Line chart not appearing for 'Unique Visitors From Search' widget on Site Kit Dashboard

[wpdarren]

Bug Description

On Site Kit Dashboard the Unique Visitors from Search widget does not have the line chart underneath it. Initially, I thought it was related to #4086 but after further investigation it appears that it was an issue from a previous release.

The line chart should appear as per other widgets.

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Acceptance criteria

• The "Unique Visitors from Search" widget should also show a sparkline when there is 0 data. (It should be a green flat sparkline like in the 0 data case in other widgets in e.g. the Search Funnel.)
  • The "Bounce Rate" widget (in the entity dashboard) does show a sparkline even with 0 data (as expected), so there seems to be something off specifically with the "Unique Visitors from Search" widget, not necessarily all Analytics widgets.

Implementation Brief

• Update DashboardSearchVisitorsWidget to remove ga:channelGrouping from the dimensions argument for all reports in the component, so that the sparkline report only uses ga:date for dimensions and the visitors report doesn't use any dimensions.
  • This will ensure that the sparkline response includes the results properly grouped by only date, which should fix the problem with the rows being empty.
  • The ga:channelGrouping dimension should have never been included here in the first place, since we don't want results grouped by it. It wouldn't even make sense since we use ga:channelGrouping as a dimension filter so it would only ever be a single group anyway.
• Update the accompanying DashboardSearchVisitorsWidget.stories.js file so that the sparkline and visitor report arguments are adjusted accordingly to the component change, to ensure the Storybook stories still work as expected.

Test Coverage

N/A

QA Brief

• You'll need an account with Analytics connected but zero data. If you don't already have one, setting up a fresh Jurassic Ninja site and connecting Analytics will accomplish this, although you'll have to wait a while for the data to become available.
• Navigate to the Dashboard.
• Verify the Unique Visitors from Search widget shows a zero and does have a flat line beneath it.

Changelog entry

• Fix missing Unique Visitors From Search sparkline issue for zero data state.

[asvinb]

Related issue and possible fix: #3774

[felixarntz]

@asvinb The current IB here isn't a proper solution for the problem. While it would backfill dates, the problem here is somewhere else, which is slightly more obscure: The only time that Analytics is expected to not return any dates despite ga:date being requested as a dimension is when Analytics is gathering data. However, this is already ruled out when this widget is rendered since it's only rendered if Analytics isn't gathering data. On the server-side we set the includeEmptyRows option for Analytics, so it should never have missing dates in the first place.

I've researched and tested this, and the problem for why this happens (possibly also fixes #3774) is that for some reason the DashboardSearchVisitorsWidget includes ga:channelGrouping as a dimension. This is entirely unnecessary since we don't need that dimension, we only care about ga:date as a dimension. We do need ga:channelGrouping as a filter, but not as an actual dimension to group results by. I tested the same request we currently fire without the ga:channelGrouping dimension, and it works as expected then and includes the dates. I'm not entirely sure why that is, but maybe there's some extra complexity around using multiple dimensions, which we typically don't do in Site Kit. Anyway, in the case here that second dimension is entirely unnecessary.

Since I've tested and found the above solution, I'm going to update the IB accordingly. cc @aaemnnosttv @eugene-manuilov for awareness - this is probably worth keeping in mind for the future, should something similar arise again.

[asvinb]

Thanks @felixarntz , that's some really helpful info.

[aaemnnosttv]

We do need ga:channelGrouping as a filter, but not as an actual dimension to group results by.

@felixarntz are you saying we can use it in the request as a filter without listing it as a dimension?

[felixarntz]

@aaemnnosttv Yes - dimensionFilters and dimensions have no relationship with each other, except they both deal with dimensions. But one is a filter and the other one defines how to "format" the response, so they're unrelated.

[eugene-manuilov]

Ok, IB looks good to me. ✔️

[wpdarren]

QA Update: ✅

Verified:

• The Unique Visitors from Search widget shows a zero and does have a flat line beneath it.
• When The Unique Visitors from Search widget has data, there is an appropriate line chart underneath it.