there is a processing time for Google Analytics - if you are downloading at 3 am on the 1st it is probable that the processing for the previous day has not finished.
Google Analytics Premium SLA is for 4 hour data freshness, so even that would have trouble. Pragmatically you should allow 24 hours before you download data for the previous day, 48 hours for e-commerce data.
Thirdly make sure it is not Unique Visitors you are requesting, as this is dependent on the time period you are requesting.