Digital Analytics
Google Analytics Audit | CXL Course Review
Or: How to audit and fix Google Analytics issues
About the course
This is the second course in the CXL Institute Digital Analytics Minidegree Program, and the instructor is Fred Pike. Course duration is nearly three hours and it consists of twelve lessons.
The goal of this course is to get a structured approach to diagnose and fix any account so you can trust your data and make the most of your digital marketing dollars.
As far as I’m concerned, I’ve got what I came for.
The course is as detailed as it should be, with excellent real-life examples. After finishing the course, I have a clear understanding of what Google Analytics Audit is, and the confidence to carry it out properly.
This time I’ll just stick to the course modules. If you want to read why I chose CXL Institute, read all about it in my previous article: Google Analytics for Beginners, CXL Institute Minidigree Review.
Summary:
- Level set
- Account And Property Overview
- GA Property and View
- Sending Page Views Correctly
- The Hostname Filter
- IP Filters
- Default Channel Group
- Site Crawl
- Content Grouping and Query Parameters
- GA Events
- GA Goals
- PII (Personally Identifiable Information)
- EEC (Enhanced Ecommerce)
- Conclusion
Level set
First things first, so let’s see how to use Chrome Developer Tools:
- F12
- Ctrl + Shift + I
- Command (⌘ cmd) + Option (⌥ alt) + I
- Chrome: Options > More Tools > Developer Tools
Two absolute Chrome Extensions you need to do a proper Google Analytics Audit (follow the URLs to download and install them on your Chrome):
Google Tag Assistant can help you in two ways: first, by verifying that you have installed various Google tags correctly on your page. Second, you can use Google Tag Assistant Recording to record a typical user flow to and through your website. By doing this, you can instantly validate, diagnose, and troubleshoot issues with your Google Analytics implementation.
On the Adswerve website, you’ll find a detailed blog post on how to use Adswerve DataLayer Inspector+. As stated, it provides real-time, information-rich viewing of dataLayer activity and Google Analytics hits as they happen in the Developer Tools console. In addition, it has other features that support development and web analytics debugging.
Another two Chrome Extensions recommended by Fred are:
3. GA Debugger
4. GTM/GA Debug
GA Debugger prints useful information to the JavaScript console by enabling the debug version of the Google Analytics Javascript.
These messages include error messages and warnings which can tell you when your analytics tracking code is set up incorrectly. (…) it provides a detailed breakdown of each tracking beacon sent to Google Analytics.
GTM/GA Debug will allow you to debug the Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics Implementations. It’s focused on providing the most data possible and in the best readable format.
Account And Property Overview
If you haven’t already added a Google Analytics Demo Account to your GA, be sure to do it now. This is a GA account for Google Merchandise Store, so add it to your bookmarks, you’ll need that website, too.
Last, but the most important, is the GA Audit Template. This is the spreadsheet you’ll use to do GA audit for any website.
Start with filling out basic information about the account and property.
There are three different ways of Sending Data to GA
- Analytics.js code snippet (Universal)
- Gtag.js code snippet (Global Tag)
- GTM (Google Tag Manager)
To check which one is your website using, just ask Tag Manager.
GA Property and View
The Ranking Scale we’re going to use is based on the Eisenhower Matrix, which I first found out about in the book, The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People. It (…) breaks tasks down into a matrix of important and urgent and you’ve probably seen this before.
Something can be Important and Urgent or Important but Not Urgent. It can also be Not Important but Urgent. Or Not Important and not Urgent. As we fill out our spreadsheet, you’ll see that many items are Important and Urgent or Important but Not Urgent.
It is up to you to determine what category applies to each of the areas that you discover as part of the Audit.
Begin by verifying settings in the Property view: default URL, referral exclusions, custom dimensions, Google Search Console, etc.
The next thing you want to do is to verify view settings and the existence of specific views. A proper Google Analytics setup includes at least two different views and specific settings within each one.
First, you want to make sure that the raw view exists, and that it does not have blocking filters applied. The raw view is a safety backup: nobody wants to restrict the traffic going to it.
Resources for this lesson are:
Learn which custom dimensions are recommended to use to collect and analyze data that Google Analytics doesn’t automatically track.
See instantly if a hop if the page is blocked in robots.txt or X-Robots-Tags, has NOINDEX/NOFOLLOW tags on it, or other technical issues like Bot-specific blocking. You can also see all cookies that are placed on each redirect hop.
You can see the strength of each link and redirect page and analyze “LRT Power*Trust” (Power like Google PageRank and Trust like “Trust Rank” for each redirect hop.
Sending Page Views Correctly
Page views are fundamental Google Analytics dimensions — you need to make sure they’re right. Assuming that the cookies are accepted with GDPR or CCPA, we want to make sure that page views are being sent to GA correctly.
There are at least 20+ Reasons Your Google Analytics Pageviews Are Wrong, so go through that article and check your GA. As Fred said, you’ll be a hero when you run across instances like this and remediate the issue.
The Hostname Filter
The Hostname is the domain of the page a visitor is on when they send a hit to Google Analytics. You should only include traffic from people visiting your site. This filter will help you to strip out ghost referral spam, or traffic that never actually hits your website via the measurement protocol.
If you’re setting up a hostname filter for accuracy, you should be accurate in which hostnames to include. Go to Bounteous blog for a detailed explanation of how to include a specific Hostname.
Carlos Escalera Alonso, better known as CarloSEO, wrote an amazing resource on how to efficiently filter spam, bots, and other junk traffic in Google Analytics. It will help you better understand why that kind of traffic is irrelevant, and how to apply filters accurately.
