CXL Review: Basics Of Google Analytics Part IV

Part 4 of a series of 12 posts that will document my progress, learnings, and discoveries from the Digital Analytics mini degree at CXL Institute.

Hello!

By now, we’ve got the Google Analitycs for Beginners covered. Whew!

It was a long ride, but I feel the learnings were worth it. We got the foundations of Google Analitycs covered. We already know how to set-up an immaculate GA account, the reports that compose it, and the overall best practices & tips.

But, more importantly, we know why we want a GA account. We want to be able to tell stories with our data. We want to answer questions, and now we have an idea of where to find them. As Mercer stated, the QIA analysis framework will be our way to go.

• Question. Never stop asking questions, stay curious.
• Information. What information do you need to answer your doubts and burning questions?
• Action. Arguably the most important one. This is when you ask yourself, WHAT TO DO? Hence, giving a purpose to everything we are learning. So always think of your next steps!

Now, that we know all of this, we are going to put it into action auditing an account.

The next course on the Digital Analytics mini degree is called “Google Analytics Audit” by Fred Pike. In this post, we are going to dive deep into the learnings of this course. It will be like reviewing everything we did in GA. Also, we are going to make SURE the GA account is healthy, we are going to be able to spot problems and solve them.

It will be structured in 3 parts:

1. Tools for auditing
2. Auditing Admin.: Account, Property, and View
3. Accuracy of data: Pageviews, Hostname Filter, and Data Sources

Tools for auditing

For auditing GA, Pike suggests a handful of Google Chrome extensions that will help as a tool for the endeavor. These tools will help you to spot tracking issues on your website. Let’s start with the most common one:

• Google Tag Assistant. A very useful software developed by Google that identifies the tags triggered by your website and any potential issues.

For example, the past image shows that the Google Merchandise Store is showing some problems with its tagging that needs to be addressed. Red means error, yellow means something is wrong, and green that everything is fine. Blue is neutral.

• Adswerve Datalayer Inspector. It is an amazing tool for detecting issues for pageviews or events triggering. It opens with the Chrome Developers Tool, and you can visualize in real-time the data that is sent to GA while you navigate through the website.

• GTM/GA Debug: It’s like Adswerve, but this one showcases in a more user-friendly manner. It’s useful for looking for specific and punctual data like the data sent in an event or pageview.

While using these tools, we can answer questions like:

• What is sending info to GA? Analytics JS? Gtag.js? GTM?
• What is causing trouble on my site?
• Are my filters working?
• Am I sending the right data? And so on.

Auditing Account Settings

This will be an overview to verify that our account set-up is neat.

This is where the actual auditing starts. For it, Pike provides a very useful spreadsheet to create an organized workflow. It is designed to prioritize tasks and keep a record of everything we are doing to the account.

First thing, we got to know what is sending info to GA. This is when we use the Google Tag Assistant tool. Then, we check if there are any active filters.

We have to verify that there are 3 views. This is crucial!

By now it is clear that we can’t work on the “All website data” view that comes by default. There has to be at least 3:

• A testing view
• A raw data view
• A master view

Data Accuracy

Basically, the whole purpose of auditing GA is to ensure data accuracy, but in this post, we are going to cover 3 areas:

• Hostname Filter
• IP Filter
• Data Sources

Hostname Filter

The hostname filter goal is to make sure we are receiving REAL traffic from our own domain. It helps to filter out potentially spammy traffic. But, how to verify it’s working?

Using the Adswerve tool, or de GA/GTM debugger, you will see that every hit you make, includes the document hostname. The tricky part occurs when you have cross-domain traffic because you’ll need to track every single domain on your filter.

Also, check that there are NO FILTERS on the raw data view.

IP Filter

To have cleaner and more useful data, we need to get rid of our own traffic.

Doing it by IP address in one way to do it. How to verify it is working?

We can use the “record” option at the GTA. Once the IP Filter is applied, we test it by activating GTA, doing things on the web, and finally, watching the recording. You can choose ANY IP address to test!

Data Sources

This one is one of the most interesting ones. I found out I was making huge mistakes.

As you already know, GA buckets your traffic sources in source/medium. Sources are many, but mediums only a few and are set by default by GA.

But what are those Medium categories?

• Direct
• Organic
• Referral
• Paid Search
• Other
• Email*
• Social*
• Affiliate*
• Display*

By default only the ones without (*) will appear on your reporting. The ones with a (*), have to be customized by using UTM’s on your links for them to show up.

Basically, GA will consider any links from other websites as referrals and email links without tags could end up indirect. That’s why we got to be careful. We could end-up with not-so-reliable data if we don’t tag our links properly.

(On another note, you could add other kinds of mediums at admin → view → channel grouping.)

So we must TAG everything. From the guest's post, news, link building, emails, social media posts, paid ads, and so on. How? With UTM’s.

If you are getting to much Direct traffic (up 20%), you MUST check if everything is rightfully tagged.

Direct traffic could be:

• Bookmarks
• Https to HTTP
• To many redirects
• Links in email
• Link in word or pdf documents
• And many more.

So, be careful!

Wrapping up…

To be fair, I believe that the greatest asset I got from this course was the spreadsheet. It is amazing to keeping track of everything. I liked that this is a way to review everything we learned in the past course. It is worth noting that “auditing” is not a one-time thing. Issues could arise every time. GA is a living project that needs continuous work.

Let’s keep working!