Setting up Google Analytics correctly is an important part of your web-analytics setup. A Google Analytics audit is one of the best ways to ensure that you can trust your website data. Across various retailers there are various issues in Google Analytics setup that are commonly seen. An incorrect setup with regards to these can cause wrong measurement of data. Below are few common mistakes
Mistake 1: Referral Exclusion or Transactions attributed to Payment Gateway
Referral traffic is a section of traffic on a website that comes through by clicking on another website. Although certain referral sources are legit, few referral sources especially through payment gateways are not meant to show as referral traffic sources and corrupt the source wise data.
For example, a user on my-site.com goes to citruspay.com, and then returns to my-site.com. If you do not exclude citruspay.com as a referring domain, two sessions are counted, one for each arrival at my-site.com. If, however, you exclude referrals from citruspay.com, the second arrival to my-site.com does not trigger a new session, and only one session is counted and a transaction is counted against the original source.
Referral Exclusion list can be found under tracking info in property settings. All payment gateway sources showing as a source should be added here and excluded by adding referral exclusion
Mistake 2: URL Query Parameter not being excluded
Query parameters can sometimes store useful pieces of information in our URLs, but they can cause problems in our Google Analytics data. Query parameters can break apart our pages and make them hard to analyze in our All Pages report. For example the below URLs point to the same page ,however they are tracked differently due to “query parameter of colour” being passed
Such query strings can be removed under view properties in exclude URL query Parameter section
Mistake 3: Bounce Rate incorrectly being tracked
Many retailers show abysmally low bounce rates. Bounce rates less than 30% are misleading and inaccurate. A very high bounce rate can be a cause of concern, but similar is a case with a very low bounce rate. The most common reasons why bounce rates get incorrectly tracked are:
- Double tagging on double implementation of source code
- Some e-commerce hits fire together with a pageview
- Some other non interaction events are fired together with a page view
- Scroll tracking being tracked as interactions
Mistake 4: Missing Transaction Data in GA
GA is a trend analysis tool, and as such cannot be expected to be 100% accurate in terms of transactional data. However, if the variance is greater than 10%, you probably have an issue with the tracking code. This could be for a number of reasons:
- The user who made the transaction had his or her JavaScript turned off
- The user has left the page before the transaction has had chance to send to Google Analytics
The method to fix the latter, is to make the confirmation page load time lesser so that the javascript loads before the user moves out.
Mistake 5: Enhanced Ecommerce Data Missing
Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce tracking helps in tracking Customer behavior at every stage of the funnel – before, during, and after a purchase. Unless implemented and turned on, enhanced ecommerce shopping behaviour data will be missing from your Google Analytics. To figure out how to enable enhanced ecommerce, you can go through the blog .
https://www.deepflux.ai/how-does-google-analytics-enhanced-ecommerce-help-e-commerce-managers/
If you are an e-commerce portal and would like an audit of your Google Analytics setup, we can help schedule a free audit for you.
DeepFlux is a Fashion AI SaaS startup that is helping e-commerce managers improve the productivity of their day-to-day tasks and decision-making.
Schedule a demo today by sending a mail at – contact@deepflux.io
By Abhimanyu Vyas, Co-Founder, DeepFlux