Google Analytics Audit Guide: Step by Step

Google Analytics is one of the latest technologies that can take your website’s SEO to new levels but you need expert advice if you want to set up your account. Therefore we will discuss this 20-step guide to simplify your efforts in setting up Google Analytics for your website. 

You may not know it but you need to embed the Google Analytics code on your website before it starts displaying information about your page and website insights. You may be the owner of a simple static page or your website may consist of customer funnels or the website may have been built with Ajax technology coupled with iframes. Either way, you need to input some code for all the particular scenarios and edit some settings before Google Analytics starts working for your particular website.

This Google Analytics audit guide will inform you of all the twenty steps you need to implement before using Google Analytics for your website. The first step in understanding Google Analytics is for an account to be created for your website to receive and analyze information from your website property and view tools.

Here is how you can understand it in a better way

To work with Google Analytics you need to make at least one account and that account should be given to the trustworthy person for interacting with Google Analytics. Then comes the property that is contained within the account, for example, you can make a property for plenty of websites or several domains. You can also make a property for your shopping cart or subdomains. All the properties have their individual Google Analytics code that needs to be embedded inside each property on the website backend.

Each property consists of views that display information from the Google Analytics utility and you can add up to twenty-five properties per view. The information contained in the views is automated, which means the information in the views will only start populating after the view has been created. Therefore, it is advised that the following types of views should be developed when you work with the properties.

• RAW Information View
• Filtered Information View
• Test Information View
• Mobile Information View
• Country Information Filter

One of the steps that you should keep in mind while making an account is that the account can be either created with the new ID for your client or you can make it with your ID and award the client with admin rights. Below are the settings that need to be set:

Google Products And Services

You need to activate this service if you want Google to read your information about the upcoming trends and online behavior of the visitors to enhance the Adwords performance.

Benchmarking

You can benefit from this service by unlocking it and sending your information to Google without showing your ID. Google will provide information relevant to your website’s performance by making Benchmarking Reports.

Technical Support

You can activate this service if you want to start a technical analysis of your website from the Google Team. It lets you know the technical aspects of your website for backend adjustments.

Account Specialist

This service can be activated if you would like the sales and marketing experts to read your website’s information. They can offer advice about your website to improve its performance.

Manage Users

Users with admin authority permission can add, delete, and approve permissions for the other users.

Read And Analyze

Users with this approval can only view the data in read-only mode.

Collaborate

Users with this permission can edit and analyze data and collaborate with a shared resource.

Edit

Users with this type of approval can add, edit, and analyze data while collaborating with other team members and they have several other permissions to work on groups.

After working with the above steps you can move on to Google Analytics property setup:

1.   You can add your website name to the property and it will not have any effect on your information collection.

2.   Enter your online address and it will not make any changes to any of the Google Analytics information gathering about your website.

3.   You should check your default view as a filtered view.

4.   In this step, you can select your business field. If the desired category is not mentioned, you can select others.

5.   This step is about advanced settings. A pro tip would be that you should not check the advanced settings if you want to implement Google AdWords auto-tagging.

6.   You should check your infographics, demographics, and interest reports to obtain the relevant information on this topic from Google Analytics.

7.   You can enable the ‘enhance link attribution property’ to make sure that all the links on the page are pointing to the same page. It can improve your Google Analytics information collection accuracy.

8.   You can integrate your search console with Google Analytics to obtain the right search information from the webmaster reports from Google Analytics. After completing the above steps you can work on the data collection part that consists of the remaining steps.

9.   This property can be checked if you want to enable the remarketing attribute in Google Analytics. The remarketing lists obtained from this property can be used to target AdWords from Google Analytics.

10.                The advertising reporting feature can be checked with the features checked in step number 6 to unlock the Google Analytics reports according to the demographics and interests.

Tracking Information

11.              

        If your website has a logged-in feature then you can add the user tracking attribute. This attribute can be used to find information at the user level and provide views on different devices.

12.          

     You can benefit from the referral exclusion list if you want to include payment gateways and multi-domain tracking websites in your Google Analytics information analysis. The referral exclusion should be configured to the domain name only if you are not implementing payment gateway or multi-domain tracking.

Google Adword Linking

13.              

     With this view, you can check whether the Adword account that you have linked with Google Analytics is correct. You can check for the linked accounts in the Google Analytics setting to select this feature for finding information on the bounce rate, pages, sessions, etc.

Optimization And Tag Manager Linking

14.                

  Google Optimize is a free tool that can help you in making A/B testing procedures. You can check for integration with analytics and optimize. The data gathered from the tests can help you with remarketing.

Audience Definition

15.                

    This step is necessary if you want to check if the list being created is helpful for search and display audiences. Adwords linking is important for this step. This step can help you with remarketing.

Customer Definition

16.               

    In this step, you can check the scope and state of the customized metrics that are generated by Google Analytics. Any small deviations in the scope can affect your data.

17.             

        This step can enhance your data-importing attribute. You can select this option to find out the type of information that is being uploaded and the metrics that are updated. This selection can help you with the Campaign data, Content data, Product data, and Custom data.

Google Analytics Performance

18.               

   In “view” settings you can select this feature to select the names based on the filters applied. It will show the view selection dropdown. This can also be used in APIs.

19.                

   Enter your website URL in the view settings. This information can be used for content reports and in-page analytics.

20.                

 In view settings, you can select your reporting zone. This setting can be adjusted to obtain time zone-related information from Google Analytics.

Conclusion:

With a constant increase in the use of digital marketing and the creation of websites, the use of Google Analytics is becoming popular each day. That is understandable when you get to know about the advantages it has and how easily it tracks traffic on-site so you can create strategies using the data extracted.