Analytics tools allow you to collect website statistics to answer fundamental questions about your audience and their interests. For example, who is visiting your website? Where did they come from? What are they doing on your site?
This is highly important information, but how do you configure and use this data?
Thanks to the experience gained from working with clients across various industries, we know that Web Analytics tools are highly effective in helping us answer these questions. There are a few tips you can follow to fine-tune your Analytics to greatly maximize the value of this tool.
1. Keep your Analytics clean
Several areas of your digital performance can get hidden in a cluttered Analytics account, so it is worth keeping it clean. Always maintain at least one clean view of all your website data in your Analytics account. This means having no filters – just the data as it was originally collected, in all its unaltered glory.
Why? Because one of the characteristics of Analytics systems is that if you make a change to your data view, the change will only apply from that point forward, which can end up causing the loss of relevant data if you are not careful.
2. Track and Tag your Sources
Website Analytics tools automatically identify different types of traffic and their sources, but their perfect operation depends on the information the tool can retrieve from the URLs people are using to view your site.
So, equipping Analytics URLs with more information means you will be able to have better and more efficient tracking. Google itself provides an easy URL builder tool that makes adding information to URLs a very simple process. This is done through UTM parameters, which include information about traffic sources, campaign types, campaign names, etc. It is important to make sure your digital agency is using well-tagged URLs. Even when using shortened links (bit.ly, for example), the original URLs must include these UTM parameters.
3. Defining Domains and Subdomains
If your site has multiple subdomains, enabling the option to show the Full Domain in your Analytics account will make your life much simpler. Google Analytics does not do this by default; it treats pages with the same name on different subdomains as the same page.
This is very important because it would mean that two pages, "example.com/page1" and "subdomain.com/page1" would be displayed as "/page1" in your Analytics, making your analysis difficult. You can easily resolve this issue by following this step-by-step guide here.
4. Keep everything together in one place
To get the best results and analysis from the information you have about your site, you will need to combine Google Analytics data with other sources. Google Analytics can be easily integrated with AdWords and Google Search Console. By making this integration, you get much richer information about your campaigns, search activities, and paid search performance.
You may have to coordinate with the agencies you work with to implement this for the first time, but it is worth noting that this is a one-time activity that will equip you with valuable data for all your future activities. You can also enable demographic and interest reports in your Analytics to get more information about your visitors and who they are.
5. Use smart shortcuts
We would never advise cutting corners in any activity, but there are some shortcuts you can use in Web Analytics. Once you have identified which data is most interesting to you, you can create dashboards and shortcuts that take you directly to this data, making your navigation easier and faster.
Dashboards are good for visual representations of data (Google Analytics has a default dashboard with key site statistics that can be customized), but if you regularly download certain data, then we recommend creating these shortcuts. You will have to add shortcuts over time, but it is a very practical way to keep things organized from the start.
These tips are some of the simplest things we have found, but they will make all the difference when using your Analytics. However, there are a number of other configurations that can be implemented, improving and easing your life with the Analytics of your choice. Since most of our clients work with Google Analytics, we focused our recommendations on this tool, but they are easily applied to other tools you may use.
*Carol Lara is CSO of Mavens of London in Latin America
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