Adding Google Analytics tracking code to your web pages, enables you to collects a large amount of information (you receive a full range of statistics on your personal or business website). Perhaps because so much data is going to be collected by default, often people believe that the answer to their questions must be contained somewhere in the reports they receive. However, when viewing these reports, except for the possibility of assessing the total volume of traffic, it appears that only a few of the business decisions can be taken based on them. Therefore it is necessary to go beyond the basic configuration.
A complete picture of visitor activity is tracking all possible actions of visitors and points to attract attention. Once this information is obtained, you need to express it in the form of money to get the true value measurement of of your site. This value is the most important metric of the site, covering the value of the page, the value of the visitor and the overall value of the website.
The latter circumstance is so important that I pay special attention to it, and again emphasize that the monetary value is the most important metric of sites, both related and unrelated to the transactions on the site.
The optimal configuration of Google Analytics should include most of the following elements, all of which can be obtained if properly configured. However, they are not included in the default reports. Setting some of those configurations require short-term thinking, and some require a more detailed analysis of the available options.
- The data structure . How best to structure the data so that reports can be compared with the real state of affairs in business, if you own more than one domain or subdomain websites, for example, mysite.com, mysite.co.uk, myproducts.com, store.mysite .com etc.? By default, Google Analytics collects all the data in one profile reports. In this situation, you should use separate profiles, individual accounts are deployed reports or a combination of all three approaches.
- Download files . Files such as PDF, XLS, MDE, DOC, ZIP and EXE, not a Web document and can not be supplied in your Google Analytics reports by default.
- Outbound links . Links that lead to third-party Web sites, such as the sites of partners, affiliates, trade associations, etc., lead to the fact that a visitor views a page managed by someone else, and therefore not traceable.
- Inside page events . Inside page events that do not generate page views, such as pressing a button add to the cart are not tracked. In fact, many steps to add to the cart, user comments, rating systems and filling out forms not accompanied by the generation of page views. Therefore, to capture all of them, users need to use event tracking configuration script which is not provided by default.
- Flash-animation . Visitor use and its interaction with embedded Flash-objects, such as demonstration of goods, videos, etc., are not tracked by default.
- Embedded YouTube videos . Visitor use and interaction with embedded videos YouTube, such as play, pause, and view up to the end, are not tracked by default.
- Defining the goals and monetization . It is necessary to determine which URL-address pages, events and limit values are the goal, and what the target value is assigned to each of them to achieve it. This can be configured in Google analytics admin panel.
- E-commerce transactions . To intercept e-commerce transactions and information on units of production requires additional tracking code. Often the purchase of goods will be carried out through a third-party payment gateway to interrupt the session. This problem and can be solved if visitor tracking code is properly configured.
- Clustering keywords . Rather than view reports on thousands of keywords search engine can be grouped by topics, such as for example “all the keywords search brand,” etc.
- Segmenting visitors . In this case we are talking about groups or subsets of related data, such as visiting only social networking users, segments by geographical location, types, keywords, etc.
- Tracking error pages . Often when tracking forget about them, or if they are still monitored, are displayed as normal page views, and not as error pages. Obviously, it is important to track those pages. Google Analytics provides the ability to view them in context with other data. As soon as the answer to the question “How much do these errors cost to your business?” is obtained, it is possible to determine the priority of the required corrections.
- Track application intra-site search . This – very valuable information coming directly from the keyboard visitor. Sometimes its tracking can be very difficult if the search terms visitors are not contained in the URL-address. And again, tracking the zero search results on the site – an important key performance indicator.
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