5 Best practices to boost your Google Analytics
These best practices will ensure that your Google Analytics is receiving only clean and meaningful traffic and your data is protected.
Note: Each setting requires different privileges. If you are not the administrator of the account you may need to ask for the required permissions
1. Assign the Correct Google Analytics Permissions
Permissions needed: User Management at Account, Property or View level
If you are the owner and the only user of the account, you will yield all the power, and shouldn't worry about this.
If there is more than one user, you should assign the right permissions to each person on the team - to avoid possible misconfigurations or data loss.
The following guide will help you:
2. Keep track of important events with annotations
Permissions needed: Every user can create annotations
Annotations are a simple yet powerful feature that Google Analytics users usually overlook. Annotations let you keep track of important events in your Analytics so you don't lose your mind, trying to figure out fluctuations in your data.
You can create annotations only for yourself or for the whole team. In this post, you can see how to easily create them.
3. Correctly setup your views
Permissions needed: Edit at Property Level
This is one of the most important things you should do in your Google Analytics. Data in Google Analytics can't be permanently altered, deleted or recovered once it is stored. If you lose a part of your data because of a wrongly configured filter or incorrect setting, it will be gone forever.
To avoid this happening you should have configured the following views.
- MASTER view: Used for analysis that will contain filters and custom configurations
- UNFILTERED view: This will have your Raw data. You can consider it as a Back-up
- TEST view (Optional): If you want to be extra cautious you can try your filters in a TEST view before applying them to your MASTER view.
If you need help creating views you can check this post:
4. Excluding yours and your team's traffic
Permissions needed: Edit at Account Level
This is the most common reason for inaccurate data. Internal traffic is all the hits generated by you or any member of the team. This is one of the first things you should do even before installing the tracking code on your website.
There are different ways of filtering your traffic depending on whether your IP is static or dynamic. The following guides should help you:
5. Filter your traffic, spam, and other irrelevant traffic
Permissions needed: Edit at Account Level
Like internal traffic, spam can make your data inaccurate. There are different types of spam, and each one of them has to be solved differently. The following guide walks you through everything you need to stop all of them:
TO BE CONTINUED...
Soon I will add more best practices that will help you boost your GA and get the best out of it, so keep an eye on the post.
