I am using universal analytics on my website via Google Tag Manager with data layer e-commerce tracking enabled.
The referral addresses are appearing to be coming from the payment providers (e.g. secure.arcot5.com)
I have included all my URLS in to the autolinker and after some testing the _ga cookie value appears to be consistent all the way through the booking process but it appears differently on the page after the secure payment takes place.
This suggests the session is being treated as a new one, hence the referral address issue I am having.
I have been trying to set a cookie on the entry page which equals the _ga cookie value but currently I am unable to retreive it on the confirmation page.
Has anyone got any ideas for a possible solution?
You will most definitely save my life!
Dan
Have you read this article? There could be a couple of pointers in there however I'm not sure what you have and haven't tried
Accurately reporting referrer from payments made with PayPal in Google Analytics
Related
I'm not sure if this is the right stack to ask this in so if not please let me know!
I am trying to get a handle on what cookies are used on a site and what they are for. When I initially did a cookie scan I noticed a cookie names NID which was set by google.
I have tried to research this cookie and can see it is used by Google for advertising purposes.
But I am confused about why and where this is being set, the site I am looking at does not use advertising anywhere, although it does use embedded YouTube videos.
Can anyone shed any light on when and why this cookie is set?
according to Google
Most Google users will have a preferences cookie called ‘NID’ in their browsers. A browser sends this cookie with requests to Google’s sites. The NID cookie contains a unique ID Google uses to remember your preferences and other information, such as your preferred language (e.g. English), how many search results you wish to have shown per page (e.g. 10 or 20), and whether or not you wish to have Google’s SafeSearch filter turned on.
For me, the cookie was hammered incessantly by the url https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=example.org Which was being used by CookieBro & FeedBro RSS feeder browser addons for retrieving icons associated with various domains. The cookie can be dropped by either an addon or by google itself.
I used cookie log via cookiebro addon for firefox & chrome to detect these cookies in realtime, its one of a kind. However I did not realize it was cookiebro dropping them until the next step below.
To see what background connection is occuring when these cookies are placed, enter the following firefox url: about:cache?storage=disk&context= and you will see when and where the google url being connected to.
It is said this cookie is for targeting & ADS and the google's settings are integrated to make the cookie inconvenient to delete for Google users.
I don't know if this is the right exchange to ask in, but if it isn't please point me in the right direction.
I'm searching for some information from Google on the _dc_gtm_UA-XXXXXXXX-X cookie, where the X's are the GA code.
But I can't find any official documentation.
Can anyone provide som official documentation?
Update: The Google Analytics' Cookie Usage Developer documentation informs about this cookie now:
_gat (1 minute TTL) Used to throttle request rate. If Google Analytics is deployed via Google Tag Manager, this cookie will be named _dc_gtm_<property-id>.
I could not find official documentation either, but here's a wild guess, from right to left:
_UA-XXXXXXXX-X is your Google Analytics (GA) property ID, or account number.
_gtm is Google Tag Manager (GTM), which means that GA was not integrated directly but injected via GTM.
_dc is DoubleClick, which most likely means that your Google Analytics account has been connected to your Google DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM).
(The DCM help page about cookies mentions __gads as cookie name prefix though.)
...so _dc_gtm_UA-XXXXXXXX-X is your Google Analytics ID, injected via Google Tag Manager, so that DoubleClick Campaign Manager can consume it -- presumably to associate and track the performance of ad campaigns via Analytics.
This cookie only seems to appear on sites that integrate GA via GTM.
Its value always appears to be 1.
Various random websites on the net present (exactly) the following explanation in their cookie policy:
_dc_gtm: used to help identify the visitors by either age, gender, or interests by DoubleClick - Google Tag Manager.
So that text appears to copied or auto-generated from an official resource, but is not referenced anywhere.
Some sites additionally present a link to Google Analytics' Cookie Usage Developer documentation, but that does not list the cookie name.
Note that this _dc_gtm_UA-... cookie is a first-class cookie; i.e., it is set for the domain of your website.
When a visitor of your website requests additional pages/files/resources on your website domain, then this cookie will be sent along with every request.
Therefore, ensure to adjust your HTTP reverse-proxy (e.g., Varnish) configuration accordingly, so that this pure client-side cookie does not cause subsequent client requests to miss your cache. Most website backend applications do not need this cookie.
Google normally uses two underscores as prefix for all cookies that are only relevant on the client-side; not sure why they diverged from that emerging standard here.
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
I am trying to find out how active are the users of my web page after registration, based on what was the source/landing page of their first visit. I would rather not try to track users myself - I am already employing Google Analytics on my web page and I know it uses the __utma cookie to tell one user from another. I can see summarized landing pages/sources in my Analytics reports but would need to have this data per specific user in the time of their sign up.
Essentially, when the user signs up with my web page I would like to retrieve their landing page and source from Google Analytics and store it in my application's database along with user's name, password, activity etc. This way I could check later, for example whether users who came from Google were more prone to buying premium service that those who came from Facebook etc.
I checked the Google Analytics API reference but it doesn't seem to provide getters for this specific data. I've been looking in up in Google and in Stack Overflow for a while.
This seems like a pretty useful functionality, which many websites should need. What am I missing? Maybe I should seek for a solution that doesn't involve GA? Or switch to a different analytics? Or track user's landing pages with cookies myself?
When visiting this site:
https://campus.ayy.fi
and submitting the login http POST request,
I found in cookie collection two google analytics related keys: __utma, __utmz.
I searched into the html code and js script for that page and didn't find any evidence that google analytics script is embedded (e.g. "ga.js").
So my question is why there are still google analytics cookies in the request and who added them?
Thank you!
Well after visiting the website mentioned I coudn´t idenfity any http requests to google analytics and also no evidence of the GA code installed on the page.
My assumption is that the "cookie collection" you are reffering to is the collection of cookies on your machine, and if that website has had any GA code installed before and you visited the page, the cookies will stay on your machine for some time (as long as 2 years for _utma and 6 months for _utmz).
The easiest way to check that is to clean your cookies and open the webpage once again. If you really want to digg in, you can use HTTPFox (enable it, click "start" when you visit the page and in the search field type "utm"). In this way, you can see every request beign sent by the webpage. (Although I did use this proccess and there really are no requests to GA).
-Augusto Roselli
Web Analytics - dp6