Things to do right away in Google Analytics

Google analytics is the data monitoring tool that Google makes available to us. In a nutshell, it is the platform par excellence for those dealing with website data analysis.

But using Google Analytics in a productive manner is not always easy, given the amount of information within it. In fact, it is not enough to have all the data available. You must also understand it!

In this article, let's take a look at a few things to do that will make reading and understanding the data in Google Analytics much easier.

 

Adding multiple views

Based on the filters that are set, Analytics views can show us specific areas of the website.

Within an account, it is good practice to have at least three different views:

• The first view is the raw view, where we keep the data in its raw state as presented to us by the platform, without changing anything.
• The second view is the test view, where we insert filters, secondary dimensions, events and more. The watchword in this view is to experiment. The test view is useful to see if the changes we have made work correctly.
• The third view is the master view, where we apply the actions we have tested in the previous view to analyse and monitor the website in the best possible way. 

 

Using dashboards

Customised dashboards help us to focus on certain types of data.

For example, dashboards can be created that present data on:

• Organic traffic
• Users and sessions
• Devices
• Social media

 

Integrations and links

It is important from the very beginning to integrate Google Analytics with:

• Google Search Console, for information and data on the site's performance in the Google search network

• Google Tag Manager, so as to centralise the management of all website tags in a single tool

• Google Ads, so that audience segments, targets and campaign data can be imported into Analytics

 

Entering UTM parameters

When creating newsletters or advertising campaigns, remember to include parameters in the URLs of the links to the website.

By doing so, these parameters (which are nothing more than labels that we 'paste' into the original URLs) will be reported within the Analytics results.

We will thus recognise the different traffic sources and have a clearer picture of the performance of each individual campaign or newsletter.

Beware, because while parametric URLs are very useful in these cases, inserting parameters directly into the canonical URLs of a website is not recommended from an SEO perspective.

How to create parametric URLs? Simply, by using this simple tool that Google makes available to us.

 

Setting goals and events

Targets allow us to track page views and user actions in Analytics. They are essential to understand how our website is performing. They can be imported into Google Ads as conversions.

Events are similar to goals, but more customisable and flexible. They can be created via Google Tag Manager.

 

Segmenting the audience

Audience segments help us with reaching the audience interested in our product or service. We can in fact use them to remarket to a specific audience.

To give an example: on Analytics we create an audience segment that has visited more than three pages of the site, and then on Google Ads we set up a remarketing campaign only on this segment.

The more we segment our audience correctly, the more effective remarketing will be.

 

Enabling advanced ecommerce

If you have an ecommerce site this is the first thing to do: enable advanced ecommerce tracking.

Advanced ecommerce allows us to see where users get stuck in the purchasing process and at the same time tracks all transactions on the ecommerce.

To enable all functions of advanced ecommerce, just follow Google's guide.

 

These we have seen together are the essential things you need to do to get control of the Google Analytics tool and to start appreciating its full potential.

If you want to learn more or are interested in our services, contact us now!