Tracking Data Effectively

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Tracking data effectively

Let's take some time to look at the best practices for using Google Analytics, so you know you have all bases covered.

• Tracking: Firstly, tracking. You need to confirm that the analytics tracking code is applied across every page. You also need to ensure that it is has been customized to cover all relevant domains, so you can track customer interaction with your website, ecommerce transactions, and so on.
• Different Views: You also need to confirm that different Views are implemented in order to maximize Google Analytics’ tracking capabilities. Useful Views include time zone, default page, currency, Google Ads cost source, and site-search tracking.
• Visits from inside company: You shouldn’t track visits from inside your company or from your partners, as this can skew traffic and conversion numbers. So your Google Analytics Views should include Internal IP filtering, so that data reports don’t include employee or partner traffic.
• Unfiltered view: It's best practice to have an unfiltered view for reference purposes. This is usually called an ‘All Site Data’ view. It doesn’t have any filters applied, so you always have a baseline to report against.
• Define KPIs: Remember, everything you are tracking in Google Analytics is to help you deliver on Key Performance Indicators or KPIs. So before you begin analyzing your campaign data, it's important to define your KPIs, so that the campaign’s effectiveness can be benchmarked against these metrics. Likewise, it's essential that Goals are set up in Google Analytics as a way of measuring these KPIs.
• Track offline marketing activity: The final word on website analytics is to consider the importance of appropriately tracking offline, as well as online, marketing activity. Not all purchases or actions happen online, so it's important to track how offline factors can influence user behavior and conversions, so you can take the appropriate action and make more informed decisions.