Nine Simple Tips and Tricks to Professionalize Your Google Analytics Setup

1. How Google Analytics helps to make the Onsite Customer Journey visible
2. Tracking marketing channels correctly and meaningfully with Google Analytics
3. Completely measure conversions and website goals
4. Evaluate marketing performance and derive insights

Data is something like the holy grail for online marketers. And the great thing about it: Every website or shop operator has relatively easy access to as much information about (potential) customers as never before. The big challenge these days is rather to read data correctly and to draw appropriate conclusions. Analytics expert Maria-Lena Matysik explains in her guest post which nine quickly implementable tips can help with Google Analytics setup.

I often hear from my clients and workshop participants that they feel overwhelmed by the many possibilities that Google Analytics offers. I must admit: I can understand that. Google Analytics is perhaps a free and very popular web analysis tool. But even though everyone has heard of it and most people even have access to analytics data, probably very few people use even half of the potential.

If you look around in the analytics world, you will always discover new possibilities to the left and right. But not everything that is feasible with Google Analytics ultimately brings the hoped-for added value through successful and efficient marketing. With this article I want to give you some orientation and provide you with 3x3 tips for your analytics journey.

How Google Analytics helps to make the Onsite Customer Journey visible

From a marketing perspective, two aspects of the customer journey are particularly important to understand. You should therefore pay particular attention to these two questions when tracking and analysing data:

• Which marketing activities bring users to my website?
• Which users convert on my website?

Channel → Website → Conversion

If you answer these two questions, you can distinguish performance-strong from -weak marketing campaigns, better understand your target group and use your budget more efficiently.

These 3 steps are necessary in your Google Analytics setup:

1. Track marketing channels correctly and meaningfully
2. Measure conversions and website goals completely
3. Evaluate marketing performance and derive insights

For each of these steps, I will give you three tips that will help you take your marketing to a new data-driven level.

Tracking marketing channels correctly and meaningfully with Google Analytics

Before we bother with the data itself, it is important that you have some thoughts in advance about how you want to set up Google Analytics.

1. Structure your marketing channels purposefully

In order to be able to evaluate which marketing channel was successful and performed well, it is important to find a meaningful structuring. What do you want to consider as an independent marketing channel? This question seems trivial at first, but it actually forms the basis for an analysis that brings you really helpful insights.

In order to develop a channel structuring that is suitable for you, you should ask yourself some questions:

• Which questions do you want to answer using analytics?
• At what level do you want to compare campaigns?
• What level of granularity in reporting would your team benefit from?

In the end, your marketing channels could look like this:

Options for channel groupings

You can then translate your final channel structuring into UTM parameters and store them in all campaigns.

2. Transfer your individual marketing channels to Google Analytics

In the acquisition reports, Google Analytics groups your traffic into “Channels” by default. This classification is based on quite banal rules. This way, Analytics sorts traffic tracked with the information “google / cpc” as “Paid” and “google / organic” as “Organic”.

So far so good. As soon as you use self-defined UTM parameters for campaign tagging, however, Google Analytics is confused and sorts the traffic under “Other”. This is of course not very helpful for the analysis. The solution: store your self-defined UTM parameters in the Google Analytics settings and create a “Custom Channel Grouping”.

Creating Custom Channel Grouping

Select Custom Channel Grouping in the Acquisition Report

So Google Analytics, knows which traffic should be assigned to which marketing channel and your acquisition report accurately reflects your individual channels. A great added value for performance analysis! Pro tip: You can create multiple custom channel groupings in Google Analytics. This way you can choose your own channel structuring with different granularity depending on the recipient of the reporting.

3. Minimize the “Direct” traffic

I still hear often that “Direct” traffic is misinterpreted. A website visitor is tracked with the traffic source “Direct” if he or she types the URL into the browser address line. Since the user already had the website in mind, “Direct” is often misunderstood as a “branding effect”.

“Direct” as alleged marketing channel in reporting

Unfortunately, typing the URL into the browser line by hand is not the only cause of “Direct” traffic. Google Analytics always interprets a traffic source as “Direct” when there is simply no information about the origin of the user. So whenever a user is tracked on a website without a “referrer”.

You have had your own experiences with Google Analytics or other tools that you would like to share? Then just leave a corresponding software review on our platform OMR Reviews – and help others to choose the right tool!

A reason for missing referrer information is actually typing the URL into the browser line. However, technical reasons make up the majority. So the referrer is lost, for example, when a user is guided to a website from an app. And the increasing cookie restrictions of browsers – keyword ITP / ETP – also contribute their part.

So: What can you do to minimize direct traffic? The best way to valid information is UTM parameters. Use cleanly structured UTM parameters in your marketing campaigns for linking to your website wherever possible.

Completely measure conversions and website goals

To determine which campaign was successful, we need to measure success. Sounds simple. But the challenge lies in the details. These tips will help you to evaluate campaign performance correctly and not to lose yourself in empty “vanity” metrics.

4. Define “Performance” for you and your marketing strategy

In order to be able to measure the performance of marketing channels and campaigns, you should first be clear about what “performance” means for you and your business model. What is the goal of your website? What would you recognize good performance by?

