From time to time, you should undertake a Google Analytics audit in order to understand some points that experts encounter every day, but that you may miss if you don't have all the skills required to make one by yourself. One GA audit also makes it possible to ensure that the data you collect is the right one, that everything is monitored correctly, and that in the near future you will have the opportunity to thoroughly analyze your account with filters and segments.Conducting an audit can also reveal some interesting points. In this article, we will see everything you can learn with such an audit carried out by a Google Analytics expert.
If your GA code is not present on all your pages, at some point you will necessarily lack data that allows you to better understand your environment. To get the right data, you need to have the right settings.That's why a Google Analytics audit can provide you with a lot of information about the quality of your data. The distribution of your traffic is a particularly important element for your future positioning choices. Let's take the example of an e-commerce site: if you work with payment providers like PayPal, Google Analytics can track traffic coming back to your site as new visits, which is not a good practice in this case. Such a scenario can inflate your traffic statistics, giving you an overly optimistic view of the number of people who actually visit your site.
Another common problem discovered during a Google Analytics audit is the inaccuracy of the data in the e-commerce part. Your transactions may not be properly integrated into Google Analytics. Conducting an audit not only uncovers the problem, but also gives you the opportunity to remedy it by adding parameters, and by setting conditions to remove bad data using filters.
The implementation of Google Analytics seems simple enough, but you may have done it wrong in your site, account, or tag. The tracking code itself can cause some problems on websites. Google updates tracking codes from time to time, so it's not impossible that your code is too old to report the correct data to your account. Other issues include incorrect code locations and duplicate codes. If a code is duplicated on a page, it artificially inflates the statistics since the script will be activated several times.
The importance of setting goals on Google Analytics for your website should not be underestimated. What is the point of following anything if you are not working towards a specific goal? Objectives may be poorly defined in Google Analytics. The tracking goals can also be compromised. An audit can reveal any problem, which could tell a very different story about how close or far you are to achieving your goals.
Another interesting insight you can get from an audit is knowing which pages on your site allow generate more conversions than others. You may even be able to identify high-converting keywords and phrases if you further analyze the content. With this information in your possession, you can adjust your content strategy to include more keywords of the same type, or any other type of element that will allow the success of these pages.
One Google Analytics audit can also give you an overview of how well your filters are working. You may think you're getting accurate data, but one or more of your filters are completely disabled or misconfigured. carrying out the audit gives you the ability to rework filters to get more reliable data. If you have never used filters to understand your statistics, you should read This article is interesting.
Google Analytics doesn't need to be too complicated, but you might not use it as effectively as you thought. An audit could show you how unreliable your data is and how you can improve it with the expertise of a data analyst.