Is Your Google Analytics
Data Accurate?
September 18, 2013
Andy Gibson
Digital Marketing Analyst Amin Shawki
1. 1 Billion+ pageviews/year in sites analyzed and supported 2. 50+ Digital marketing training programs a year
Table of Contents
Develop Your Web Analytics Strategy
Google Analytics Tracking Background
Common Pitfalls with Tracking
1. What are your marketing objectives?
2. What are your online KPIs? Is your analytics solution be able to provide you with actionable metrics?
3. What are your long term plans for data?
4. Can you define the metrics you need for both short term and long term success?
Answer this question: “
Why does your website
exist?
”
These are good too:
Table of Contents
Develop Your Web Analytics Strategy
Google Analytics Tracking Background
Common Pitfalls with Tracking
•
4 ways data is pushed into Google Analytics
–
Pageviews
–
Events
–
E-Commerce (items and transactions)
–
Social
•
Other data that you can track
–
Custom variables (pushed with the data from
above calls)
Understanding
Structure
A view represents a distinct view of data from a web property, and provides access to the reports for that property. For
example, within a web property you might have: – One view that has a view of all the data for
www.example.com
– One view that has a view of only AdWords traffic to
www.example.com
– One view that has a view of only traffic to a subdomain like www.sales.example.com
Filters allow you to limit and modify the traffic data that is included in a view.
InfoTrust Property
View by
Region
Language
View by
Directory
View by
Master
View
Dimensions are ways of describing visits,
visitors, pages, products, and events.
Examples of dimensions include
Visitor Type
(whether new visitor or returning visitor),
Source
(the name of a referring
website/search engine ),
Page Title
(the HTML
title of a page on your site)
Table of Contents
Develop Your Web Analytics Strategy
Google Analytics Tracking Background
Common Pitfalls with Tracking
Pitfall - Inconsistent Tagging
•
Most common form of inaccurate data
–
Tracking snippet not on every page of the site,
including subdomains (leads to self-referrals,
increase in visits, higher bounce rates etc.)
–
Tracking snippet duplicated on some pages
–
GA Virtual Pageviews used all over site when not
needed
Pitfall - Inconsistent Tagging
• Subdomains
– By default, GA does not pass cookie data from one subdomain to another. You have to update your GA tracking code to include the ‘_setDomainName’
variable. By updating this, GA will now pass cookies across the subdomains of your website.
<script type="text/javascript"> var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-834138-7']);
_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'infotrustllc.com']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() {
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://' : 'http://') + 'stats.g.doubleclick.net/dc.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
Pitfall - Inconsistent Tagging
Pitfall - Inconsistent Tagging
Pitfall - Incorrect Account Set Up
•
Incorrect URL for web property used
•
Default page used incorrectly
•
Time zone not set correctly
•
E-Commerce setting not enabled
Pitfall - Internal Traffic
• Filtering out internal traffic isextremely important to maintaining accurate data • GA allows you to filter your
traffic by excluding IP
addresses. Note: This does not work for dynamic IP addresses that change.
• How To Exclude Internal Traffic with Dynamic IP Addresses
•
Campaign tagging was not used on external
off-site marketing campaigns
–
Visits from email campaigns are not tracked
properly
–
High amount of direct traffic
•
Campaign tagging used on-site for internal
links
–
Overwrites off-site external marketing campaigns
–
Creates a new session as well
Campaign Traffic
Google URL Builder for Campaigns
test.com?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=OctoberCouponPush
The Google Analytics cost data upload feature allows you to take
exported cost data from non-Google paid campaigns and upload it to
Google Analytics. The cost data is then joined with user-interaction data, enabling detailed ROI analysis for all of your paid campaigns.
• Use this custom report:
http://goo.gl/1Xg0LP
• Shows top landing pages for (not provided) keywords
– Homepage typically means it is branded keyword
• This is a result of the daily database limit being hit in Google Analytics. For any single dimension, GA will only record up to 50,000 rows on a specific day.
