Is your Google Analytics installed correctly? Are you sure? In this video we're gonna learn
five important points to check in our Google Analytics account from Paul Koks. All and
more, coming up!
Hey there measuregeeks. Julian here back with a another video for you. Today we have Paul
Koks from onlinemetrics.com on the channel,. He writes a really great blog on everything
Google Analytics, which you should definitely check out. Now I talked to Paul for our upcoming
event MeasureSummit, where he conducted a session on his Google Analytics audit process.
Today, we're going to hear a little part of this, but you can catch the whole session
and many others at MeasureSummit 2020. Just head over to MeasureSummit.com and sign up
to get your free ticket. All right, we still got lots to cover. So let's dive into the
MeasureSummit session with Paul Koks.
Okay, cool. Take us a little bit into your probably if you have a checklist and you have
your your steps. What are some common things that you see inside of the checklist that
yeah, that people can check right now maybe even in their analytics implementation if
they haven't implemented yet?
Let's start with one thing that is really important to be aware of and that's personally
identifiable information PII or IPII also know. You probably know it from like having
betas ready email addresses at that sent to Google Analytics. That's an example of PII,
which you can also have inside search or in your event labels, event action, even your
custom dimensions. So one of the things I stumbled upon it was for an American fashion
company in the ecommerce niche is that they had like the checkout step measures and measured
so which is great from announced ecommerce. You can also fill in the checkout options
with additional information and they passed in the address in the checkout step one, so
the address information they took like the postal code And also the the city name. And
actually in some countries, you can lead this lead information into like one individual.
So it's II. I think we're getting such a lot lots of data of PII. So, PII, I'd probably
recommend to check the pages, events, custom domains, etc. You can search in Google like
what's actually included a PII. But that is, that is a big one. And I see it often coming
to like at least 50% of the cases.
Well, another one is that I think it was roughly three years ago, I did an audit for a real
estate company in the Netherlands, really a big one. I think nowadays, it has like 40
or 50 million pageviews per month. And what I what I saw what I noticed, like the default
channel grouping is, as you might know, people are listening and connected to campaign tracking.
So if you set up like source mediums, and need to be in line with either the default
channel grouping as defined by Google, so the channels for example, paid Search, organic
search. Affiliate affiliate connects to medium as an affiliate as an example. And if you
don't have the connection, right, then the traffic ends up in the other bucket within
the channels within the default channel grouping. So I always strive for having like the other
bucket lower than 2%. In this specific case company now having 40 million pageviews or
visits, they had like campaigns running at that time, but it campaigns for very large
but defined with source and mediums that were not picked up by the default channel grouping
setup. So what happened is that they had like 30 to 40% of all at the time of monitoring
when I checked their account, so and they actually created dashboards out of it in Data
Studio sample where they have like the other channel like being listed there. So this is
a big one campaign tracking, source and mediums. You need to be aware like that they both impact
if you analyze at that level, as well as connected to the default channel grouping to the channels.
Why do I mention the default channel grouping? Just one side note is that the default channel
grouping is the only one that is connected to the reporting API at the moment. That's
why I recommend to look into the default channel grouping when defining it and set up the custom
channel grouping. If you want to build out like dashboards outside of GA, for Google
sheets or different different to the question, you can use the API to automatically import
the data in a different in a different to.
Another one. And if you look at nowadays, like SPA, like single page applications, it's
a little bit of an let's say, current topic, because a lot of companies especially ecommerce
companies, see this as well, like a lot when I'm doing audits for ecommerce sites, is that
the page like not the the entire page is being refreshed when someone navigates to another
page. What usually happens is that page view tracking works like with a full reload of
the page, and that everything is refreshed. So then the next page is measured. So if you
look at your own website, and you have like an SPA and you're running Universal Analytics
there might be a chance that you are actually not measuring the pageviews, right. But what
can be an example is on an ecommerce site, there are, for example, a lot of different
categories. And when someone navigates from one category to the other, then the second
page view is not tracked anymore. So you will actually not measure pageviews right. This
is like a basic measurement. But the SPAs can be much more challenging. I need to do
like some technical things in GTM probably based on the history listeners or something
like that and work with a developer to get that fixed.
And one more one more thing. I worked for a lead gen site and goals. Goals are not a
topic that is very important to check. A lot of companies either don't measure like the
right goals, or they have like a lot of different goals. Why they didn't have like goal values
implemented on money ecommerce sites. I once had a lead gen site with a lead gen form and
they had just one goal and goal installed was quite a comprehensive site with a lot
of content. The goal was like, of course to submit the lead gen form. So ask them what
is actually the value of this submitting of the lead generation form, like what is the
value that your company gets economically out of it. And of all like, so they didn't
know like they really, they really didn't translate like this into like what actually
brought in for the business. So work with them to eventually define also a goal value
in the front end of like having this lead gen form submitted based on average that they
get out of all the deals. And then it gave some more like economical exposure in the
company as well in terms of what the website was delivering, instead of only having like
a numbers like we had seven lead gen forms submitted last week. They mentioned like we
probably had roughly $30,000 in revenue. This is not like completely accurate of course,
but it gets like the longer term a better representation of what the channels are driving
in terms of economical economical value.
And then the last thing, like I mentioned already about event tracking. Event tracking
something you should definitely check. Few things that you should check is, for example,
event categories. You shouldn't have like 100 or 300 different categories, but try to
categorize it right in a way that you can actually analyze and work with the data. So
keep your event categories a little bit low. Event action event label, what I can say about
the event label is that it's often not filled and you can use like, you can fill it with
a lot of useful information like in addition to the main event that is tracked, for example,
ecommerce, or if you do like scroll tracking or specific clicks or anything, please fill
in the event label field. And don't always fill it in with page because page is something
that is already like as your disposable with an event trading as a normal dimension that
you can use. So simply don't do always like the page spot as the event label for events
that you are tracking.
So these are just a few things that we could go on like for an hour or so. We have limited
time. So yeah, I hope this helps. Hi, I'm Paul Koks from onlinemetrics.com. Hear me
speak about Google Analytics audits and how they can improve your analytics data quality
at MeasureSummit.com.
All right, so there you have it. This was a sneak peek from my session with Paul Koks
at MeasureSummit 2020. We talked way more about this topic, like his actual process
that he goes through, what he's doing after he detected the errors on the clients websites,
and the future of GA audits now that Google Analytics is out with App + web. If you found
this interesting and want to see the full session, then head over to MeasureSummit.com
get your free ticket and then you can follow along with all the sessions that we have at
MeasureSummit. 15 plus speakers are there from Simo Ahava to Krista Seiden and many
more measure experts. Definitely check it out. I'm super excited about this. So I hope
to see you there.