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google-analyticsmeasurement-protocol

Mobile data reported in GA Measurement Protocol appear in realtime but not in daily summary

I've been attempting to log activity on a mobile-like device using the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol. All of these attempts have validated using the validation URL, and I can see activity when I look at the real-time reports on the Analytics website. But when I look at the Home or Overview reports for the day - no activity is shown.

The view is set for "All Mobile App Data".

The POST body looks something like this: 

v=1&tid=UA-000000000-1&ds=app&qt=1601&uid=uid-zzzzz&t=screenview&cd=Foo&an=Foo%20App%20Name&aid=com.example.foo&aiid=com.example.foo&av=0.0.1&ua=Mozilla%2F5.0%20(Linux%3B%20Android%207.0%3B%20SM-G930V%20Build%2FNRD90M)%20AppleWebKit%2F537.36%20(KHTML%2C%20like%20Gecko)%20Chrome%2F59.0.3071.125%20Mobile%20Safari%2F537.36

The ua field is just a pre-defined string. I found that if I omitted it, the Real Time monitoring listed the hits as desktop hits, although I was in a Mobile report and the ds field was "app".

Am I missing a field that is required? Is there some reason why it is showing up in the real-time report, but not in a daily report? Is there some other way to diagnose why the data is vanishing, or confirm the data is actually being captured?

When i check the debug endpoint the hit is valid

Request:

https://www.google-analytics.com/debug/collect?v=1&tid=UA-XXX-1&ds=app&qt=1601&uid=uid-zzzzz&t=screenview&cd=Foo&an=Foo%20App%20Name&aid=com.example.foo&aiid=com.example.foo&av=0.0.1&ua=Mozilla%2F5.0%20(Linux%3B%20Android%207.0%3B%20SM-G930V%20Build%2FNRD90M)%20AppleWebKit%2F537.36%20(KHTML%2C%20like%20Gecko)%20Chrome%2F59.0.3071.125%20Mobile%20Safari%2F537.36

Response 

{
  "hitParsingResult": [ {
    "valid": true,
    "parserMessage": [ ],
    "hit": "/debug/collect?v=1\u0026tid=UA-53766825-1\u0026ds=app\u0026qt=1601\u0026uid=uid-zzzzz\u0026t=screenview\u0026cd=Foo\u0026an=Foo%20App%20Name\u0026aid=com.example.foo\u0026aiid=com.example.foo\u0026av=0.0.1\u0026ua=Mozilla%2F5.0%20(Linux%3B%20Android%207.0%3B%20SM-G930V%20Build%2FNRD90M)%20AppleWebKit%2F537.36%20(KHTML%2C%20like%20Gecko)%20Chrome%2F59.0.3071.125%20Mobile%20Safari%2F537.36"
  } ],
  "parserMessage": [ {
    "messageType": "INFO",
    "description": "Found 1 hit in the request."
  } ]
}

I cannot use one of the mobile libraries from Firebase - this is not one of the platforms they support. I do not wish to pretend this is a web page - there is no associated hostname or path. I do not wish to use Events since I can't do event Behavior Flow, which is one of the things I'm interested in seeing.

I'm aware that it can sometimes take "a day or so" for results to first appear. The site was setup over five days ago at this point, and has received data during that time.

Good thought about the anti-spam setting, however the setting appears to be correct:

enter image description here

I've also tried using GET instead of POST - no change, it still shows the hit in real-time, but then it vanishes.

However, I know that it can record hits permanently. There were two hits from a spammer in Russia that have shown up in the daily report (I wasn't there to see it show up in real-time). I don't know what they did, but would love to find out since it might help figure out how I can add a record.

In the real-time reports, it correctly points out the data center all the hits are coming from. Perhaps that is filtering it out somewhere out of my control?

Solution

  • Try adding Cid I know it says this is an optional parameter but for mobile accounts I belive it may be required.

    Client ID

    Optional.

    This field is required if User ID (uid) is not specified in the request. This anonymously identifies a particular user, device, or browser instance. For the web, this is generally stored as a first-party cookie with a two-year expiration. For mobile apps, this is randomly generated for each particular instance of an application install. The value of this field should be a random UUID (version 4) as described in http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4122.txt.

    Example value: 35009a79-1a05-49d7-b876-2b884d0f825b

    Although this says it needs to be a UUIDv4, it does work with other UUIDs (I've tested it with a v5, which is a hash against the value used for the uid parameter).