• Any dimension with more than 50,000 rows on a single day will get recorded in the (other) dimension.
• One possible fix is to exclude unnecessary query parameters from your reports by stripping them from the URLs.
– Admin > View Settings > Exclude URL Query Parameters
When you create a link between Google Analytics and AdWords, you allow four types of data to flow between the two. This means you can:
– Import Google Analytics goals and transactions into AdWords – View Google Analytics site engagement data in AdWords
– Create remarketing lists in Analytics to use in AdWords for targeting specific audiences
– Automatically view your AdWords click and cost data alongside your Analytics site engagement data
• Not tagging AdWords campaigns will show up in Google Analytics as Google Organic traffic
• Without specific AdWords tagging on campaigns, visits from AdWords will not show up in the Advertising report section of Google Analytics
• Happens by default within the GA interface whenever a data set contains more than 250K visits in a selected time period
• Used to speed up the GA interface, as it can require a good amount of time to query the database and then populate a table within GA. • Just think of how many people use GA at one time and the amount
of data being queried!
• Overview standard reports are pre-aggregated and thus sampling does not take affect, however as soon as you customize the data through filters, advanced segments or custom reports, sampling can occur.
• Note: Sampling occurs at the Web Property level, not View level.
• Sampling is a mathematically accurate way to estimate characteristics of a larger population.
• However, sampling is not 100% accurate!
• A major benefit of Google Analytics Premium is access to
unsampled data.
Pitfall – Sampling in Effect
This indicates sampling has taken
• The free version of GA allows you to have five custom variables (index: 1-5).
_setCustomVar(index, name, value, opt_scope)
• If you have multiple custom variables on your site using the same index number, they will overwrite each other anytime they get pushed to GA.
• This will cause lost and/or confusing data.
• Google Analytics Premium allows you to have 50 custom
variables.
Pitfall – iFrames and 3
rd
Party
Plugins Loading GA Multiple Times
•
If there are iFrames and 3
rdparty plug ins or
widgets on your site loading Google Analytics
events, custom variables, or virtual pageviews,
this can affect the Google Analytics
architecture and set up you have on site
•
If you implement iFrames from your own
Pitfall - Robot Traffic
•
Google blocks most of this traffic
•
Those that it does not, search for criteria then
exclude with filter
–
0 time on page
–
100% bounce
–
100% new
–
100% one browser, version, operating system
–
100% one country
•
When looking at reports, be cognizant of what
filters, advanced segments, and data ranges
you are using.
•
Many times we see clients trying to compare
data that isn’t apples to apples
–
Ex: Comparing different dates ranges, using
different advanced segments.
Pitfall – Using GA Advanced
Table of Contents
Develop Your Web Analytics Strategy
Google Analytics Tracking Background
Common Pitfalls with Tracking
Google Analytics Debugger
Google Tag Assistant
Real-Time with Campaign Tagging
1. Using Real-Time reports for some high volume sites may be difficult because it is not easy to locate yourself
2. This is where campaign tagged URLs and real-time filtering comes in Example: To test infotrustllc.com; use
Custom alerts can be set up to track specific
desired changes that may occur
–
Influx in certain product transactions
–
Sudden drop in traffic to certain content pages
Tag Inspector is an InfoTrust product that will scan all
the tags on your site in real-time and provide you with
a report detailing all the tags and their location on your
site.
It can see inside JavaScript files and Tag Management
Systems for more detailed analysis.
Tag Inspector
Does web analytics drive actionable recommendations
in your organization?
Want More?
1. Current promotion:
• Free 1 hour Google Analytics consultation and assessment with an InfoTrust Web Analyst - Contact Us.
2. Upcoming free webinars:
• Enterprise analytics series – http://goo.gl/NVSFqo • October 30th – 1:00pm EST
Is your company data driven? Start Now.
http://goo.gl/kHZ1N5
• December 4th – 1:00pm EST
Enterprise Analytics Architecture
http://goo.gl/WJdkiq
• December 11th – 1:00pm EST
Mastering Google Analytics Premium Features
