Google Analytics is a valuable tool that any marketer can use to optimize their content, website and overall campaigns, but there are still some pitfalls to the greatest free analytics tool on the web.

There are two main ways your GA data can actually mislead you:

(1) the metrics themselves have flaws and

(2) the way you think about the metric is flawed.

Here are 7 common metrics that you’re probably doing wrong.

Site Speed

Site speed is an important metric for optimizing user experience, however most marketers don’t have an accurate idea about their site’s speed because of the way it’s measured.

By default, GA measures site speed by sampling the loading time for 1% of your visitors. That’s a really small sample size, which increases the chances of outliers giving you inaccurate data. Luckily, you can fix this.

You can add a code in GA to increase your sample size to 100%. In the “Admin” section of your property, click “Tracking Info” and then “Tracking Code.” You’ll find a code like this:

Change the script to this:

ga(‘create’, ‘[YOUR GA ID]‘,{‘siteSpeedSampleRate’: 100});

Save your changes and you’re good to go!

Some metrics like site speed are designed with very high-traffic sites in mind. To avoid GA sampling too few of your visitors, it’s important to adjust these metrics to suit your unique needs.

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To avoid GA sampling too few visitors, adjust metrics like site speed to suit your needs.
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Bounce Rate

Most marketers think a high bounce rate is always a negative thing — it means that someone came to your site, didn’t like what they saw, and left. But that’s not always or even often the case.

Have you ever read an interesting blog post, got something out of it, and then left the page? I do it about ten times a day. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of website interaction for the marketer, but GA tags it as a bounce.

That person who read your blog post then left could be heading over to follow you on social media, or return to become a longtime customer later on. While very high bounce rates overall is a sign of something negative, there is a certain amount of it that is acceptable.

So instead of stressing over the bounce rate of every page on your site, consider the purpose of the content, and how you might expect your audience to react to it. Sometimes, there’s nothing wrong with reading and then moving on.

Exit Rate

Like bounce rate, exit rate is another metric that marketers tend to think about only in the negative, when that’s not always the case. For example, a page with content that’s designed to convert, and does so effectively, would have a high exit rate. A page with a high SERP rank for long tail keywords would also have a higher exit rate than others. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t valuable.

That’s why it’s important to consider your intent and the search position of the page when deciding if a high exit rate is good or bad.

Conversion Rate by Channel

GA calculates conversion rate by acquisition channel based on the last non-direct click. That’s the best they can do to determine what influenced the conversion. But sometimes, users return to the site as direct traffic, which isn’t taken into consideration. Because of this, the metric often underestimates the actual conversion rate by different channels.

Considering multi-channel funnels and attribution modeling reports in addition to conversion rate by channel will give you a much clearer picture.

You can find the model explorer tool under Conversions>Attribution in the menu:

This sample attribution model from Optimize Smart shows the channels for organic search.

Average Time on Page

Many marketers take average time on page to mean how much time visitors are actively consuming content. But GA’s measurement gives the metric a completely different meaning.

Average time on page measures how long your web page is open in the user’s browser. However GA can’t tell if the visitor has multiple tabs open, and is perusing a site in one tab while yours is open in another.

After 30 minutes of not looking at your page, the analytics will “time out.” But still, looking through a few pages of your site for a minute and then leaving the tab open while surfing elsewhere is not a very accurate measurement of user behavior. On top of that, GA is unable to include how much time someone spent on the last page they visited, because another pageview doesn’t follow.

At this point, there’s not much you can do to improve the accuracy of this metric, so just keep in mind that it will almost always be an overestimation of actual behavior.

New and Returning Visitors

New and returning visitors can also be a very misleading metric. That’s because GA tracks returning users with cookies, so any return visitor who deleted their browser history would be considered a new visitor. Also people accessing the same website from different devices (laptop, mobile, tablet) and would be counted as a new visitor each time.

Many consider a low number of returning visitors to be bad for retention. That is valid, but it’s important to remember that a large number of those new visitors are probably not new at all. Also, it’s possible that your website is so well-targeted that users buy your product or service on the first visit, never to return. That’s not a bad thing either.

Keep in mind that there’s a lot of unavoidable noise in your new and returning visitors metric. It’s still valuable to pay attention to, especially if it changes drastically, but don’t let it be the only driver for major adjustments in your content strategy.

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Keep in mind that there’s a lot of unavoidable noise in your new and returning visitors metric.
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Referral Traffic

Most marketers think that measuring referral traffic will tell them how many backlinks there are for their website, but this metric has a lot more noise than that. Clicks that come from social media or from links in your email marketing campaign can all be marked as referral traffic by GA. Even clicks from one page of your website to another can. But there is something you can do about it.

