Things you didn’t know in Google Analytics
Over the years I have spotted some very important nuance about how GA (Google Analytics) works. Some are common and some are pretty rare. I hope you find this very useful and some even a game changer.
I would recommend you count how many of them you knew and how many of them you weren’t familiar with, then see at the end how geeky are you.
Did You know? this can be a game changer!
1. Sharing Custom reports and segment will generate a new report/segment for your colleague, they will each have their own ID. This means you cannot share your report using the URL (even if your recipient installed your report/segment)
2. View filters, apply on the whole day they were created at. This means that even if you added a filter at 11pm, all of the data of that day will be filtered according to this new filter.
3. In the free version of Google Analytics, enabling the User-ID feature, lowers your maximum sampling rate from 500K sessions down to 180K sessions.
4. In the Overview report (under the Audience menu), viewing the hourly time resolution graph, will enter the sampling mode in case you exceed the maximum sessions on the dates you picked, even though you didn’t apply any segments.
While same graphs in the conversion will present unsampled data!
This was fixed in the release of Sep 2017
5. Using the GA API allows you to build a query of maximum 7 dimensions and maximum 10 metrics
6. Custom Dimension and Custom Metric product level, is only available if you enabled Enhanced Ecommerce in your view.
7. RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) requires a minimum of 1,000 unique cookies (users), while with display remaketing, 100 unique cookies (users) is sufficient
8. While building a sequence segment (In Segments under Sequences), using the “First user interaction” with User scope, is based on its first session within the selected date and not a lifetime as expected. This means that the segment will ignore users interactions before selected dates.
9. We can build up to 1,000 Segments per account and 100 Segments per user, per view
10. Viewing Active Users in the Events report under the Real time section, will show only the interactive events, while the Events (last 30 min) will show both interactive and non-interactive events
11. GA 360 sampling is according to the number of sessions in the specific view you are viewing, while GA, is based on the number of total session in the whole property. GA samples after 500K sessions while GA 360 samples after 100M sessions (200 times more unsampled data)
12. The higher the “Results Pageviews/Search” is, the poor your sort is in the search result pages. The closer that number is to 1, the better your sorting is.
13.Product List Performance report that is located under e-commerce (for those who implemented enhanced e-commerce) will show you who many added to cart, checked out and purchased. The product attribution is set to Last action in the same session.
14. Multi-Channel Funnels data collection lags by up to two days, therefore, data from today and yesterday may not be available in your reports.
15. In order to increase the maximum number of sessions for unsampled data you can choose the “Slower response, greater precision”.
Faster response, lower precision = 250K sessions
Slower response, greater precision = 500K sessions
16. Viewing reports in the Dashboard will never alert that you’ve exceeded the maximum sessions for unsampled data, even though the reports will contain sampled data if you exceed the maximum.
17. Adding a Secondary dimension that doesn’t contain data within all the first dimension will reduce the amount of data presented. Same as performing an inner join between two tables, the outcome will be only fields that are present in both tables.
18. The percent seen in the segment toolbar, indicates the share of the specific metric in the current report you’re located at
19. Data is based on number of hits your account gets, the less hits the more recent your data will be.
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2 Comments on "Things you didn’t know in Google Analytics"
Thanks for this, there are some gems in here!
Can you elaborate on the Product List Performsnce attribution part? ‘The product attribution is set to Last action in the same session’ – does this mean last product click action, so if more than one product is added, checked-out or purchased, do all still attribute success back so each list?
Thanks Gary!
Yes.
In case you view other product lists after that they will be attributed to the last product list you viewed (in case they are presented there of course)