Lots of people are (sensibly) using Google Analytics (GA) these days.
It’s free, packed with an ever expanding incredible feature list and as easy to install on your site as could be made possible.
The problem a lot of the time is that companies know they should be collecting data but beyond that are unaware of any configuration being necessary or exactly how they will use the data they collect in the future.
Now, not knowing which data that they collect is going to be the most useful to them in the future or knowing how they and other stakeholders will want that information presented to them doesn’t matter one bit. Reports can be produced or changed retrospectively. They are purely a way of presenting the data that’s been collected in a format most useful to the recipient.
The problem arises when the data hasn’t been collected properly in the first place. Simply adding GA code to your site is not enough.
Most companies who rely on an external web agency won’t realise that in order to view valuable reports in the future, reports which will enable them to make informed decision making about so much more than just their websites, their must be settings put in place in advance of collecting that data. Settings which cannot be applied retrospectively!
If your data is not filtered correctly as it’s collected then you are going to have big problems being able to interpret it accurately, if at all, down the road.
So if you are a company who uses an external web agency or you have in house developers who maybe have a limited knowledge of GA then make sure you check with them that these steps have been taken. Not getting them right could mean all your reports being worthless and the decisions you make based on those reports being completely wrong for your business even if your interpretation of the data is correct because it’s polluted.
Here are 5 Google analytics essentials that you should make sure are configured correctly in your account:
- Filters
Your data must be filtered as it’s collected to prevent collecting data that you do not want being gathered as well as making sure the data that you do want is correctly identified.You cannot go back and retrospectively apply filters to data which has already been collected.
An example of polluting your data would be allowing visits to your website from your own staff and web teams to be collected and the activities they performed whilst reviewing and updating the site to appear in the reports along with real user data. Visits from certain locations can easily be filtered out of your reports by excluding certain IP addresses.An example of correctly identifying data would be to ensure that you are able to easily identify which subdomain a user visists resides on.
By default Google Analytics only displays the name of the page a person visited in it’s reports so if you have multiple subdomains you wouldn’t easily know whether a person had visited http://a.domain.com/page or http://b.domain.com/page as both would just appear as /page in your reports. A filter can be applied to display the subdomains in the reports making life much easier.
- Goals
Every website has a goal(s). Whether it’s getting people to visit a certain page, perform a certain activity, view x number of pages on their visit or stay on the site for a certain period of time and a website’s success can in it’s most simple form be determined by monitoring and measuring your goal success.
Goals relating to time on site and depth of visit (pages viewed) can be easily reported from the data Google Analytics automatically collects. However if your goals involve an activity being performed such as the number of times a form is successfully completed you will need to setup goals in your GA profile.
For example, if you want to know how many contact enquiries you received through your site’s contact form and you haven’t set it up correctly as a goal with a unique thank you page then you would have to manually add the number of enquires you received up. But you wouldn’t know the useful stuff like how they found your site, what they did on the site prior to contacting you and what prompted their enquiry.
- Link your Adwords account
If you don’t link your Adwords account to your Analytics account then you will not be able to identify which keywords in your reports were paid ones which generated the visit via a PPC advert and those which results in a successful organic listing.
You also will not be able to identify via your analytics reports which of your PPC keywords and adverts resulted in successfull goals and instead you would need to do it via your Adwords interface and add additional code to your site giving you twice as much work and half as flexible reporting.
- Track on and offline marketing campaigns
You can easily track your on and offline marketing campaigns using the Google URL Builder.
Obviously it’s invaluable to see which of your marketing efforts are working on the site. The URL builder will generate tracking links which you can use on your online marketing campaigns such as mailshots and advertising banners. The traffic which comes from these tracking links will automatically be tagged in your GA reports so you can see which campaigns worked and which didn’t in your goal reports.
The tracking links are long and ugly and whilst you can hide them easily in your online markting you wouldn’t want to put a long horrible url full of variables and symbols on a print advert for example. You can easily get round this by redirecting a nice url such as domain.com/offer to your tracking link so you can measure the success of your offline marketing too in GA.
- Have master profiles as well as segmented accounts
It’s great to have different profiles to monitor different sections of your site.
You might want to have a seperate profile for each subdomain you have or to have profiles set up for subdirectories on your site you want to easily view reports on in isolation such as http://blog.domain.com/ or http://www.domain.com/blog/It’s also a good idea to keep a master profile which accumulates all the data together even you can’t envisage a need for it in the future.
You currently can’t combine the data from different profiles in GA so do yourself a huge favour and have a mster profile just in case you ever do want it. Maybe you will get a chance to advertise across all sections of your site or want to pull up a report of all user demographics.If you never need it then you’ve wasted 10 minutes setting the profiles up. If you ever do it will be the best 10 minutes you’ve invested.
If this has helped you then please let us know using the comments area below and please share with as many people as possible incase it can help them too.
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