Continuing the GA health check
Last week, I covered the first few steps of our Google Analytics Health Check, as one of the first, and most important steps when putting together a measurement plan. To recap a bit, the main aim of a Health Check is to ensure that we are collecting the right information, filtering out any undesired data, to allow us to create actionable reports for the stakeholders that, at the same time, help them to make informed business decisions.
Checking goals and funnels
Once we have gone through the overall implementation details, the Web Property set up and reporting Views and Filters, the next stage to tackle would be checking that both Goals and Funnels, have been properly set up. So, let’s get to it!
4- Goal and Funnels
Goals are a fundamental part of a measurement plan, as they are an easy and versatile way of measuring if you are actually fulfilling your KPIs and therefore your business objectives.
Improper goal setup can lead to inaccurate data and negatively impact business decisions. When checking goals, we normally cover aspects such as:
- The type of goal is correctly chosen to befit the tracking purpose
- The goal description is clean and follows the naming convention (if present)
- The destination page’s url is correctly defined (remember that using the Real Time view is always very helpful when setting up goals)
- Has a monetary value been assigned to it and if so, is it representative?
Setting up funnels
Setting up funnels is an option that Google Analytics gives you when you set up a goal. A funnel allows you to track the path, or set of pages, that a user goes through before getting to the goal page. It is important to bear in mind that when a funnel is set up, it’ll restrict the goals’ completion to only those pages that follow the defined path.
When checking funnels, the things we would normally look at are:
- Are all the steps (pages) recording pageviews?
- If RegEx is being used to define the pages that are part of the funnel, has it been properly implemented?
5- E-Commerce
E-Commerce reporting is one of the most valuable features of GA. It allows you to measure the number of transactions that take place in a website (or app) as well as the monetary value. E-Commerce is also probably one of the trickiest parts to set up in Google Analytics and in many cases, it will require the help of an experienced web developer to set it up.
Some of the key checks to run through an E-Commerce set up are:
- Has the code been implemented correctly and does it has all the elements required?
- Has the E-Commerce plug in loaded properly?
- Are there any duplicate transaction calls issues (i.e.:when an user revisits/reloads the confirmation page)?
- Correct use of E-Commerce product taxonomy
6- Event tracking
Event tracking allows you to track and measure the interaction of the users with the different elements of the website, giving us invaluable information regarding specific site interactions.
It’s always important to check:
- Is the Event Tracking code syntax correct?
- Are the Event Category, Action, Label and Category set up and follow the naming convention (if there is one)?
- Check whether the events are firing by using the GA Debug tool or Real Time Reports
Wrapping up week three
With the above points, together with the ones covered last week, we should have a clear idea of what are the main implementation issues and priorities to start putting together a Measurement Plan.
The depth of the Health Check will always depend of the size and measurement needs for a particular website. However, it’s important to link things back to a Measurement Plan - using data to set and achieve KPIs.
And that’s about it folks! I’ll return next week to tell you all about my adventures and hopefully, we’ll cover some interesting topics too. ;)
Thanks for reading and as usual, give us a shout if you have any questions or comments!
