I'm working on a google analytics dashboard for a CMS I've created. I'm trying to decide exactly what information to display to the user. So what information would you want to see at a glance (when you first log in) and what information would you want access to, but don't need to see every time you log in?
Do you have a customer? You might want to ask them.
The time spent on page is the most valuable. You can see what pages result in reading and which pages are ignored.
The referrers and keywords is the next most valuable, because that tells you if your promotions are working or not, if you are getting the right audience.
Google analytics has some integration with adwords' analytics and that is on my periodid checklist as well.
Everything else depends on if you have a specific question in mind, like is it safe to start ignoring MSIE6 users, are there enough users of Opera visiting to care how things render for Opera, do I need to pay attention to international readers and add internationalization features to my website, etc.
A:
Visits count (today, yesterday, this week, this month);
Page views, references, adwords effect;
B:
Bounce rate, effective keywords, browsers usage (in %)... stuff like that.
Sometimes, it's all about the $$.
The Adsense revenue for different pages and for different keywords.
Related
It might be a very stupid rocky question but I’ve never worked with Shopify before.
We have implemented Google Analytics via default functionality available with Shopify Plus. On top of it, I have added quite simple JS to track Consumer Funnel Steps and activated enhanced ecommerce feature.
One month later I have discovered the discrepancy in both number of transactions reported and the revenue that is nearly 50% which clearly indicates that something went wrong. My investigation has shown no patterns from the point of payment method/checkout process/device category. Our success manager told us that the process looks ok from their end and the issue is on our end.
Please help me to understand where else shall I look to identify the bug. Thanks!!
This is a common issue for Google Analytics and it happens on all ecommerce platforms and the main reason behind it is ad blockers.
About 20% of users use ad blocking extensions which prevents Google Analytics from firing and capturing any data regarding that visit (this also includes ecommerce data), thus, discrepancies are created between the numbers reported in Shopify backend and Google Analytics.
There are more reasons behind why the discrepancies might happen (some of them are of legit concerns like faulty tracking) but ad blocking extensions are probably responsible for most of the discrepancies. If interested, you can see the full list of transaction discrepancy causes here.
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/
I'm not a really advanced Analytics user, so I've been trying to Google this, but haven't come up with a great answer. My analytics says 95% of my site visits to my blog today have come from site38.social-buttons.com and yesterday it was another subdomain of the same site. I visited social-buttons.com, but am unfamiliar with it, and have never deliberately put that code into my Wordpress site. I do have some plug-ins installed, which are "Subscribe / Connect / Follow Widget", which displays my social media links, and also "Really simple Facebook Twitter share buttons", which puts the like links on my posts.
My questions are, how are people finding my site through social-buttons.com? And are these quality hits?
Thanks, I appreciate any info!
This kind of visits are called Ghost Referrer Spam since they never reach your site. They use a GA weakness to make a fake visit and get a record in your data.
They do it to get traffic, people get curious to see who is visiting them and click on the link.
This specific Referrer Spam is nasty because it make multiple visits at the same time, is related to the number of the subdomain so if it says site38... it hits with 38 visits, I've also have many of these, here is a screenshot I took:
In my case is a different simple-share-buttons.com but is the same thing.
The easiest way to stop it is by making a filter for each spammer in your GA. Check this article to find more detailed information http://www.ohow.co/block-social-buttons-simple-share-buttons-referral/
As an alternative, you can make a more general filter to take care once and for all of all the Spammers by making a list of Valid Hostnames, this is more advanced and you have to be more careful. You can find more information about this solution here https://stackoverflow.com/a/28354319/3197362
It's actually referral spam. Take a look at this https://www.mooresoftwareservices.com/Web-Commerce/social-buttons-com-referrer-spam
So unfortunately they are not good quality hits.
I have been requested to get involved with a family member's site.
To date, they have been paying an SEO outfit, which I believe has been feeding them lies and milking them for money.
I can see that all pages in the site have Google Analytics. However, the SEO outfit refuses to let us see the Analytics page, and has always just forwarded them some (presumably doctored) slideshows.
