Optimize your Google Analytics setup

Google Analytics is a great tool to help you understand where to find value within your website and to help you improve what is not working. The first step to unlock this insight requires that you set up Analytics so that the data you are gathering and analyzing serves your business objectives. The old adage 'garbage in, garbage out' is very fitting.

What to look for in a basic Google Analytics setup

There are a few basic steps you need to take so that the data you are gathering is clean and relevant.

1. Make sure to create one Analytics profile that is unfiltered so that you have a complete history of all activity on your site regardless of source.

2. Create a second profile that filters out traffic that creates business 'noise'. Examples of 'noise' traffic include your internal office visitors as well as consultants and agencies who may be working on your site. Basically, anyone who will be accessing your site but whose visitor traffic tells you nothing about how your on-line business is performing should be excluded from the second profile which becomes the 'business master' profile.

3. Tag everything on your site! You can start by simply tagging all of your pages. BUT... tracking pages alone tells a partial story, particularly when there are other interactions which do not generate 'pageviews'. Think about someone downloading a brochure/newsletter/sample in pdf format. Think about a visitor interacting with your Flash movie or embedded YouTube video. These are likely to be interactive events without pageviews and are therefore not tracked even if you are tagging your pages. So, tag your events! Analytics provides great event tracking reporting that can be used to segment your visitors you never thought about. Ask yourself - are the visitors who download my brochure more likely to purchase a product? With event tracking you can begin to answer this question.

4. Tag all the inbound links that you control - the Tweets, Facebook pages and posts, and LinkedIn updates that you create; any paid advertising that comes from sources other than Google Adwords. Anything that links into your site that you control can be tagged and tracked. So start tagging!

5. If you are running Google Adwords, make sure to link Adwords to Analytics and to turn on auto-tagging in Adwords. Otherwise you will likely see all of your paid search as organic traffic. And beware - if you are managing Ad campaigns for different websites from a single Adwords account, then you need to set up filters in your business master profile that removes the campaign data that belongs to these other sites. Otherwise it will appear as if you are attributing all of the Adwords account traffic, costs and conversions to your single site.

6. If you are running an Ecommerce site make sure to add the Google Analytics transaction tracking code to the page that indicates that someone concluded a transaction - like your Thank You page. That way you are able to capture detailed data about each transaction.

7. Last but not least - set up at least one goal in your business master profile. The goal(s) should relate back to your business and site objectives. If you cannot think of a goal, then ask yourself a simple question - what am I trying to achieve with this site - Sell stuff? Answer customer inquiries? Source leads? Then set up your goals .

Happy tagging!