Our customers log in from several different computers over the course of a day, and so our unique visitor count in google analytics is really inflated. I'd like to give GA our user ids, for example, so that it could be much smarter about this stat. Is there any way to influence what GA considers a unique visitor?
Besides trickery with cookies (which I wouldn't recommend), there's no "built-in" way to better inform Google Analytics to take into account multiple computers for its Unique Visitors calculations.
However, you could set the user ID in a Custom Variable, and use that to track the number of "real" unique visitors, and the distribution within the users.
_gaq.push(["_setCustomVar", 1, "User", user_id_string ,1]);
Be sure to delete this custom variable once the user signs out, both for privacy and accuracy reasons.
GA uses two cookies __utmb and __utmc. You can try to capture and recreate those if your users authenticate or you have a way of tracking them.
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I'm new when using google analytics for App and it make me quite confused, I have several question that I want to ask:
Is Google Analytics still track unique users? some of source that I read say no but and some say yes I'm quite confused about this
Let say if I want to search a Unique users can I use User Type dimension with users metric to get the right value for new users (Not with session but users)
for question number 2, let say it have New Users and Returning Users as user Type dimension and users have a metric and from google analytics itself give an explanation such as this:
Users who have initiated at least one session during the date range. Learn more about how Analytics calculates the number of users.
Can someone help me to understand this? I'm already using it for 2 weeks and still confused with this
By default, Google Analytics track unique users by setting an unique id (clientId) in device memory (a cookie in web tracking). This method isn't accurate because cleaning a cookie or device cache would reset clientId, causing the tool to identify a new user in the next session. To avoid it you can collect User Id, a built-in dimension specific to user tracking.
I want to know the total amount of time any one of our users has spent on the site, across sessions. Is there a way to find this stat in Google Analytics?
If you want to track an individual customer through different sessions, it is not natively possible under Google Analytics, and there are quite a few traps you need to avoid to make sure to be complying with the conditions of use of the service. You can find more information here
If you mean tracking the total duration of sessions, Session Duration and Time on Page should give you what you want.
They basically measure the same thing, but can give you slightly different results depending on your implementation.
I am searching for a way to track user behavior on my website. I want to know if it is possible to get a table with data looking something like this:
+------+---------------+-----------------+------+---------+
| time | ip or user_id | user_session_id | link | actions |
+------+---------------+-----------------+------+---------+
(Link - where user came from)
I want to track different user actions by sessions. Is this possible using Google Analytics or I should search other tools? My site is currently set up to track events but on my Analytics account I get only the number of events that occurred. I want to track what a specific user does on my site.
tl;dr: if you must do this use Mixpanel or similar software.
Time based dimensions are already available (date, hour, minutes and datetime). "link" would be referrer. Actions in Google Analytics are basically pageviews, events and transactions, so you have that, too.
IP and user id are a big no-gos. Storing anything that that identifies a person is a violation of Googles Terms of Service and depending on your location might be a violation of national laws.And if by user_id you mean the Google Analytics feature of the same name, Google says you may set it for logged in users and have to unset it for user that log out, so by extension that means storing it in Ga would probably be a violation of their TOS.
The GA session id is not exposed via the interface. You may read it from the cookie and store it in a custom dimension (I'm not sure if this is allowed within the TOS, on the other hand GA premium customers get this via a BigQuery export in any case, so it should be allowed).
If you simply want to tell different users apart you might simply generate a string in the UUID format and store that in a custom dimension. If you want to actually identify users (by name, adress etc), well, you are not allowed to and Google will terminate your account if they find out.
Not to mention that it completely eludes why so many people want to track individual users. You must not use GA information to target individuals, and simply looking at individual user paths will not help you (I wrote an article about that, although I do not expect that this will convince you).
Google Analytics is for technical and legal reasons not a good tool for tracking individual users, if you need to do this use a software that is made for this purpose. Mixpanel is often mentioned in that context but I'm sure there are many other solutions.
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.
How can i track a single users path through the webpage with Google Analytics?
I am not interested in who that user is, only what path the user went.
You can assign a unique value to a Visitor-level Custom Variable when a user visits the site. Then you can filter/segment based on the value that you want to examine to narrow down paths by individual. It's not entirely clear whether or not this violates Google's terms, though. You're not technically tracking an individual, you're just relating the actions of various anonymous users.