Is there a way to (in Javascript+jQuery), extract the data of whether a visitor is Paid vs. Organic traffic (or other such metrics)?
For the scope of the question, you can assume that Universal Analytics is running on the landingpage, but I'm limited to console-level Javascript only.
Little background: For a test we want to run, we're looking to target different visitors in different ways in a sort of tag manager-tool. The tool limits us to only using Javascript, so we can not directly use the information from Analytics.
I've seen this question. However, that question appears to be outdated, because (as is written in the comments of the answer), the answer does not work with UA.
This information is available in Analytics, so you'd think they'd be able to retrieve it from somewhere. My question is, could I find this information through Javascript?
You can identify the traffic on the landingpage, since with UA paid traffic either needs to have a gclid (a Google click id from Google Adwords) or campaign parameters ("utm parameters", most notably utm_campaign) that identify if this is a paid channel. Then you'd have to store the information via a cookie or localstorage.
Other than that the Universal Analytics tracking code will not reveal anything about the visitor except the client id, which says nothing about paid vs. organic.
For completeness sake: In theory you could store client ids as a custom dimension in GA and use the API to create a service that let's you retrieve information about a given client id via an ajax call, but that would have a certain lag (since GA needs a few hours before it has processed data for a visit), would probably not be very efficient and might have privacy implications that might put you at odds with the Google TOS and national laws.
Related
I am trying to implement a GDPR-compliant site which implements Google Analytics via Google Tag Manager. GDPR status is determined via a cookie, which I do not have control over and is the only method I may use. My understanding is that I need to set the anonymizeIp value in Google Analytics to true based on the value of this GDPR cookie. I'm not quite sure how best to do this. I can make changes in GA or GTM directly or I can conditionally load different GTM snippets on the site. What I cannot do is use a different strategy to determine GDPR status. What is my likely best choice?
As far as I know I can't just drop the standard ga('set', 'anonymizeIp', true); when using GTM. (Though I'm not an expert on this.) Configuring the value via "Fields to Set" in the GA variable inside GTM is also not allowed unless I reset it when the GDPR cookie notes that un-anonymized tracking is allowed.
GA & GTM are extremely difficult to make GDPR compliant. You should not even load the scripts before getting consent. EU courts have already ruled that analytics does not constitute an "required" service, and thus does require consent, with all the baggage that goes with that.
GA's IP anonymization setting is a cosmetic fob - the act of loading the script has already revealed the user's full IP (and other fingerprintable data) to a corporation outside the EU, and it will also have fully identified them if they happened to have a google cookie set (which is very likely). The anonymization setting may mean that full IPs are not sent to analytics as part of analytics data capture, but by then the damage has already been done. Also, IP anonymization alone is insufficient to deidentify visitors.
GTM very often means that people without technical awareness load third-party extensions that add extra tracking without appropriate consent or control, that you (as the data controller) are liable for.
If you need proper compliance (in the spirit, not just the letter) of GDPR, I recommend self-hosted analytics and tag manager systems such as Matomo or Open Web Analytics.
We use Google analytics with Google Tag manager for our ecommerce platform based to track the conversion, etc.,
In the thank you page, its used to track the order value and the revenues.
Consistently we see a difference of about 15 to 20 % difference between GA data and the data from the core platform.
Tried to find a pattern among the missed orders but couldn´t ascertain one easily. The GA recorded orders include devices like Desktop, tablet and mobile and we see different browsers too.
Need inputs to analyze this better.
Note: Thank you page is loaded by a redirect from the payment gateway system
15-20% difference is not good at all. Google says you should expect better than 95% accuracy, and to keep at it if you're not getting those numbers.
Note: The more "techy" crowd that your website has, the more folks you'll run into "Do not track" or with Ad-Blocking tech in their browser. Normally, you'd want to try to baseline that difference using device category filters to see if the gap is bigger for desktop (most phones/tablets don't use ad-blocking).
First, question. If the user lands on the thankyou page, and hits the refresh button, does it send another "conversion" to GA? IF so, you want to make sure that you build in logic that prevents duplicate conversions to be sent if the user was not making duplicate purchases. A browser refresh is not a purchase, don't record it as such.
Second, if the page takes forever to load, or you have users that have bad internet, then that could increase the difference. They might be closing the browser or exiting site before GA client has a chance to send the final conversion to the server. So how is the performance of your thankyou page?
Are you sure you're looking at the correct business data? I've been told GA numbers are off by the business before and it turned out they messed up their own query in the transaction system (and they had been doing so for years!). It is a long shot, but if you feel super confident about your GA measurement setup, then run it by the folks giving you the transaction numbers.
Finally, if you can't get the difference down then move to the Measurement Protocol server-side implementation of GA. You simply need to record the IP address of the user and their GA client id, and then construct an HTTPS GET request using the Measurement Protocol fields for a valid hit. Server side measurement is the most accurate way to do this, but requires code updates in the ecommerce platform itself.
I'm implementing Enhanced Ecommerce on our (mainly affiliate) website through GTM. We have list views and detail views etc.. so implementing impressions and clicks is easy, but for affiliate purchases there is a problem.
We have two payment models for the shops that are showing their products on our site:
Cost per Click. I can implement a small purchase on the clickout page.
Cost per Acquisition. Here is the problem: The purchases are made on a different website on a different time. Using PHP API's I get the purchases made a few times a day through a cronjob.
How can I create a purchase (preferably using PHP, using javascript is messy on a cronjob) but retain the cookie value so I can link the purchase to the clickout and channel people used to get on our site.
