So you have followed along with our videos, set up your tracking, and everything is working fine,
but you ask yourself, "What else can I do here? How can I even further
improve my analytics setup?" In this video, I'm going to talk about seven ways to improve your
analytics setup to take your data game to the next level. All and more coming up.
Hey there, Measure geeks. Julian here back with another video, and today I want to give you some
ideas on how you can improve your analytics setup. We are not going to cover how to set up your
analytics correctly or make sure your conversions are actually tracking, but I wanted to give you
some tips on the bigger-picture stuff that you should be thinking about when it comes to taking
your setup to the next level and future-proof it. So shall we get started? Let's dive in.
Number one: document. Imagine you have to assemble Ikea furniture without the instructions.
Yes, it's doable, but would be quite frustrating and probably take you a long time. The same is
true when taking over analytics implementations. When I first open out someone's Google Tag Manager
account, it's impossible to say what's actually going on, especially without any context.
Online businesses have become more complex in the past years, and so has the tracking
tech itself. Nowadays, tracking setups can consist of many different components
than a tracking code that is just installed on the website itself. And you're probably
also not just using one tool to track your entire business. So how do you keep it all together?
Now, as soon as you start working with multiple tools, or even multiple people work on the same
projects with you, it's a good idea to start documenting how your setup actually works.
This is great for several reasons. One, you will get clarity over your systems, what is essential,
how you can improve it, and how X plugs into Y, and two, anyone you ask for help later on will
be able to understand your setup much faster and come up with a solution. Just imagine hiring a
specialist for help and paying him a few hours just to understand your tracking setup before
he gets to the actual problem-solving. There are real costs that you can save by
consistently documenting your tracking setup. So if you haven't yet, get out the good old
spreadsheet and start writing down the tools that you use, the data that they gather, and what
measurements are most important to your business, and then keep this all updated. Evolve this
document so you have it for later. It's a great thing to go along with a tracking deployment over
the years. And then this document will obviously also be super-valuable for new hires or anybody
who is new to your analytics systems. And even for consultants, if you are a consultant out there,
it's also a great deliverable for your clients later on for the good work that you have done.
Number two: clean not-used data. Tracking is not setting it up and then forgetting about it.
Once you create your tracking setup, there are always things changing along the way. New data
sources get added, requirements change, and stuff just breaks. If you had your own analytics setup
already running for a few years, chances are there is data in there that you don't need any more.
"But, but, but," I hear you say, "I might not be using that data right now, but maybe tomorrow or
maybe in a year." Well, this is a myth and it actually has really big consequences.
More data doesn't hurt, right? Well, consider this. Data isn't useful if you don't actually use
it. Only data that you actually use and handle will then be turned into value, into change
that you can put into an organization. The more garbage data you actually have in your systems,
the harder it gets to get any value out of it, because nobody wants to look at that data mess,
and not to mention the maintenance that you have to do on that unused data, the price
of collecting that unused data, the storing of it, and then possibly the fines that you might
get from privacy violations later on. Now, it's better to Marie-Kondo your data
and let go of everything you don't really need. So audit your system, see what is needed, what can be
discarded, and clean up your data mess. And to be honest, it's also okay to declare data bankruptcy.
Start fresh from the beginning and get it right in the first place. You'll be surprised how much
clarity you can gain by starting from scratch. Number three: user identification. This is an
improvement all of us have available, but it's not often used. By default Google Analytics and
tools alike use cookies to identify your users. Thing is, it's pretty easy to lose those cookies
or get them deleted by the new browser protections that are out there. And if you come from another
device, well, the tools will probably see you as a new user. That's why every major tracking
tool nowadays has the ability to give the tool an external ID: an ID that you define. And this will
then help the tool to be able to de-duplicate certain users and immensely improve your data
collection. In Google Analytics, there is the User ID feature. In Facebook, there's
the External ID, and other tools have similar mechanisms. Implementing the user ID, though,
is not so trivial because you really need to think about how to ID the user in the first place.
Now, the best-case scenario would be if a user needs to ID himself before you start tracking him.
This is usually done through some kind of login on your site. But even if you don't have a mechanism
to log into your site before the user can start using it, you could be using, for example,
when a user clicks on an email, the CRM system can identify it, and you can put that into the query
string to ID the user then when he comes to your website. So there are various ways to actually do
this. Try to figure out which one is the best for you, and this will be super-beneficial, especially
in the light of the upcoming cookiegeddon that is coming, where browsers don't want to carry or get
rid of third-party cookies in the long run. So it future-proofs it, but it also is definitely
really good for your data. It will enhance your data and elevate your data quality.
Okay, so this feels like a good moment to talk about the sponsors of today's video: Hotjar.
Chances are you've already heard of Hotjar, the industry leader in heatmaps and the recording
space, but they've got a specific feature that I think a lot of people probably don't know about
and it fits perfectly into the last point I just talked about. It's called Identify API, and you
can easily segment your users within Hotjar using data from other tools like Google Analytics.
