- Cardinality Issue: One issue that has caused me some strife is the Unique Exceeded issue where only the top 500,000 rows for a particular month are shown. This happens when cardinality for a particular dimension (E.g. Page URL) is very high and Analytics outputs a string called "Low Traffic" as shown below where it's the most popular data point. This means that any segments leveraging Page URL will not show accurate results as only the top 500,000 values are shown in the UI.
- How to Address the issue: I can think of 2 solutions to tackle this issue:
- Add Dimensions with Low Cardinality: In your implementation, define a unique page name or sub sections for a combination of URLs and capture query string in a separate variable to keep the URL clean. Basically, look at alternative dimensions that have a low cardinality.
- Leverage DataWarehouse: DataWarehouse (shown below) allows you to export more than 500K rows so you can essentially, export as many rows and then filter the data offline.
- Single Page App Issue: In a recent client scenario, we had a situation where they had a Single Page App (SPA) built using AJAX and the UI experience changed but the page didn't refresh. These experiences often times leverage callback functions which developers can configure so that we can fire off "artificial" page views even if the page doesn't reload.
- Issue: My client wanted to see how many users landed on the SPA experience when the "cmpid" URL query parameter was present. They populated an Analytics event tied to this query string but saw a very high number of instances which exceeded the actual page views on this landing page. The issue was tied to the fact that the Analytics URL (highlighted in Red) did not get updated when in fact, the SPA URL changed (highlighted in Green) for additional steps in the flow. Given that the Analytics URL is used to evaluate if the query string is present, the instances of the event kept getting inflated despite the fact that "cmpid" was not present anymore.
- Solution: The solution was to update the Analytics URL by overriding the s.pageURL (Analytics URL variable) with document.URL using JavaScript. This allowed us to ONLY track events when "cmpid" was populated.
- Visitor Stitching Segment: A very common use case for enterprise clients is to stitch visitors across mobile app and mobile web where they want to attribute downstream events to visitors coming from a mobile app to a mobile web view. An example is a conversion funnel that is embedded in a native app where there is a mix of native app screens and web specific HTML or AMP pages. It will make sense to define a unique variable to differentiate between mobile app and mobile web and use that in a segment as shown below.
- Sequential Segmentation: Sequential segments are explained very well here and I highly recommend you read this but my example is much simpler and deals with a recent question I got from a client.
- Question: How many people stayed on the "about-us" page for at least 2 minutes and then clicked on the "visit-homepage" link?
- Answer: The answer is a simple sequential segment which did take me a few tries and it's shown below:
- Exclude Segments Work Well: I've used exclusion segments quite extensively to remove users tied to a particular dimension or event. I've also used exclusion as an option to create "inverse" segments to test my results. Below is a simple example of an Exclude segment that worked really well for me recently where I had to exclude visits who spent less than 15 seconds on a page:
- Finally, a Segmentation Container Primer: I'll wrap up by covering a simple yet confusing concept of segment container which has often stumped me. It's the general difference between the various segment containers (namely Visits, Visitors and Hit) and when to use these. In the following screenshots, we see how each container affects the underlying data.
- Hit Container: This container when applied, yields the fewest page views and instances as it confines the data to the actual hit level. The requirement for this container to work is for the variable to be set in the image request. It will show the lowest number of page views or instances.
- Use Cases: Apply this when you want to get the most accurate results for a particular dimension or event. E.g. You can use this container if you want to get actual page views or video views for a particular time frame or search term. You should also use Hit level segments to create Virtual report suites.
- Visit Container: This container shows data for a particular visit where something happened without a gap or timeout of 30 minutes. The will show page views or instances that are more than that of a 'Hit' container and less than that of a 'Visitor' container.
- Use Cases: If you're looking to analyze user behavior that can only happen within the same visit such as Bounces, Click on a Call to Action on the Homepage, Landing page Visits tied to a marketing campaign etc.
- Visitor Container: This container will show data tied to a Visitor cookie (typically 2 years) and will show all page views and instances for the lifetime of the Visitor. This will show the most number of page views or instances as the scope of this is the biggest among the three containers.
- Use Cases: If you're looking to find out total revenue captured across all visitors or to see how many visitors traversed from a mobile app to a mobile web view.
I hope these tips will help you answer some simple, yet confusing concepts that often requires additional investigation and can lead to unforeseen delays.
