Google Analytics is able to collect a great deal of helpful data initially. Sometimes too much.
The face of your company which is presented to the world is your website, and it will be seen by an extensive variety of people, including potential customers, the press, and search engines. Individuals may come from similar origins and take a look at the same webpages, but they have different reasons for doing so.
Marketers face a difficulty as all of the said functions are fused in Google Analytics reports. If you’re concentrating on obtaining leads, then habits from bots, clients, and staff members can corrupt the facts that would otherwise provide meaningful understandings about what’s having success (and what is not).
What steps can you take to ensure the reliability of your data and gain an accurate insight into the situation in order to make the most suitable choices?
Keith Moehring and the organization he works for, L2 Digital, focus on organizing Google Analytics accounts and making reports that marketers can use to assist in making smart decisions.
Moehring states that in order for Google Analytics to prove beneficial, it is essential that the data is unblemished, exact, and broken down into relevant groups of visitors. One must set up perspectives, preferences, and sieves so as to eliminate information that masks web operation linked with marketing.
Moehring reveals that when assessing a new Google Analytics profile, eleven factors come under immediate consideration.
Before You Begin
Moehring suggests creating a separate Google Analytics View specifically for marketing prior to starting the process of data cleaning.
Once the data has gone through the process of being filtered or tidied up in Google Analytics, it cannot be retrieved. You should have an untouched Google Analytics View to ensure the accuracy of the information. It can be used as a useful benchmark to make sure that no crucial details are overlooked when using any other type of filtering.
1. Irregular Traffic Spikes
Spontaneous and rapid variations in the traffic flow can be a hint that the analytical info is unreliable.
The typical weekly traffic for many sites designed to block bots is quite consistent (with the exception of specific holidays). If things seem unusual or unexpected, it’s likely due to you sending out a message or due to good publicity.
Nevertheless, spambots and poorly designed websites may cause irregular stages of high activity.
As per Moehring, certain robots often direct a lot of traffic to a website that the user’s session timeline could look similar to Batman in a police line-up.
Any traffic sources that are not genuine or reliable will raise the numbers of users and their time spent on the site inaccurately and this will negatively influence how audiences engage with the site’s data, such as the bounce rate, length of sessions, and how many pages they visit.
Finding out if the traffic is bot or spam related can be done by visiting the Audience > Overview report in Google Analytics. Under the dates, there is the option to look at website traffic in hourly intervals.
Figuring out how to thwart bot or spam traffic from manifesting in your reports can be tricky due to its various forms. Identifying the origin can assist you in installing a barrier to impede it from repeating in the future.
Restrict the date for your survey to identify when a surge happened, and then contrast it to an ordinary day from the previous week or month. The comparison data will quickly highlight any anomalies. If the traffic from Random City, Ohio is the only place that has experienced a 1300% increase, that is probably the cause of your difficulties.
A couple of useful reports to try to identify spammy sources include:
- Audience > Geo > Location. In some cases, spikes will all come from one city. See the “Traffic From Ashburn or Boardman” section below.
- Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. See if you can identify a source, landing page, or keyword that looks spammy (e.g., freebottraffic4all.xyz). Sometimes the issue can show up as all three.
2. Sudden, Sustained Traffic Changes
A large and lasting change in traffic level, either up or down, is typically not related to visitors to your website. Most of the time, the source of the problem is an adjustment to the monitoring code or your Google Analytics account.
Moehring indicates that if analytics reports look unchanged for some time, before suddenly changing and becoming static again, it is important to investigate if the tracking code has been taken off of a page and if any filters were added to Google Analytics. In both scenarios, the alteration happens right away and will not be resolved until it is addressed. These missing pieces in the information can make the data entirely pointless.
Verify that the Google Analytics tracking code has been added to each page first. If you’d like to use Chrome or Firefox, it’s a good idea to get the Google Tag Assistant extension.
3. Irrelevant Global Traffic
If you have designs on becoming a world power, then you should pay attention to the result of the Audience > Geo > Location survey, as it includes all nations that are pertinent to your interest. In the event that your business targets a more limited geographic area than the entire world, investigate how much movement is coming to your principal zones from different spots.
If your company operates only within the United States, website visits from other countries such as Australia, India, etc. are still relevant to your marketing activities. Users from other countries complicate your data.
Creating a filter that only allows traffic to enter from certain countries, removing all other countries from the list. If you are a business that operates in a certain area, you can bring in more customers from that particular region.
To set up a geo filter, use the following settings:
- Filter Type = Custom
- Select the Include radio button
- Filter Field* = Country (or region)
- Filter Pattern = United States
- Click Save
4. Lots of Bounces
Bounce rate is often a misleading metric. This does not consider people who go through your material carefully and engage with your page. This kind of involvement is an indication of potential customers that need an excuse to make a deeper commitment.
Most people are aware that a “bounce” occurs when someone accesses a website but does not stay there to look at any additional pages. A bounce is recorded when a single action (e.g., a page view) is executed.
By incorporating fresh analysis of interactions, you can gain a much clearer understanding of how many people visit and deem your content helpful or engaging enough to take in or take part in.
