CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-analyticsgoogle-tag-manager
Edgaras Karka
Edgaras Karka

Reputation: 7852

Google analytics track user behavior. Or possible?

I am searching for a way to track user behavior on my website. I want to know if it is possible to get a table with data looking something like this:

+------+---------------+-----------------+------+---------+
| time | ip or user_id | user_session_id | link | actions |
+------+---------------+-----------------+------+---------+

(Link - where user came from)

I want to track different user actions by sessions. Is this possible using Google Analytics or I should search other tools? My site is currently set up to track events but on my Analytics account I get only the number of events that occurred. I want to track what a specific user does on my site.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 427

Answers (1)

Eike Pierstorff
Eike Pierstorff

Reputation: 32760

tl;dr: if you must do this use Mixpanel or similar software.

Time based dimensions are already available (date, hour, minutes and datetime). "link" would be referrer. Actions in Google Analytics are basically pageviews, events and transactions, so you have that, too.

IP and user id are a big no-gos. Storing anything that that identifies a person is a violation of Googles Terms of Service and depending on your location might be a violation of national laws.And if by user_id you mean the Google Analytics feature of the same name, Google says you may set it for logged in users and have to unset it for user that log out, so by extension that means storing it in Ga would probably be a violation of their TOS.

The GA session id is not exposed via the interface. You may read it from the cookie and store it in a custom dimension (I'm not sure if this is allowed within the TOS, on the other hand GA premium customers get this via a BigQuery export in any case, so it should be allowed).

If you simply want to tell different users apart you might simply generate a string in the UUID format and store that in a custom dimension. If you want to actually identify users (by name, adress etc), well, you are not allowed to and Google will terminate your account if they find out.

Not to mention that it completely eludes why so many people want to track individual users. You must not use GA information to target individuals, and simply looking at individual user paths will not help you (I wrote an article about that, although I do not expect that this will convince you).

Google Analytics is for technical and legal reasons not a good tool for tracking individual users, if you need to do this use a software that is made for this purpose. Mixpanel is often mentioned in that context but I'm sure there are many other solutions.

Upvotes: 3

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