Google Analytics in gas

The Websites section in the left-hand menu shows how people come to your website. The numbers come from Google Analytics, the measurement tool that collects data directly on your site. gas only displays them, it does not measure anything itself and does not insert anything into your site.

The one exception is the Pages analysis page. It sits in the same section, but has nothing to do with Google Analytics: it measures the speed and technical quality of the site. A separate part of this article describes it.

This article walks through every page in the section, explains what you will find on each one, where the numbers come from and what to do when they do not add up.

Before you start

Two steps have to be finished before the section shows any data. Both are done outside this section, in the settings.

• A linked Google account. You sign in to Google in Settings → Connected services → Google. That is how gas gains access to the services you manage under your Google account.
• A Google Analytics property connected to the customer account. Signing in alone is not enough. You still have to pick a specific service, which Google Analytics calls a property. It is the measurement unit for one website or app, and only connecting it decides whose traffic you will see in the customer account. What is connected is shown in Settings → Customer account → Linked accounts.

It is also worth knowing:

• Only Google Analytics 4 properties are offered. The older generation, Universal Analytics, stopped collecting data for standard accounts on 1 July 2023, and from 1 July 2024 Google deleted its data and made it unavailable even for reading, including through the interface for applications. If only the old measurement code runs on your site, gas has nowhere to take the numbers from and you need to deploy Google Analytics 4 measurement on the site.
• Who is allowed to do what. All roles including Viewer may view the data. User and Administrator may connect a property, and only an Administrator may unlink it.
• Pages analysis depends on your plan. It is not available in the Lite plan and its menu item is not shown at all. In the Business plan you can monitor 2 pages, in the Enterprise and Tourism plans 50 pages.

What all pages in the section have in common

The header of every page contains the same set of controls:

• Property selector. When you have several Google Analytics properties connected, you switch between them here. Your choice is remembered even after you move to another page in the section.
• Period selector. The period always ends yesterday, today is never shown in this section. The reason is described in the part Where the numbers come from and how fresh they are.
• Refresh button, which reloads what is on the page.
• On pages with a timeline there is also a breakdown (Day, Week, Month, Quarter, Year) and a graph type switch.

There are two kinds of pages in the section. A metric page shows how one number develops over time. A breakdown page shows how one number splits according to some criterion, for example by country or browser. How to read a breakdown is described in a separate part below.

Overview

Overview is the opening page of the section and summarises the main numbers for the selected period on cards we call widgets. By default you will find here:

• Sessions as a graph,
• Users as a graph,
• Bounce rate as a single number,
• Average session duration as a single number,
• User engagement time as a single number.

You can change the card layout. On the right in the header there is a button with three dots and it contains three options:

The changes apply to your user account and to this customer account. Your colleagues will see no change.

Audience

The Audience group answers the question of how many people visit the site and what they view it with. It contains two kinds of pages.

Metrics with a timeline

• Sessions is the number of visits, that is individual arrivals at the site. One person can make several visits in a day.
• Users is the number of people who visited the site. The number is therefore always lower than sessions.
• New users is the number of people who came to the site for the first time.
• Page views is the total number of pages viewed. One visit usually contains several of them.
• Page views per session says how many pages a person goes through on average during one visit.
• Average session duration is the average length of one visit in seconds.
• Bounce rate is the share of visits that do not count as engaged: the visitor did not spend enough time on the site, did not open another page and did not perform any tracked action. With this metric a lower value is better, unlike the others.

All these pages look the same. There are three cards at the top and a graph below them.

• Total (or Average for average-based metrics) sums the selected period up into one number.
• Short-term trend and Long-term trend compare the recent development with the previous period.
• Graph shows the course according to the selected breakdown. Depending on your graph settings, a comparison curve for the previous period can also be drawn into it.

Breakdowns

• Sessions by content shows the individual page addresses of your site, that is the part of the address that follows the domain name, including any parameters. This is how you find out which pages people really read.
• Browsers splits traffic by browser (Chrome, Safari, Edge).
• Operating system splits traffic by the device system (Windows, Android, iOS, macOS).
• Screen resolution shows the screen resolutions of visitors, for example 1920x1080. It is useful when deciding which widths to tune the site for.
• Device brands shows the manufacturer or brand of the device (Samsung, Apple).
• Device models shows specific models, for example iPhone X or SM-G950F.

Geographical data

The Geographical data group splits traffic by where people come from and in which language. All four pages are breakdowns of the Sessions metric.

