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Google Analytics is a powerful tool that, in the simplest terms, helps you understand customer behavior on your site, as well as how well your marketing programs are performing. On a deeper level, Google Analytics (GA) can help inform you about pages that need to be optimized, products that are selling well, content that’s effective, identify behavior of specific customer segments, and identify profitable marketing campaigns and tactics. And best of all, it’s free!
While doing a basic installation of GA can be as simple as copying and pasting some JavaScript into your website’s content management system, it’s not always foolproof. We look at some common GA issues and how you can fix them.
One of the most common problems we see with Google Analytics is that not every page on a site is tagged with the GA code. This becomes particularly problematic when using subdomains or some ecommerce platforms that don’t give full access to the shopping cart.
An easy way to check for this is to install the Google Tag Assistant on Chrome. This will identify what GA tags, if any, are firing on a given page. You can also use a site audit tool such as Screaming Frog to identify missing code.
One of the main metrics businesses often look at is pageviews and bounce rates on a website. Double counting can occur if your Google Analytics script was added to your site more than once. We often see this if it was added in the actual code of the site by a developer, and then also added through a content management interface or Google Tag Manager.
This overinflation of pageviews and bounce rates can cause you to question the effectiveness of your marketing programs and site usability.
Fortunately, this is generally an easy fix. You can look at your code manually, and see if there are multiple instances of the Google JavaScript by viewing the page source in your browser, or by using the Inspect option in Chrome. If you’re not comfortable with HTML, you can use Google’s Chrome extension, called Google Tag Assistant. If you see that there are multiple instances of GA installed on your site, you can then review your site code and/or CMS to see where it’s duplicated.
If you’re seeing a spike in referral traffic traffic to your site, that can be great news. Unfortunately, it’s often due to spam links and bot traffic. This can artificially inflate your traffic numbers, so it’s important to mitigate this in your reporting, so you have a better understanding of real traffic and traffic sources for your site.
There are a number of ways to keep GA from reporting on spam traffic, as well as filtering spam traffic from your reporting, and some are much more involved than others. But, the first, and easiest step is to go to your analytics admin panel and exclude hits from known bots and spiders (Admin > View > View Settings > Bot Filtering).
(Note: We’ll talk about how to remove traffic from specific spammers in a future blog.)
Every time you, or one of your team members visits your site, that visit is counted in Google Analytics. So imagine if you visit your site regularly, are making coding or content changes, and refresh the page to see how those changes look. All of those visits and pageviews add up quickly. Now imagine if you have a team doing the same thing. Those numbers can inflate exponentially.
We had one retail client whose call center used their active website to look up part numbers for phone customers. As you can imagine, this unknowingly added thousands of pageviews and on-site searches to its reporting that greatly inflated their numbers and created inaccurate site usage behaviors.
If you or your company has a static IP address or range, you can filter this internal traffic from your reporting so you can eliminate these non-customer metrics. You can do this by going to Admin > View > Filters. Note, we recommend creating a separate view for any filter, since it will impact all future reporting. We always like to keep one view that is all traffic, and completely unfiltered just to have a “raw” view. Be cautious when applying a filter to your view; if you’re filtering by an IP that is too broad, you may be eliminating entire ISPs (i.e., internet providers) from your reporting.
While not technically a mistake, not using or correctly setting up goals and conversions is a definite miss. Setting up goals on your site can help you track those behaviours that are important and that can lead to more business and customer acquisition. This includes things like newsletter signups, downloads, contact form submissions, etc. And obviously, if you have a commerce site, you want to make sure that purchases are being recorded correctly as well. By measuring these goals, you can see what marketing channels are the most effective, what content generates acquisition, and where you can improve your site.
At its most basic, deploying Google Analytics can be simple depending on your website platform, business needs, and your technical expertise. However, this data is critical to understanding your business and optimizing your website and marketing efforts. If you have any question as to the accuracy of your data, contact us today to help you implement it correctly or to conduct an audit.
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