5 sure fire ways to get better website tracking

Deciding your key performance indicators (KPI’s) is often the first rung on the analytics ladder.

Too many organisations place emphasis on generic metrics as KPI’s such as number of pages visited, average time on site etc. Working towards more concrete KPI’s like subscriber rates and number of leads generated will often show the most value to you and your team.

Whilst there may be some overlap between different businesses, it’s essential that you work out your internal measures of success.

Think to yourself, what indicators show my success as a marketer, help provide a larger pipeline to our sales team or help to improve the bottom line?

Knowing how users engage with your website is just as important as how they got there. Using custom event tracking can really help in this case.

There are many event types that you may want to track to help you figure out if your entire user journey, or a small subset of it is causing issues for your potential customers. You might want to:

• know when the user has started and ended a video view on your website
• see how users interact with your accordions, tabs and other hidden content
• check how often dialog and lightboxes have been loaded
• be aware of users who interact with external links and downloads

Adding custom events to your website will require a working knowledge of javascript or the use of plug-ins.

Using WordPress? You might want to try out a plugin like WP Google Analytics Events. Or, looking for something a little more complex in terms of setup, or outside of the WP environment? Reach out – we’d be happy to discuss your needs!

Creating filters and excluding traffic from particular IP addresses is best practice.

From your own visits and those of your team, to 3rd party apps and extensions you use on your site, to over-zealous visits from companies soliciting their services, the list of meaningful data is vast.

Start by speaking to your internal IT team about the range of IP addresses you can discount as company visits.

Also speak to your various suppliers and partners – you’ll be able to prevent their visits from skewing your overall stats, or at a minimum filter their visits into a separate view in your analytics dashboard.

You can also take the time to understand the networks and IP addresses of visits from bots and automated traffic – you may see these in your analytics reports as visits that last 0 seconds. Whether its your SEO software checking your page, or even an approved tool that helps you to preload your cache, it is always better to remove these anomalous results.

Did you know that you can create multiple dashboards in Google Analytics to help give you an overview of specific data patterns?

You may need to report on traffic sources to your team, to work out which sources of referral are working best for you. Or perhaps a more detailed analysis of social activity is needed when working on upcoming digital marketing plans.

You can create a dashboard showing almost any variation of data, custom segment, user group, behaviour pattern etc.

It may seem like an overwhelming amount of options to consider. But fret not, you can access a range of public dashboard setups from the Google Analytics Solutions Gallery.

Here, you’ll find preset dashboards from users who’ve faced similar challenges to you. So, whether you want to follow a solution to the letter, or use a setup as a starting point for your own needs, it couldn’t be easier.