• Language is the language set in the visitor's browser or device. It is not the language in which they viewed the page.
• Country shows which country the visit came from.
• Region is a higher territorial unit that Google derives from the visitor's IP address.
• Municipality shows the town or municipality, again derived from the IP address.

Acquisition: where visitors come from

The Acquisition group answers the question of how people got to the site. All four pages are breakdowns of the Users metric.

• Channels group traffic into groups defined by Google itself according to its own rules. They include, for example, Direct (a direct arrival, the person typed the address or came from a bookmark), Organic Search (an unpaid result in a search engine), Paid Search (paid search advertising), Referral (a link on another site), Organic Social and Paid Social (social networks), Email, Display and others. The rules are set by Google and cannot be changed in gas.
• Source sites show the specific source that brought the visitor to the site for the first time, for example google, seznam.cz or facebook.com.
• Medium shows the way it happened, for example organic (an unpaid search result), cpc (a paid click), referral (a link from another site) or email.
• Campaigns show the campaign name. It reaches Google Analytics from parameters in the link (so-called UTM parameters) used to tag links in newsletters, in paid advertising or on social networks. A link without these parameters has no campaign name.

How to read a breakdown

Every breakdown page has a pie chart on the left and a table on the right.

• The table contains all items sorted from the largest and is paginated. You switch the number of rows per page in its footer.
• The pie chart keeps things readable: it does not draw very small shares individually, but merges them into a single slice labelled (other). They remain separate in the table, so the pie chart and the table can differ in the number of items, but not in the numbers.
• Each table row has a Show graph button. It opens a window with the development of that one item over time, so you can compare, for example, how traffic coming from Facebook developed during the month.

Where the numbers come from and how fresh they are

gas asks Google Analytics for the numbers directly, so you see what Google has available at that moment. Several things follow from this that are worth knowing before you start comparing numbers.

• Today is not shown. The period always ends yesterday, because numbers for a day in progress would be incomplete and confusing.
• Not even yesterday has to be final. Google states that data processing takes 24 to 48 hours and that numbers in reports may change during that time. A difference in the last two days is therefore normal, not an error.
• Attributing conversions to a source is calculated for even longer. According to Google, attribution for key events can change for up to 12 days from the moment the event occurred. Retrospective changes in campaign and source numbers are therefore not a mistake.
• History goes as far back as the measurement does. Google Analytics does not calculate data retrospectively, so gas can show the period from the moment measurement on the site started collecting. The data retention setting, chosen in Google Analytics as 2 or 14 months, does not affect standard reports, it only limits detailed explorations inside Google Analytics.
• Data from the old Universal Analytics is not available. Google deleted it in 2024, so nobody has anywhere to take it from.

Pages analysis

Pages analysis is in the same section, but it has nothing to do with Google Analytics. It does not measure visitors, it measures the website itself: how quickly a page loads and how well it is technically built.

It uses Google Lighthouse, a measurement tool from Google. It works by opening the page itself like an ordinary visitor, measuring the course of loading and rating the page. It needs no code on your site and no linked account, you only enter the page address. The mobile view of the page is measured, because a large share of visits now comes from phones and they are more demanding in terms of speed.

Measurement runs automatically once a day, at night. For a newly added page the first values therefore appear only the following day.

How to add a page

You can also measure individual subpages, not just the home page. How many pages you may monitor is determined by your plan. When the limit is used up, the button turns grey and a coloured bar with an explanation appears above the table.

What the table shows

The URL column contains the address, which you can click to open the page. The Last update time column says when the measurement last ran. The other columns are the measurement results, and each has a coloured square that hints at whether the value is fine.

Score is the average of four areas that Lighthouse rates: performance, accessibility (how the page is used with a screen reader, for example), best practices and readiness for search engines (SEO).

Hovering the mouse over a column name shows an explanation of the value. Each row also has a Show graph button, which shows the development of the values over time, and a button to delete the measurement. Deletion is irreversible and only the Administrator role may do it.

Common problems

There is no data in the Websites section

Most often because no Google Analytics property is connected to the customer account. Check Settings → Customer account → Linked accounts. If the property is there, verify in the top bar that you have switched to the customer account the website belongs to.

There is no property to select in the selector at the top

The message No account appears instead of data. Click Connect account and gas takes you to the connection settings. There, first sign in to your Google account and then pick a specific property and connect it to the customer account.

There is data in gas, but I do not see any Google account in Connected services

The service link belongs to the user account of whoever signed in to Google, whereas the connected property belongs to the customer account, that is to the whole team. When a colleague connected it, you will see only your own links in Settings → Connected services. You can find out who the owner is in Settings → Customer account → Linked accounts in the Who links the account column. Their email is there and you can write to them straight away.

