Identify The Needs of Your Website
Why Do You Have a Website?
Installation Optimization Strategy
Understanding the nature of every website will always lead to an optimized tracking code installation. Whether it is your hands that integrate the code or your team’s you must fully understand end goals before working on configuration. The set up of your ROI measurement machine (Google Analytics) is a large part of your reporting focus.
In my opinion the most profitable tracking code implementations, interface configurations and reporting are supervised by one (knowledgeable) analyst.
Key Reasons You Want to Discover Site Type Now: 
- It is the first step into setting goals.
- Finds Problems that you were unaware of.
- Helps form a basis for key performance indicators.
- Sometimes it effects how you place your tracking code. E.g. Ecommerce.
- Identify your coding language, architecture and determine the best method to place the tracking code.
- Become acquainted with your site from an installation perspective.
- Fully optimize Google Analytics to your specific requirements. Your abilities will become more proficient the more experience you gain. If integration of the code is not 100% correct … neither is the data collected for reporting. Special installation considerations should be taken when your site has the following characteristics:
Broken Links & Discover Site Architecture
Every website is architecturally sound right? I know you just launched your website that was a full production team effort- how can there be any problems?
As part of being an effective analyst it is your job to discover the good, the bad and the ugly as quickly as possible. Let this free program find problems on your site in minutes that would take a human hours. You can also generate a site map for code placement purposes.
Go Beyond!
First download your free copy of Link Sleuth. Using this free software you will learn the way a bot crawls your website. Find broken links and get a full report of your site. Learn architecture to give you a good idea on the pages you need to install tracking code on.
VIDEO: How I use Link Sleuth
This is a handy program that I use on a regular basis. Now you should have a pretty good take on the site map architecture and other problems nobody knew existed. This is a tool to help install your tracking code more accurately and identify problems. Your first gold nuggets can be found here and you have not even started using Google Analytics yet. Does that feel good or what!
Quickly Find the Following Errors with Link Sleuth:
- Broken links, ordered by link
- Broken links, ordered by page
- List of redirected URL’s
- List of valid URL’s you can submit to a search engine
- Pages with a Title
- Site Map of HTML Broken page-local links
- Orphan files
- Statistics for managers
NOTE: This step is not in any Google Analytics manuals. It is a special step I have developed that is an option you may want to consider. I do this to help guide installations of the GATC on an unfamiliar website, discover architecture and find broken links. If you are familiar with the website you may want to overlook this step. Although, checking for broken links is always a good idea. Any errors should be reported to the right team members (usually web development) to be addressed accordingly.
The Link Sleuth site map rendering will help with Google Analytics code integration, especially if you are not familiar with the architecture. The pages (spider friendly) that are found in the site map should ideally have the tracking code placed on them. This section of the tutorial assumes you are not familiar with the website design and architecture. If you are not well acquainted with the website, the design team that created it will have the most valuable information for Google Analytics Code integration in tricky situations. You may want to skip by this step, but there is some very helpful information here to help you check the functionality of any website. Look for errors and my bet is you’ll find problems that may influence the way Google Analytics reports data. If they don’t effect data they the site may suffer in other negative ways.
Site Assessment Summary
Answer Questions Before Installing Google Analytics
- Will discovering site architecture be helpful to install GATC (Google Analytics tracking code) and discover errors?
- Why do you have a website?
- What kind of a website do you have? Is it a lead generation, brand lift or an ecommerce site?
- Does your site allow for java script? There are some management systems that pose a large challenge. The bottom line is if you cannot put JavaScript on your site you cannot use Google Analytics.
- Do you have email campaigns, links, and download or special page elements you want tracked?
- Is the architecture easy to navigate? Does it have special html tags or unique characteristics?
- Are there ‘frames’ being used on your site? This may inflate your statistics if proper modifications are not made to implementation.
- Do you have an Ecommerce website? What software is used? Some of the more popular ecommerce software comes with an easy Google Analytics integration module such as Xcart. Ecommerce installation is trickier then standard installation.
- How many domains need to be tracked that are a part of your website?
- What is the action you want your visitors to take when they reach your site? What is the expected pathway to goal?
- Do you want to track flash events?
- Are you also doing Pay per Click Marketing?
PPC Traffic is also measured with Google Analytics but requires Adwords/ Analytics Special Practices set up. You can use a special filtration system to expose even more data along with a custom profile isolating PPC traffic only. This will help tune in your ROI and sort out keyword performance faster.
Once you consider these points the implementation of your GATC should be installed accordingly. Later on in this tutorial I will share my process documents with you for installation. When your code is installed it is important that you test and make sure it is tracking all data correctly.
Tools For Troubleshooting
- GASHelper- A Firefox Plugin that shows whether Google Analytics is installed on the page you are viewing
- Live HTTP Headers with checkbox for “Filter URLs with regexp” checked off and “utm\.gif” in the adjacent field of the Config tab.
- FireBug, with this free plugin for Firefox you can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript real-time on any web page.
- IE Developer Toolbar Toolbar provides a variety of tools for quickly creating, understanding, and troubleshooting Web pages
- HttpWatch for IE testing. The usage of these tools is somewhat advanced but they work great.
There is a checklist of set up practices which I will cover later but for now the basic objective is getting to tracking code placed and logging accurate data. Once we are up and running with proper code installation, the cool reporting features you can expect include:
Google Analytics Key Tracking Features
- Custom Reporting
- Advanced Segmentation
- Geographic Location Reporting
- Floating Motion Charts
- Clearly Defined Funnel Navigational paths
- Traffic source comparison PPC>Organic>Referrals>Email>Social
- Identifying Keyword Sweet spot
- Campaign ROI
- Integrates automatically with Google AdWords
- Measure offline campaigns with geographic location reporting
…and did I mention it’s totally Free! Once you find the magic you need from Google Analytics, you will definitely feel better about what’s going on with your website activities.
Important Points
To improve the accuracy effectiveness of your installation—intuition, experience and web savvy are definite assets. There are other tools that will compliment your objectives very well. It is your direction combined with intellect that paves the road for great data collection which leads to actionable reporting. It is your reporting that will determine the future of your ROI world, better make sure your data is collecting accurately.
- From the start, look at your website in as much detail as you can externally. Remain focused on the task at hand- “Extreme accuracy in tracking code implementation”.
- When you begin any web analytics tracking project identify the type of website you are dealing with, it will help you install and configure a great user’s interface for the entire team.
- Make a point of trying to spot “special attention” areas of each website you track. This can be executed by using the link report combined with the design team’s knowledge.
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