Common Google Analytics Mistakes

By Author: Tatiana Podus
Total Articles: 8
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Since Google Analytics is the most widely used service among website owners, unchanged default settings lead to incorrect indicators.
These four following mistakes are typical according to the opinion of web analytics experts :

1 You have not inserted the tracking code to every page of your website. The lack of a tracking code makes it difficult to understand the amount of traffic and cause a lot of blind spots. All this leads to the inability to improve your website performance because you do not know what is wrong and what exactly visitors do not like. The problem can be solved simply – just use a scanner and inventory tool. You will receive a list of URLs that are codeless.

2 You have not excluded internal domains or self-referrals.
You, your in-house managers, developers and other ‘company friends’ who work with your website all day long give you traffic which spoils the relevant picture of your performance. You should exclude your office IPs and self-referrals — ie.traffic from pages withing your domain, to track the real situation. The one more thing is to exclude sessions from third-party referrals, for example, payment systems which redirect users to your website after successful payment processing.

3 ‘Other’ Traffic Increased Significantly
If you noticed the increasing amount of ‘Other’ traffic, that indicates problems with your ad campaigns UTMs. Thus, Google just can not recognise the traffic channel. In most cases, manually-tagged tracking URLs reflect the source of traffic, but not the type (i.e. utm_medium=social, not utm_medium=Instagram).

4 You Use Smart Goals from Google.These smart goals are designed to track your conversions, which should lead to gaining profit. But Google does not know the specifics of your business, so do not entirely rely on the goals proposed by default. Analytics experts recommend spending some time on defining your conversions, rather than using ready-made models.

This is only a drop in the ocean of prevalent mistakes in Google Analytics.

Digital marketing specialist in Promodo ecommerce marketing agency https://www.promodo.com/