Clarification: Placing the default GA code in your web site is not considered GA implementation.
For businesses engaged in digital acquisition of customers and leads, accurate and comprehensive data about how people interact with their website is critical. Out-of-the-box Google Analytics (GA) provides great reports, yet fails to provide context, insights and truly meaningful data that drives results.
Advanced GA implementation will not only provide many more data points through tracking unique events, goals, funnels, user segments and more – it will also identify partial, inaccurate data, which affects important business decisions. Gaining access to advanced and accurate data will ultimately generate a substantial increase of your conversion and acquisition rates.
These are some common issues requiring advanced GA implementation:
- Goals set up – whether it’s lead generation, account signup, user engagement, or online sale, correct goal set up and tracking are key to effective site measurement.
- Tracking Events – anything that happens on the website is significant, not only the ultimate conversions. Every user interaction such as clicking buttons, watching videos can be tracked by defining Events.
- Tracking unique User Segments – your website visitors tend to divide into distinct groups with distinct goals. For example, existing customers visit your website for different reasons than new visitors. You should have the ability to view the metrics and behavior of each group, independently of the other.
- Tracking Conversion Funnels – A goal funnel describes the steps that a visitor to your site needs to go through in order to complete the goal. Advanced funnel visualization will identify the weak spots in your sales process, and provide you with actionable insights to improving your results.
- Websites with online transactions often involve subdomains, multiple domains and third party payment gateways. This is a potential source for data inaccuracy. True measurement of such businesses, often requires non-standard actions applied directly to the site code.
A typical measurement error is Self-referrals: referrals are key to understanding the sources of registrations. Self-referrals from sub-domains distort the data and obscure the actual sources of traffic to which conversions and should be attributed. Common causes are:
- Usage of advertising systems that redirect users.
- Incorrect configuration of setDomainName
- Javascript Redirects
- Missing tracking code