Business owners and marketers have quite a few options when it comes to tools for collecting data. Some may be gathering information from different sources and putting it all into a spreadsheet for analysis. Others may have a custom BI solution using technologies such as MySQL and ETL procedures for making sense of the data. For collecting data from web properties, Google Analytics is one of the best solutions.
However, most just get the code, forward it to the developer and get it installed. While this basic Google Analytics setup can help you get started – any information is better than no information at all – there are a few things business owners and marketers should consider if they want to get actual value from the data they collect.
As a word of caution – this post does contain some technical aspects which may require a developer’s assistance with implementation. Fear not, however, it’s nothing to be scared of.
Decide what valuable data means for you
This matters most before you install Google Analytics. Take a moment and think about what kind of information is valuable for you and how you can track that. It might be important for your business to know how many people fill in a contact form, how many make a purchase or how many view a key page.
This matters because unless you have all the necessary data points, you won’t be able to build reports to get value from Google Analytics.
Unlike Mixpanel, Google Analytics records data only from installation onwards. So, even if you install the code on your website, without the proper setup you might not be able to get all the information you want. If you have to work with a new setup, you will have to wait until Google Analytics collects the data in order to answer the question you’re asking.
To find out what data you need, start by creating a list of questions about what you want to find out. Here are some suggestions:
- What information is essential about your users? The technology they’re using, geographical location, screen resolution?
- How do visitors find and access your website?
- What do you want to know about what visitors do on your website?
- Which actions are important for your business?
- What steps do users need to take towards those actions?
Important: Tracking information such as interest categories requires a change to the standard Google Analytics tracking code. It doesn’t matter if you tick the box in the Google Analytics interface, you also need to make a change to your tracking code. This applies to subdomains as well.
Now that you’ve decided on what you want to track, you need to make sure that you’re getting clean data. Here’s how to do that:
1. Filter out internal data from Google Analytics
This is a key step to make sure that you’re getting reliable info. You probably access your website yourself. Also, after website changes, testers will probably check to make sure that everything works properly. Also, your coworkers may access your website as well. All this may lead to a higher number of page views, sessions and users – even if they’re not real.
To avoid mixing internal, testing data with actual data, you need to filter it out from your Google Analytics view. This isn’t complicated. First, check for your IP. (If you’re not sure of it, google What is my IP)
Next, it’s time to create the filter that will remove the internal traffic. To do this, go to your Google Analytics account > Admin > Property > View. Filters work on a view level. Here, click Create new Filter, select from the dropdown IP address, and paste. If you work in an office that uses multiple IPs, check with your network administrator for a range of IPs.
2. Keep clean URLs
One of the things you probably want to know is if certain important pages of your website are being viewed. Yet having thousands of similar URLs without any possibility to sort and group them will make it impossible to gain any insight. Analyzing each individually will require a lot of work. Exporting the data and sorting manually isn’t a good solution either. It takes a lot of time and, in case you’re missing some information, you need to start over from scratch.
The best solution here is to consider the URL structure. Build your website links so that they make sense. Also, you could use a common parameter that makes it possible to filter all the pages with similar content. For instance, if you’re a SaaS that allows users to generate content, make sure that all the generated content can be filtered through a common parameter.
Only as a last resort, you can opt for a filter that rewrites URLs and allows you to get data that can be analyzed for insights. However, it’s advisable that you create a separate view to apply this URL rewriting filter to. That way, you’re not writing out potentially useful data.
Also, avoid using # sings when creating URLs as these make up for broken URLs. If, however, you are using # sings, Simo Ahava has a very quick fix for you in this article.
3. Track your campaigns correctly
Probably one of your main questions is how well do different channels perform. Are the users that come in through social media campaigns more valuable than the ones that are referred from various sites? How well do paid search campaigns perform compared to your email marketing campaigns?
If you don’t track your campaigns properly, Google Analytics won’t be able to provide you with answers to those questions.
By default, Google Analytics identifies traffic that comes through search engines, referral, and social media. However, unless you set up correctly, it won’t be able to tell the difference between organic social media and paid social media campaigns. Similarly, any traffic coming from email marketing campaigns will be tracked as direct traffic by default.
In order for Google Analytics to be able to identify all traffic sources correctly, you need to tag your URLs correctly. Don’t be scared – all you need to is add a UTM parameter to your campaigns. You can use the Google Analytics URL builder. All you need to do is add utm_medium, utm_source, and utm_campaign so Google Analytics can identify the medium and the campaign driving visits.
For paid campaigns that run on Google Adwords, you simply need to connect your Analytics and Adwords account. By default, once you do that, all your traffic will be tracked as “cpc”, both search and display. However, you can make combinations of medium and campaign name in order to analyze and compare search vs display campaigns.
4. Consider hostnames, domains, and subdomains
Data accuracy matters a lot. However, it’s important to know that Google Analytics treats subdomains as a separate website. This becomes a problem when you have multiple subdomains, a root domain running with the same tracking code.
Let’s say you have blog.mydomain.com and mydomain.com using the same tracking code. By default, Google Analytics will consider both as start pages. When you check the Behavior > Content> Pages report, the / will count both views from mydomain.com and blog.mydomain.com. You could see there 1000 pageviews. 100 of those may be generated by blog.mydomain.com and the other 900 by mydomain.com. Without the proper tracking in place, you won’t be able to tell the difference.
The solution to this is simple, all you need is a filter that shows the entire URL name in the reporting. Here’s how to set it up.
Important: If you have set up goals prior to using filters to show the entire URL, double check them to see if they haven’t been affected by the filter. For example, an URL goal set up for starts with: contact will no longer work because your new URL starts with mydomain.com/contact.
5. Set up goals
Goals allow you to see if your website is really performing. You can have a lot of visits, long average session duration. All those can be rather worthless unless your visitors perform actions that matter for your business on your website.
In order to find out how well your website performs, you need to set up goals. Since this is an important topic altogether, I recommend that you check out this article.
To sum up
Google Analytics is a valuable source of data. However, in order to extract accurate useful information, you need to make sure that you have the right setup to get clean, accurate data.
One of the best things about Google Analytics is that it’s pretty flexible when it comes to reports. You can use the standard ones or configure your own custom reports. But if you haven’t laid a solid foundation to start from, you’ll either start looking for information that you’re not recording or you won’t be able to tell if the information you have is correct.
The advice above is ground level work that any marketer or small business owner should do in order to make sure they’re getting value of Google Analytics