So say you are seeing an alarming trend for a key user group inside of Google Analytics. With the
Identify API set up, you can hop over there to Hotjar and see the actual screen recordings of
the same users and see what's driving this change. It's pretty neat, because you get rid of all the
difficult parts of the process where you try to consolidate your qualitative and quantitative data
in an outside tool, try to put it all together and then hop between different tools. So it saves
tons of time, and it's really seamless. This feature is available on the Business
and Scale plans of Hotjar and can be used in combination with the other powerful features
of Hotjar, like the survey heatmaps and the incoming feedback. Most tools let you know what
your users are doing on your website, but Hotjar actually lets you find out why they are doing it,
and that's why I think it's a great tool to add to your analytics tool-belt. Check out Hotjar,
in the description down below, there's a link, and sign up for a free trial today. Thank you
again to Hotjar for sponsoring this video. And now the next point to improve your analytics
setup, number four: add context. Which tools are actually measuring your data? Where do you keep
your data? Probably some in your shop system, some in your CRM, then there are other analytics tools
like Google Analytics. One sure way to enhance data is to break up those silos and start making
connection between them. Now, taking data from your recent survey and feeding that
into Google Analytics could help you understand your users better and how they behave. Or feeding
your behavioral data into a CRM can help you email your users at the right time.
You can also, of course, use this in your analysis. Blending different data sources together
will let you form connections where there were none before. Adding a lifetime analysis to your
sales report or using your net-promoter score in your CRM to score your customers
can be quite beneficial. Thinking through how to break up those data silos, and where you have all
that data, can be a very fruitful exercise and can help you build real data advantage
in your company. So this goes a long way. Number five: go server-side. This is a pretty
hot topic, and maybe it's not for everyone right now, as you might need to invest
substantial time and resources into it, but going server-side will definitely become more important
in the future. Now, client-side tracking is where we install a tracking code on our website and
then the user downloads that website and it sends data directly from the browser of the user to your
tool vendor. Unfortunately, this is increasingly error-prone. Just think of the browser protections
that are now out there: ad blockers, privacy restrictions. This just makes things harder.
With a proper server-side set up, you can take control again of our own data pipeline. It can
elevate our quality of our data, and we can take advantage of combining and unifying our
data pipeline. This can be used to control, for example, your data flow for proper privacy
protection. You can speed up your website because you don't have all that JavaScript on your page,
or you also can combine different data sources on the measurement side into one data stream
that then goes to your analytics tools. It's truly a really cool technology shift,
but it comes with some downsides. For one, it's not easy to set this up, and you might need to
spend some time and money on the setup itself. While you might get better data at this point,
you also need to take into account that you need to maintain this, because you are now
taking control of your own measurement. So again, it's not set it and forget it,
but you would get more and much better data and much more control over your data flows.
Number six: add qualitative data to your data mix. Measuring conversions to optimize your ads
is definitely essential, but you shouldn't forget that there are real people buying your products
or submitting your form. If you have data on who your ideal customers are, what they think or feel,
it can optimize your marketing even faster than traditional data from Google Analytics because now
you can take that data and inform your copy, your products, or communicate with your customers.
So how would you get such data? Well, the most common tool is actually just having a
conversation. Get in touch with those who are visiting your website, talk to them
and listen to them, and then take that data and distill it into something that you can use. Now,
if this is too analog for you, transferring this into the internet age, this would probably just be
a survey that you run and then get results and analyze those to interpret them and get a clearer
picture of your visitors on your website. And if you'd like to get deeper insights, you can
always use heatmaps or session recordings from tools like Hotjar to gain better understanding of
your data. This will definitely go a long way to support your existing analytics data, because now
you can see it from the eyes of the perspective of a real user that is visiting your website.
Number seven: last but not least, invest into people over tools. You can have the best tracking
data in the world, but if you don't use it, it's useless. Data alone doesn't quite cut it.
You need to analyze your data, produce insights from it, create hypotheses
that then are presented to your stakeholders and used to produce actual change. Now, this
is all hard to do, especially if you don't have the training for it, yet a lot of us default to,
"Well, let's just get another tool that can just give me that data." Well, spoiler alert,
that tool is probably not out there. Being good at analytics doesn't mean having
the most tools. If you look at Stéphane Hamel's digital analytics maturity model,
tools are just one part of being a matured organization who can use their data effectively.
Far more important are how you can use your data, and that depends oftentimes on the right people.
So before you think about adding another tool to your stack, how could you use your existing
data better? Well, a fresh pair of eyes on your data wouldn't be a so bad idea, right?
So maybe hire some help, either an outside agency, a freelancer, or maybe it's time for
your organization to level up and build out their capabilities internally. Now, trust me, this will
improve your analytics setup even more than the other tips I gave before. Humans are just simply
the biggest bottleneck in any organization when it comes to analytics, so get a handle on that.
All right, so there you have it. These are my seven ways to improve your analytics setup. Now,
obviously, those are my own suggestions based on the businesses and sites that I work with,
but I'd love to hear from you if you have anything to add. So leave me a comment down
below and tell us what your biggest improvement was in your analytics setup and how it took
you to the next level. And if you'd like to implement server-side tracking for your website,
check out this video right over here, which will give you a bit of an overview of how server-side
tagging with Google Tag Manager works. Now, my name is Julian. Happy measuring.