DW Tips

Google Analytics lets you measure a lot. As soon as you set up your account and you have data flowing into your dashboard, it can almost feel like you can measure too much at once. Information overload sets in quickly, so you have to have a plan about what you're going to use your data for. In fact, setting up how you want to measure the data before the information starts flowing in is the only way to get useful insight instead of raw data.

Why do you need to have a plan before you start analyzing your website interactions?

Google Analytics can't start pulling data until you have the code embedded in your site's pages. But it also can't start processing complex analyses unless you tell it to do so ahead of time. For example, you can see daily traffic early on. Before any modifications, you'll get a number for weekly, daily, and hourly visitors. 

But that number includes all of your visitors. It includes bots. It includes internal traffic. It even includes each time you refresh your site after a half hour of adjusting the web design. This can massively inflate your statistics, especially at the beginning. You have to adjust your data view ahead of time to tell Google Analytics if you don't want the bots and internal traffic included.

But it gets more complex than that. If you want to measure trends just for traffic in North America, you need to create a view just for North American data. If your salespeople need just the EMEA data because that's their focus, that view also needs to be created ahead of time. Google Analytics will separate out the data if you have a global view, but that adds an extra step of filtering out elements every time you need an answer. Extra steps that you could have avoided is an easy way to corrupt data, and that's bad for business.

If you want to know which views are the best for your business, and how to create views that pinpoint the answers you need, go to Designer Digital here.