Website Analytics March 4th, 2020
Sophisticated internet marketing is impossible without analytics. But what do you do if your statistics are displaying incorrectly?
Below, we’ll take a look at the technical difficulties that you can experience while working with Google Analytics. These range from interface limitations, to tracking configuration errors, to receiving inaccurate data.
From day to day in Google Analytics reports, you may find extra traffic from unknown sources. For example:
Subdomain Referrals: in the case of several subdomains, it’s possible to switch between them. The stats will then show this: sub.domain.com / referral.
Payment System Referrals: if you pay for orders on your site through a third-party system, in the reports you’ll see traffic related to … / referral.
Accounts.google.com Referrals: if your website provides a user signing in through your Google account, then after they log in the session is overwritten.
Such sources can create a great number of conversions. As a result, the real source that led this traffic is evaluated on false data. To solve this problem, the exclusion of transition sources will help. Include this item in your checklist for setting up your analytics to prevent making decisions based on false data.
To do this, go to the admin settings at the share level. Select the “Tracking” section and click on the list of excluded migration sources.
Add each domain individually that you don’t see as a source of migration in your reports:
Note that this setting only works with analytics.js and gtag.js codes.
If you have ga.js installed, the setting should be made itself.
Once this setting is done, it will not be terminated and the merited conversion will be linked to the correct source.
Briefly about the problem: Google Analytics can sometimes hide data because of privacy. This is usually the case when “(not provided),” or “(not set)” appears, instead of a target’s age or location, for example. It’s often encountered by SEO professionals when analyzing search queries. Some reasons you might have this include:
1. Lack of connection between Google Advertising and Google Analytics or an error in its setting.
2. Problems with UTM tags:
3. Features of the site – for example, the parameters are converted to lowercase, 404 not found, or the tag is cut off – because these nuances will be incorrectly transmitted (or completely lost) on the parameter “gclid” or hand tags.
4. Google may not receive enough data about search systems. Because of this, said traffic stays unidentified or written to the referral.
5. Finishing the session at the end of the day – this is the default and is followed by overwriting the session. Here, there may be changes in the parameters.
To put it simply, sampling is a manipulation of the source data used to identify a smaller set of data similar in properties to the source data.
What’s really going on: if you have a large number of statistics, Google Analytics takes only part of the data to multiply it several times by 100%.
Here’s how you can avoid this, from simple steps to an advanced level, with maximum convenience:
There may be errors in the settings of Google Analytics and Google Advertising, so serious data discrepancies may occur. Incorrect statistics will lead you to the wrong conclusions and ineffective decisions.
What mistakes may occur and how to correct them:
In Google Analytics, go to “Administrator” – “Resource” – “Connection with Google Advertising”:
Select the desired advertising account:
You can also connect through the Google Advertising interface: “Settings” – “Linked Accounts” – “Google Analytics.”
You can enable it in the “Account Settings” section by checking the “Automatically Tagging” box.
If automatic tagging is not enough for you, check the corresponding item in the “Property Settings” section of Google Analytics:
This will allow you to manually set some UTM tags.
But make sure you fill in the labels correctly. For example, if you type a value for a campaign that is different from Google Advertising, your data will be separated in Analytics.
Once you have set up a connection between Google Analytics and your Google Advertising account, the reports will show data that precedes your visit to the website. It cannot be gathered by the counter – for example, the number of clicks and the cost of clicking.
But when using other advertising systems, it’s necessary to obtain similar data from them. For this purpose, you can set up data import using additional services.
Anyone working with Google Analytics knows how important and useful data visualization is. It makes information easier to understand and often reveals problem areas that may be invisible to the naked eye.
Everyone who has worked with Google Analytics has made sure that the possibilities for building charts are very limited. To solve this problem, you may install external tools.
You need to choose a tool based on your needs. Keep in mind that when using paid tools, their costs must be accounted for in ROMI. This means that for smaller projects, additional tools are often not allowed because they cannot pay for themselves.
Wonder why your transaction data in Google Analytics is being multiplied? It could be because you and/or your visitors refreshed the “Thank you for your order” page. Moreover, the problem may be in the implementation of e-commerce.
To correct it, determine what exactly is the reason it’s happening, then:
In fact, this is a solution. The issue, however, is that Google Analytics doesn’t have any data about the actions in the future of your funnel.
This forms some limitations and errors in analysis:
The solution: building a private analytics system using one of the above-mentioned methods.
You may use off-the-shelf solutions, or you can build your own analytics. This depends on your resources:
When using Google Analytics, anyone can encounter a number of questions or issues. Yet each problem comes with a solution:
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