Google Analytics for Your Business

Introduction

Web analytics are the core of a successful online business. Without knowing your data and user behavior, you’re blind to how well your online business performs or even worse, make decisions based on inaccurate data. This week we’ll look at a popular analytics platform in Google Analytics and how to check for some common issues.

Background

I started using Google Analytics (GA) a little over 2 years ago. I remember at the time, as a frontend developer, I only cared about two reports in GA: average site speed and traffic and revenue by device type. Why? Because I always wanted to make sure what I built was catered to who our users were. However, as I got into GA more, I started to realize just how powerful and useful a tool it could be and how little of its potential we were utilizing at the time.

Fast forward to the start of 2020 and we were using GA to track the following: recurring subscription orders, promotions, user behavior based on page types, and subscribers who purchased outside of their subscription to name a few. I turned GA into our go to web analytics platform so anyone could go in and view how a promotion was performing, what products users were picking in their subscriptions, or if the subscription was auto-picked or manually picked. Insights which had been missing and left us blind towards the success of changes we were implementing. Since then, I’ve really enjoyed using GA and believe it is the right solution to many businesses.

Why Google Analytics?

There are many reasons for going with another analytics platform, but none come out of the box free like GA. Yes, GA is free! For the first 10 million hits a month, it will cost you $0, no credit card required. For the vast majority of organizations, this is probably going to get you more than you will ever need. If you’re an enterprise or wanting to track every single event on a website with moderate to high traffic (+2 million sessions a month) then this is not going to be enough and the price does increase pretty quickly from $0 to over $100,000. But if your site is receiving such high volume, it’ll be worthwhile to invest in GA 360. Even with the free version you get a lot of options, especially for eCommerce businesses that enabled the enhanced eCommerce part for GA (see fig. 1 for a sample of product performance report in GA). Additionally, the built-in integration with a lot of other Google Tools (e.g. Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, Google Adwords, and Google Optimize) make it a no-brainer if you are already heavily invested in Google’s other marketing platforms, which most companies already are (definitely with Google Adwords and Google Search Console). 

Figure 1 - Sample of Product Performance Report in GA

The other great thing about GA is its transparency. If you give someone read access to a property, they’re able to go in and look at any report within that property. You don’t have to provide access to specific reports as the reports should already be built in GA, minus custom reports which you’ll have to create yourself. When it comes to data, the best way to build trust and confidence is to have it available for anyone at any level (yes, I’ve had requests from C-suite level executives for GA access) to be able to go in and look at the data themselves. It’s a key part of data governance and web analytics is no different. 

Finally, know what is happening on your site. GA is a great tool to collect data on what users are doing on your site such as pages visited, what they’re buying, search terms they’re using, etc. It is the first step towards a data-driven mindset. The data can be a way to pinpoint issues on your site by seeing that a specific page has an extremely high exit rate or customers are not completing the funnel in checkout so there’s probably something wrong with one of your checkout steps that is deterring them from purchasing. These insights can be invaluable to companies who wish to know more about their customer and their behaviors and fix low hanging issues that otherwise would be missed. GA should be used to validate any hunches you may have and build your hypothesis for any conversion optimization efforts.

Using Google Analytics Effectively

When going into GA my recommendation is always have a question in mind? For example, “What are the device types being used to visit our site?” or “What percentage of our visitors are new vs returning?”. This is important because if you don’t have a question in mind, you’ll easily get lost or go down a rabbit hole in GA since there is a lot of information that can easily get you off track. For the two questions above, since you’re asking a question about the customer, the first place I’d start is the Audience section (see fig. 2 below for a sample device type report). GA groups similar types into the broad categories of Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion. If my question had been “Where are my customers coming from?” then I’d recommend starting in the Acquisition section as that is primarily focused on traffic. As you get more familiar with GA, you’ll start to better understand the layout and easily find what you need.       

Figure 2 - Sample Device Type Report in GA

Google Analytics Audit

With any implementation of Google Analytics, I’d highly recommend getting an audit from a 3rd party. Always remember with data, Garbage In, Garbage Out. If you’re pushing bad data to GA, you or someone else in the organization could be making business decisions off this inaccurate data! An audit is a great way to get an objective look into your GA set up to make sure all data is flowing in properly or provide areas where you could improve on. Below are common errors in GA which could really hamper any online business.

Low Bounce Rate

This is one of the more common errors when doing a GA audit. Bounce rates are based on users who come to your site and leave without any type of interaction. An easy way to identify a low bounce rate is if your bounce rate is showing less than 10%. Any bounce rate in single digits is a clear sign something is not right. The way I would read this is “People are coming to your site and must really like your offering since hardly anyone leaves”. There are a few causes for low bounce rate: multiple analytics.js files being loaded, multiple GA event tags firing on pageview or not properly setting the non-interaction hit to true when sending an event tag to GA. If your site has experienced this issue, I’d have a developer or someone familiar with debugging GA go in and check for these issues.

Cross Domain Referral Exclusion List

This is another common error in GA that could easily skew your traffic sources. Cross domains are when another one of your domains (i.e. yoursite.net) brings them to your main site (i.e. yoursite.com). To prevent double counting the visitors, you can go to the following in GA (Admin > Tracking Info > Referral Exclusion list) and add your other domains to your exclusion list. This is also common practice when using a third-party payment service, such as Paypal, to add them to this referral exclusion list. If you do not, you will see paypal show up in your traffic report as a referring source, as the users’ session will reset when they leave your site to complete their payment in Paypal and come back to finalize checkout. This will improperly attribute your traffic to Paypal when it should be properly referenced to whichever channel they came from (e.g. Paid Social, Organic Search, etc.)   

Conclusion

GA is a great choice for many online businesses as it starts out free. When searching for reports in GA always go in with a question in mind and use the broader categories: Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion to help navigate. Finally, make sure to have a GA audit done as soon as possible. There are common issues in many GA implementations in which business decisions are made off bad data. The cost of the audit will save you more money than a campaign based on bad data.    

If your online business is in need of a GA audit or setup, feel free to reach out to me at tou@pactx.digital.