In this video I’m going to show you 10 Chrome extensions that you can use in
combination with Google Analytics, all the more coming up right after this.
Hello and welcome back to another video of Measure School teaching
you the tech tools and tactics of today’s digital marketing world.
My name is Julian and today we want to talk about 10 Chrome extensions that you
could be using with Google Analytics.
Now this is really for people who use Google Analytics on a regular basis, and
it will help you to implement faster.
They are more convenient and also more prettier to look
at in the interface itself.
So there are a few enhancements with a few different Chrome extensions, and I tested
all of them, but I must say that some were really repetitive so I didn’t put them
into the stack here of the 10 extensions.
But if you find anything missing, and I’d love to hear
from you in the comments below.
And if you want to try out one of these extensions.
We also have them linked up in the description down below.
Now we got a lot to cover, so let’s dive in.
Alright, let’s start with our little Chrome extension parade here.
The start makes our beloved Google Tag Assistant.
Now this extension once you have installed and enabled it will tell you which Google
Analytics codes have fired on your page, and also a bit information about Google
Tag Manager, it will let you know if what information gets sent over, and
if they have any kind of recommendation for a better implementation although
I find this very buggy at times with the recommendations, but nonetheless
it’s a very essential tool for anybody who works with Google Analytics.
There are a lot of other capabilities that this extension offers such as
recording so you can start recording your session, and then when you go through
and visit different websites, you will be able to view back your recording.
See, a report that shows you what tags are fired on which pages, and therefore
that you debug whether a tag has not fired on certain pages for example, or
if there’s anything else wrong with your quotes, quite a useful tool when it comes
to the first line of debugging within your Google Analytics installation.
Now if you want to go more in-depth and see what data actually gets transferred
over to Google Analytics, I would recommend the Google Analytics debugger.
Now this little extension will send data to your developer tools so
you need to open them up in Chrome, just under the View Options, you
find here your JavaScript console.
And that’s where the information gets sent over, with a lot more
detail, then your Tag Assistant.
So everything about dimensions, events, the tracking IDs and more can be extracted
from this little report and every time you go to another page, you will see
new information, entering your console.
When it comes to really determining what data gets sent over to Google
Analytics, what is received, then this is the tool for a job.
Now you might have noticed that the Tag Assistant actually also has an option to
enable the Google Analytics debug mode.
Unfortunately I find this as well a bit buggy.
So I prefer this extra extension, which is the GA debugger.
Next up, another extension I find quite useful when it comes to debugging,
and it’s the redirect path extension for Chrome, and this will essentially
just tell you how you got to this page, what were the HTTP headers and
the redirects that were happening.
Once you enter the page.
And if everything has gone fine because sometimes you might enter
a page through weird redirects, and Google Analytics won’t be able to
pick up the data correctly anymore.
And therefore, it’s quite useful to see how you got to this
page, and what the redirect was.
So for example, if I go over here.
Changes to HTTP, I get redirected to the HTTPS version.
This was a 301 redirect, and I landed on the correct page, so I can make
sure that everything is working correctly on this redirect path.
And if you’re working on any kind of cross domain tracking issue or sources
not getting attributed correctly or you come from a different ad source and you
want to check whether your redirects are working correctly then I dearly recommend
this extension as well for debugging.
Now number four is an extension that a lot of you have already
installed and this is ghostery.
Ghostery helps you to actually identify the different analytics and
add codes that are installed on your page, but also lets you block them.
So if you don’t want to be tracked, you can utilise this extension.
I would actually encourage you to keep this turned off for the most
part, because we’re all working in an industry where tracking should
be possible, and we should be a role model for getting comfortable with it.
That said, there is a very specific use case for ghostery, which is
actually blocking yourself out from your Google Analytics data, and this
is possible with this extension so a lot of extensions out there, block
Google Analytics on all pages, no matter if it’s your page or another page.
With ghostery you can actually go in and say that you want to block this code
on only this page, which makes it quite useful once you want to prohibit that
information going into your account.
Other than that, the extension is also very useful when you go to a
competitor’s website and see how they are using tags and different
analytics tools on their site.
Speaking of the data that we are sending in to our Google Analytics,
we can also change how sources are detected by Google Analytics by adding
UTM tags at the back of our URL.
So for example, we have another video on how to use UTM parameters in your
URL correctly or normally you would need to add a string, just like this
to the actual landing page and then take this URL and put it into your
advertising system such as Facebook advertising or Twitter advertising.
So, you know, exactly from which campaign the user came in which
source, it needs to be attributed to writing these UTM tags might be a
bit cumbersome to do this manually.
So, in our UTM parameter video we actually recommended a spreadsheet that we had
built to make this a bit easier to fill out your campaign medium source and so on.
This will give you the capability of actually giving you as well a
documentation of your different UTM codes, and parameters
that you had used in the past.
There’s also an extension that you could use, which is the
Google Analytics URL Builder.
This extension will let you input the source medium term content
and your campaign directly into this little tool and give you back
your final URL that you can copy.
You can also choose to only copy the parameters if you want to encode
that into the appropriate field.
You could also shorten and then copy this URL.
So for any kind of social media posts that you might want to tag.
And the cool thing about this is also you can define any kind of presets.
So, if you have ad services that you use quite often, then you can
preset that in this little tool.
So quite useful when it comes to building UTM parameter URLs within Chrome directly.
