Google Analytics: 4 things to do once you set it up

Published in

Deskera Engineering

5 min readApr 27, 2020

Google Analytics (GA) is the most widely used analytics tool in the world. Given how popular it is, and it’s ease of setup, it is not surprising to find people jump in, only to find later that they messed up in some way.

Now, messing up in itself is not a problem. Fail and fail fast, as the saying goes. But here is the kicker — if you are not careful and lose data in GA, it is lost. There is no way you can get it back. So if you mess up, and don’t realize it soon, you may lose valuable data… forever.

If you like your data (and why wouldn’t you if you have reached this far), and would like to get the most out of it, follow the basic steps below after setting up your GA account, and you should be good.

Assumption: You have already setup a new GA account and done the groundwork. If not, Google has this excellent walk through for you here.

1. Have at least 3 Views

The first view, created by default, is the unfiltered raw data view. Never add any filters to this view. This is where all the data for your website or your app is stored, in all its completeness.

Immediately, create a Test View, and a Report View. You can do this by going to Admin and clicking on Create View.

You can also go to the View Settings of the Raw Data View, copy the view and give it a name.

The “Test View” is your playground. Play around with whatever filters, content groups, segments, goals, custom definitions and settings you want here. When you are satisfied with the setup, create a “Report View” (or whatever name you want to give it) for actually tracking your data with the desired filters.

If you do this, you will always have a fall back — your raw unfiltered view, if something goes wrong somewhere.

2. Setup Goals

This may sound like an existential question (and may hit closer home than intended), but here it is nonetheless: “Why are we here? What are we doing here?” (here being GA).

Whatever the explicit answer maybe, the implicit answer, inevitably, is to track and achieve goals.

One example of a goal in GA is to use a destination page that shows a “Thank You” message, displayed after a desired user action. This can be setup as a goal easily in GA. There are other ways as well, and we will explore them in another article. The important point is to identify and define your goals as soon as possible, and add it to GA.

It is well known in common folklore that GA users who did not create goals are, to this day, creating meaningless pivot tables with the exported data.

So yeah, setup your goals in all views where you need it tracked first thing. Adding goals is pretty straightforward in GA. Go to Admin, and under the desired view, add your Goal.

More often than not, I’d choose the custom option and choose a destination page. Anyone landing on the destination page is fulfilling the goal. Say you want to track sign-ups for your emailing list. Once the user fills a form and submit, you can display a “Thank You” page, and use this page as the destination page for your goal of “Sign Ups for Mailing List”.

Make sure to setup relevant goals in all your Views. To avoid confusion, generally we don’t setup country specific goals in views not limited to the country in question, as it can skew your actual goal conversion data. e.g. if you have a different checkout page with varied payment options for different countries, but have the same Thank You page, then the conversion data is not so useful if you do not filter out traffic by country.

3. Link your Ad Accounts

Do not forget to link your ad accounts to your views. If you forget, then you may miss out on valuable campaign data in GA.

To link your ad accounts, go to Admin and look for Product Linking under Property.

You can choose to link different ad accounts to different views, e.g. link your US Ad Account to the raw view and the US Traffic View, but not to say France Traffic View.

4. Setup a Funnel for your Goals

Funnel visualization offers you insight into user path towards your goal. If you want to track effectiveness of a campaign, then you will want to enable funnel visualization for your goals and define the funnel path.

To do this, as with everything else, go to Admin, and go to Goals. In the Goal Create/Edit screen, under Goal Details, switch the toggle for Funnel to On.

Once done, you will see steps to add. Remember, these steps are precursor to the goal. They happen before, not after. So say you want to see the path from your landing page to the conversion parameter, then the starting entry would be the landing page itself, followed by intermediate pages.

This will show you a funnel starting with the landing page and leading to the goal (/campaign-thank-you in the above example). The end result will be something like this: