Ditch default - it’s all in the set-up baby!
The majority of the tourism businesses that I speak to who are measuring their online activity use Google Analytics to track their websites. But I also find that the businesses using this free tool are often missing out on the best functionality by sticking with its default set-up.
I completely understand why. The set up section of any tool is rarely sexy and the terminology can be off-putting. If it seems to function pretty well with out clicking on those set up links, so why risk making it go wrong?
But if you’re using Google Analytics and haven’t yet customised the set up your goals, filters and multiple profiles - you’re operating on just a fraction of the power available to you. Not only that, but you’re not getting the clearest view of what is really happening on your website.
So - here are five GA set-up tricks which if implemented today, will have you operating on super analytics speed for tomorrow morning!
1) Set up your goals
Google Analytics lets you track in depth up to 4 success outcomes for your site - I strongly suggest you take advantage of this.
Why? Because ultimately, online success is not about how many people come to your site in total, its about those people that come to your site and then do what you want them to do (or not!).
What might your goals be? Well think about why your site exists - what do you want people to do when they’re there? Those are your goals. They may be sales, form completion/enquiries, newsletter sign-ups, downloads or views of specific content pages. By telling Google Analytics what you’re trying to do, from tomorrow morning onwards you can start to track how well you’re actually achieving it.
For example, newsletter sign up is an objective on my main website, so I have used the newsletter confirmation page as one of my Google Analytics goal. I have inputted the thankyou page that is shown to people who complete a newsletter sign-up. Now I can track not only how many times that goal is achieved, but can also look at the steps people took to achieve the goal, what proportion of visitors actually converted, which segments of visitors converted (based on language or geography) and the cash value of those sign ups to the business.
GA gives you the option of assigning a monetary value to your goals and I would recommend doing this wherever possible.
You may know your average order value from a web form enquiry, but other cash values can be fairly arbitrary. But its still worth doing - you may decide that the value of a downloaded brochure is £10, compared to the cost of posting a printed one, or that a newsletter sign-up is worth £50. By including cash values to goals, you can really start to see in revenue terms how well (or otherwise) your website is working for the business, even if you do not transact online.
More on setting up goals from Justin Cutroni and in this 7 min video from WebShare
I should point out that e-commerce tracking is covered later in this post, in point 5
2) Set up on-site search
If you’re using search on your site, I beg you to take 2 minutes of your life to switch the track search function on - you’ll find this feature invaluable.
Switch this on from the home page by going into profile setting and editing your main profile information. Add in your site’s search parameter (in my case its simply s, as shown here after the ?: highlandbusinessresearch.com/?s=test) and you’re ready to go!
This excellent post from Justin Cutroni at the EpikOne blog tells you all you need to know on setting up search in GA, including how to identify your search parameters. (By the way, I’d also highly recommend his Google Analytics eBook, particularly to experienced users).
What will you be able to measure once search tracking is activated? Ultimately, the voice of your customer, because internal search is how users talk to you.
Tracking internal search helps you understand the purpose of visit and the main pain points. You can also see what ratio of searches have to be refined in order to produce results, how many searches lead to site abandonment and of course what specific words are used.
3) Creating multiple profiles of the same site
The tracking data for your site is stored in a profile. Google Analytics allows you to have multiple profile views of the same site.
Why on earth would you want more than one? Well GA analytics lets you slice and dice your data in all sorts of ways by a process of filtering - basically a set of rules to include and exclude things. Using different profiles lets you set different rules to see different things.
Some of the profile views I use are as follows:
1) Main view - the website, excluding any traffic generated by me, my company and my web company
2) The website with no filters at all - (it lets me see if changes I have made are tracking OK)
3) A view that includes UK visitors only
4) A view that excludes UK visitors, so is international traffic only
I use some additional ones, too, but some of these are pretty geeky. The key reason I use these different profiles is to allow me to take segmented views of what is happening the the site. This gives me clearer understanding and therefore better strategy.
The key thing to making these profiles works is using filters, as covered in the next point.
4) Filters are your friends
You can get really smart with GA filters and do all sorts of customisation, but to stop your heads exploding I will try and keep it simple here.
And at their simplest filters work like gates. They either allow you to specify which bits of website data can pass through into your reporting (includes) or which bits of data must be excluded.
GA has some predefined filters, such as exclude all traffic from a domain or IP address, plus the facility to let you customise your own filters (for example based on location or browser language).
If you do nothing else with filters, at least exclude your internal traffic from your main view of the site. That is you, your call centre, your web developers etc.
Traffic from you and your staff does not represent a genuine opportunity to do business, so including these page views just depresses your conversion rates from the site.
Your own behaviour also distorts the picture of how the site is being used, as insiders will use a site very differently to potential customers.
You can filter out internal traffic by excluding specific IP addresses or addresses - Google Analytics explains how. And (of course) Justin Cutroni also has some great tips for how you can exclude a single computer - especially handy if you have a dynamic IP address.
5) If you’re selling anything at all, switch the e-commerce tracking on
Lastly - if you’re selling online, start tracking those sales in detail by implementing the e-commerce tracking feature. Installed correctly, this embeds transaction receipt data into your reporting and again, installed correctly you can usually track transactions even if you use a third party shopping cart facility.
Strictly I shouldn’t include this in this list as you’re unlikely to get this done by tomorrow morning (it enquires code addition/modification on your site) - but if you’re transacting online, it is just too important a set-up procedure to leave out.
A rather dry overview of instructions can be found in Google Analytics help and if you’re struggling, the Google Analytics eBook mentioned earlier will prove its worth.
So who wants a default view with this tasty stuff on offer?
I hope I’ve inspired you to ditch the default set-up. With the exception of the e-commerce feature which will need additional tagging on your site, everything else can be done right now from your desk and be live and kicking by the morning.
Finally, its worth remembering that these are all changes that will take place from this point forward - changes made to Google Analytics do not alter the historical data.
Let me know how it goes!
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Web analytics and web measurement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.