Before you consider using the data in your Google Analytics account to start seeking insights and drawing conclusions, there are a number of things you should check to see if they’re being handled correctly/optimally.
This is not an exhaustive list, but in preparation for a webinar I’m doing on Google Analytics, I started putting together a number of common pitfalls – configuration and tracking details that could potentially introduce flaws in your Google Analytics data.
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is everything you have on a single domain?
- cross-domain tracking is tricky, but common for sites that have a ‘secure’ component like commerce, or donations, or login areas
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is it OK to count traffic from your staff?
- Internal network traffic can skew your numbers and give you a very twisted view of what’s going on
- For example, if IT installs browsers on all your computers to load your homepage by default!
- In the Admin area, set up filters to suppress views from inside your network
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do your URLs have parameters that make pages that are the same seem unique?
- http://sfaf.org/gsearch/?q=hiv+oral
- That should probably be configured as a Site Search parameter (in the Admin area)
- https://actnow.tofighthiv.org/site/TRR/AIDSLIFECYCLE2014/AIDSLifeCycleCenter/488914570?pg=tfind&fr_id=1630
- The URL above has a long number just before the question mark that’s unique to the visitor. So in tracking, we’ll see hundreds of pages with a single page view, when in actuality, they’re all the same page being viewed by different people
- consider setting up Filters in the Admin area to change tracked URLs so that pages are aggregated in the way that makes the most sense
- multi-page transactions/donations?
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do you know what those URLs look like?
- walk through the process and copy the URLs into a text document so you can create conversion goals and funnels
Checking that you’re tracking:
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Use the Chrome browser, and add the plug in called ‘Google Analytics Debugger’
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Navigate to your site
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Hit F12 to open the Console
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Activate the GA debugger plug in
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Navigate the site and see what data is being sent to Google in the console. This is pre-filtered data.