Is there a way to test the url you're entering in a step, to see if Google Analytics will recognize it?
What I'd like to do is provide some web page or some web service with a URL, and get a pass or fail. It passes if Google Analytics recognizes a page hit to the url.
Let me give some context.
We've been having issues with our goal funnel steps in Google Analytics. The instructions on adding steps say not to use the domain.
e.g.
DO NOT use : http://www.mysite.com/step1.html
INSTEAD use: /step1.html
Our custom CRM uses friendly urls and as a result GA is having a hard time picking up on them. So we've experimented with changing around url we've placed in the step, however we've got to wait a day to see if the new url we've provided is going to work! Hence why we're looking for something quicker.
OK- so what you're doing is futzing around with the friendly URLs to see what's being tracked (so you can distinguish one URL from another), but you don't want to have to wait?
There are a few Firefox plugins which report on on-page GA (WASP & Observepoint), but the Firebug Net panel is as good as anything.
The other option is to pass a 'virtual URL' to GA in the _trackPageview, rather than depend on the friendly URL - maybe something like this
_trackPageview("/goal1/step1")
although I'd attempt to have the virtual URL (it's really just the path) named more like the actual steps in the process.
What I'd like to do is provide some web page or some web service with a URL, and get a pass or fail. It passes if Google Analytics recognizes a page hit to the url.
This would be a waste of time for someone to make, so you won't find it; it's a waste of time to make it because all that anyone needs to do to see if the page is being tracked by google analytics or not is to look at their 'content -> top content' report to see if the page is listed or not.
One can also go to the page with Firefox, and using the Firebug addon on can see if a call for the _utf.gif image is made, or not, and confirm that the ga account id's are correct, which would mean that GA is receiving the data, but this does not tell you if the data is making it past your ga profile filters. The only way to determine that the page is tracked and that the tracked page view is available in your profile is to check your content reports.
Related
I have hunted around a bit and only found how to setup the site search parameter in a site's admin section. This is not what I want. Also looked through some Google Search Console videos - no go.
Given a URL, https://somesite.com/redirect/?redirect=https://gofundme.com/somecampaign/.
As some background, what I have setup here is a simple page that says "Loading..." and is used for external links I want to track analytics on, from platforms that I may not have access to the link's analytics. For example: https://gofundme.com/somecampaign.
Rather than having a redirect setup on the page itself, I injected custom JavaScript through Google Tag Manager that records analytics data in Google Universal Analytics (anyone want to recommend how to do this in G4A?) then performs the redirect.
My question is, in Google Analytics, how do I setup a custom report where the query string parameter = redirect and/or the specific page URL?
Thanks.
I started to notice that my Google Ads clicks wasnt 100% counting by google analytics (For exemple, during a certain period I had 300 clicks and only 100 sessions were counted as Paid Search on analytics). So I contacted Google Ads Support, they investigated and came to me with this:
Actually, your site is losing the attribution of Google Ads because of an automatic redirection of the structure in which it was developed.
When we have Google Ads linked with Google Analytics, they are talked through a parameter called GCLID. To verify this loss, follow the path I made (in several products, here is an example):
1- I accessed the link https://mywebsite.com/products/running-shoes?variant=15320930779194
2- After full site loading, I added the & gclid = Tester123 parameter to the URL (in the browser, so the final URL was https://mywebsite.com/products/running-shoes?variant=15320930779194&gclid=Tester123) and hit Enter
3- 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 some (and hence the assignment)
So, the campaign actually appeared (not set) in Analytics, and could be assigned to any of the other channels (Direct, Organic, ...) For this to be resolved, the site structure must stop causing this automatic redirection in the final URL of each product. With this, the results will be effectively assigned to Google Ads.
They also said that if even if I want to use manual tracking (UTMs) I would still have that problem, since the redirections would keep spoiling it.
As I use Shopify as my website platform, I checked with them and I have no redirections that are causing this problem, at least not created by me nor that their support know.
So I am lost over all this. I dont know where to start solving this problem. Google doesnt tell me what kind of redirections may cause this, I dont use any kind of redirections, and Shopify cant tell me if their code causes this problem (what I dont believe, because other shopify websites would also been suffering from this).
So can anyone give me any direction about this? What redirections may be causing this lost of data?
