(Other) Page grouping pageview count changed exponentially Week over Week

Top image is 2 weeks ago. Bottom image is last week. This does not appear to be a site issue, but something with Google Analytics. Has anyone had this happen? What is the cause and solution?

 

First and foremost, you will become able to see actual users in your reports, rather than different devices.

Imagine this scenario:

A person using a smartphone is looking for a product, they find your store and interact with it, taking a look at different products and so on. Hopefully, they like what they see.

After a few days, they have decided to do some further research, ending up visiting your website again, this time using a tablet. Now, they really like the product and have decided to buy it.

Much like many of us, this person prefers to fill in the details etc. on their desktop device. So they grab a laptop and buy the product they found from your store, using their smartphone a few days earlier.

Without the Google Analytics User ID feature you would see three different users visiting your website.

The first one is using a smartphone and is visiting many pages and products on your website.

The second user prefers a tablet and seems to be interested but then, suddenly leaves the site.

Now the third one is a perfect guy, going straight to the product and buying it like it was their job.

But that is not correct, it is actually the same person, a single user!

Using User ID you will see them as one, I think this is a pretty good reason.

Is my website eligible?
Probably all of you that don’t have the User ID feature on their website already, are now in hurry to get the feature installed.

Sadly, this feature is not for everyone. Your system must have some sort of unique ID in place already, something that would stay the same, cross-device.

If your website provides a login option, you are good. If no login nor another way of identification is involved and you are not planning to add some, this feature is not for you.

Sites that almost always are eligible include e-commerce, social networks, applications, and anything with login, really.

How to set up Google Analytics User ID
As this is an extremely useful feature, enabling it takes a bit more than two clicks. But don’t worry, it’s doable.

Start by going to the Admin view in your Google Analytics account.

In the Property section, click on Tracking Info and then on User-ID. There you can enable User ID tracking.

Session Unification
While setting up User ID you will need to choose whether you want to turn Session Unification ON or OFF.

Turning it ON will make sure that all of the hits that occurred before the User ID was assigned to a user are also assigned to this user.

So, basically, it will make it possible to track what a user did before logging in, too.

Unless you have a good reason to do vice versa, turn it ON.
Google Analytics User ID Setup
Modify your tracking code
To begin with, you need to figure out which value you are going to use as a User ID, we recommend using the same ID as does your identification system.

After you have figured out the ID, you need to pass it into a javascript variable (you might want to ask your developer’s help here)

When you have successfully passed the ID into a variable, you need to set is a User ID and send it to Google Analytics.

The easiest way to do so is to include userId attribute in your Property definition function.

ga('create', 'UA-XXXXX-Y', 'auto', {
userId: USER_ID
});
Important!
The USER_ID value should be a unique, persistent, and non-personally identifiable string identifier that represents a user or signed-in account across devices.

In some cases, it can happen that you are not able to identify the user right away. This can happen in single page applications or with dynamic login forms.

Luckily, Google Analytics lets you set the User ID value later, too.

All you need to do is to call the following function, once the User ID is available.

ga('set', 'userId', USER_ID);
Keep in mind that in this case, all of the hits (including pageview) will not have User ID attached to them automatically, unless you have Session Unification turned ON (which you should).

User ID View
In order to view User ID data, you need to create a separate view for it.

This view is going to include ONLY the visitors that have User ID value assigned to them, so expect to see fewer users, sessions and pageviews than in your main view.

This is important because some of the calculations are done differently from the non-userID views. For example, counting the users.

You can create your User ID view at the same section where you turned ON the user ID tracking. Admin -> Property -> Tracking Info -> User ID

Give your User ID view a nice descriptive name. We recommend naming it just “User ID View”.

How to use User ID data
The very first thing you should do is to make sure that your User ID tracking is actually working.

You can do so by choosing your User ID view and checking if it has any hits.

Then navigate to the Audience section in your Reporting view and choose User Explorer.

If everything is working as it should, you can see the table where the first column is named User ID, as opposed to Client ID in your regular view. The values in that column should represent the User ID-s that you have sent to Google Analytics.

Eventually, you should see something like this:

Google Analytics User ID Success
To see how many of your users actually have User ID assigned to them VS how many don’t, switch back to your main view and navigate to Audience -> Behaviour and choose User ID Coverage report.

Now what?
Once you are sure your User ID setup tracking is actually working, switch to your User ID view and start analyzing how people in this segment behave and perform.

You can also create segments based on whether the user has a User ID assigned to them or not.

Most probably you will soon realize that users, that have User ID are converting better, now it’s time to figure out if it’s a correlative or causative relationship. And then if and how you could get more people into this better converting segment.

Hope this thing will help you properly.

 

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