CXL Review: Google Analytics Part V

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.

In the last post, we talked about auditing and about finding issues on a GA account. We went through verifying the account set-up, making sure there were no filters applied to the RAW Data View, and took a look at the spreadsheet Pike provided.

Furthermore, we talked about auditing data accuracy. In that endeavor, we saw that we could achieve that by applying Hostname and IP filters. On another note, we went through how Google Analytics buckets data and how we can make sure we are tracking our traffic correctly by using UTM’s.

In this post, we are going to broaden that knowledge by learning other techniques to achieve data accuracy in GA. Consequently, I’m going to talk about finding conversion opportunities and the best techniques that have worked for me.

Let’s go!

We are going to go in this order:

• Grouping pages
• Events best practices
• Goals best practices
• PII (Personal Identifiable Information) in GA
• Finding conversion opportunities

Grouping pages

We’ve talked about this in previous posts, it can be a real pain to report multiple pages, when in fact, is just one. This can happen by an extra ( /) in the URL or by the query parameters created when accessing the website from another site. But for our luck, filters exist and can help us group these sources.

Here some quick tips:

• Use the lowercase filter on your sources! It will prevent that — Email and email — appear like 2 different sources.
• Trailing slashes. Look for pages with that extra (/) and filter that fool out!
• Exclude query parameters. Go to your Behaviour -> All Pages report, and search them by adding a (?). There can be a lot of different querys, but the most common one are:
• fbclid = FaceBook click ID
• gclid = Google Ads click ID
• mc_cid = Mailchimp Campaign ID
• mc_eid = Mailchimp e-mail ID
• msclkid = Microsoft (Bing Ads) click ID

Events best practices

Events are the heart and soul of GA. So we got to put them some love.

To know we are setting up the right events, we must answer first:

• What are you looking for?
• What do you want to track?

Events must reflect the engagement at the website. There’s not really a “formula” perse to create goals. It just depends on the structure and objectives of your business. Nevertheless, we can keep this things in mind while reviewing / creating them.

• Please don’t create hundreds of events. They must be simple and able to bucket the information on your site cleaverly. Try to keep them from 10 to 20 max!
• You MUST have an outbound link event and a downloads (pdf or whatever) event.
• Try to detail information on every level. (Category — Action — Label) If your action is a click, well tell me WHERE.
• Navigate your site as you were your customer. Do things. Explore.

Goals best practices

Goals reflect the purpose of the website. We must be really cleaver while creating them. We only got 20 (on the free version of GA).

As events, there’s no secret formula to create goals. We must analyze and come up with goals that are valuable to our specific situation.

• Follow the ACE framework (mentioned in post 4).
• Don’t create hundred of engagement goals. Remember we only got 20.
• Create funnels! They are a great way to visualize results.
• Be sure that your goals are working by testing. Real-time report comes in handy!

PII in GA

Personal Identifiable Information is FORBIDEN in GA. So yeah, we don’t want any trace of it in our account. Google can’t shut it down and destroy your data if they, by any chance discover that you have PII stored.

So, how to get rid of it?

PII could be on:

• Page Content
• Events
• Search
• Custom Dimension

The trick is to look on those report thoroughly. Email addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, names, all of that is PII. When you’ve found it, destroy it before Google destroys you. (8

Conversion opportunities

Well, this is a little like when we covered how to analyze data. I will put some of the most relevant tips a found on the course and helped me develop insights.

• Where is the highest quality traffic coming from? Look at conversions / goal completion at the source/medium report.
• Averages at reports can be deceiving. Look at them individually.
• What can we do to week traffic sources? A promo? Should we cancel it?
• Should we optimize for conversion OR make better targeting in our campaigns?
• Don’t base your decision solely on Bounce Rate. It can be deceiving. Make sure you know the purpose of your page.
• Look at your Page — Value metric if you have EC activated.
• Better your page that has high page value.
• Better your page that has worst page value. What is it missing? How can I make it more like the best performing one?
• Compare Bounced Sessions with Converters. What makes them so different? The traffic source?
• Compate desktop Vs. mobile.

Wrapping Up

I think the amazing thing about this courses is the way they wrapped up the things we learned at the GA for beginners course. Sometimes, it felt kind of redundant, but it helped me reinforce some things.

The highlights for me were the Google Chrome extensions, the spreadsheet and the resources.

My only “complain” this far, has to be the “Conversion Opportunities” by Jeff. I had so high expectations, because his site is amazing but the course didn’t led up. Mainly because its positioning within the Minidegree. It felt like a more rushed version of the GA for beginners course. Nevertheless, I think I could milk it, and got some useful insights.

Next time, we’ll get MORE deep in GA at the second course by Mercer, Google Analytics Intermediate. Yay!