Goole analytics mistake

Google Analytics comes with a long list of features and all of these are useful for taking your business to the apex of success.

But, sometimes due to lack of knowledge or casual approach, marketers make several mistakes in using the Analytics programs.

Here are 11 Google Analytics mistakes that a marketer or digital marketing expert or businessperson ought to know in order to not to make them.

1. Not using Google Tag Manager

When it comes to tag management, marketers look for simple, trustworthy and easily integrating procedures with the existing systems.

This is what Google Tag Manager offers and you’ll be able to launch programs swiftly and thus, making fast decisions.

If you haven’t used Google Tag Manager, you won’t be able to update your own tags for conversion tracking, remarketing, site analytics and much more.

It helps in error checking and speedy tag loading making sure that all of your tags work.

Google Tag Manager is impressive when you are trying to improve association across your business.

Google Tag Manager

So, when you have such advantages from a Google platform, not using it can be unproductive for your business.

2. Encompassing all traffic as one

Your website would have been receiving traffic from different online resources like organic search, other website referrals, paid traffic, email marketing and much more. But, all of them aren’t equal and shouldn’t be measured in one way.

Suppose, your website is getting 5,000 or any number of visits in a particular month, you need to divide that visits into smaller units representing the individual marketing sources. You need to check the traffic generated from organic search or other website referrals as well as their ascending and descending number and percentage in a month-after-month manner.

When you would come to know these numbers, you will get an idea where to invest time and resources.

If an organic search or any resource generated traffic to your site gets converted into leads, it’s pretty good sign for you to continue investing your efforts in that particular resource.

Similarly, if any other resource comes with few visits and lesser conversion rates, you would try to slow your efforts on this channel and make efforts on those channels which are giving better results.

Conversion rate 3. When data storytelling & visualization is poor

You should believe your data collection techniques so that, you can make trustworthy analysis. But, if you aren’t able to tell a strong and convincing story through your analysis, how you will convince others to take action?

It’s a colossal issue in analytics niche and people who spend their most of the time in looking and understanding gets more troubles in explaining to people who are less familiar with the data and unable to understand the meaning.

So, there are loads of examples which show bad data visualization. But, with the context of conversion assessment, the objective is to make people less confusing and more understanding of the data.

Bad Data Visualization

Bad Data Visualization-

4. Not including site search reports in Google Analytics

If you have added a search feature to your site, make sure you have reported to Google Analytics.

Adding a search button site gets help for you while collecting the data about the searches and you can optimize them for making your business strategies.

You come to know about the interests of users, topics that are in trend and requirements of the users.

When you enable site search reports with the help of Google Analytics, your hassle of data collection and maintenance get minimized.

Site Search Reports 5. Not Setting Up Events Correctly

Like Search Reports set up, the setting of events is also an important data collection procedure.

If you haven’t set up event feature to your site, get it done at the earliest.

Event tracking in Google Analytics helps you optimizing special events or activities that are related to virtually everything which your website possesses.

Events aren’t a single way to see the traffic or activities being done on the site, but it provides a much deeper insight into particular events and activities a user can take.

Tracking all these actions can prove to be worthy of your business.

These are 3 steps for setting up events in Google Analytics
1.

Event Set up 1

2.

Event Set UP 2

3.

Event Set Up 3

6. Not Using Annotations

Annotations help to track notes in the Google Analytics reporting interface on the basis of date-wise events that have impacted your data in otherwise seemingly inexplicable ways.

You can annotate anything that looks contextual-

Annotate anything you think might need context:

  • Huge traffic spikes
  • Marketing campaigns inception
  • Website redesigns
  • Competitor actions
  • Any seasonality explanations

annotations-600x144

 

7. Poor Campaign Tracking

If you want to see your campaigns flourishing on the web, then, keep tracking their performances.

Many fail in reaching desired results for their industrious Analytics efforts due to sloppy or casual campaign tracking approaches.

Alike other practices performed in Google Analytics, campaigns are equally important.

When you are tracking campaigns in Google Analytics, you should be able to use UTM tags.

They look like this-

http://www.example.com/?utm_source=adsite&utm_campaign=adcampaign&utm_term=adkeyword

These campaign parameters let you know how you can analyze the effectiveness of traffic sources as well as specific campaigns you’re running.

UTM tags or parameters help you analyze the efficaciousness of traffic generating sources along with particular campaigns that are running from your end-

5 UTM tags used by Google Analytics:

  • Medium
  • Source
  • Campaign
  • Content
  • Term

Campaign tracking can be tedious and messy, so you should know the standards and rules of thumb for creating campaigns.

So, you need to use centralized documentation procedure where everyone can create campaign tracking from the similar place and archive it for others to go through.

UTM Tags 8. Using Cross-Domain Tracking Wrongly

Cross-domain tracking is the procedure that enables Google Analytics to see sessions on two sites that are from the same business niche.

Most marketers fail to achieve the results due to incorrect cross-domain tracking and it is one of the commonest problems while managing a Google Analytics account for a website.

Cross-Domain 9. Not Focusing on Self-Referrals

While decoding the issues of Google Analytics, marketers find self-referrals as the tricky one.

A self-referral is a referral traffic that incepts from pages of your own domain. Generally, they indicate that there are problems in Analytics implementation on the site.

If you’re finding self-referrals, it would mean that the session count for your website is inaccurate or that traffic to the site is being ascribed erroneously.

This occurs because of using UTM parameters on the site to link to other website pages. It is recommended not to do that.

So, to solve the problems of self-referrals, do some debugging.

self_referral_landing_page_report

10. Not Using Custom Alerts

Custom alert creation in Google Analytics helps you in getting the notification that is visible only to your current reporting view and also in other views where you apply the alert.

Thus, you come to know many essential things related to your website and by taking those steps can make your site more productive.

But, most of the marketers don’t use the custom alert, but, they should as alerts ease the hassles of finding wrong practices or the latest updates. You can resolve technical problems like broken links and drops in traffic or conversions.

How to create a custom alert?

These are the steps for creating custom alert-

  • Sign in to Google Analytics.
  • Navigate to your view.
  • Open Reports.
  • Click Customization > Custom Alerts.
  • Click Manage custom alerts.
  • Click + NEW ALERT.

Google-Analytics-Create-A-New-Custom-Alert

11. Not Adding AdWords to Analytics

Google AdWords being a top Google platform enables a marketer to run reports. So, if you are advertising with AdWords, you should link to your Analytics account.

Linking these accounts offers you additional insights into the browsing pattern of your advertising traffic.

You earn a great advantage by linking these accounts as you get an additional view into the browsing behavior of your advertising traffic.

You can create remarketing lists based on goal completions, or use Intelligence Events to get alerts about unusual behavior on your landing pages. Mainly, it’s easier to make decisions about your marketing strategy when all of your data is accessible in one place.

So, you will easily be able to decide the marketing strategies when you get your data are accessible in one place.

See an example of Google AdWords added Google Analytics account-

AdWords-Not-Set-Error

Conclusion

Google Analytics is a useful platform, but, there are certain mistakes one shouldn’t use to make it unworthy.

When you are trying to get the best benefits from your Google Analytics, keep eyes on the mistakes that can ruin your ambitions.

DSIM Team
DSIM Blog is created to help you to know all aspects of Digital Marketing ranging from basics of Digital Marketing to Advance Level Topics, Read our posts and feel free to reach our team for any queries.

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