The only tracking service that lists their site is Compete, which shows a number of visitors far from what they are paying for.
I would like to add their site to my own Analytics account. I have ftp access to their server, and permission from the site owners to modify any files I want.
However, I don't want to do anything that might destroy the entire existing history of analytics data, or even that would interfere with the current SEO outfit [until I have something concrete in-hand].
Does anyone know:
Can I add Analytics to my own account when it was originally setup by someone else?
Will there be any negative results of attempting this?
Any other ideas?
Thanks
Edit: Can anyone suggest a better title - I can tell mine is not good?
I've put two Google Analytics tracking codes from different accounts on the same site without issues. It may cause the site to be a tiny bit slower (as it communicates twice with Google) but it'll do nothing that would delete old data or impede collection of new data.
In short, what you're doing sounds like a good first step.
You will not, however, be able to access past data by doing this. You will be able to compare their numbers with the numbers you're getting, though, which should be valuable.
I don't know if you can add the same domain to two different Google Analytics accounts (easy enough to try, though), but you can always add another service's Javascript snippet, e.g. Woopra. Google and Woopra produced very similiar results in my experiments.
You may want to leave their Google Analytics tracking in place while adding your own Google Analytics tracking. In that case, your numbers should be identical to whatever is being tracked by this third party.
You'll need to set up your own account and then add in the creation of your pagetracker object and your own track page view. You don't need to recreate the entire page code. You can do it with two more lines. It would look something like:
var pageTracker =
_gat.getTracker("UA-XXXXXXXX-1"); //EXISTING pageTracker._trackPageView();
var secondTracker =
_gat.getTracker("UA-XXXXXXXX-1"); //YOUR TRACKING ACCOUNT secondTracker._trackPageView();
I am setting up a website for students of a school, which must include a schedule page which will show a calendar with events populated by feeds from various teachers' calendars. After trying out a variety of scripts and tools made for showing calendars, I finally hit upon a very shoddy, hacked-together way of doing it, and I want to know if theres any specific things wrong with my implementation.
My requirements from this calendar are posted in a previous question
This is how my implementation is gonna work:
The teachers make their schedules in their own calendar programs and make those feeds available in the iCal format. A common Google account for the school subcribes to all these calendars, and so gets read only access to ALL the teacher's schedules in school.
Google Calendar has a feature that lets you select some of your calendars, and then get the html code for an iframe to embed on your website, so that visitors to the site can see what events are coming up. When I experimented around with the options in the Google 'Configurator', I found that by simply including certain codes in the url called for the iframe contents, you could change which calendars were visible. These codes, or calendar ids, are clearly displayed in the settings for each calendar. Thus, my final solution is thus:
For every student, there is a record stating which courses he has taken, and hence which calendars he should be shown. With some SQL magic, I can retrieve the calendar ids from a pre-prepared database of all the calendar ids, and then generate the correct url for the iframe using php, and display it.
I hope that wasn't too convoluted to understand. Now can anyone tell me if there are any inherent security flaws or bad programming practices etc in this. Something about the whole idea of dynamically generating urls, using iframes, using a common google account etc just screams 'Mistake!'. Can someone tell me if this is an ok way to go about it, or is there some problem with it?
Actually, I think your solution has the potential to be very secure. Using a single google account to collect the read-only calendars into one place is just an organizational shortcut. As long as the calendars themselves are read-only, your single account contains nothing that isn't already public.
Generating URLs is perfectly reasonable, as long as you are combining strings that you've sanitized beforehand. Since your database can only get calendar IDs from your aggregation google account, you know that potentially malicious users can't cause arbitrary characters to end up in your synthesized URLs.
The biggest problem you'll probably run into is that the google embedded calendar iframe only allows up to ten calendar feeds.
The most likely security vulnerability you'll face is the security of all of the teachers' google calendars.
By default, google calendars accept "invitations" and post them as events. You might find that anyone can "invite" a teacher's calendar to prank events and those prank events will then show up on student calendars.