IP Filters
Filters are, as we already learn, used to block certain traffic, and the most common example is internal traffic.
Because you’re most interested in traffic from prospects, clients, things like that, you want to block internal traffic.
Typically you’ll do that through an IP filter but beware: there are countless ways of doing it wrong.
Three resources to help you do it the right way are:
- Identifying and Filtering Internal Traffic from Google Analytics
- CIDR to IPv4 Address Range Utility Tool
- IP Anonymization (or IP masking) in Analytics
Default Channel Group
Traffic ends up in different channels in endless ways, and that’s why you have to learn how to audit Google Analytics properties to ensure the rules are being applied.
As you can read in About Channel Groupings,
Channel Groupings are rule-based groupings of your traffic sources. Throughout Analytics reports, you can see your data organized according to the Default Channel Grouping, a grouping of the most common sources of traffic, like Paid Search and Direct. This allows you to quickly check the performance of each of your traffic channels.
Rules for good traffic “bucketization”:
- Read and know the Google default definitions
- Adjust tracking to the Google default definitions
— AND / OR —
- Adjust the Default Channel Group
The most important thing is to ONLY USE lowercase!
By default, most traffic from the e-mail is going to show up as Direct traffic. You want to make sure that any link in an e-mail campaign can be tracked, thus use Campaign Builder (UTMs).
Look at some of the many ways traffic can inadvertently end up as “direct” and how to move traffic to the right channel in OptimizeSmart Blog’s article Direct Traffic mess-ups.
Site Crawl
Site crawl should be the first thing you’ll do when starting with any website audit.
Crawl your property to look for analytics tags that should and shouldn’t be there. There are many different SEO tools for site crawling. Start with the two most known:
Note: Look for utm_ parameters on the site you’re auditing because they can throw off your session accuracy (and break traffic sources).
Content Grouping and Query Parameters
In an ideal world, Google Analytics will report all the results for one specific page in one line.
Way too often, it’s not what’s happening.
Query parameters can sometimes store useful pieces of information in our URLs, but they can cause problems in our Google Analytics data. Query parameters can break apart our pages and make them hard to analyze in our All Pages report.
Edit view settings — Google Analytics Help section describes Exclude URL Query Parameters:
Any query parameters or unique session IDs (e.g., sessionid or vid) that appear in your URLs that you do not want to see in your reports. Enter as a comma-separated list.
This setting is case sensitive. There is a 2048-character limit.
Additionally, the parameters you identify here are excluded before filters are applied, so be sure you identify them here as they appear in the original, unfiltered URIs. It has become a common mistake to apply filters, and then return to these settings to identify query parameters as they appear in your filtered reports, thus ignoring the case-sensitive requirement of this setting.
Detailed explanation on how to exclude URL query parameters in Google Analytics will make your audit easier.
GA Events
Three main questions regarding Google Analytics Events are:
- Do they exist?
- Do they make sense?
- Too many / too few?
The only thing worse than no Google Analytics Events is too many of them. The optimal number of events is 10 to 20.
The minimum type of events every website should have is tracking of file downloads and outbound links.
The way you have the events set up is what differentiates a crappy GA implementation from a really good one. And if you do nothing else in your GA audit, then improve the events that are being tracked and how they’re being reported, you’ll be helping your client a lot.
Think like the website owner: What user interactions are most valuable to track and why? This is what will help you to set events that make sense.
GA Goals
Goals are almost as important as events.
As with Events, you don’t want too many Goals either. And, as with Events, we want to know:
- Do they exist?
- Do they make sense?
- Too many / too few?
Note: There are only 20 goals that you can use with the free version of Google Analytics (200 at GA 360). Beware: you can’t delete a goal, you just can repurpose it–but then you’ll have a historical discontinuity!
PII (Personally Identifiable Information)
Personally Identifiable Information, or PII, on the website you’re auditing, is a major problem. Google can even delete all your data if it finds PII in your account!
Where should you look for PII?
- Page content
- Event Category, Action, Label
- Search Terms
- Custom Dimensions
Not all PII is truly PII — but you should probably treat it as if it were because Google will surely do.
Important note: Personally Identifiable Information (PII) can not be removed with View Settings or filters. Data is collected at the property level, so the View Settings and filters do not stop the data from being collected and violates Google’s Terms of Service.
Learn at least one approach to mitigating PII using GTM, so PII never gets sent to Google:
- How To Find And Fix PII in Google Analytics Data
- How to Find and Purge Personally Identifiable Information from Your Google Analytics
- How to Find Personally Identifiable Data in Google Analytics
EEC (Enhanced eCommerce)
This lesson is not about how to set up Enhanced eCommerce tracking, whether it’s WooCommerce or Shopify or any of hundreds of other eCommerce platforms. The whole setting it up is fairly complex or can be fairly complex, and it should be covered separately.
Enhanced Ecommerce is a set of dimensions, metrics, and reports, which combine to provide you with a mostly complete view of how users are interacting with products in your online store.
What’s not so great about it is that it is complicated to implement.
Simo Ahava gave his best to cover every step of implementing EE in his Enhanced Ecommerce Guide For Google Tag Manager.
Conclusion
Let me finish with the words of Fred Pike:
This is the beginning of your journey — not the end. You’ll continue to learn lots from the sites you audit. You’ll run into issues you never knew existed. And you’ll have fun figuring out what the heck went wrong!
