Crucial Setups For Google Analytics

In case I had not mentioned before,  I am a big fan of Google Analytics . The data which Google Analytics gathers is very beneficial in allowing you to understand your website better.

However, it is important that you need to start off with the right implementation for your Google Analytics account in order to get suitable data for your analysis work. Most users will start their analysis once they place the basic tracking code into their site and see data appearing on their dashboards. However, I would recommend that a few more steps to be taken prior to starting on dissecting the statistics  – you will want to have data that is “appropriate”.

First, you need to exclude the visits coming in from your own company. This is one important step which many Analytics users fail to take note. As the total visits in Google Analytics would also include those coming in from your own company, the resulting data will be higher than the actual number coming in from your web visitors.

Next, you need to ensure that the all advertising campaigns which you are currently running are being tagged accurately. While Google Analytics automatically tracks your Google AdWords advertising, your ads on Yahoo!, Bing, Facebook and others would be shown as “organic” results in your Analytics reports. This means that you would not be able to differentiate your paid links from the non-paid ones from your Google Analytics.

To do so, you would need to tag your advertising links with perimeters which will all you to identify your ads. This includes the source of your advertising (e.g. google, yahoo, etc), the medium (e.g. cpc, cpm,etc) as well as the campaign which you are advertising for (e.g. xmas sale). I can’t stress further how important this tagging is!

Lastly, take note of the important pages and visitor criteria you would like to track on your webpage. There are some important actions that you may wish to keep track in your website – such as the duration of time your visitors say on your site, or the number of visitors which sent you a contact inquiry. While all this information is present and tracked in your website, you will need to  label these important tracking perimeters as Goals within your Google Analytics. This will allow you to analyse how your website and your advertising efforts are performing in fulfilling these Goals which you have determined. That way, you can better improve on your advertising efforts to meeting these Goals.

These 3 pointers which I had mentioned are just the very beginning of the implementation process for your web analytics tracking. To find out more information about web analytics implementation, please feel free to drop us a comment or consult us for any web tracking help.

Cheers from your friendly GA dude.