How does the Google Analytics audit work? Does your website have visitors, but you don’t know what they are doing there? Do you get any revenue from your site at all, and if so, through which channel does the most traffic and business come? Which page generates the most sales? Here is a complete explanation.
Do you already work with google analytics, or do you not understand it at all? Would you please read this article to discover the biggest pitfalls and use my tips to avoid them? Here it is.
How Google Analytics Doesn’t Work?
Understandably, you compare the data from Google Analytics with an earlier measurement period.
But…
Is this a fair comparison?
You will most likely already take holiday periods into account, but do you also consider other factors?
What was the weather like during the measurement period?
How was the economy?
Which marketing campaigns did you use?
Comparing measurement periods can be a good way to see progress, but always keep in mind that this comparison is nothing more than an indication. You can never conclude without taking other factors into account.
Working in Google Analytics Audit without asking questions
Google Analytics is meant to answer your questions, not to find answers without asking the questions.
Before you even log in to your Google Analytics account, I advise you to ask yourself a few questions.
What do you want to get out of the data?
Which questions are you looking for an answer to?
When I started working with Google Analytics, I looked at it day and night. I became almost addicted to all the numbers, graphs, and statistics.
Before you know it, you’ll be staring at interesting data for hours (at least it feels like that) without actually getting answers to your questions and without actually coming up with strategic actions.
If you want to work effectively with Google Analytics, let it answer your questions.
Take 10 minutes to write down at least 10 questions.
- What questions would you like to ask Google Analytics?
- What would you like to know about your website visitors or marketing campaigns?
Ask the questions first, then find the answer.
Have you thought of some questions you want to ask about Google Analytics Audit? Then use advanced filters to find the answer easily.
Set the most important things before you start working with Analytics
Set the most important things before you start working with Analytics
What is the most important thing on your website?
Or…
What is the most important of all the marketing actions you do?
However you invest in marketing, whether it’s your own time or marketing budget, you have a specific goal in mind.
However?
Have you already set this goal within Google Analytics?
Is it easy to find out how often people contact you with a few mouse clicks, download your e-book or buy your product?
Within Google Analytics, you can easily set your goals via:
Admin > View > Goals
Make smart use of Google Analytics Audit Segments
If you use Google Analytics without using Google Analytics segments, you have only seen the tip of the iceberg.
With the segments, you really make the deepening.
There are countless segments to add within Google Analytics. Within each report, you can easily find answers to your questions by adding additional segments.
Save your precious time and use the Google Analytics Robot
You can, of course, log in weekly to view all the data, but why bother when it can be done much easier?
With a few mouse clicks, you can let Google Analytics automatically keep you informed in case of changes, a weekly summary, or a monthly report.
Do you work with Google Analytics Audit? Then work with UTM codes
In whatever way you send visitors to your website, you prefer to know everything.
At least, if you’re like me…
Then yes.
You want to know whether that campaign on Facebook has brought you extra sales, the newsletter you sent has been effective or whether that banner on that one website is really worth its money.
Now you can dive into the technique, but it is even easier to add different UTM codes to each link via Google’s campaign URL builder.
Google Analytics retrieves important data through the UTM code that you can use as management information when optimizing or steering your marketing campaigns.
Always work with Filters.
If you have not set any filters within your Google Analytics account, I can already give you a note that all data is enormously clouded.
By setting filters, you can, for example, remove yourself, your employees, or your web designer from the data of Google Analytics.
Monitor the search traffic on your website
Do you have a search field on your website? How interesting would it be to see all the searches of your visitors within your Google Analytics account?
Fortunately, this is also arranged with a few mouse clicks.
Go to Admin > View > View Settings > Track Site Search.
Enter the Query parameter there.
Filter the spam traffic
Ouch!
You are so proud of all those visitors, and then it turns out to be spam.
It has happened to every Analytics user at least once, spam in your account.
Spam is annoying enough, and the last thing you want is for it to pollute your Analytics data.
There are different solutions for each type of spam, as they affect your data in different ways.
Block/filter ghost spam
Ghost spam can be filtered from your website using a hostname filter, as this type of spam uses no or fake hostname. For this, you need a list of all known spam hostnames so that you can block them.
Block/filter crawler spam
There are several ways your crawler can remove spam from your data. With a Campaign Source Filter, the crawlers are filtered out of your data, but they are not removed. A filter in the .htaccess file removes the spam before it can visit your website. This solution is tricky as your website will crash if you make a mistake. Both solutions require a list of all spam domains found so far.
The following solutions also work but are not perfect:
1. A screen resolution filter can help as many of the spam domains have no resolution set.
2. A new tracking ID can be used, but only if your data is not already infected. It doesn’t completely prevent spam, but it does make it harder for them to visit your website.
3. Bot Filtering is a feature in Google Analytics that can be used against referral spam. It’s the easiest solution, but it doesn’t remove all spam.
4. You can use Custom Segments in the Advanced Segments settings of Google Analytics to filter some spam.
The best way to get rid of referrals and ghost spam is a combination of these solutions. In many cases, this takes a lot of time, so some tools and programs automatically help do this.
A handy tool is that of Adwordsrobot.com.
In addition to filtering spam traffic, you can filter the bots via Admin > Display > View settings > Filter bots.
Do you really want to know how Google Analytics works?
Do you want to know how Google Analytics works?
Or…
Do you want to know how to quickly find answers to your questions and find the right data?
Would you like to know how successful your campaigns are on, for example, Facebook or Google Adwords, without spending hours on Analytics, but you do not have any technical knowledge?
Or do you want to know which page on your website generates the most turnover?
Or why your website isn’t bringing you customers yet?
Do you want to learn Google Analytics and experience for yourself what it can do for your website?
Want to know more? Let us know
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