Best way to track campaign transactions in Google Analytics - regex

We have just begun trying two price comparison websites that are using different source, medium and campaign values in Google Analytics.
I want to try to track sales from these to the product and notice that in Analytic Goals they are fine for setting up a goal that would end in our transaction confirmation url but need to have a funnel url that ends with, for example below
utm_source=pricerunner&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=pricerunner
Anybody have any idea how to do this using the end of a url? All I can see if GA is the entire url value or "begins wih"
I have tried using regex but nothing is being tracked

The campaign parameters needs to be passed in the url from the price comparison website to landing page (probably a product page at your end). At that point the GA session gets automatically associated with the utm parameters, and you do not track those url parameters subsequently in your funnel.
If you want to see the funnel for a specific pricce comparison website you can use a GA segment to isolate the goal traffic based on the campaign name. that should do the trick

Related

Google Analytics - Match URLs on Unique Number in Content Drilldown Using RegEx?

I am trying to track pageviews on Google Analytics for knowledge base articles (on Zendesk).
Each article has a unique number. However, the title of the page is sometimes appended to the URL, and GA tracks this as a separate page. If the title of the article changes, it generates a new URL.
For example, these would all be the same article, so I want to see a single pageviews count, but GA would show as 3 separate stats
/hc/en-us/articles/360039413394
/hc/en-us/articles/360039413394-How-To-Make-A-Sandwich
/hc/en-us/articles/360039413394-How-To-Make-A-Turkey-Sandwich
I want GA to roll up the articles matching on the unique number, and ignoring everything after that. Is there a built-in way to do this? Is there a way to do this with Regex? Where would I add the Regex for the Content Drilldown page? Help!
Thank you.
Analytics cannot know in an integrated way which part of the URL interests you or which distinguishes one page from another.
What you should do is understand when in your system the page title is appended to the URL and avoid it.
For future data you can try to clean the data with a regex before it arrives in Analytics, for example with GTM, but this could compromise the other URL cases that need to be handled differently.
In general, if in the Analytics reports you filter the URLs for an identifier, for example 360039413394, in the first row of the report you can see the aggregated values of all the URLs that contain that string. So if you need to verify a particular product page you can use this workaround when viewing data.

I'm looking for a way to get Google Analytics to recognize clicks that lead to external site

I'm trying to create a goal in my analytics page. The goal is "when a user clicks a certain link", the problem is the link is an external link with different domain than my website so i cant just write /pagename in the goal details.
I've researched and tried different things, but examples I've seen only shows how it works when its an internal page. I don't have access to the website back end code, just its Google Ads and Analytics account.
In the analytics menu, I set my goal description as "when user clicks x button" Goal type is "Destination".
And then under goal details, I tried regular expression like this:
.*externalsite*html$
I also tried
^http://externalsite\.com/
and
/^http:\/\/externalsite\.com
and some other regex that I forgot.
Google kept saying the goal would have 0 conversion results, which isn't true as I've received email about the thing this click event was about just about everyday.
Any suggestions?
The basic problem is, that Google Analytics by default is not tracking clicks on external links on your site, only visits to your own pages. Although it is not explicitly stated in your post, I assume, that you don't have tracking of external links implemented in any custom ways. If this is the case, you will need to get your Analytics tracking improved, either by accessing the site code via a developer, or by getting Google Tag Manager implemented also by a developer, which will make similar task very easy. Newertheless, I'd recommend implementing external link tracking with events, as using additional pageviews for this, as it would have major impact on your pageview based metrics, like bounce rate and average pages per session metrics
In case you have implemented external link tracking as pageviews, you need to make the following adjustments.
By default, all these page visits get tracked and displayed in the pagePath dimension by their path, and domain is tracked separately in hostname dimension. Goal setting will only consider pagepath, so you need to set up an Advanced view filter, to modify pagePath dimension, and include hostname in it. Your filter would look something like this:
This would allow you to use a Regular Expression in your destination type goal, and filter for the domain as well. However, protocoll will still not be included, so something like this could work, which simply checks for the third party domain:
example\.com\/

Will this cookie track what visitors do after they have clicked on a rep url? The pages they go to, until they leave the site?

As I have no idea of code, html or the programs I am using, I would like to know if this cookie will work the way I want it to.
I would like to know what pages the user visits in the session after he/she has arrived to the website via the url containing: repid.
I have a custom html tag that I have set up in Google tag Manager and the code is:
<script>
var cookieName = "RepUrl";
var cookieValue = "true";
setPersistentCookie(cookieName, cookieValue, 365); // set for 1 year
</script>
The Trigger Type is Page View, Some Page Views, Page Url, Contains, repid
I then went to google analytics and created a Custom Dimension called Rep Url the scope was Session.
After this I go back to google tag manager and create a variable called: Cookie-Page..., Variable type: 1st party cookie and linked to the cookieName: RepUrl (as in the above code).
Then I make another tag, this time it is a google analytics tag type, track type: page view. I then enable overriding settings in this tag and enter my google analytics id UA-xxxxxxxxx-x . I go to more settings, custom dimensions and enter the index number of the custom dimension I created in google analytics and in the dimension value, I enter the variable I created in tag manager called: Cookie-Page...
After all this I then went to customization, custom reports in analytics created one for the custom dimension (Rep Url) with added filters: Sessions, Avg. Session duration, Entrances/Pageviews, Pages/Session, Users.
I would like to know from start to end if this cookie will work the way I would like it to. All help would be greatly appreciated!
The GTM/GA setup will work, but you might not get the results that you were hoping for in the custom reports.
One reason is that you're setting the cookie once the user, enters the site and arrives at the page with RepUrl, but by that time, the hit for the page view would already be sent to GA thus not capturing into the custom dimension until subsequent hits. This would throw off the sessions, entrances metric in the custom reports.
You could consider looking into creating a custom segment that isolates sessions with the parameter "repurl". This would work if repurl would always be how the user enters the site/starts the session.
Another solution would be to abandon the javascript for setting the cookie, but instead, user the URL variable in GTM and capture the RepUrl parameter that way and set it on pageview.

Google Analytics - Grouping URL according to query paramters

I am running a campaign and all partner traffic going through a landing page.
However, this page url is dynamic according to various parameters... so my GA reports show hundreds of lines.
I know I can filter the parameters out... but I would like to extract the data per partner.
Here is an example of the dynamic urls :
/landing-page/?ref=partner01&id=value1&email=value2&param=value3
I want to clean the urls but leaving the first parameter "ref" in the report.
I tried ref=([^&]*) but it is not working.
Then GA should group urls (I guess) and I can see a report with data sorted per partner.
you may use 'Exclude URL Query Parameters' in a view settings and put there a list of all the unwanted parameters like id,email,param
Having ref out of the list will keep it in page path.
More on Help pages

Display content on web page depending on Google Analytics data

Is it possible to use data from Google Analytics when someone visits my web page?
I would like to get information about the visitor, eg:
location
how many times he visited the page
from where he comes
time spent on website
etc
And depending on those informations display proper content. Or even add them (silently) to the contact form.
Is it possible to use the data collected by Google Analytics or should I create my own mechanism based on cookies? Maybe any other solution?
This isn't possible. Universal Analytics uses a cookie with an ID for the user and handles the rest on the server, so there's no data available to you. However, all of the info that Google is tracking is accessible to you.
location you can get via the users IP
visits you can get by setting a cookie on each user and tracking sessions
referrer should be in the request headers
time spent can be tracked the same way that ga does, but keeping track of the time everytime the user creates another hit