Three incredibly simple tips to get better data from Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerhouse of information.
Used by nearly 29 million websites around the world, the free tool can be used to find out anything from your most popular pages, to what types of devices your visitors are using.
But, if you are using the information as a basis for business decisions, you will want to make sure that it is as accurate as possible — and that requires some customization.
Below, I list three important tips to improve your Google Analytics data.
Note: It is recommended that you that you set up views within your account before making adjustments.
Views give you the freedom to experiment within Google Analytics without affecting your information. By default, Google Analytics creates a view for your account, but you will want to add other views so that your original data is preserved.
Follow these steps to add a new view.
#1 Exclude Data from Internal Traffic
Google Analytics is a great tool to track the behaviors, trends, and demographic information of external visitors.
But, it is not able to automatically distinguish between the visits of external users versus those of yourself and your team. This can lead to an inflated amount of visitors to your site, along with the misrepresentation of other crucial information.
There are a few steps you can take to filter out information from the specific IP addresses of yourself, or your team.
The IP address you include in the filter should be based on the location that you visit the website most commonly from. For some this may mean filtering out the IP address of your business location, or perhaps your home as well as your business location.
This quick video tutorial takes you through the process of creating an IP address filter for several different scenarios.
#2 Put Everything in Lowercase Filters to Avoid Duplicate Information
Items such as page URLs and site search terms (if your website has an internal search feature) may show as duplicate items in your report based on how website visitors enter the information.
For example, if a visitor types in a link with a capital letter, (www.yoursite.com/Blog), it will be counted separately from another that was entered in all lowercase letters (www.yoursite.com/blog).
This may be important if you are tracking the amount of views on a particular page, or looking for the top search terms on your website.
Without the right filters, you will have to manually sift through multiple pages of data to find the various versions of the same item, and then add them up.
With a lowercase filter, you will tell Google Analytics to display the information as one line item, regardless of how visitors enter the search term or URL.
#3 Create Goals to Track How Effective Your Website Is in Reaching Your Business’ Objectives
Data, such as page views, is a great way to help you determine how much traction your website is getting.
However, knowing the amount of visitors does very little in helping you to determine the role your website plays in growing your business.
Knowing that you had 200 visitors to your website last month is good. But, knowing that half of last month’s visitors performed an action that you would consider a lead, is the type of information that can grow your business.
You can efficiently track this type of information through the goals feature.
There are four ways you can track goals — through a Page URL, the amount of time a visitor spent on a page, the amount of pages a user saw during their visit, or a unique event.
Neil Patel gives a detailed rundown on how to set up each type of goal in your Google Analytics account.
The Bottom Line
With these three actionable steps, you can quickly, and easily improve the quality of your data reporting within Google Analytics.
Google Analytics provides a lot of valuable information about your website that can help you to find out more about your visitors.
However, filtering out data, and using goals can take your reporting to the next level.
With more organized reports, you can confidently use this data to make decisions to improve your business.
Which of the steps did you find most useful?
