Google Analytics Best Practices

Ben Johnston
GOOGLE ANALYTICS BEST PRACTICES
Head of SEO & Data Analytics
29/06/2018

esvdigital.co.uk
About ESV Digital
• We are a global search marketing agency, offering PPC,
SEO, data analytics and online branding services
• Established in 2004, we have grown to ten offices around
the world, with over 200 team members
• We are pioneering with our technology and our approach,
and we are sticklers for best practice – which is what
we’re going to talk about today

esvdigital.co.uk
About Me
• 12 years experience in SEO, 10 agency
side
• Data driven and spent a lot of time with
Google Analytics and Tag Manager, as
well as other analytics tools
• I’ve also worked as a data analyst using
statistical methodologies across many
different types of datasets
• Qualified R programmer
• Google Analytics Certified
• Worked with over 1,000 clients – almost
all of them needed Google Analytics
setting up properly
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-
johnston-seo/
• https://twitter.com/ben_johnston80
• https://www.ben-johnston.co.uk/

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About This Morning’s Session
• We’re going to cover best practices with setting up your Google
Analytics account, ensuring that your data is as accurate as it
can be and that you’re tracking the right things in the right way
• You’ll learn what you should be implementing and why you
should do it
• This is very much a basic session for people with a passing
familiarity with Google Analytics who want to get the most out
of their data rather than an advanced session (although we
may run one of those at a later date)

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What Are Best Practices And Why Do They Matter?
• There are generally three kinds of Google Analytics
setups:

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setups:
1. The right way

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setups:
1. The right way (which we’re here to talk about)

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setups:
2. The wrong way

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setups:
2. The wrong way (>90% of accounts I see)

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setups:
3. The IT department’s way

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setups:
3. The IT department’s way (the same as the wrong way, but
much more complicated and takes six months)

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• Best practices let you ensure that you’re always working
towards doing things the right way
• They provide a framework
• By following the best practices we’ll lay out today, your
Google Analytics accounts will be giving you accurate,
useful, easily-digestible data around the things that really
matter to your business

1 MEASUREMENT PLANNING
2 VIEW FILTERING
3 VIEW SETTINGS
4 GOAL TRACKING
5 EVENT TRACKING
6 ANNOTATIONS & ALERTS
7 TROUBLESHOOTING
8 QUESTIONS

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Measurement Planning
• This is the single most important part of any Analytics
setup
• It is where you identify what it is you actually want to
measure and track – the metrics that matter to your
business
– Macro conversions
– Micro conversions
• How do you track and measure these metrics that matter?
• What are your KPI’s?

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What Is A Macro Conversion?
• These are the big goals for your website –the things
which directly matter to you as a business
• They are often purchases, enquiries etc
• These need to be identified before you begin your
tracking configuration and, in many ways, they are the
easiest part of measurement planning

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What Is A Micro Conversion?
• Micro conversions are the elements of your website which,
while not directly influencing your bottom-line, they assist with
them
• They’re sometimes also known as “soft conversions”
• These are usually elements which are further down the
conversion funnel, so they provide a great opportunity to
nurture growth
• A micro conversion will typically be something like downloading
a PDF of your content, signing up for a newsletter, viewing a
series of pages or similar

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Macro vs Micro Conversions
• A car dealership has a series of vehicle detail pages, where
visitors can see all the information about a car
• They consider people viewing these pages as important to their
business as they are the pages which lead to enquiries
• However, these pageviews are not an enquiry in and of
themselves
• In this case, the enquiry would be a macro conversion and
viewing the vehicle detail pages would be considered a micro
conversion

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The Measurement Planning Process
• Identify: Work with stakeholders
across the business to identify what
success looks like
• Integrate: How do your web
measurement goals fit in with your
overall business goals? Are you
measuring against the same
metrics?
• Implement: Set up your Google
Analytics and Tag Manager to track
these metrics correctly
• Interrogate: Examine the data
constantly and see whether there
are other elements you should be
tracking or monitoring
Identify
Integrate
Implement
Interrogate

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What Are View Filters?
• Filters are a way to modify the way your data is collected and
reported
• There is a lot that can be done with them, from the simple –
such as excluding an IP address – to the more advanced, such
as rewriting URLs or aggregating pages
• They are also a good way to minimise sampling if your site
gets a lot of traffic
• Filters do not change your data retroactively
• You can’t just turn them on and off the way you can a segment,
which is why there should be a dedicated filtered view

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The Difference Between Filters And Segments
• Filters are permanently applied to a view, whereas a
segment can be applied and removed on the fly
• Segments are quicker and more convenient, but typically
less powerful
• There are many pre-built segments within Google
Analytics, but you can also build your own custom ones
• In many cases, segments trigger data sampling sooner
• You cannot exclude things like IP addresses with
segments, you need a filter for that

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Google Analytics Account Structure
• Google Analytics accounts are
structured like so:
– Account: The top-most level
where a series of properties
are stored. Your login can
have more than one account.
– Property: An individual
website or app. Tracking
codes are generated at the
property level
– View: Where you can see your
data and reports. You can
have many views below a
single property
Account
Property
View