I thought of creating all zero purchases for each clickout and maybe repurchase using the same transaction ID. This might work, but we will end up with thousands of empty purchases.
I ran across a similar problem a while back. Our checkout lives on a different domain. So when Adwords people would checkout after migrating to Universal, I was losing that data at checkout. I think my solution there could help you. This all assumed you're using Universal Analytics and not the old deprecated libraries.
The first thing I do is grab the GA cookie, which is named _ga. Inside it is your GA session. It looks like this (it will be much longer)
GA1.2.3456.7890
The third and fourth number sets (including the period) are the session itself. Parse them out.
Now you want to find some way to store this with the user. I used my PHP session (we pass it in the query string when we jump domains) and stored it there. You'll have to figure something out that works for you here.
On the other site we need to specify the GA session and site within the GA block. Please note that the new site will report these visits as if they belonged to the original site. The UA-XXXX-Y should be from the original site and yourdomain.com should be the new site TLD
ga('create', 'UA-XXXX-Y', { 'cookieDomain': 'yourdomain.com', 'clientId': '3456.7890' });
Now you can pass your purchase metrics in. When a session converts on the new site, the old site will track it, along with any other things that session held (i.e. page impressions, Adwords clicks, etc.). You don't need any messy cron jobs to do this. Just be aware, as I said earlier, that these page visits belong to the original site as far as GA goes. You could try reporting two sets of metrics to get around this, but I have not tried that.
Reading the comment beneath the answer from Machavity, i assume that you are using Universal Analytics, or else Universal Analytics is the way to go!
I have had a case in the past where we had to think of a one way tracking system because we didn't have access to the other site's code.
Give a look at the Google Measurement protocol. This protocol makes it possible to send raw userdata directly to google analytics over HTTP.
Link to Google measurement protocol
We have an page that is shown inside a software tool we have. It's a sort of "starterpage" that shows up when you start it. Our software is available as Free, Pro, and Trial.
I have set up my tracking so that people who visit this page are tagged as a "Free user" or a "Pro user" using custom variables.
I then segment my visitors in GA to show only, for example, "Free users" to see how many of these later go on and purchase the Pro-version (using a regular Goal).
The software leverages a specific browser, called the JXBrowser, and the purchase is done through the regular webpage visited through another browser (like Firefox or Chrome). I want to know how Analytics saves the tag of the user. Does it tag the IP address visiting the software starterpage or does it save it in some sort of cookie.
I'm asking because I want to know how accurate the data I'm seeing is. I am seeing that the tagging is working and that the goal completion for that usergroup is working as well. The goal completions is somewhat low though, which is why I want to make sure that isn't becuase of some technical difficulty.
TL;DR; Is Custom Variables tagging users IP as certain visitor-groups or are they saving the data in a cookie? How does Custom Variables work in cross-browser situations?
Custom variables available in Google Analytics ga.js library have a scope that defines whether they are attached to a pageview, visit or visitor. From your question, I would assume that you are using a visitor-level scope.
_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',
1, // This custom var is set to slot #1. Required parameter.
'Software Version', // The name acts as a kind of category for the user activity. Required parameter.
'Free', // This value of the custom variable. Required parameter.
3 // Sets the scope to visitor-level. Optional parameter.
]);
Visitor-level custom variables do indeed use a cookie to persist the value (the cookie name is __utmv).
On a side-note, GA also uses cookies for measuring unique visitors and many other things like session start / end, number of visits. This means that a user using multiple browsers will not be seen as one users, but as many users as there are different browsers (based on cookie sets).
It's worth pointing out that Google Analytics offers another collection libary designed to make tracking across browsers and devices easier, the analytics.js library. In your case, if all users are registered or have a unique 'install id' you might be better off disabling cookies storage and using your own id for the cookie - a feature available in the analytics.js library.
We want to embed an ajax style service into a number of our websites each with a unique api key. The problem that I can see is that because the api key is stored in the javascript file the user could potentially take the key, spoof the http referrer, and make millions of requests to the api under that api key.
So I am wondering how Google prevents Analytics spoofing? As this uses almost the same idea.
I'm also open to other ideas, essentially here is the process.
SiteA -> User <-> Ajax <-> SiteB
EDIT - is there any way to protect the API from being abused while having it called via ajax?
I don't believe there are any such protection measures in place. Spoofing of traffic is a serious problem for other Google services, such as Adwords. For instance a malicious individual who is bidding on adwords can generate many fake clicks for their competitor's ads to drive up their advertising costs and thus Google's stock price. The inverse is also true, people will generate fake clicks on their site to get extra money from a PayPer Click ad on their site.
At the end of the day a hacker can amass a list of 10,000+ anonymous proxy servers without too much difficulty and there isn't much you can do about it. A hacker could also use a botnet, some of which are millions in size. Traffic generated from a botnet can appear to be legitimate machines with a legit Google Cookie, because they where hijacked.
Many proxies and bonet'ed machines are enumerated by Realtime Black Lists (RBL) such as the one run by http://www.spamhaus.org , and many legitimate ip addresses are also on that list. There are also proxies that can't be used for spam but could be used for click fraud and thus they won't be on that list.
At a guess, I'd say the key is one half of a public-private key pair that (somehow) includes the URL as a hash. This way, the key will only work, and the hits only registered, if the request is for the URL for which the key was generated. You can't spoof the request, because if you do it goes to the wrong URL and nothing happens.