Thanks for your time!
One thing to note, Google Ads might have a different way of counting, there is the possibility of multiple clicks per session.
That said, you can try Google Tag Assistant, start your recording, click on one of your ads, follow that through and see the parameters being passed.
Unfortunately, it is hard to debug with limited information. The more details you can provide the better.
Check where your GA code is placed in the page code. If GA script is at the bottom of page or there are some heavy scripts above GA tracker, losses of bounced sessions can be large. I.e. user enters the page and immediately closes it. GA script doesn't have time to download.
Why user closes the page immediately?
Сlick by mistake
Slow site
And check that all your landing pages are OK and have 200 server response.
Recently I've been experiencing a large amount of (what I think is) ghost traffic.
I need help in creating a filter to exclude this traffic from my Google Analytics.
URL's are showing up that have other websites appended to them.
Almost all articles I've read mention including only relevant hostnames but this doesn't seem to apply to my situation.
Here you can see the URL's with other random website addresses.(overworlf.com/evite.com/shmoop.com and many others)
Here is a screenshot of the hostnames none of them are out of the ordinary. I suspect this ghost traffic is using my main domain looking at the huge amount of users.
Posted the same question at stackexchange, someone there was able to help me
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/118666/94264
"Almost all the analytics spammers insert data into your stats by pinging the GA tracker directly with fake data. They never visit your site and they usually just guess at the tracking id without knowing website host name associated with it. They won't send a host name, so it wouldn't appear in that report. See How to fight off Google Analytics referrer spammers?
That appears not be the case here. In this case these appear to be actual hits to your website. I tried one of those "top active pages" and it gives a 404 error. It looks like your 404 template has the GA tricking snippet installed on it. I don't think that is best practice. You could try taking the snippet off your 404 page. Then if you did get actual hits to such URLs, GA wouldn't count them as pages."
This can happen when there are search and replace or advanced filters. Are there filters on your view that alter the Request URI?
EDITED AFTER IT WAS CONFIRMED THAT THERE WERE NO FILTERS:
Typically, tracking 404 pages is best practice (referring to your other post).
I don't believe that removing the tracking from that page will help anyway. Like the other poster mentioned, these hits are sent from bots most of the time and they never actually land on your site. The hit is sent directly to your property with an http call. It bypasses the site completely, so whether there is a 404 page or not, the hit will show up in GA.
Adding an exclusion filter to exclude traffic with a page path (not hostname) ending in ".com"
We are implementing a native analytics system and want to apply the same tracking principles Google Analytics uses. We've figured everything out but one thing:
Every time I refresh a page with an url that has utm-parameters attached to it, Google Analytics somehow figures out that it's not actually a visit but the same page that gets refreshed and shows only one visit in its dashboard from that particular source.
Is anybody aware how GA specifically does that so I can replicate it in our system?
I know that I can use
performance.navigation.type
in my JS script, but it doesn't give me desired results.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Attribution in GA happens on the Google servers, so JavaScript will be of limited use. Basically since a reload means that the user has the same client id and no change in the channel (source, medium and campaign are the same as in the previous visit) the existing session will be continued (a change of campaign/source information would trigger a new Google Analytics session).
Google has a very nice chart that explains how campaign information and traffic source information is processed.
I'm trying to figure out "automatic referrals" (without me providing the link)
I see some sources in the referrals section (Acquisition -> All traffic -> referrals) like t.co and bunch of weird websites I don't have any connection to them
Or some websites I do know that link to me but with no UTM or something (the link is "clean" to my landing page)
Having said all that - some sources I DO want to know if clicks came from - don't appear on the referral - and when I test it (and look at real time data to verify it's me) I get it as (direct)
I understand I can make a UTM but I'm trying to figure out why sometimes it works and sometimes not...
From the comment I posted:
t.co is from twitter, it's their link shortner. The other websites could be referral spam (something that has been popping up more and more recently). Here is a good article on this. As far as other referrers, are you sure that you're actually coming from that domain? When you visit from there check in your dev console and see what document.referrer
There are a few reasons that the referrer could be empty (coming from an app, secure page, etc.). Best way to check this sort of thing is to see what is passed on the page to Google's servers (Google's debugger is a good starting place).