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The Views You Should Have
• Generally speaking, you should have at least three views for
each property
– All Website Data: The default view which comes out of the box
with Google Analytics. This is completely unfiltered and should not
be used for reporting, just as a control
– Filtered Master: This is the view which should be used for
reporting. It should filter out bot traffic, your business’ IP
address(es) and those of any partners/ partner agencies, ensuring
the only traffic recorded is “real” traffic
– Staging: A view which only includes traffic from your Analytics
team’s IP address, used for testing out new deployments

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Setting Filters Up

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View Settings
• Aside from filters, there are
some other configurations for
your views which should be
used
• Make sure that your settings
are correct for your website
and your location, otherwise
you can end up with
confusing data
• Also be sure to tick the
“Exclude all hits from known
bots and spiders” box

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Site Search
• Really useful way of
understanding how people
are using your site
• Very easy to set up under
View Settings
• You’ll find the data under
“Behaviour” in your
reporting view

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Back To The Plan
• Remember the macro conversions we talked about in the
measurement plan? Those are our goals
• Depending on your site’s configuration, these can be very easy
or very complex to set up
• In many cases, they are just a destination, but they can be
almost anything you like, including time on site, the number of
pages people view or an event
• If you’re using Google Tag Manager, you can make these
events be almost anything, giving you real flexibility around
what you track as a goal

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Tracking Macro Vs Micro Conversions
• In many cases, micro conversions (number of pages
viewed, watching videos etc) are better off set as an
event rather than a goal
• However, depending on how they support your big
business goals, it may be worth tracking them as a goal
as well (such as mailing list signups)
• Ultimately, that decision is a case-by-case basis

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Keep Your Goals Tidy
• Goal tracking can get messy if you have too many of
them running
• You can lose sight of the metrics that matter and find
yourself focusing on elements which don’t matter as much
as others
• Don’t set every little thing you want to look at as a goal –
your measurement plan should be as much about
efficiency as efficacy
• You have a limit of 20 goals to a view. Make them count

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What Is Event Tracking?
• If we can consider a goal a desirable action taken on your
website, an event is simply an action taken on your website
• They require special code to be added to the element of your
website that you want to track as an event (clicks on a PDF
link, for example), which previously meant the development
overhead was higher than people would like
• However, Google Tag Manager makes event tracking easy and
flexible
• You can use event tracking to see form completions, clicks on
individual links, scroll depth, video views and much more. The
possibilities with it are almost endless

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What Events Should You Track?
• With all these possibilities, it can be difficult to decide what to
track
• When doing Google Analytics and Tag Manager installations,
we configure events around the measurement plan, but there
are usually a few core ones which we always track:
– Form submissions (these are usually a goal)
– PDF downloads
– Outbound links
– Video views (if applicable) and length of view

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Events As Goals
• If you configure the tracking for
them correctly, events will
automatically feed through to
Google Analytics
• However, these events can also
be set as goals if you have any
which are important, such as
form completions
• It’s vital that when filling in the
goal details for an event, that
you are exact – they won’t track
as goals otherwise

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Using Events
• Events are a fantastic way to really understand the ways
people are interacting and engaging with your website
• By tracking what visitors are clicking on, how much of
your video they’re watching, how far down the page
they’re scrolling, you are able to gather a wealth of
information which you can use to optimise your site
• We generally suggest that if it can be tracked as an event,
do so, but not every event needs to be set as a goal

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Annotations
• Heavily under-used – they’re
Google Analytics’ best-kept
secret
• Annotations are used to mark a
date when something happened
(a new campaign, new site
design, something broke etc)
• The provide vital history to
anyone and everyone who works
on the website
• Annotations take seconds to set
up, but save hours later on

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Alerts
• Custom Alerts are the quickest way to let you know that
something isn’t working the way it should be
• Or, conversely, they let you know that things are going
great
• Again, these are underused in the vast majority of
accounts we see

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When To Use Custom Alerts
• You would use Custom Alerts to alert
you that traffic from different channels
has dropped by a certain percentage
(typically 15%), or if it has increased
• However, there are a huge range of
possibilities with them
• Custom Alerts should be part of the
measurement planning process.
During the “Identify” stage, you
should also identify what you want to
be alerted to and over which date
range
• As you can see, there are a wide
variety of metrics which can be used
for Custom Alerts

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Most Common Google Analytics Issues
• There are so many possible problems with Google
Analytics, that we’re just going to hit some of the ones we
see most commonly
• If you have other problems with yours, feel free to ask me
about it in the next section

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I’m Not Seeing Any Data
• Check that your Google
Analytics/ Tag Manager code
is installed on the site - use
the Ghostery plugin for this
• Check that your Google
Analytics code matches the
account you’re looking at –
you’ll find your UA number
under Tracking Info below
Property

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My Bounce Rate Suddenly Dropped To Almost Zero – Yay!
• This almost certainly means that the Google Analytics
tracking code is now on your page more than once
• This will be skewing all your data, not just bounce rate
• Remove the duplicated code

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My Goals Aren’t Tracking
• There’s a configuration issue somewhere
• Check that your confirmation page URL hasn’t changed
or that your event details within Google Analytics are the
same as the event tracking code or setting within Tag
Manager

Contact
+44 (0) 203 475 1801
contact_uk@esvdigital.com
THANKS

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