The data stopped on a certain day

The Google access has probably expired, for example after a password change or after permissions were removed. In Settings → Connected services → Google such a row has a yellow Paused label. Click the label and then Reconnect. This is also common when the connection was created by a colleague who no longer works at the company. A detailed procedure is in a separate article about restoring a link after access expires.

Today is missing from the graph

That is intentional, the period in this section always ends yesterday. Numbers for a day in progress are not yet complete, so they are not shown.

The numbers differ from what Google Analytics shows

The three most common reasons:

• Processing on Google's side. Data is processed for 24 to 48 hours and changes during that time. Figures for the last two days are therefore not final.
• A different definition of the Users metric. gas shows the total number of users, whereas reports in Google Analytics itself show active users by default, that is those who engaged with the site. These are two different numbers and the one in gas tends to be higher.
• A different period. Verify that you are comparing the same range of days in Google Analytics. In gas the period ends yesterday.

Most values in device brands and models are (not set)

Google fills in the device brand and model only for mobile devices. Visits from a computer do not have this information and therefore fall into the (not set) value. If people come to the site mostly from computers, a large share of (not set) is expected.

Part of the visits show (not set) or the wrong city in geography

Google derives the location from the IP address. With company networks, mobile operators and connections through a VPN a different city often comes out, and where the location cannot be determined Google reports (not set). More accurate data cannot be obtained from Google Analytics, this is a property of the measurement, not a fault of gas.

I do not see our campaigns in Campaigns

A campaign name reaches Google Analytics only from links that have UTM parameters in the address. A link without them carries no campaign and the visit is classified elsewhere. If you are only starting with campaigns, have your links for newsletters, advertising and posts tagged with UTM parameters and they will appear in the report from that moment on.

Source sites and Channels do not add up to the same number

That is correct. Source sites and Medium describe where a given person came to the site from for the first time, whereas Channels and Campaigns describe individual visits. The totals are therefore not equal and cannot be reconciled with each other.

The table has more items than the pie chart

The pie chart merges very small shares into a single (other) slice so that it stays readable. The table lists them individually. The numbers are the same in both cases, only the way they are displayed differs.

I cannot see data older than a certain date

Google Analytics does not calculate data retrospectively, so the history starts on the day the measurement on the site started collecting. An older period therefore does not exist. If you used Universal Analytics before, Google deleted that data in 2024 and it cannot be obtained through gas or directly from Google.

There is only one property in the selector, even though we monitor several websites

Either only one is really connected, or your plan limits the number of profiles per network. Connected properties above the limit stay in the list of linked accounts, but they cannot be selected in the selector in the page header. The solution is to unlink a property you no longer monitor, or to have your plan upgraded.

The Pages analysis item is missing from the menu

This feature is not available in the Lite plan and its menu item is not shown at all. If you need it, write to us through the contact form and we will arrange a plan upgrade.

The Create measurement button cannot be pressed

There are two possible causes. Either you have the Viewer role, which may only view data, or the number of pages allowed by your plan is used up. In the second case there is a coloured bar with an explanation above the table, and hovering the mouse over the button shows text with the current number of used slots.

The new page is in the table but has no values

Measurement runs automatically once a day at night. Until it runs, the columns stay empty and there is a dash instead of values. Wait until the next day.

The score differs from what another speed measurement tool showed me

Every measurement is a separate page load and its result naturally fluctuates depending on server load, network speed and the content displayed on the page at that moment. gas also measures the mobile view of the page, which tends to be slower than the view on a computer. Do not take a single number literally, rather watch the development over time using the Show graph button.

The score dropped from one day to the next

First look at the graph for the given row. A one-off fluctuation is usually caused by the measurement hitting a worse moment. If the value stays low on the following days too, something on the page has changed, for example large images, new embedded content or measurement scripts have been added.

The measurement cannot be deleted

Only the Administrator role may delete a measurement. For other roles the button is unavailable. Ask the administrator of the customer account, or have your role changed.

The address cannot be saved

The URL address field only accepts a complete address including the https:// beginning (or http://). The form will reject www.priklad.cz on its own. Copy the address from the browser's address bar, where it is always in complete form.

We added a new page to the site, but it is not in Sessions by content

Only addresses that someone actually visited during the selected period get into the breakdown. Try extending the period. If the page is missing not only from the breakdown but has no visits at all, verify with whoever manages your website that the Google Analytics measurement code runs on it.

If you are not sure about something, write to us through the contact form.