Every website owner and web analyst reaches a point where there’s a need to get Google Analytics data in Excel. While the Google Analytics web interface is very user friendly and easy to work with, it quickly becomes an obstacle when doing more advanced analysis. Very often, we also want to do the same analysis from month to month for reporting purposes. Or maybe we need to merge Google Analytics data with other data - and Excel then gives us more tools than the Google Analytics interface. Read more →
Google Analytics Annotations are a built-in feature of Google Analytics. It lets all people with access to Google Analytics account add comments to nearly all reports (at least those with charts). Everybody should use annotations to comment on traffic changes, traffic spikes and other important events. This can save you a lot of time. You won’t have to do the same data dives every time you wonder why something happened to your traffic. Read more →
If you see self referrals appearing in your Acquisition reports in Google Analytics, or if you are performing a Google Analytics implementation audit, one of the first steps is to make sure that the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) is present on all pages - Screaming Frog will help you do that fast and easy. In this post, I’ll show you a step-by-step guide for checking your website for pages that don’t have the GATC installed or don’t have the Google Tag Manager snippet present. Read more →
This post provides a complete event tracking example so you’ll be able to set up and configure it on your own. I’ll be using the autotrack feature, which is a plugin developed by Google Analytics released early in 2016. This plugin allows website owners to easily set up event tracking - even if your knowledge of HTML and javascript is limited.
When to use event tracking First, it’s important to know when you should use event tracking. Read more →
When you are setting up Google Analytics on your website, you’ll want to verify that it’s actually working and that data is being collected and processed. So even before you begin to configure events, ecommerce tracking etc., it’s crucial that you can trust your data collection. This involves checking if Google Analytics is being loaded at all and if your customisations such as event tracking is working as intended. In this post, I’ll provide some tips and tricks that can help you in the initial setup phase on your Google Analytics implementation. Read more →
Have you ever observed pages on your website with a 0% or very low bounce rate? If so, then chances are that you have a faulty Analytics setup. Well, of course it’s possible to have a website or a landing page that is just so amazing, that all of your users interact and stay on your website! But, every time I’ve seen a close to zero percent bounce rate, it’s been caused by an error in the Google Analytics implementation. Read more →
The Bounce Rate is probably one of the most used metrics in web analysis. But it’s also one of the most misused and misunderstood metrics. Much too often, analysts simply look for high bounce rates on specific landing pages, and recommend changes or even deletion of those pages - based solely on their bounce rate. While bounce rates can tell us a lot about page performance, it’s - as always with digital analytics - much more complicated than that. Read more →
Ad blockers have been around for years - and I won’t go into a moral or ethical discussion about the use of them. But with Apple’s iOS9 update, content (or ad) blocking suddenly became much more mainstream. Now, the problem is that many ad blockers also block Google Analytics. Analytics software such as Google Analytics is there to help users - not monitor or track them per se. We use analytics data to improve and optimize our websites. Read more →
Google Analytics auditing is the first thing I do, everytime I start working with a new client. It’s one of those things that need to be in order before I can do anything else. Because, if we can’t trust our data, we can’t trust any of our decisions or recommendations. So one of the most important tasks is simply to secure that data is being collected, and that it’s being collected correctly. Read more →
I am constantly surprised annoyed about how short sighted many sales and marketing people are thinking about ecommerce and online performance. In many organisations, it’s not that big a surprise. People in sales and marketing are very often measured by short term goals. So they are naturally using their weekly or monthly sales reports.
But once in a while, it can be a real eye-opener to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Read more →