An example from my analytics practice shows well what it's all about: For an e-commerce shop, the goal is to win customers and make sales. It also matters at what shopping cart value a customer has bought. A shop would therefore define performance as “transactions with high shopping cart value”.

Other business models, on the other hand, have other goals. The website of a B2B company, which typically acquires customers in the offline world, must apply different standards for evaluating website performance. The same applies to content portals or affiliate sites. Every business model is individual and so the tracking should also be thought of individually.

5. Use goals as a “quick win” for campaign analysis

If you want to analyze the performance of your campaigns in GA, you have two options for detailed, meaningful tracking. Either you implement an event tracking for your most important conversions. This is particularly suitable if a form signup is the goal of your website. Or you implement a e-commerce tracking that reflects the sales achieved by a e-commerce shop.

My recommendation: definitely implement one of these options! Most of the time, however, this doesn't go as fast as we would like. Larger tracking setups need a little more time for planning and implementation than just five minutes. Resources are also often scarce and schedules are tight.

So: What to do? Use a very simple, but no less valuable trick: Define the page view of your conversion's thank you page as a “goal” in Google Analytics.

Goals in Google Analytics

You can find the settings for this under Administration > Data view settings > Goals. Page views are tracked in every basic setup and setting it up as a goal takes less than two minutes. The big advantage: You can later select your goal in the acquisition reporting and thereby find out which of your campaigns is responsible for most of the conversions. The ultimate “quick win” that you can implement immediately.

6. Use the full power of Enhanced E-Commerce Tracking

Even though I'm a big fan of “quick wins”: Only an individual, meaningful analytics setup will help you in the long run to gain valuable insights.

So when are analytics data really meaningful? Whenever they answer your questions. If you are wondering at which checkout step your shop visitors drop out or which products from the “Often bought together” list land in the shopping cart, you won't get any further with a basic tracking. If you want to track the purchasing behavior of your visitors, you should implement an Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking. It gives you exciting insights about:

• The checkout behavior
• Internal promotions (banners on your own website)
• Performance of coupon actions
  

The insights about the transactions and the shopping behavior will definitely compensate you for the setup effort.

Evaluate marketing performance and derive insights

Always keep your KPIs in mind. A conversion tracking and clean marketing data alone of course do not yet bring you any added value. Only if you actively and regularly work with your Google Analytics data can you derive valuable insights and use them for optimizations.

By the way, you can find hands-on solutions, expert knowledge, video tutorials and much more on Google Analytics in our OMR Report “Professional Guide to Digital Analytics”.

7. Automate your Google Analytics reporting

So much for the theory. Unfortunately, everyday life often gets in the way and we don't work with the analytics data as intensively as we planned. And so the insights often remain unused. But there is a simple solution: just let Google Analytics remind you to regularly evaluate your campaign performance and keep an eye on trends.

In Google Analytics you have the possibility to automate reporting at several points.

1. You can use the “Share” function to send any of the standard reports regularly by email to your email inbox.
   
2. If the standard reports are not enough for you, you can create a custom report (using the “Edit” function in every analytics report) and then have it sent to you by email.
   
3. If you need a crisp summary of performance and key metrics, then a dashboard is the best choice. The limited possibilities are an additional incentive to stay focused and only include the really relevant key figures in the dashboard.
   

8. Use segments for more insights

Segments are probably the most important and valuable analysis function in Google Analytics. Those who do not segment, in the end, only look at aggregated, average data. What decisions can we make if we know what the average of our data points is? (Almost) none.

Only through segmentation can you lure out the information from the data. It is always about comparing different groups (=segments) with each other in order to identify differences and starting points for optimizations. Which target group converts better? On which devices is the bounce rate higher? Which content categories are particularly successful? Maybe you have never noticed it so clearly: The Google Analytics interface is designed for easy and versatile segmentation.

Segments in Google Analytics

In the date selection you can create time segments. In every report you can compare two metrics with each other in the overview. The custom channel grouping is a segmentation based on the traffic source. With an enhanced e-commerce tracking you can create e-commerce segments (e.g. “cart abandoners”). Google Analytics provides you with predefined segments (e.g. New vs. Returning Users). And with the custom segments, you can map all other groupings. Without segmentation, the really valuable insights remain hidden in your data.

9. Acquire important analytics knowledge

Successful, data-driven online marketing requires two important ingredients. These are on the one hand clean, meaningful data that is collected through a robust, individual tracking setup. The second ingredient is often underestimated in my opinion: You need the necessary background knowledge to gain the really valuable insights from the data. In order to assess abnormalities in the data correctly, you need to know how the data logic behind Google Analytics works. How is the data structured? How are the metrics in the reports created? How can (supposed) errors be explained?

List of all dimensions and metrics in Google Analytics

But not only an understanding of the data structure, but also of the most important metrics and dimensions is important. Google Analytics knows a seemingly endless number of different metrics and characteristics. Those who know them and can interpret them correctly have the most important basis for a valuable reporting!

My tip: You don't have to know everything, you just have to know where it is. In this case, Google Analytics helps us with a detailed documentation of all dimensions and metrics including an official definition. You can find the list in the “Dimensions & Metrics Explorer”. An important reference work for all marketing managers.