The 7 (relatively) basic Google Analytics configurations that any marketer should do
It’s all about slicing and dicing.
There will come a time when, as a marketer, you’ll be asked to provide data-driven insights from your marketing activities from which business decisions will be made. In order for you to provide this insight, however, you need to make sure that you’re looking in the right place and more importantly, that you’ve set up the foundations of your marketing analytics correctly.
If you’re new to marketing analytics, or a seasoned pro, wondering why you have 3 different versions of LinkedIn appearing in your Google Analytics, then read on to follow our tips on how to set up your GA for pain free reporting.
Setup the right goals
Basic, yes, but – are you really setting your marketing goals correctly?
If you are, fantastic! You should simply divide them into goal types, ideally by the same steps of the step in the funnel the users who reached those goals are using your website and that’s it, you’re done.
However, we see a lot of marketers defining time spent as a goal – which lets face it, isn’t really going to tell you much.
Ideally, you should make sure to set up your goals based on forms submissions, successful request a demo, engagement metrics, content download, or contact us forms, which you can then filter the time later on in the reports.
Meaningful events
If you’re not using events on GTM, you should. Events are the building blocks of your entire user tracking, which helps you understand what’s going on, on your websites.
When you setup events, use the right combination of category, action, label, and value to make sure you’ll have meaningful reports on GA. You should have a strategy for using those attributes, there’s no “correct” way, but you’ll have to think and plan this ahead, because changing it later will be very hard to do while keeping the history data.
Read more about events here or just search for Google analytics events strategy.
Segments
What is your bounce rate? Regardless of what your answer is, it’s probably wrong. This is because the question is wrong.
What you need to ask is what’s my bounce rate for new visitors, who are not careers applications, and that are visiting from the desktop. Then ask the same for mobile. The secret to answering this is – set up a segment for people looking for careers, and then filter them, set up a segment for each audience, set up a segment for existing customers (can be done based on internal pages or marketing automation cookie).
A good segmentation will really help you understand visitors’ behavior and get helpful insights. And your actual conversion rate, will never be the same.
UTMs
If you’re seeing multiple sources of LinkedIn, linkedin, Linkedin and manually aggregating them – you’re doing it wrong. You can consolidate them by lowercasing your sources [but you can also take care of it in the reporting section].
Generally speaking, it would be advisable to re-think the process of creating those sources and mediums
While not directly done on analytics, you should use a naming convention for UTMs and make sure no one is using your site address without UTMs.
- Sales decks? UTMs.
- Email signature? UTM.
- Link to your product pages from LinkedIn? UTM.
You get the point. Your direct visits will be lower, and you can get a better understanding of your marketing channel’s behavior.
Content grouping
The second not “out of the box” feature that GA users are missing is content grouping.
While sometimes its easy to forget that content is the king, The website pages are to be divided into a few metrics that are relevant to the content, such as:
Topic, Funnel stage, Conversion type
Slicing and dicing your user events using content groups sharpens the picture when it comes to time on-page, and enables comparing pages from the same group to each other, rather than comparing your landing page performance to your product page performance.
Default channel grouping
The last configuration that needs to be done is the default channel grouping.
After defining the table for the channel, source, medium, campaign, and so on for enabling the UTM process to start running smoother, now is your chance to define the rules for each channel and set them up in GA as a customized channel grouping, that will enable you to see how many conversion, events and time was spend from each channel.
Reports
With no configuration done, Google Analytics is just showing you a load of misrepresented data. But, if you have configured all of the above, you’ll be able to provide meaningful data and start answering important business questions.
To get the data you need, you first need to define your question, what is that you’d like to know? Visitors behavior? Conversion rate? What CTA is most successful? How much time should people spend to convert? Which of the A/B testing is performing better? What sources are most converting? Are people following the journey you planned for them? Whatever the question you want to know the answer for, creating custom reports should easy if you follow our tips above.
Here at Airfleet, we prefer using data studio for reports and visualization as it’s much easier to slice and dice the data such that you are only seeing the relevant data for your question.
We recommend setting the daily goals report, but also mix in some of the interesting events that are happening on your site, and have a look on daily basis to measure success and optimise it.