Alright, enough with the data that you can send into Google Analytics let’s
look at some extensions that enhance our experience within Google Analytics.
So here we have some extensions installed, the first one being DaVinci tools.
Now if you click on DaVinci tools you also get quick access to your different
Google tools, but what it does in Google Analytics specifically is give you
different enhancements from blocking you from your Google account, like we did
previously, with the ghostery extension.
It gives you a few more tweaks within the interface that are quite
useful so for example here we have the ability to enable heat maps for
the column that we’re looking at, and the three versions, actually.
So, top to bottom, bottom to top, and this little bar chart here, which
is quite useful once you analyse and want to quickly spot trends
here to see where the outliers lie.
Few more quite useful extensions like the export function for the new
reporting API that you can check out a frequency tester tool for A/B test
so if you have an A/B test you can just choose the metrics that you want
to compare and the outcome metric.
And then calculate the statistical significance, whether your
result is significant enough.
Definitely a tool I would check out to get a few more enhancements, inside
of your Google Analytics account.
Next up, the PII viewer for Google Analytics.
Now, you might know that PII is personally identifiable information,
which is not allowed to be sent into Google Analytics, and it’s
prohibited by the terms of service.
So any kind of information like the email address and name is not allowed
to be sent into Google Analytics and stored there, what you can do
is send in a unique identifier.
So for example, a special user ID which we have implemented
on this page on this account.
Let us know which user has visited certain pages and outside of Google
Analytics, we have our database.
We have stored our user information that ties back to this special ID.
Now with the PII viewer, you can actually input information through a CSV
upload and then map that data to this unique ID, and then you will be able
to activate this plugin inside of your Google Analytics account, and see the
actual personal identifiable information that is attached to this user ID.
Now obviously this is not real data, but it shows the power of this, because we
now know and can backtrack exactly the user that has taken a certain action
or visited certain website, especially powerful if you go into this user
explorer pod and your audience section where you can find out the different
users, and then can analyse the path that this user exactly took through
your website, see how he visited your website and also what are the different
sessions and which pages, he has seen.
So really quite useful.
If your business is very centric around, knowing what a specific user is up to.
Alright, next up an extension that has been outsourced from Google
Analytics because it was actually part of Google Analytics, and it’s
now only available in this extension called the page analytics extension.
And with this, you can actually look at a website that your Google
Analytics account is connected to and activate this extension will give you
some data about this particular page that you’re looking at right now.
So really page analytics on a page by page basis, how many
people are on this website.
At this time, some data surrounding this particular page that you can also
change around, and also implement a heat map here for the clicks, for example,
that will give you data about where are the users clicking or how much they’re
clicking, which is sometimes a bit buggy so let’s reload this and see right
here we see the click data as well.
So quite interesting if you actually want to look at this on a page by page basis.
Now, this really is based on the page view itself.
So you need to have a unique page without any parameters attached to this, in order
to make the most out of this, especially when you want to get quick insight about
this particular page where do people click this might be useful as well.
All right now at this point, I must be honest that I have looked at other
extensions and couldn’t find appropriate ones anymore that actually still work
because there are some extensions out there that I couldn’t get to work,
but to get out our 10 extensions full here, we, I come up with some bonus
tips, and these are not extensions, but actually built into Chrome.
So, one of the tools is the actual Chrome Developer Tools, obviously, So if you
go into our Chrome Developer Tools, we already made a video about this tool
set that is super powerful when it comes to debugging and installation within
Google Tag Manager so for example here we have a bunch of JavaScript errors.
We can see the document object model to see how it’s
actually marked up in the HTML.
But what I find most applicable to what we are doing with Google Analytics
is to actually be able to go into the applications and see what cookies have
been set on this domain to see maybe what Google Analytics client IDs to
have available, which other information is set in my cookies, but also to be
able to delete one specific cookie, or delete all the cookies to clear my
browser, as well as the great option here in the clear storage section
to empty the cache, in order to test with a clean slate in our browser.
Now, some of you might know the trick of actually opening up a private browsing
window, which is also a good way to test an implementation, but if you want to
make sure that your cache is actually emptied, and your cookies are cleared,
then make sure to use the developer tools developer tools are much more powerful we
get another video on why marketers, should be using the developer tools as well.
So this is a little bonus tip and the last but not least is actually user management.
So in Google Analytics itself.
You can switch between different accounts that you have access to.
But they all need to be tied to your Google account.
So you need to make sure that you actually have access to them.
If you are working with different clients, you might have different accounts that
are tied to a Google Analytics account.
And there’s another menu, that you can use on the right side here, that
actually lets you switch between your logged in Google accounts, but I
find this quite annoying because you actually need to log in every time.
And then you don’t know which Google account you’re currently in.
So the biggest tip that I can give you is actually use the built in functionality
of Chrome, where you have the ability to have user personas, so we have different
user personas here that let me, log in to different accounts within our
domain and have a different data set available, and I’ll be automatically
logged in with that account as well.
So, really useful when it comes to switching between accounts that you
need to have access to, and especially not having all your account access
tied to one Google account, which might be different from the test
that you are actually working on.
So make use of these user personas within Chrome.
Right.
So there you have it.
These are the 10 Chrome extensions that I have found most useful in combination with
Google Analytics if I forgotten anything.
And please let me know in the comments below.
And if you like this video, as always, give us a thumbs up and
also subscribe to our channel right over there, because we bring you new
videos just like this one every week.
Now, my name is Julian till next time.