I'm having a problem with Advanced segments in Google Mobile App Analytics.
A condition has been setup to include all screens that match regex "/01-12-2013/" - but it's also showing me screens which does not contain this string. For example I'm getting a screen name containing "/11-11-2013/" which I would have expected to be filtered out.
The segment seems to return different results based on which tab I'm in in Google Mobile App Analytics. If that helps at all.
In "Audience Overview" I's returning 48.02% of all Screen Views. In "Behavior Overview" it's returning 71.51% of all screen views.
Here are some screenshots to illustrate the problem.
This is going to sound a bit ridiculous but, when creating advanced segments, after you've created them, I'd give them an hour or two before relying on the data they provide. I still have yet to find a solid answer as to why this is, but across a wide range of sites over the past year or two I've found similar issues. I've noticed that when I create an advanced segment to filter specific pages, invariably the initial results still show irrelevant pages I specifically filtered out. The only thing I've been able to attribute this to is some sort of "lag", on Google's side, in updating the Analytics data/property/view/segment. In almost every case, I've simply waited an hour or two after creating an advanced segment, and the data that was filtered usually displays correctly by then.
An interesting thing I've also seen was that a third party reporting platform I use, that has a Google Analytics integration, actually displayed the correct advanced segmented data BEFORE it showed up properly in Analytics. Strange.
Related
I had a few questions related to the changes to the Google Maps/Routes/Places that happened a couple weeks ago
My app calls places.PlacesService.GetAutocompletePredictions and, at the moment, in the Google Cloud Platform, I can see my "request" usage. However the billing switched to "per-character" and I could not find my usage by that metric. Any idea how to view it?
Is there a way to see my usage for the past few months?
How does this "per-character" thing work? Is it the number of characters of the prediction that I pick or the number of characters predicted at the end of my pre-filled phrase? Google doesn't seem to want to make their pricing particularly clear
Scenario:
In Google Analytic, I notice that it is possible to replace certain URI parameter to words that you want by using search and replace filter like the following example below.
e.g. www.example.com/abc/product_id=3 -----> www.example.com/abc/product_name=shampoo
Problems:
Currently I've got a list of over 1000 products in my hand, instead of creating 1000 search and replace filter, what would be the most efficient and maintainable way to go solve the problem?
I've done some digging and notice that custom dimension could be the solution, however it would require me to modify the the JS code on the FTP sever which I dont have permission on. What other solutions do I have?
If it is not possible to show it here would there be any kind of tutorial that I could follow through?
Really appreciate for the help, Many Thanks
This is not a complete answer, but it's certainly more than a comment.
Besides the tedium of writing this out by hand, I can think of two options available to you.
Firstly, you could use the Google Analytics Management API (https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/config/mgmt/v3/). By constructing a set of commands, you could quickly iterate through your list and create the required 1,000 search and replace filters.
Secondly, if you were to use Google Tag Manager you would be able to create a Custom JavaScript Variable that takes the page path and compares it to your list. This variable could then replace the Page field before the hit data is sent to Google Analytics. This may sound more complicated, but it would allow you to pull your solution out of Google Analytics and into the flexible world of JavaScript.
Note that if you rewrite the product_id to a product_name once, you will have to maintain that cross reference every day and keep it in sync with what appears on the website -- make sure you have an automated solution or it will quickly get out-of-sync and be more of a mess than before.
An alternative is to do the search-and-replace on the reporting side.
I know Analytics Edge or Analytics Canvas products could easily do this, or you could just download into Excel or Google Sheets and do a series of lookup formulae.
The problem is to collect the map coordinates of some given locations and display on the site that i'm creating.I have heard that it is called Scraping.Can anyone tell me how to do this?
Google has really tight controls on what they let you get to -- there's an API, but there are limits on the order of 1,000 queries/day, depending on what information you need exactly. If you try to get around their API, they have incredibly clever algorithms that shut you out immediately -- attempting to scrape Google search results, I found that after a few minutes, they were able to immediately block me as soon as I hopped on new Tor endpoints.
The people at Google are extremely good software developers, and if they don't want you to have some info, you can't get it.
I'm writing an app to collect facebook posts matching a certain search term, and I'm trying to fetch only new or updated posts since the graph.facebook.com/search endpoint. I've concluded from debugging that this particular endpoint uses time-based pagination (since, until), so here's my process:
fetch new posts using the most recent 'since' time (default to now - 5 mins at start)
update my 'since' time to the most recent created_time or updated_time from the list of return posts
sleep X seconds, repeat
However, I can't even see my own newly created posts. I do get some results, but they seem random in terms of why they match my search and not my own. For testing purposes, I'm using a user-level access token generated using the FB developer tools, so I should definitely not have any permissions issues restricting me from seeing my own content.
What gives?
Edit: More testing reveals that I can randomly receive SOME of my own posts, but there appears to be no rhyme or reason why one post shows up and the others don't. For example, I just posted 3 posts and received the second one via my app. The first and third are nowhere to be found.
I think what you are seeing here is an artefact of the consistency model Facebook is using. You can see another example of this when you look at your feed from two different devices. If I look at my feed from my smartphone and then go and check out my feed on my PC, sometimes I see the same items and sometimes there are items I saw on one device, that I didn't see on the other. This is because Facebook uses Eventual consistency.
In simple terms this means that given enough time, all data clusters will be consistent, but this is not guaranteed at any given time point. The bad news is: there is not much you can do about this. It's just a fact-of-life when working with very large distributed systems (and Facebook is one of the largest in the world). At this scale it is just not practical, where technology is today, to keep all copies of the data completely in sync at all times. What I think you are seeing is two requests serviced by two clusters which are currently not 100% in sync.
Here is an interesting read on the subject.
And here is something from Facebook. You can skip to the Consistancy section of the page (Although, I would recommend reading the entire post. It is a very interesting overview of Facebook architecture).
I was used to getting datas from google places web service. But, This week I realize that web service link: https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/search/json?location=41.025414,29.114866&radius=5000&types=gas_station&sensor=true&key=XXXXXXXXX is returning "ZERO_RESULTS". It was used to return 50 places and I did not change anything on code.
When I remove types=gas_stations, it is working well. So, do you have any idea why "types" is not working well like it used to be?
I don't think you would have ever received 50 results as the Places API can only return 20 establishments at a time.
I would suggest trying the parameter types=gas_station at a multiple locations to make sure that is not working correctly, after which if you are still not receiving any results I would suggest filing this issue on the Google Places API Issue Tracker.
A temporary solution would be to use the keyword=gas station parameter. This appears to return relevant results.