How do I check data from Google Analytics?

After setting up the Google Analytics (GA) integration and correct URL tags for your campaigns, you will start seeing GA data reported for your campaigns in Smartly. You might also want to check from GA that data is reported correctly and compare values between GA and Smartly.io so here are instructions for doing that. Please note that the data starts populating only for the campaigns you've setup with the correct URL tag, so there won't be any data just after connecting to the GA.

To find the correct values from GA, you must first navigate to your GA profile. From the left side menu, select Acquisition → Campaigns → All campaigns. After that, the next steps depend on which UTM tag (Google uses term UTM tag when speaking of click tags or URL tags) you have used for GA integration in Smartly. Instructions for next steps can be found below.

Checking the Standard Google Analytics UTM tag values

Standard UTM tag values here refer to the following UTM parameters: utm_campaign, utm_content, utm_source and utm_term.

You can generate a report using one of these parameters by clicking on other in the primary dimension row and selecting the desired parameter under Acquisition category.

The URL tags used in Smartly.io are visible in GA reporting as the following dimensions:

Checking utm_id Values

Utm_id cannot be selected as a primary dimension, so you can keep Campaign selected as the primary dimension. Now click on the Secondary dimension box and open the Advertising category. Finally, select the Campaign code under that category. Campaign code is the parameter in which the utm_id information is tracked in GA.

Filter Facebook link crawler traffic in Google Analytics

NOTE: This shall also filter traffic coming from real people, who are using internet connection provided by Facebook’s own ISP, such as Facebook's offices.

This may be incomplete solution to excluding all Facebook link checker traffic, which may come through other ISP's, too.

Whenever you create new ads, a Facebook crawler bot checks every link contained in the ads, verifying that the link leads to valid website complying with Facebook's advertising policies. This link crawler traffic will be included in your Google Analytics statistics and skewing them, unless filtered. This link crawler traffic does have the same Click tags as paid ad traffic and thus it will have same attribution to your Facebook ads in Google Analytics as the real ad traffic from Facebook.

Unfortunately at the moment there's no easy way to filter out crawler traffic precisely. Possible solutions are:

1. Fetch ISP data from a 3rd-party API on the client and send this information as a dimension, then use it as a filter as per article (Update section).
2. Filter out Irvine, CA city traffic - note that this will exclude legit customers' traffic as well.
3. Filter traffic from all known bots:
   

Why can't I see my Google Analytics metrics in Smartly.io?

Smartly.io s Google Analytics integration allows you to see all the goals you have added to the GA view selected in Smartly.io in addition to the default GA metrics (Transactions, Sessions, Bounces, Bounce rate, Pageviews, Sessions, Avg session time, Users, New Users & New Users / Users).

If you have trouble finding a specific metric, follow the steps below.

Log in to analytics.google.com as the same user who has integrated Google Analytics to Smartly.

Open the Admin panel and choose the same view (profile) you have selected in Smartly.

Open the Goals menu. Under it, you can see all the goals that are synchronized to Smartly.

What can I do if I don't see the metric I want to use?

• You might have another view that contains the goal. If you find the goal from another view, you can switch to that in Smartly.
• You can also create a new goal by selecting + NEW GOAL
  • After adding new goals, save the GA settings in Smartly.io to refresh the list of available goals.

Is it possible to use multiple views for Google Analytics?

No, at the moment it's not possible to use multiple views at the same time with our integration.

What if I do not see data in Google Analytics?

In case of Facebook integration, please, check that you do see the respective metrics on Smartly.io side. If the data is present in Smartly.io is present in Google Analytics, since we download the data from Google side, not the other way around. This means, that you may not be using correct filter in your report: try adjusting it.

For other platforms or in case if there is no Google Analytics data on Smartly.io side as well, the situation is a bit more complex (and outside of Smartly's control), but if simplified, it can be related to your setup of UTM tags or changes done to them recently.

Google has a certain logic (refer this flowchart) of attribution of a session to respective "report", and if some UTM tag is missing or "corrupted", it may affect the attribution. We recommend checking the setup, to ensure that proper values are being used (a very frequent issue is using wrong case, for example "Facebook", instead of "facebook" (which is default on Smartly.io). While checking the setup, it may be useful to refer to this article on Google side.

Frequent changes to UTM tags may also affect the number on Google Analytics greatly, because they may result in invalidating of existing sessions. Generally, a one-time change should result only in slight drop, but if doing several consecutive changes may have a more significant impact. We recommend learning some basics on how Google Analytics works with sessions and about respective timeouts in this article.

Note, though, that even if you have "bad" UTM tags setup, that will not affect actual performance of the ads, but only the data on Google side. As such we advise not to rely on Google Analytics data alone, when measuring performance of the ads (especially, since some differences are expected).