Google Analytics: 5 Tips To Avoid The Most Common Mistakes
Google Analytics is a great tool for gathering data to help you ensure that you are offering user’s the best experience they can have on your website. Moreover, it provides you with key data that allows you to gain crucial insights into users’ behavior, as well as analyzing how well your website (and business) are performing. Yet, despite its user-friendly interface, it’s easy to make mistakes and even fail.
Here are 5 tips to help you avoid the most common Google Analytic mistakes.
1. Create Custom Insights –
Firstly, it’s important that you know how to access Insights and particularly, how to create custom insights. These are particularly important as they allow you to create specific conditions, as well as collect and track data which is important to your business. Start by identifying your key business questions and collect data based around these. This in turn will enable you to make precise choices for your individual context.
From the Analytics Home page, you’ll be able to see the Insights card. From here you can see two options – ‘Automated Insight’ and ‘Custom Insight’. Another option at the bottom of the card ‘View all insights’ allows you to see, manage and even create further custom insights.
2. Set Up Goals And Funnels –
It’s essential and simple to set up goals in Google Analytics. To create a new goal, simply click on Admin, Goals (in the View column) and then click on ‘+ NEW GOAL’ or ‘Import from Gallery’. Think about what’s most important to your business and set goals to allow you to measure and track it. You can also create goals to track negative experiences, such as form validation errors or 404 errors pages.
When you set up a goal, it’s important to set up funnels too. It’s simple to do and will allow you to easily identify any steps in the process which are faulty and affecting your conversion rates. Simply think about the journey a typical user would need to take to reach the desired goal (e.g. making a purchase) and work backwards to create your funnel.
3. Understand Bounce Rates –
Bounce rates refer to a user’s single-interaction session on your website, where they don’t take any actions which trigger further requests to Analytics during that time.
Make strategic adjustments to your site to reduce bounce rates.
“The key is to clearly define for yourself and business what constitutes an interaction. For example, if you create an interaction event on your page, such as playing a video or piece of audio, then that action can be counted as an interaction and therefore won’t be counted as a bounce rate,” explains Alton Williams, a PPC specialist at Paper Fellows and Australian Help. Making small but strategic adjustments to your website can help to significantly improve bounce rates.
4. Track Technical Bugs And Errors –
It’s important to track errors and technical bugs so that you can quickly correct these and make your website run more smoothly, creating a better UX. You can check for cross-device and cross-browser testing under the ‘Browser & OS report’ tab. Alternatively, if you want to check your website’s speed, click on Behavior, then, ‘Site Speed’ and finally, ‘Page Timings’ for a report.
5. Use Search Data –
Learning to make use of data from your search bar is extremely valuable. Make sure that you have set up your site search by going to Behavior, then click on ‘Site Search’ and then ‘Search terms’.
“Run a monthly search terms report to get invaluable insight into what your users are typically searching for. You can also do a time period comparison which will allow you to see if there are any new topics being searched for that you maybe need to cater for, as well as check for any new trends. In particular, take note of any search terms that had zero search results and use this to help you identify new content or business opportunities,” suggests Clara Akin, a marketer at Boom Essays and State of Writing.
Conclusion
Google Analytics offers a wealth of opportunity to collect and track data which is most specific and relevant to your business. The key is to ensure that you create custom insights which answer your particular business needs and questions. By tracking the data most relevant to your business, you can make better informed decisions which provide a better UX and improve your conversion rates.
Kristin Herman is an editor at UK Writings and Academized. She also writes articles for online blogs, such as Essay Roo. As a tech enthusiast, she blogs about the latest tech trends. And, as a project manager, she oversees many business projects nationwide.
