6 Mistakes of using Google analytics that can cost you dearly

It is not capable of delivering an amazing degree of data about all the information of your website and its performance. The best part is it is not that complex to learn to use even by a non-technical person.

You simply need to understand the basics properly during creating a Google Analytics account. There are following major mistakes that most of the marketers commit while creating this account for the first time.  So, have a look at these errors and avoid committing it if you’re planning to set-up a new Google Analytics account.

Not using personal session filtering

It’s not only your audiences or customers that would visit your website. Often, you too frequently visit it and your teammates too. How to detach the data from your internal visits from the actual customers of visitors?  Many marketers either do not pay attention to this arrangement or are not aware of it.  But in big businesses, where internal activities are large per day, it may lead to myriads of visits per month which are not actually your prospects delivering you a mixed metrics of visits.

It becomes necessary to create a custom filter to set aside the internal session log from your actual visits and results. This will provide you with the exact picture what is actually going on on your website.

For creating this filter, you can go to Admin of the Google Analytics and Add Filter following the thereby instructions to create one.

Insufficient knowledge and use of UTM parameters

This (Urchin Tracking Module) is a tracking parameter used as an identifier that is added in the URLs to keep a track of the sources from where you are receiving the traffic to your website. You can the UTM parameters to the specific URLs of your blog or website campaigns for the reasons of tracking. There are 5 UTMs tags that work in a hierarchy. Using this you would be able to visualize where the traffic is being directed from. If you have running a marketing campaign and sending people to the a common landing page through various online ads, you would be able to track the sources from where you are getting traffic.

By integrating a UTM, you can see the difference in the URLs that are linked to the ads, thus enabling you to separate each of the URLs to realize which ads are working and which ones not. The thing that is vital here is to understand how and when to take help of these UTM parameters.

There are people, who do not use it at all. For such people they would realize that they are getting the entire traffic from a single source without finding any difference in the URLs. Thus, it can easily be understood that not relying on UTM technique you will lose to have access to a great source of metrics, and you cannot get an in depth insight of all those resources that are actually working well for your marketing campaigns.

Neglecting goal tracking setup

Your website can work in multiple ways. It can fetch you the details of leads, traffic, trigger engagement and finally conversions. Now, if you are tracking Google Analytics for monitoring your top priority goals like freezing a sale, it is just a part of the utilization of your website as well as Google Analytics. You may not be able to know how people are engaging and communicating with your online brand and website.

The best way to know how your audiences are interacting with your website, you must set up different goals in the form of contact form submission, commenting on blogs, newsletter signups, and free brochure downloads. It will actually help you understand the closer view of the activities of your website and what are the preference and requirements of your audience.

You can set up multiple goals by logging into the Google Analytics, going to admin and then hitting goals to define different goals.

Not breaking down your data

Segmentation of your data is similar to filtering your emails by creating separate folders for each category.  Same way you can break down the website traffic into many segments like based on demographic, gender, behavioural etc. By doing this, you can have a better insight than simply having a data in a bulk.

You may also use the already defined segments available with your Google Analytics and after getting used to it, you can craft your own personalized categories too as per your exclusive business needs.

Not removing spam traffic

Yes, this too is often overlooked because of which you get a load of unnecessary referral spam traffic. It slows down your site putting extra load on your server and gets loads of meaningless traffic to your website. You must filter out your spam traffic to stop it from corrupting your genuine data.

Google Analytics is the best way to do so. You can apply “Segment to Eliminate Spam Referrals” using Analytics Edge.

Not utilizing the Google analytics solutions gallery

This option offers you the access custom reports, dashboards, and segments developed by the professionals in the community of Google Analytics. You simply need to pay a visit to the solutions gallery to get the most suitable things that you would need.

No doubt, Google Analytics is actually a huge platform that can give you a complete and deeper view of your online business by offering customized reports and many more things to make a better strategy to promote your business. You simply need to understand the features and facilities to use it to its best ability. Once you are used to it, you’d be surprised how informative and useful it could be.