The best way to monitor activities is by using events. Something happens when someone takes an action that is categorized as an element with attributes that can be determined. Some common events that can help improve bounce rate include:
- Scroll tracking
- Video views
- Form completions (if the visitor is not taken to a thank you page)
- Interactive page elements
5. Traffic from email marketing
If you distribute a newsletter via email that contains a link to your website, and the person reading the email then clicks on the link in their browser (such as Gmail or Yahoo!), the page view will be logged as a referral, even though the email newsletter was the primary source of that traffic, which you may want to track separately. Unless you include the code for tracking promotional activities, this rule will remain valid.
You can use the URL Builder to put tracking code onto each hyperlink in your emails, just like before. This will ensure that your direct traffic is monitored accurately, as well as enable you to observe what visitors who have come from emails are doing. This is a guide detailing how to utilize the Google URL Builder for the purpose of tracking campaigns.
6. Traffic from social sources and mobile apps
Lots of social activity happens within apps. However, not all links within applications transmit a referrer so it can appear as direct traffic in your Google Analytics.
A solution is to have some applications that will change long links into shorter ones that contain a referrer by routing the user through another URL (Twitter applications delivered traffic through the t.co address). This allows social traffic to be categorized more accurately. No matter how well you compose posts and tweets to be more traceable, you cannot make the rest of your supporters and followers imitate you.
7. Traffic from email providers like Outlook
Some of the visitors coming in from the newsletter you sent will be seen in email services such as Outlook or Mail. The main reason for this is that desktop programs are not able to transfer data identifying the source of referral like web browsers can.
The solution: Include tracking code related to your promotional activities in your email communications.
8. Keyword data is (not provided)
Analytics may not be giving a false statement, yet it is not presenting the entire reality. In November of 2011, Google ceased providing particulars regarding particular keywords in Google Analytics. Here’s what happens:
When looking up something on Google, if you see https:// at the beginning of the URL in your internet browser instead of http:// (with no ‘s’), your search terms will remain private if you click on a link in the search results. The keyword will appear as (not provided).
There are numerous other explanations why keyword information is not supplied. If you take advantage of the search feature on Firefox, or if you prevent Google Analytics from functioning in Chrome.
There is no solution to retrieve the concealed keyword information. You can employ Google Search Console to uncover some of those questions. If you link your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts, you can easily access the data within Google Analytics. If you don’t know how to join Search Console to Google Analytics, here is an explanation.
To reach the Queries report, navigate to the Acquisition tab, select Search Console, then choose the Queries option.
9. Traffic from bad campaign code
Analytics will not utilize referral information in cases where its campaign tracking code has been identified. But if the tracking code has difficulties, it does not categorize the visit as being from a referral source; instead, it perceives it as coming from direct traffic.
If you are putting tracking code in place manually, you should, at the least, do it cautiously and double check that it has been done correctly.
10. Traffic from a page with missing javascript code
If either the Google Analytics tracking code or the Google Tag Manager tracking code is not set up correctly on a page within your website, any visits from this page to other pages on the same website will register as direct traffic. Direct traffic is a blend of all the leftover traffic.
One way to solve the problem is to employ an application like Google Analytics Debugger or Screaming Frog to check through your website for any errors or missing pieces of code.
11. Traffic from you: Companies affect their own stats.
If filters aren’t configured correctly, it is feasible that much of the traffic to your website could be from yourself, people in your workplace, or those you work with. If just a few employees make the website their default homepage, it will cause an eventual increase in direct web traffic.
Create a filter to exclude data from your reporting that is coming from IPs within your own network. I trust that you have internet access with an unchanging IP address.
In Google Analytics’s management part, visit filters.
Select “Add Filter” and then search Google for “what is my IP address.”
Type in the name of the filter > Select Predefined Filter > Select Option to Exclude > Filter Out Traffic from Specific IP Addresses > Enter a Specific IP Address > Type in Your IP Address That You Obtained from Google. Click save!
More inaccurate and misleading Analytics data
Let’s continue this outburst to create more discrepancies in our web analytics. Here are some more misleading stats. There are some problems which cannot be solved technically and others which can be quickly resolved with the proper setup.
No cookie? No data
Rather than the traditional webstats that use log files from one’s server, Google Analytics needs cookies in order to operate efficiently. If the visitor’s machine or firewall blocks cookies, it will create a data gap.
Whenever a visitor who has been to the website before erases their cookies, they appear to be a new and separate visitor the next time they visit. As far as Google is concerned, it would be as if they were dealing with a newborn baby.
The fix: None
Speaking of cookies… Did your website traffic just drop in Google Analytics?
Verify if you have added a GDPR compliance mechanism to your website such as Cookiebot.
When the GDPR legislation came into force in 2018, numerous companies had to put in place cookie agreement mechanisms on their websites to ensure compliance with the GDPR. I’m positive you come across cookie consent notifications frequently when you’re exploring the web.
The setup of each instrument determines the result, however, cookies are not monitored by those instruments. Therefore, Google Analytics is unable to track those users.
According to CookieBot’s website:
The decrease in website traffic is mainly due to visitors who encounter the cookie consent banner, yet choose to leave the page before they select either agreeing or declining the cookie usage.
This does not signal that individuals have stopped employing your website; it reveals that Google Analytics is incapable of monitoring them, thus causing a decrease in Analytics’ traffic.
There’s no solution to this as it is a regulation. You can select how the cookie authorization features are set up. Ensure that you consult with your legal department or specialist in this field prior to doing anything!
Leave a Reply