If you spent any time working in Google Analytics, you know that it is only possible to generate awesome insights if you’re starting from a point where the data is organized enough for you to see trends and generate hypothesis about how to generate more traffic to your site.
There are the top 5 things that I regularly see that get in the way. Below is a list of data challenges that I always look for when I can access to a new Google Analytics account.
1. Your website is driving Traffic to Your Website
You often see this when you look at Google Analytic’s Referral Reports and you see that your own domain in those reports.
There are a variety of reasons that this could happen. Most of the time it’s because at the domain level the client hasn’t 301 redirected the www to the non www version of that domain (or vice versa). Or it could be caused by pages on the site that don’t have the Google Analytics tracking code.
Either way, it’s not helpful. Most marketing folks when looking at the referral reporting think “outside people linking to me” and that’s not the case when you see your own website in that report.
2. Your own employees (or consultants) are being tracked as “outside” visitors
This happens all of the time because most web developers when setting up a site don’t follow all of Google’s instructions for how to do so properly. If they did, then they would set up one full profile in GA that has no filters, and then create a second (copy) profile that has filters to remove employees, consultants and other folks employeed by the company who might skew the averages.
3. There’s so much email! I can’t see anything else!
This is the real reason that I decided that I needed to understand Google Analytics. When I was at ewg.org they had an email list of a quarter of a million people. And they emailed those people A LOT. The referral report was a complete disaster with various mail.yahoo.com’s showing up everywhere. While at EWG, I actually hired a certified Google Analytics consultant to help me clean up the mess. They introduced me to Google Anlaytics URL tagging. It’s really an amazing tool and if you’re sending emails, you should really use Google’s online tool and tag every link.
Be careful though when using Google URL tagging as EACH field needs to be entered consistently the same otherwise you’ll see “email”, “Email” and “e-mail” as separate lines in the report. I still use Epik One’s link tagging spreadsheet to keep it all straight.
4. Every URL is sacred, but you’ve got 12,000 versions of the same URL in your reports
At some point I’ll write a blog rant about how important URLs are, but suffice to say, Google Analytics (and Google) views EVERY URL as an unique entity to be tracked separately, regardless of whether your CMS cranked out the same piece of content across multiple URLs.
5. No internal search data
This is really a shame, because once you set up Google Analytics to track internal search, the reports can be really insightful. I had a client that viewed that report regularly as a way to generate ideas for future blog posts. But you need to turn it on to actually gather the data…
There are a variety of other ways that Google Analytics can collect dirty data, but the top 5 above are the ones that I see most often. Stay tuned for my next post where I will share other ways to spot (and clean up) the dirty data you see in your reports.