What Is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google which allows you to analyse your website traffic. By implementing tracking code across every page of your website, you are able to collect useful data about every visitor to your site.
What can you do with Google Analytics?
Once installed, you are able to gain insights into a whole host of website visitor information each time they come to your site including:
- Pages visited
- Actions performed - e.g. button clicks, downloads, videos viewed
- eCommerce data - total revenue, transactions and items purchased
- How they arrived at your site - via organic search, paid search, referral, social or direct
- Location data
- Technology and device data
- Visitors demographics including age and gender
This is essential data when analysing and assessing the impact of any digital marketing strategy and website performance as a whole, therefore, it's imperative that when added to a site, Google Analytics is configured to ensure your data is accurate.
There are of course, always issues faced with setting up most tracking accounts and ensuring data is accurate whether that be via mis-configuration, or spam.
Common Google Analytics Issues
- Spam - there are 000s bots out there determined to skew your website's tracking data. They can be blocked, but first you may have to identify them - Google does it's best to block these by default (provided you switch on this setting) - but the battle against spam is never ending.
- Code added to multiple sites/configurations - this is when code is added to a test site, or a partner site and inflates your true activity.
- Code isn't added to every page, meaning key visits are missed
- Internal traffic (e.g. your office) isn't blocked, meaning the data is not a true reflection of natural site activity
- eCommerce tracking isn't actually switched on
- Tracking is not configured to run across multiple domains - e.g. sub domains or payment sites
And whilst not issues, many accounts do not take advantage of functions such as site search tracking, goal values and custom alerts which mean they are missing out on key insights into user activity on the site.
How Can Organic Digital Help?
The audit process will ensure your site doesn't have any configuraiton issues that means analytics isn't over or underreporting your site traffic. This is done by checking things like:
- You have the latest version of analytics on your site
- The code is in place on each page
- You have filters in place to block out unncessary traffic being tracked
- Goals are in place to give you valuable insight to visitor activity and see which pages are (and aren't) contributing towards your site's success
- Ecommerce tracking is capturing every transaction correctly
- Alerts are in place for if/when traffic drops due to technical or SEO issues
Useful Google Analytics Resources
If you want to find out more about Google Analytics, the following resources are a good starting point, alternatively, if you want any assistance with your configuration fill in the contact form below:
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