What is Google Analytics Management? Simply put, it’s the measurement of how well your website interactions with the public are tracked. It’s purpose is to help optimize the tracking, monitoring and strategizing of important website decisions, that will affect traffic overall.

Do you think Google Analytics is a set it and forget it website tool? Because it’s not even in the slightest. Every so often you need to update settings and even audit your data. Google products don’t manage themselves, you need to keep them optimized and audit them semi-annually, even more so if you aren’t the only one with access! 

What Is Web Analytics?

Web analytics is the monitoring of website interactions. Without having such basics facts, most website changes would never have their impacts known. Making the updating and optimizing of any website random guesses. When site analytics are setup properly, user interactions are better understood and adjustments to improve the user’s experience is achieved. Google search console data isn’t always enough to help you find website functionality problems or even track goal completions, so Google Analytics fills that void. 

What Are Website Analytics Good For?

The more data around user engagement of a website you have, the better picture you can draw of how users view a website. Using that picture, the problems as well as the solutions are better highlighted. It’s not always easy to see a page speed loading issue, but if a high bounce rate, low time of page and lower than normal user counts present themselves, that page loading issue then pops into the realm of possibilities as the culprit. SEO is a lot like playing website clue, your presented a set of variables, an need to then work backwards as to how they happened. 

What Is A Google Analytics Audit For?

Google analytics audits help double check that a website analytics campaign is being properly tracked. Analytics isn’t just a source of data, but also an indication when a website technical issue arises. Metrics will help to highlight both user interaction issues as well as website functionality issues. But if a analytics campaign isn’t setup properly, false flags can be thrown and have people looking for problems where none exist. Also to the opposite side of that spectrum, having a problem highlights via analytics data, gives you more insight on how to improve that user optimization!

How Can Filters Ruin Your Data?

Website analytics are that important, that when configured incorrectly, it’s like allowing your website to not properly heal a broken leg. So it becomes a burden everytime a basic activity is accomplished. A filter can actually rewrite data, and when setup, if no backup data view is created, you’ve ruined the data for that time period.

This is one of the most common mistakes in Google analytics, using filtered views incorrectly. Some mistakes with filters have been rewriting a URL prefix to the wrong subdomain type, so you don’t know the full traffic for a subdomain, unless you have GSC data to compare to. As well having a filter that actually uses the goals of another view, talk about misleading data. 

What Are Segments Good For?

Segments can be a filter into the metrics of website pages that matter most. Once you have a desired website section to focus on, you can create a segment around those variables and always have a faster way to view the same variable from a preconfigured view. This is a great way to showcase sections for date comparisons to understand content performance and user engagement. 

Google Analytics Has Limits!

Believe it or not, Google analytics has limits that if your website is large enough, you’ll run into rather quickly. In your terms of service with Google Analytics, you will be able to find a section about the number of hits allowed per month on any FREE google analytics campaign. That limit is “10M hits per month” per free website tracking property. So before you start panicking, understand what a “hit” is. A hit in Google’s terms, is any pageview or event that occurs within that analytics property. You analytics property is any tracked metrics with the same Google analytics tracking code on it. 

Now you have 3 options, but you may not like them. 

  1. Reduce the amount of events that occur on your website. ( If you don’t need them, remove them to save hits ) 
  2. Reduce the amount of webpages on your website. ( If you don’t need them, get rid of them! )
  3. If you need both of the webpages and event counts, you’ll need to look into Google Analytics 360 ( $150k a year ) or find another analytics solution. 

10 Million Hits Per Month Doesn’t Sound Like A Problem!

Now 10,000,000 hits per month, doesn’t sound like a bad problem to have! Infact, if your website is receiving 10 million hits per month, there is a good chance you can afford the pricetag for Google Analytics 360. And if not, you may need to look at option 1 and 2 again closer, as you might be doing something wrong. 

If you’ve found this helpful, please share, like, follow and subscribe! Pass the word along, so we can make a positive impact together! Thank you!

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