our website was using absolute url before(such as "www.example.com/?action=splash"), and now we switched to relative urls(such as "/?action=splash")
We know that we were not doing the correct thing before. We noticed that by using absolute urls, we are doing self referrals when user click from one page on our site to another page on our site.
However, since we changed to relative urls, our visits dropped sharply based on Google Analytics, therefore, we wonder if self referring were counted as new visits.
Thank you so much for your help.
Google Analytics is blind to whether the links on your page are relative or absolute.
The likeliest cause of self-referral, though, is if you're changing subdomains between pageviews without having set _setDomainName to a compatible value.
When you do have self-referral (which is bad), it does indeed artificially inflate your visit count. So, fixing a self-referral problem will lead to a fall in visitor count. (But, it will be more accurate.)
Example: if I arrive via Google, I'm now a visit attributed to google. Then, if I go from www.example.com to secure.example.com without the GA tags being configured properly with _gaq.push(["_setDomainName","example.com"]);, then I'm now treated as a visitor with his second visit, this time referred from www.example.com. ie, self-referrals cause duplication of visit counts.
If you're seeing less self-referral, its not because of the absolute/referral difference, unless the absolute URLs were being inconsistent with, say, whether they included www.
Based on the way Google Analytics works, the referrer should really not affect anything like that. It is more probable that you broke something else when you changed your URLs.
Related
I manage the analytics of a website that uses a headless web, and have noticed an unusual amount of page_view events one some of the pages.
Perhaps it could have something to do with the website being headless, meaning that the URL doesn't change/refresh when clicking, even though the content on the site is changed as if it was a url redirect.
does this make sense? Anyone got any good suggestions on why my events might be off?
My first thought was that the event tracking configuration wasn't set up correctly, resulting in multiple pageviews on the wrong pages (i.e. first page visit → 2nd page → 3rd page = three pageview fires on first page), but upon investigation this doesn't seem to be the problem.
Checked for bot traffic and it doesn't seem to be that, as we're also tracking through UA and Matomo and those numbers look way more likely.
First, what you've described is not necessarily a headless website, it's just a misconfigured Single Page Application that doesn't care about updating the url. A Huge SEO issue, but not a blocker for Analytics. And when an SPA affects analytics, it's most commonly less events, not more.
If the bot traffic inflates one analytics system as a side-effect of whatever it does, it will inflate similarly pretty much any other analytics system, so if numbers in UA and Matomo look alike, it doesn't rule out bots. Especially if your GTM sends events to both systems on the same triggers.
Now, there are ways to debug it besides just going to the website and looking at a few pages tracking.
In cases like this, you want to use data to debug your tracking.
You build a report (custom report, or just use pregenerated UA reports) in which you compare the anomalous traffic period to the previous period so that you would have your base. Now, whatever dimension you're using, you're looking at the value or a few values of this dimension that contain most of the anomalous traffic. This is to see if any dimension contains the outlier that would explain the nature of the anomaly.
Dimensions that I would look at right away are: hostname, country, hour of the day, source, page, landing page, exit page, referrer. I would also take a quick look at all the conversion numbers, bounce rate and avg time on site.
If all of these look organic, then I would presume natural growth of good traffic.
Our site is broken down into 4 main subfolders lets say www.site.com/a/, www.site.com/b/, www.site.com/c/ and www.site.com/d/.
Each of those subfolders has a different Google Analytics tracking account because we treat those subfolders as different divisions.
We want to be able to track clicks from www.site.com/a/mypage.html to www.site.com/b/yourpage.html.
Because they have different tracking codes the clicks between divisions don't carry over between GA accounts. So when the page www.site.com/b/yourpage.html has stats the referrer is {not set} and the previous page path is set to {entrance}, even though they should be www.site.com/a/mypage.html.
It was suggested, during the creation of our GA accounts to put our domain site.com in the Referral Exclusion List to avoid new sessions being created but I'm wondering if this is what is causing the clicks to not detect the previous page or referrer page, because we are excluding it.
Can anyone help me figure out how I am going to track these stats?
Is using cross domain tracking an option, even though we're not changing domains?
Any help on this will be a big help. TIA
The exclusion from the referral is certainly what makes the direct traffic result, however it is correct that it is set like this. The main problem is that track the same site by dividing the sections into 4 different Analytics Properties is not a good practice.
Cross-domain tracking will not work because they are different Properties (unless you have GA360).
However you can get what you need by using the UTMs parameters on the links, for example for a link from site A to site B you will have to write the URL of the link like this:
www.site.com/b/yourpage.html?utm_source=fromA&utm_medium=referral
In reports you will see these values in referral channel with the defined source instead of direct traffic.
I've identified a discrepancy between Google Ads clicks and Analytics sessions in Paid Search (about twice more clicks than sessions). So I contacted Google Ads support and after a long conversation, they send me an email saying that my website structure uses redirections and it's making it lose parameters, and that I had to contact a developer to solve that problem because they don't give assistance on it. What exactly they told me to tell the developer was that:
Loss of parameters by redirection
The website trendotrends.com is not holding navigation parameters
because of the structure in which it was developed.
To verify this redirection, simply replicate the following steps: I
accessed the link
https://trendotrends.com/products/running-shoes?variant=15320930779194
After full site loading, I added the & gclid = Tester123 parameter to
the URL (in the browser, so the final URL was
https://trendotrends.com/products/running-shoes?variant=15320930779194&gclid=Tester123)
and hit Enter To understand if there is a redirect, the normal
behavior would be for the URL to remain the same (with & gclid =
Tester123 at the end), but in this case, the parameter disappears (and
hence the assignment) This link was just an example, which can be
verified in several other products of the site.
They also said I can't use manual tagging (UTMs) instead of automatic tagging in Google Ads because those redirections are also going to spoil the UTMs.
I don't use any redirections in my website and I have also tested with UTMs and there's also a discrepancy in google analytics data for that.
But before I contact a developer and invest on this fix, I would like to know if anyone had experienced that? If Googles answer fits this problem? And even if is there a way to fix it without being an expert.
Thanks in advance.
The issue here isn't really that there's a redirect (301), but a state change. There is javascript on the page that essentially rewrites the URL before the GA code can parse it.
Are you able to change to a different theme and test if this happens with that theme?
I'm currently running an experiment without redirect, using Google Analytics, but I'm running in some issues.
The case
I work for a company that has two websites, with two separate brands, selling the same product. Today, we are plaining a merge of the brands, one of the reasons being the low costs of maintanance.
To see how this would affect sales, we are doing an a/b test. The test consists of changing the logo of the sites, and displaying an information about the merge of brands in the variant. The original is the website without changes.
We have some requirements to do it:
We use a CMS that has no support to the Google Analytics Experiment tag (we get some errors when we install it to the , and are unable to run it)
We need to run it through all pages of our websites. We have also a subdomain in each site, that the user is redirected to place an order.
We doesn't have time to wait for the experiment to end for itself. So, we came up with the idea to track the rejection and sales using a duplicate pageview with "/variant" in the url and in the title.
To do that, I used the Content Experiments without redirects, with the Google Tag Manager.
Configuration of the Experiment
In Google Tag Manager, I load the Content Experiment Javascript API and define the choosenVariation variable in all pages of both websites and subdirectories.
I track the "gtm.load" event, to see when the page finished loading all elements and change the DOM in three ways: changing the logo, adding the content about the merge and add an item to the main menu. All of this, through Javascript.
Along with the changes of the DOM, I add a datalayer called VirtualPageView, and pass the corresponding url with "/variant" and the title with "Variant".
When the datalayer fires, I send a new Pageview with the variant information.
The problem
The experiment is running right, but when a user gets the B variant of the experiment and procceed to a subdomain of our websites to place an order, it seems that it's somehow running another test, and happens to the user get the A variation.
We are trying to persist the original session and the client Id through the domain and subdomain, in order to the user that saw the different logo, continue in his way to order.
I saw this page about Running Experiments across Subdomains, but its about the Classic Analytics and the classic experiment, and we are using the Universal Analytics with the Content Experiment without redirects.
I don't know if my explanation was clear enough, so if someone have doubts, please ask me. I don't have a profound knowledge of Google Analytics or the Content Experiments either. So, if you have a better way to do this, please, tell me.
I came up with a solution to our problem. We agreed to use the experiment only in the pages of the main domain, so I can change the content otherwise in the pages of the subdomain:
When a user visits our main domain, through Google Tag Manager, I created a cookie that says what the result of the variation chosen for the user (0 for the original and 1 for the variation).
When this user goes to our subdomain to place an order, still via GTM I check the cookie to see its value. If its equal to 1 (a variation), I change the logo and the menu, according to our previous configuration, and I send a virtual pageview to help us check the data.
Until now, this is working properly.
So I've been working on a website for a while. GA account has been up for a couple months but I waited for the website to be finished before putting up the actual JS tag.
In the meantime, the website is being HTTP password restricted (basic authentication) so it isn't even accessible unless you know the user/pwd combination.
To my surprise, I realized today that GA has logged several hundred views to the root of my website. Paths are mostly things like:
/
/?from=http://social-widget.xyz/
/?from=http://www.traffic2cash.xyz/
Bounce% and exit% both at 100% for all of them.
I realize this looks like referral spam, and there are ways to prevent it. Came across this upon googling:
http://botcrawl.com/block-social-widget-xyz-referral-spam-in-google-analytics/
My question is: how can GA log anything anyway when no tag is up and the website isn't even accessible?
Thank you very much in advance
Because it's spam. They hit Google Analytics directly with random GA codes and don't even go through your website.
GA can't tell if these are real hits (from website visits) or fake hits (from spam bots who hit GA directly calling the same ode as they would if on the website). Though arguably they should do more about this.
Massively annoying - particularly when first starting out as this can be a heavy proportion of your "traffic".
It's easy to set up a filter rule is to catch a lot of this by filtering on hostname. As they are randomly hitting GA and don't even know what website they are hitting GA for, they don't usually set this correctly. Real traffic should only come from yourwebsitedomain.com so add a filter for that.
STRONG piece of advice: abandon the default UA-########-1 tracking code of your new website -- simply do not use it!
Create a second and third property on the Admin screen, then use the tracking code for the third property. You will immediately see a lot less spam. No filters or segments necessary!
If you want the whole sad story about spam visits in GA, I have been maintaining the Definitive Guide article for over a year now:
http://help.analyticsedge.com/spam-filter/definitive-guide-to-removing-google-analytics-spam/