Social media: Use a link shortener tool like bit.ly to add a tracking code to your links so you know where they came from.

Then under GA Admin, click “Social Settings” and add the URLs to your “Social Sources.” Then GA will know it’s not referral traffic.

Email marketing: Use GA’s URL Builder to create campaign tracking codes for links to your site that appear in emails. Then you can track which clicks are coming from emails.

Your website: Make sure that all the cross-linking on your website references the relative page (/page), not the full URL (www.site.com/page). The full address will be counted as referral traffic in GA, but the relative page will not.

Make what efforts you can to reduce the noise from non-referral traffic, but understand that you’ll never be able to completely clean up the statistic. At best, your referral traffic numbers will only be a vague proxy of  the growth of your citations.

The Takeaway

GA is a valuable marketing tool, but it’s important to not take the data at face value. Here are some key points to remember about your metrics:

• High bounce and exit rates aren’t always a bad thing.

• Site speed and referral traffic have some limitations that you can fix.

• Conversion rate by channel, average time on page, and new and returning visitors have some limitations that you can’t fix, yet.

The best thing you can do is consider the big picture with each metric, remember its limitations, and focus on how the data actually translates to user behavior. The only way to really know if the data reflects something good or bad is to consider your overall goals for the website, as well as the goals of specific pages within it.

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GA is a valuable marketing tool, but it’s important to not take the data at face value.
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 Courtney Danyel is a content marketing writer who provides unique and valuable content per audiences, based on the latest  scientific and  industry research. Visit her website to learn more about her work.

 

Setting up a website without proper tracking is the equivalent of being lost in the woods without knowing you’re in the woods.  If we do not know where we stand how can we get to where we want to go? The following Google analytics guide will serve as a roadmap to avoiding common mistakes, ensure the proper tracking is in place, and provide a clear understanding of the key metrics that every marketer should be focused on.

Why is Google Analytics Important for Tracking?

Do you know how many unique visitors are coming to your site?  What are the top pages they are viewing and how much time they are spending on each?  Which channels are truly driving conversion?  Google Analytics is a free tracking tool, provided by Google that can provide those answers.  One of the most powerful analytics tools on the market, Google Analytics provides critical data to allow marketers to understand performance and derive data-driven actionable insights.

 

What makes Google Analytics so helpful?

1. It integrates with other programs like AdSense and AdWords, adding additionally value if you are running any type of paid media campaigns.
2. It’s relatively easy to implement and works on any type of website or blog
3. There are built in reports and interfaces that provide enough information for beginners to analyze their site’s performance, but they also offer a wealth of functionality for more advanced users.

 

Setting Up Google Analytics:

 

Step 1: Signup for an account

Like all other Google products, you will need a Google Account in order to take advantage of Google Analytics.  If you have a Google Mail account you can use the same ID, or you can create a new account.  In either case you will need to visit the Google Analytics site to get started.

 

Step 2: Set up your account properties

There is a hierarchal relationship between accounts, properties, and users:

Account: This is your main access point for Google Analytics and is the top most level of organization

Property: An account can have multiple properties.  Properties can be a website, mobile application, blog, etc.

View: This is where you go to access reports and can be customized for each property.  Each property can contain one or more views and each view can contain multiple reports.

Users: You can add users to an account and then manage their permissions.  Users can be assigned different permissions for each property or view level and the permissions govern what a user can see and what actions they can take within the account.

 

Step 3: Add the Tracking Code

Find the tracking code for your site: Click the Admin option from the top navigation.  Use the Account and Property drop downs to select the property for which you want to generate the tracking code.  Click on the Tracking Info/ Tracking Code option under the Property column.

Copy the tracking code snippet:  You will see a box with several lines of code starting with <script> and ending with </script>.  The tracking code contains a unique ID, also called a UA, which corresponds to a particular site.   Copy everything in the box without making any edits.

Step 4: Add the snippet to your site

Paste the tracking code on every single page of the site.  Any page that does not include the tracking code will not be tracked.  The code should be placed right before the closing </head> tag in the HTML of the page.

Step 5: Verify your set up

Log back into Google Analytics and make sure that the site is capturing data.  You can do this by going back to Admin from the top menu bar and clicking Tracking Info/ Tracking Code.   At the top of the page it will tell you the status of the site’s tracking ability.  There are four possible readings:

• Waiting for the data: The tracking code was detected on the home page of the site and Google’s servers are updating before data will appear in the report.  If you see this status nothing else needs to be done.

• Tracking Not Installed or Not Verified: If you see this message it means the tracking code was not properly set up on your site.  Make sure that you copied and pasted the full code and that it is included before the closing </head> tag.

