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Google Analytics has a lot of data—no surprises here! And although the standard reports cover a lot of ground in understanding how users interact with your site, sometimes there are specific things you want to know. And, of course, our favorite analytics tool has the ability to customize reports in the way you need, but with this much variety, sometimes what you get isn't what you expect.
This blog post will cover some of the most common reporting problems we've come across when working with Google Analytics—Part One! Although this list isn't exhaustive, it should cover a good amount of things you may have run into and explain why it happens and how to solve it.
If you want to see other issues covered, click here for Part Two!
A. My report returned no data OR
B. My secondary dimension breaks my report
More often than not, this happens when a report with dimensions or metrics cannot be joined to the given dataset. Dimensions, in Google Analytics, have one of four scopes. Scope refers to the type of data to which the dimension is applied. The four type of scopes within Google Analytics:- Hit Level Dimension / Metric: The lowest scope, if a custom dimension has a hit-level scope, the value is only applied to the hit with which the value was set.
- Session Level Dimension: Session scopes incorporate data that was associated with all hits within a given session.
- User Level Dimension: The highest scope, if a custom dimension has a user scope then all the data associated with all hits within a given session is incorporated into the user scope. Furthermore, all data from future sessions is also incorporated into the scope.
- Product Level Dimension / Metric: This is only specific to Enhanced Ecommerce implementations, where certain dimensions are only available when looking at a specific product (e.g. Shoe Color, Shoe Size).
- Ensure the chosen metrics and dimensions in a report are scoped similarly to produce best results
- When trying to combine two or more dimensions, check with your analytics / development team to verify the information from the first dimension was surfaced at the same time of the second dimension
C. My report filter is not working
Report-level filters are extremely useful when only a specific subset of data is needed. This section covers report filters in Custom Reports, but the same logic can be applied in Standard Reports. When applying filters to any Report, it's important to understand that filters are sequential (remember this!!!). This means that the filter logic will get applied from top to bottom using "and" logic. Examples of this will be seen later, but let's first talk about filter options. Exact Option This option truly will only return data from the data that matches the filter text. This option should be used only when there is one value a user is looking for, and no variations of that value. The most common mistakes when using the "Exact" filter option include:- Unintentional spaces
- e.g. Country of "United States" versus "United States " or "United States"
- Most commonly found before, after, or between words
- Improper casing
- e.g. Medium of "Organic" versus "organic"
- Maybe you have a force lowercase filter here? Check your actual data to verify!
- Missing characters
- e.g. Page of "analyticspros.com/blog/" versus "analyticspros.com/blog"
- Note that missing trailing slash!
/blog/google-analytics/google-analytics-session-quality-how-to-make-the-most-of-your-traffic/|/blog/google-analytics/screen-resolution-browser-size-in-google-analytics/|/blog/google-analytics-using-google-app-script-to-copy-custom-dimensions/
Since all of these pages share the same first beginning, possible configurations could include:/blog/google-analytics/(article title 1|article title 2)
/blog/(.*)
In the above example, (.*) means "anything", so any number combination after "/blog/" would be included in this logic. However, if this was the only URL structure for blog pages, and I stress only , and no other URL on our site could possibly have "/blog/" in the page path unless it was a blog, then the regex function could simply be: Note, the use of "CONTAINS" in this case must be used carefully as there may be traces of the value in places you don't expect. For example, this page below looks like it is just a category page and not a specific article page. Including this in reporting would inflate pageview performance. Lastly, regex is not case-sensitive.D. I see "(not set)" in my report
Broadly speaking, the "(not set)" values are placeholders used by Google Analytics when data is either unavailable or not displayed. More specifically, “(not set)” indicates that Google Analytics did not receive any information for the associated dimension in a given report. One place we can see this is for traffic that was not sent via campaign tracking parameters, such as Direct, Referral, or Organic traffic. When we apply a secondary dimension of "Campaign", it makes sense that campaign information does not exist and is not associated with these visits. Another common occurrence is seeing "(not set)" in your Landing Page report. A page needs to be associated with every hit, and there are cases where an event may send before a pageview tag has fired, causing (not set) to appear in your Landing Pages report. How to Fix: Verify that the source of data is sending the data appropriately.- Is the data point populated from a Data Import?
- Verify values are imported correctly
- Are the data points populated from the website?
- Verify values are sending from the website correctly