Google Analytics Account Setup Tool

  Analytics, Google Analytics, Web Analytics Tools   17 Comments

 

How a Google analytics account is set up tells a lot about the agency/seo consultant’s understanding of analytics and SEO at large. For e.g. if custom reports are not set up in an account I can safely assume that whoever is in charge of SEO/Analytics is reporting squirrels (word borrowed from Avinash Kaushik) and not useful analytics insight. Without any further delay I present to you my Google Analytics Account Setup Checklist:

{check the task when you have completed it}

1. Visit the client website. I do this to understand what needs to be tracked and to understand client’s business. Without a deep understanding of the client’s business you will have a hard time setting up SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely) goals in analytics and coming up with useful analytics insight.

 

2. Do a five second test. As soon as I visit the website, I view it for five seconds, try to remember as much as I can and then go to Google or some other site. Then I ask myself two questions: what the website is all about and what it is trying to sell. I note down whatever I remember about the site. This five second test will later help me in coming up with the strategies to reduce the bounce rate of the website.

 

3. Browse the website thoroughly and note down what is important. I again visit the website but this time browse the website thoroughly and note down following things on paper as I browse:

i) Website Issues- Any issue I encounter regarding site design, navigation, usability, contents, images, videos etc.

ii) Website Sections- Sections of the website which should also be tracked separately (through filtered profiles) like blog, forum etc

iii) Traffic Sources that should also be tracked separately (through filtered profiles) like traffic coming through social media (facebook, twitter), email and other marketing campaigns.

iv) Visitor’s interactions- Interactions which should be tracked (through event tracking).These users interactions can be: clicking on the Sign-up button, Log-ins, downloads, clicking on twitter/facebook profile button, clicking on share button, clicking on video play button and other user’s interactions I think are important to track. Please note: GA by default can’t track such type of user’s interactions.

 

v) Website Objective(s)- Purpose of the website. What the website is trying to achieve. There can be one or many purposes for which a website has been set up. These purposes can be something like selling clothes, generating leads, branding, building good relationship with the target audience etc. The major purpose(s) of setting up the website (like selling clothes) can be my major goal (or macro conversion) and other purposes can be my minor goals (or micro conversions) like branding, building good relationship with the target audience etc.

 

vi) Navigational paths which can lead to macro and micro goals conversions. Such type of navigational paths are made up of series of web pages which I can expect my visitors to follow to achieve website goals like making a purchase. There are ‘N’ ways of making a purchase on a website. Like my visitor can start his shopping journey from the home page and then go to the product category page followed by product detail page, registration page, checkout page and ‘order confirmation’ page or he can directly go to the checkout page (few days after registering on the website and adding item to his basket) and then to the ‘order confirmation’ page. I will have to determine the most efficient way of making a purchase on my website and expect visitors to follow my path. All this will later help me in setting up or optimizing the funnel pages in GA.

Please note: If you don’t have administrative access to the client’s site, then you will need to ask your client’s developer to give you a list of web pages which makes up the shopping cart process and URL of the order confirmation page.

 

vii) Visitor’s behavior which can lead to macro/micro goals conversions. If one of my micro goal is user engagement then how i will measure it. I can measure it through visitor’s behavior on my site. But this behavior should be something which i can analyze through my analytics. I certainly can’t analyze how many visitors got delighted when they landed on my page (unless GA can do face reading and report visitors emotions). So i need to use one of the available metrics which can help me in understanding visitor’s engagement. One of the metrics i use to measure engagement is ‘time spent on the site’. