How to Set Up Google Analytics The Right Way in 2019
Chances are you probably already have a Google Analytics account.
But are you making the most of the latest features for 2019?
In this video, I'll show you how to set up Google Analytics the right way in 2019.
Assuming most of us already have Google Analytics installed, I'll skip over the installation steps.
There's couple of new things that Google Analytics has released recently.
One of the new features is something called 'Google Signals'.
Note: you may only be able to access it if you have a Google Ads campaign active. If this is the case, Google will be making it available to everyone shortly.
If you have access to it via your Google Analytics account, it's one button press to enable.
Once enabled, you will gain cross device tracking capabilities. For example, if someone looks at your website on a mobile device, then accesses your website from their computer, Google Analytics will attribe those sessions to a single user.
Before, Google Analytics would consider that action as two sessions across two different users, which is not accurate.
Cross-device tracking centralised that user session data, improving the accuracy of your user data.
You'll also be able to access things like demographic & interests tracking, age & preferred language of your website visitors.
Google Analytics gathers with data from the user's Google Account. Since most internet users either use Chrome or have a Google Account, you can gain a lot of demographic data easily from your website.
You can do things like interest-based segmentation with this data, which can help you to make better decisions.
That way, you can augment your standard statistical data from Google Analytics with user demographic data.
If you have Google Search Console, you should integrate it into your Google Analytics account.
This will give you more detailed organic search information inside your Google Analytics account. You can use this additional data to gain a clearer picture on how your website is performing in organic search.
If you have a relatively large website, or if you have a blog with a site search, you should set up search tracking.
Search tracking track every queried keyword phrase that your users have entered into your website search
You can take that information out and then get an understanding of where your website is failing to inform your user's questions.
That data can be useful for planning things such as website content refreshes or the next articles you'll produce on your blog.
The most important thing to do in analytics is to configure conversion tracking.
Your opportunity analysis & KPI roadmap should tell you what to track on your website.
That way, you can then see if you're hitting your KPIs and where the conversions are coming from.
Personally, I always used the custom goal setup in Google Analytics to configure goal tracking. I find it to be the fastest and easiest way to setup destination and event-based goals, which should cover the majorty of your tracking requirements.
When setting up custom page destination goals, all you need to do is:
1. Select 'destination' as the goal type
2. Enter in the destination URL that you want to be tracking
3. Save it
And that's it - you're done.
Finally, once you've configured your goals, the next step is to prepare your backup and testing views.
When you create a goal or data filter, you cannot undo these actions in Google Analytics. There is no 'undo' function.
If you are not sure if you goals that you are setting up will work, its best that you test them in a seperate 'testing' view first. Once you've confirmed that they are working, you can replicate them in your main 'working' view.
That way, you keep your 'working' Google Analytics data clean while avoiding potential mistakes that could mess up your data.
Once you have your first Google Analytics view configured:
1. Go to view settings & rename your current view to yourdomain.com - Working View
2. Create a copy of your working view, and rename it to yourdomain.com - Testing View. As the name implies, this is the Google Analytics view that you want to experiment with before carrying over your changes to the working view.
3. Create another copy of your working view, and rename it to yourdomain.com - Backup View (Do not edit) - as the name implies, you do not edit this view at all. This is your fallback plan if you mess up your data on your other views.
If you want to learn more about Google Analytics & digital marketing, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel by clicking on the following link: / @web3au
