@ Mackenzie: Link tagging is used to identify traffic sources. Conversions are measured using goals. You need to use both in order to see conversions by different marketing campaign. You don’t need to create different pages for each campaign, but you do need to tag the links in your different marketing activities differently.

@Peter: No, I have never tried to inject a different userID into the GA tracking cookie. But if you’re trying to identify uniques by members/non-members then you should check out custom variables. It’s exactly what you need. Yes, it is cookie based, but it’s the best way to solve the problem you’re looking for.

@ Shailendra: No. Google Analytics does not have the traditional path analysis report that you’re looking for. Remember, different people will navigate the site differently. It’s unlikely that everyone will take the same path. However, if you have a defined path that people should follow then use a Funnel to measure the performance.

@Danill: It may be a sampling issue or, perhaps, if you’re including data from the current day, some processing issue.

I’ve noticed when running a custom report for one day’s worth of data, with Visits and Unique visitors as the metrics, the “visits” almost doubles… as does the unique visits compared to what is shown in the normal visitors report.

Any idea why this is happening?

Thanks,
Carl

Thanks for a great blog. I wonder if you would mind answering a question which I’ve searched for again and again but haven’t found a solution to.

For sites that track logged on users over cycles of months or more years (like our company which offers an online website builder) it’s hard to use google’s unique visitors metric since it’s cookie based and of course the cookies aren’t cross machine and have a relatively short half-life.

Is it possible to either override Google’s UserID with a custom one or have you ever tried storing the assigned Google UserID in your own user table and then forceably injecting it back into the Google cookie when the user logs in?

Doing this accurately allows you to track funnels that may be months long (customer lifecycle) and would be super-valuable to subscription services like ours.

Thank you in advance for your help,
Peter

I have question

Can i get the series of pages which are visited in a single visit.

For example, A user land on page x.html then goes to b.html then c.html & so on & exits from x.html.

Can i get the funnel of all these visited pages starts from a.html

But, when I created Custom Report all three metrics have been avaliable: Visits, Visitors and Unique Visitors. Generally strange that last two metrics exist together. And they are still avaliable in my Custom Reports.

Here is all data for that case:
Visits 322055,
Visitors 141077,
Unique Visiotrs 141533.