How can I view individual hits to pages within a GA custom report

Question

I would like to compare some data between a 3rd party analytics tool and GA.

Now I would love to see the IP addresses that Ga is receiving however it seems that they do not reveal this information, fine, however, I cannot find a way to use the flat table in the GA custom report to show me the following if possible;

Full Date Time (Seems as though they don't want you to have this either) Browser Version Browser Width & Height Page (from the hit)

And I would like this data not to be grouped by the metric, this way I can see that if the same user has hit a page 3 times it isn't grouped.

If anyone can help please let me know. If the question is poorly phrased please let me know.

Thanks,

Connor.

Answer 1

This requires some work, and it will allow the breakdown only for future hits, not for hits that are already collected.

To view individual hits you need to create a hit based dimension that is unique per hit. Unless your page has an amazing amount of traffic a timestamp in milliseconds (e.g. new Date().getTime()) will be sufficient (for your report you might want to format that in a nice way). So in the admin section of your GA property you go to custom definitions, create a hit scoped custom dimension, and then modify your pagecode to send the timestamp to that dimension. Hit scoped means it is attached to the pageview (or other interacton hit) it is sent with.

If you want to break down your report by user you need the clientid (clientid is how Google recognizes that hits belong to the same user). Again, send it as a custom dimension.

This does not tell you how many sessions the user had (there is no session identifier in GA). If you need to know that you can create a session scoped custom dimension and send a random number along ("session scope" means that GA only stores the last value in a session, so you don't need to maintain a session id over multiple pageviews, since the last value will be set for all hits within the session). The number of different sessions ids per client id then tells you the number of sessions per user.

The takeaway is that GA only shows aggregated data, and if you want to defeat this mechanism you need to throw data at it that cannot be aggregated further. You might run into other constraints (i.e. there is a limited number of rows per report).