• Tracking Installed:  The tracking code is setup properly, collecting data, and sending data the report in Google Analytics.  You are good to go!

• Unknown: There is no data available that Google Analytics can use to tell if the tracking code is setup.  As stated above, check that the code was implemented correctly.

 

Most Common Mistakes When Tracking

 

1.    I’ve added my GA tracking code, but no data is being collected

The Google Analytics tracking code should be copied and pasted directly from the GA admin console.   Copying and pasting it to another program first like Microsoft Word or Outlook will insert additional characters that will cause the tracking code to function improperly once uploaded to your site.

2.    Not all of my pages are tracking data

In many cases data can be tracked for the majority of a website, but certain sections may not contain any data.  The GA tracking code needs to be present on every page of the site because only those pages that contain the tracking code will report data.

One way to check if the code is on each page of your site is to visit each individual page, right click for view source, then use CTRL +F to search for the tracking code or the UA.  This can work for smaller sites, but for sites with many pages you can use a tool such as Screaming Frog to scan your site for the tracking code.  Within Screaming Frog you can create a custom filter to pick up any pages that do not

3.    My site has a really low bounce rate, so users must love it

In some cases a business may redesign a section of their website and see their bounce rate decrease significantly.  For example, a drop in bounce rate from 60% to 5%.  This may seem great, but it is worth considering possible causes for the drop, as a bounce rate under 15% is highly unlikely.  The likely cause is that the analytics code has been duplicated on some pages, therefore when one of those pages are landed upon, the code is fired twice.  If a user leaves straight away the bounce is not registered.

4.    The misuse of filters

In certain cases you may want to use filters to exclude certain types of traffic from your analytics.  Filters can be applied to manipulate the final data in reports; however having an incorrect filter can severely impact the accuracy and viability of reports. A good example is filtering out an office IP address to make sure those users are not counted in reporting.  When creating ‘include and exclude’ filters it is important to think carefully about what is being included and excluded.  Include filters act as “include only” and will only include the data specified.  Carefully monitor any new filters once they are created and look for any major drop-offs or changes to the reporting.

5.    Improper setup for sub-domains and multiple domains

Do users ever cross over to sub-domain, or to an entirely different domain during their journey?  Tracking subdomains can be a more advanced topic, but is one of the more common mistakes that users make when setting up Google Analytics.  Check out the Google help files for instructions on setting up your Google Analytics Tracking code to work with subdomains and multiple domains.

 

Top Metrics to Track for Conversion Optimization

In this Google analytics guide we’ve listed some of the most crucial metrics you should be following for understanding your funnel better and your leaks.

Google Analytics provides a wealth of data, but with limited time it is critical to prioritize the most important KPIs to analyze on a consistent basis:

Device Segmentation – By 2015 it is expected that mobile search will outpace desktop search for the first time, and in some markets 40% to 50% of all traffic is from mobile.  Understanding how traffic is performing at a device level is one of the most critical metrics to track.  Large variances in metrics such as bounce rate, time on site, exit rate, and conversion can indicate device level issues impacting performance. Even more important, this metric can help define where you should start optimizing.From the left navigation, under Audience, select Mobile, and then Overview.  This will bring up the default mobile dashboard, highlighting key metrics comparisons for Desktop, Mobile, and Tablet.

• Site Content – Underneath Behavior, from the left navigation, is an extremely helpful section known as Site Content.  Site Content contains four sections: All Pages, Content Drilldown, Landing Pages, and Exit Pages. The All Pages view, as it is aptly named, shows all pages on the site. This gives a quick view of how all the pages of a site are performing, and which pages are being visited the most. The Content Drilldown report shows pages of a website grouped into their subfolders.  The report rolls up performance of a particular section of the site to see how it is performing. This is an often overlooked, but extremely valuable report. The Landing Pages section highlights the top pages that users land on when reaching a site, sorted by default in order of sessions.  The key metric to review here is bounce rate.  A high bounce rate indicates that a landing page is not doing an effective job of transitioning a user to a site. The Exit Pages section shows the top pages that are causing visitors to leave a site.  Focusing on those pages with the highest exit rates can remove leaks in the user journey to conversion.
• Channel Overview – One of the most important reports is the traffic and performance by channel.  The channel overview report, found under the Audience tab in the left navigation, provides a wealth of information into how each channel is performing. The key metrics on the Channel report are Sessions and, if goal tracking is properly configured, conversions.
• New/Returning Visitors – The New vs. Returning visitor report in Google Analytics, found under Audience/Behavior, provides insight into how people who have been to a site before perform differently than first time visitors.  This report will show you where you can make the biggest impact on the funnel. The report has two rows, New and Returning, for a quick view of how each bucket is performing.  Clicking the pie chart icon on the top right of the table provides a great visualization of the proportion of new vs. returning visitors.

