Issue with chrome store google analytics property

[Travel Arrow]

Seems like our GA property stopped receiving events from the chrome store page earlier today. Anyone else experiencing this issue?

[Arnoud Kooi]

Yes, seeing the same. Already any guidance to move to GA4?

[Oliver Dunk]

Just noting that I've seen this. I'll ask internally to see if we've made any changes.

Oliver Dunk | DevRel, Chrome Extensions | https://developer.chrome.com/ | London, GB

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Chromium Extensions" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to chromium-extens...@chromium.org.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/chromium-extensions/9578f347-8422-4dcb-9c10-a728db519075n%40chromium.org.

[Oliver Dunk]

Hi again,

I just wanted to confirm that something changed on our side and we've found a possible fix. I'll let you know once it's live.

Thanks for reporting this!

Oliver Dunk | DevRel, Chrome Extensions | https://developer.chrome.com/ | London, GB

[Harpaul Sambhi]

Hi Oliver - did the Chrome Store go down during this time, or was it simply the analytics part going down? We also noted a 30 hour gap between Feb 14 - Feb 15 (ending 9 AM PST)

[Zach Warneke]

Hi! Eng from CWS here - due to a bug, we stopped sending data to developer properties for a bit (the store did not go down). Sorry for any inconvenience caused. As mentioned above, the issue should've been resolved around 9 am PST yesterday.

Zach

[Travel Arrow]

@Zach @Oliver - the issue seems to have happened again today for the track_install routes. 

[Oliver Dunk]

Hi,

I just wanted to acknowledge this - thanks again for the heads up.

We had just tried to make a similar change to last time, but were hopeful we had fixed all of the issues.

I've passed this along and we'll make sure to keep this thread updated.

Oliver Dunk | DevRel, Chrome Extensions | https://developer.chrome.com/ | London, GB

[Zach Warneke]

Hi again! The track_install path should be fixed now. We have a few of these custom paths that we send events for, and they were being sent as normal page view events instead recently (so you may have seen slightly more normal page views for your extension while the track_install ones were missing).

I am a little curious, are the track_install page views useful? We also have some internal metrics that track installs, although those metrics are aggregated daily (e.g. see the "Installs" tab on the dev dashboard: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/cws-analytics-revamp/).

Zach

[Travel Arrow]

Thanks! Yeah they are useful to see real time performance of marketing campaigns as we can't always wait one day to iterate on campaigns.

[David Emelianov]

Hello, it looks like we are still having issues tracking the track_install path. The install event itself is being captured in Analytics, but it seems that it can no longer differentiate between Paid and Non-Paid traffic. Our hunch is that the gclid inserted by auto-tagging is being lost by the Webstore.  

Some context:

We added our Google Analytics UA property to our Webstore page 1-2 years ago. This has been extremely useful to track the performance of Google Search Ads, which we point directly to our Webstore landing page. Since our Google Analytics account is linked to our Google Ads account, we are able to ingest the "install" data from the Webstore into Google Ads and automatically optimize performance based on the conversion data. These ads have been running for about 8 months with this setup, and everything has been working perfectly.

Around March 2nd, the "install" conversion data from the Webstore stopped flowing into Google Ads. We didn't change our ad spend or our ad configuration, and the number of clicks on the ads remained the same. Without any changes on our side, it seems that Google Ads was no longer receiving any attributed "install" events from Analytics.  Screenshot below:

Here's what we see in Google Analytics. It looks like the "visitors to the webstore landing page" is being reported as normal. There are some dips in overall volume (because ours Ads bidding strategy started getting mixed signals and then we turned off our ad campaigns for a while) but the data looks correct. As you can see, Analytics is able to correctly attribute traffic as "organic" vs "paid" (the green line vs the orange line).

However, if we drill down to our "install" conversions (which are tracked via the track_install path) then the problem becomes clear. Something changed on March 2nd which caused install events to stop being tracked entirely. And then shortly after that, the install events started getting tracked again, but Analytics was no longer able to differentiate between organic and paid conversions. The orange line and the green line completely inverted themselves. 

Is it possible that this was due to a recent change in the webstore? 

We are confident that this behavior is not due to any changes that we have made on our side. Here are some things that we have tried to verify this issue:

- We tried creating a new conversion event in Google Analytics and importing it into ads

- We tried unlinking and relinking our Google Analytics account from our Google Ads account

- We tried creating a brand new Google Analytics account and hooking it up to our Webstore page

- We audited our auto-tagging setup and verified that it was enabled in Google Analytics and in Google Ads. We also manually viewed one of our ads in Google Search and clicked on it to verify that the "gclid" URL param was getting appended property.

- We tried enabling manual auto-tagging overrides

Any assistance you would provide would be greatly appreciated. Currently, this issue is having a massive business impact for us because we are completely unable to run our ad campaigns effectively. If there's any additional details we can provide, we'd be happy to!

Thanks

[Zach Warneke]

Hey David - sorry about this. This does seem likely to be an issue on Chrome Web Store's end. Just for our own investigation, do you mind sharing the the "gclid" URL param that is getting appended? Feel free to email this to me directly at zwar...@google.com if you'd prefer. Thanks!

Zach

[David Emelianov]

Hi Zach, I appreciate the quick response. 

I just searched for one of our ad keywords and clicked on the Google Search Ad. This is the Chrome Web Store URL that it took me to, with the gclid URL param automatically appended to it:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unsubscribe-from-emails-w/jdlcknnokoelkdobgacandnnnmoblhgh?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=US%20EN%20Ext%20Trimbox%20Broad%20Match&gclid=CjwKCAjwzuqgBhAcEiwAdj5dRky2YHACA4ZBebzgTapToZJerLI4lDCDlJoWBLlqq4RRTCO_P5iRsRoCBwkQAvD_BwE

Hope that helps. Please let me know if there's anything else.

Thanks,

David

[Sidwyn Koh]

Hi, it looks like track_install isn't working well for GA4. 

We can't seem to create an event to track installs based on the page_path. Page location, referrer and title are there, but not page path. However, page location somehow doesn't turn up any /track_install URLs.

Has anyone been able to create events / conversions in GA4 to track installs?

[Zach Warneke]

Hi,

Just wanted to give a quick update that we decided to add a custom "install" event to developer GA4 properties by default going forward (since the "track_install" page view was fairly hacky). You should see this event on your property now with data starting sometime last week. Please let me know if you aren't able to see it! (I'm not sure what will happen if you had previously created a custom "install" event though - you may want to delete it if you've already made one based on the "track_install" path.)

Zach

[Arnoud Kooi]

Thats great!

In the new analytics page, is there a way to get today's visits by hour view? (Sorry if offtopic)

[Sidwyn Koh]

That's amazing Zach - thanks for working on this. Will definitely be very helpful!

[David Emelianov]

Hi Zach, thanks again for this fix!

Are there any plans to allow us to ingest our "track install" event into our Google Ads property? 

We were able to do this with the old setup, because we had Admin access to our Google Analytics instance for the webstore. But after the move to GA4, we no longer have Admin access so we cannot ingest the install data into our Google Ads account.

This has completely killed our ability to optimize acquisition campaigns by "install" performance. Huge step backwards with a serious business impact for us.

Thanks,

David