Week 8— My Journey into Data Analytics — DA Minidegree Review — CXL Institute
It’s been 8 weeks i.e 2 months into this course and Believe me, this course has been very eye-opening for me as a Marketer. I recently gave an interview test and scored 100/100 in their GA Quiz (It was a real-time GA quiz, I had to access the GA Demo account, analyze the data, and answer particular questions). This week I covered GA Audit, A/B Testing, and Finding Conversion opportunities through GA. Let’s dive into my favorite lesson — The GA Audit
Data analysis can only be successful if the Data collection is set properly. Proper data gathering and analysis is one of the main factors to optimize and scale your Business.
Once the GA is set up, it is crucial to answering the following questions
- Am I collecting all of the data I need?
- Can I trust the data I’m collecting?
- Is anything broken or tracking/reporting incorrectly? Why?
Note: This article covers majorly the checklist, for the remediation process, please refer to the previous Articles on GA.
Before we start the audit, make sure you have these extensions
We shall be using this GA Audit template, make a copy of it, to get started. For priority level, the template follows Eisenhower Metrics
- Important and Urgent
- Important and Not urgent
- Not important but urgent
- not important and not urgent
Once you classify the tasks based on this list, follow up the remediation process according to the priority level.
We shall audit the GA Health by Segments i.e Property Level, and View Level
Checklist for account Level and Property Level
- Is the default URL set up correctly?
Set the default URL. It should be the exact home address of your website (be careful and mind the difference between “http://” and “https://”)
- Are your referral exclusion settings configured correctly
We need to have the domain and cross domains included in our referral exclusion list, payment gateways such as Razorpay, Paypal need to be excluded too.
- Have you enabled demographics and interest reports?
Turn on Enable Demographics and Interest Reports. It allows gathering data about the age and gender of your users
- Are Google Search Console and Google Ads linked properly?
Go to the Product Linking category, Select All Products — here, you can check if all of the Google products that you have on your website (like Google Ads, Search Console, etc.) are linked to Analytics
- Is the Homepage filter used?
If you don’t filter your homepage correctly, you could end up tracking multiple homepages (e.g. / and /en/ and /fr/). Go to Admin > All Filters > + New Filter.
- Is your Bounce Rate less than 10%?
A low bounce rate is a dream but what if it’s too good to be true. If your bounce rate is less than 10%, something has gone wrong. Ensure you haven’t added two scripts to the page. This majorly happens when the GA script and Tag manager GA variable are both installed simultaneously.
Checklist for View Level
- Do you have Raw, Test, and Production View?
Every property needs to set up 3 views, Raw (unfiltered View), Test (used to test and deploy settings), and Product View (the view with ongoing tested filters and goals). Make sure that the Raw view includes search, GSC, ads, EEC, etc.
- Is eCommerce tracking turned on?
If you have an eCommerce tracking implemented on your website, the Enable Ecommerce switch should be on. Similarly, if you have a more advanced enhanced eCommerce installed on your site, be sure that you turn on Enable Enhanced Ecommerce Reporting.
- Is site search tracking turned on?
Site search and category search show user intent and provide additional keyword lists for PPC and search campaigns. Go to View Settings > Set Site Search Tracking to ON > Enter the parameter(s) that indicate(s) a site search.
- Is bot filtering Enabled?
Bots inflate the Bounce Rate and send erroneous data of virtually zero time spent on your website. This filter stops the collection of Bot traffic. The filter should be disabled only in the Raw View.
- Are the Goals set up properly?
The goals should reflect the purpose of the website. You should have at least three goals (suited to your business) to be able to measure the most important data and evaluate if you’re going in the right direction.
- Is your time zone and currency configured properly?
Make sure that Timezone and currency are set correctly. Otherwise, there’s a risk that the number of conversions per day will be distorted or not in line with other data sources.
- Do you have an IP exclusion filter and URL Lowercase Filter?
excluding your IP address (as well as the IP addresses of your remote team members and contractors) avoids self-generated traffic. The URL Lowercase filter helps to avoid duplicating the same addresses typed in different cases (/contact vs /CONTACT)
- Are PPC Keyword IDs visible on landing pages?
When PPC keyword IDs are visible on landing pages, they’re harder to analyze because Google Analytics thinks they’re two different pages. Go to Admin > View > View Settings > Exclude URL Query Parameters.
- Have you configured your custom and default channel groupings?
Make sure that the tagging of your marketing efforts is aligned to the Default channel definitions.
- Have you tagged the (other) Channel?
The other channel collects the traffic when the campaigns are wrongly tagged or not tagged at all. it should contain less than 2% of the traffic. If your majority traffic lands in (other) channels Fix the tagging.
- Is your (direct) / (none) traffic is bigger than 20%?
This can occur if your marketing campaigns such as email or paid ads are not tagged properly. The tagging should be done according to google channel grouping settings. Refer to the Default channel definition before tagging your campaigns
Common Google Analytics Issues
- Insufficient Data Collection — This happens when GA Script is missing on few pages. Missing tracking code on some pages results in self-referrals or visits not recorded. Use Screaming Frog to find out the missing pages.
- Thank you or sale complete pages not using separate URLs — If goals completion works on the condition of /thankyou page, this will lead to confusion as different courses or lead forms can have the same Thank you page URL.
- Transactions are not Equal to Back-End Numbers — A lot of times the number of eCommerce transactions will not match your back-end. We cannot get the accurate match due to various reasons but we need to make sure we are capturing most of it by setting up enhanced eCommerce, goals, etc
- Tracking Personal Identifiable Information (PII) — PII is something that can effectively shut down your account because Google has a policy that prohibits PII inside the data from Google Analytics. To check if there are PII in your data, you should go to the pages report, then begin an advanced search for searching the Physical addresses, Credit card information Zip code, Phone number, and email addresses.
- Incorrect filter settings. Incorrect filter settings can affect the data you see and can inadvertently filter all data from your reports. In most cases, this occurs when users apply multiple “Include” filters.
- Too many Goals — Goals once created cannot be removed, hence be very stingy while creating them. Plan it out ahead.
Next week, I shall cover the GA 4 and Intermediate Tag Manager Module. Stay tuned and Have a Great Week.