Google Analytics offers a wealth of data at no cost, is easy to setup, and provides good reporting to get started with.   By installing Google Analytics and frequently reviewing the report, you can get a much clearer picture of how your site is performing and more importantly – where to start optimizing.

When it comes to conversion optimization there are many rules, techniques and AB test checklists you should follow. The hardest part in CRO is deciding what to test – finding the leaks in the funnel, coming up with hypotheses, prioritizing tests and getting the team on board. Miss out on one of these steps and all the time you’ve spent in launching your tests will go to waste.

Finding the leaks – When is it comes to identifying the pain points in the funnel, Google Analytics is the first place you can turn to. There are many metrics to follow that will give you a clearer picture of your results: The top landing pages on the site for example, are important as we want our tests to impact the bottom line results, sessions count too for understanding the traffic coming through your site, traffic sources, exit pages (which pages are being abandoned the most by your visitors), your conversion rate of course, new vs. returning visitors, demographic reports and more. Don’t forget to use heatmaps to get an even better understanding of your visitors’ behavior.

Prioritizing tests – You’ve found the leaks, now you need to determine what would be the best place to start. Time, resources and impact are 3 main parts of our checklist before deciding what to test. How much time will it take to get validity, how many resources in terms of the team and money spent will we need and most importantly – how much impact will testing this part of the funnel have on the end results.

Coming up with Hypotheses – once you’ve located the leak and decided where you want to test, you have to come up with strategies and hypotheses for optimization. It’s not enough to just change a call to action a button, you have to dive deeper into emotional triggers – your customer’s emotional needs and goals. Get some testing ideas from our latest post: 4 meaningful AB test ideas. Remember that conversion optimization is all learning and gaining greater insights about your customers – this knowledge can then help you create a better customer jounrey and grow your business.

Getting the team on board – Probably the most important part of CRO before launching a test is getting all the team on the same page. For many team members CRO is often times perceived as a distraction, something that’s getting in the way of “important” work so spend a lot of time explaining the importance of CRO to your team and demonstrating how it can help each individual do their job better. After getting your team on board with CRO in general, you then need to explain your findings, hypotheses and make sure that the team is aligned with your expectations.

The, once you’ve done all these and set up the test, it’s time to follow these 5 golden rules for launching a conversion optimization test:

1. Traffic Distribution Google has a tendency of remembering pages that already exist and favoring them. To make sure your test isn’t contaminated with old data give all landing pages a new link. This happens on various platforms, once Google sees that one page has had more traffic than the other and more results it favors it. Another option while setting up the test is to distribute the traffic evenly across all variations and that way certain pages won’t be “favored”.
2. QA – Don’t just start the test. This may seem obvious to some but I’ve seen dozens of tests go wrong just because the footer was misplaced, or the errors won’t showing up correctly. Don’t forget to check for:

• Browser compatibility – Check on all browsers (don’t forget to clean cache and also QA from incognito).
• Errors – See what happens when someone enters the wrong data in a form. Make sure you know exactly what happens to users every step of the way
• Mobile compatibility – Very important issue, mobile traffic is on the rise and you HAVE to have an answer for mobile traffic. Check out these amazing mobile stats and get 9 essentials tips for improving your mobile pages.

3. Time – It takes time for a test to be conclusive; you’ll be surprised to see the difference in the results from hour to hour. Give the test at least 4-5 days to run to see conclusive results (depending on the amount of traffic). You’ll be surprised to see the difference in the results from hour to hour.

4. Set Goals- What would you like to test? Make sure to set your goals correctly before you start testing. It is important to have 1 clear target for the test and keep to it. It’s also best to start at the top part of the funnel and make your way down, meaning don’t be tempted to jump straight to the payment process for example, start with the signups, this way you can be sure you are building a successful funnel. Be sure to set the goals on Google Analytics.
5. Loading time – As I’ve written in several posts, the amount of data we’re exposed to on a daily basis as users is HUGE. We have no time, gone are the days when we clicked on a link and waited for a site to load, we want everything NOW and if your site takes longer than 5 seconds to load, you will lose 25% of your traffic. A few tips to fix your site’s speed. Most important one: “The ‘Distribution‘ report is tucked away behind a tab in the ‘Page Timings’ report. The distribution report is very useful, as you can see ‘% of pages loaded in less than X seconds’.”

We’d love to hear from you, do you have any golden rules and tips before launching a conversion test?