It’s been a complicated year for digital marketing data.

Trends have been altered, we’ve seen some significant fluctuations, and uncertainty still remains.

One thing that is certain is that good data can be leveraged for future decision making.

With all of the curveballs 2020 has thrown us, here are some adjustments you can make to Google Analytics that will enhance the data’s accuracy.

Google Analytics Adjustments and Tips

Filter Employee IP’s

With teams going virtual, people are at home on their own IP’s. Assuming you had your office IP(s) filtered out already, now is a great time to also filter out your employees’ home IP addresses.

Have your team go to whatsmyip.org, then copy/paste the IP into an email to whoever manages Google Analytics. This will help to keep your data clean.

It can be added in GA via settings, Filters (under view), add filter, name it, predefined, exclude traffic from the IP addresses that are equal to, enter the IP, save.

Regularly Filter Low-Quality/Spam Referrals

A good practice when setting up Google Analytics, in general, is to filter out spam referrals/crawls where you can.

For example, when looking at your referral data for the last 6 months, you may see a URL like “sitecrawler-xyz.com” as a referral with a 100% bounce rate, 1 page per session, 0:00 avg. time on site. This clearly is a bot of some sort, and can be eliminated from future data. Filter it out!

Along with this, you can setup a “Filtered Accurate Data” View in Google Analytics, along with a “Raw Data” view. Best of both worlds, and a good safeguard for your data.

Utilize UTM tracking

The pandemic has resulted in an abundance of content creation. People are finding what they love, and putting it out for the world to see and engage with.

Here at wFC, we’ve been doing digital marketing webinars and posting links in Zoom. UTM parameters can be used in cases like this to ensure you know where data is coming from-and have specific data sets. This could also apply to ads, email marketing, etc.

More details on UTM available via the link in the heading.

Utilize Conversion Tracking

We utilize Google Tag Manager, fire Google Analytics through there, and this allows us to track everything we want to. With your UTM campaigns, conversions can be populated.

If you want to track where form submissions, PDF downloads, newsletter signups, transactions, revenue, etc. are coming from—utilizing conversion tracking is critical.

This is especially true with everything going on. There are going to be shifts, and having that data can help you get ahead of the curve, and gain competitive advantage.

More on conversions + tracking.

Set Alerts

Many businesses are updating their websites, adding ecommerce, etc. With all of these changes, there is an increased possibility of a tracking code issue.

Setting up alerts is a great practice to ensure that if the code drops off or something goes wrong, you can get it fixed quickly.

For example, you can setup an alert that triggers a notification on 0 traffic for a certain period of time. You can do this via settings, custom alerts, then set the details.

Interesting Analytics Data to Review

Geo

In-part with everyone working from home, and the closures/limited hours bars and restaurants have in some downtown areas-you may see a shift in where people are visiting the site from.

This data/knowledge could apply to digital and non-digital campaigns and how you approach them.

Certainly worth seeing if your users are shifting locations!

Time of Day Usage

Working from home, quarantine, CEO’s checking-in on emails, and going online after-hours—that could all be changing in your industry.

Worth checking in on this as well.

Traffic + Conversion Fluctuations

It’s easy to blame everything on COVID, but is there something else going on with your website that could be improved?

Evaluate your data YTD vs. last year (if you have it.) Work on CRO. Keep pushing with your SEO Campaign.

There are a lot of businesses that have been forced to cut marketing costs, or are doing it as a safeguard. Those who can maintain digital marketing efforts will gain a competitive advantage now and into 2021, because that competition is dropping off.

Analyze data and use it to your advantage, do not just blame COVID and wait!

Want to make the most of your data?

Let experts review, interpret, and make recommendations based on it! Contact us.
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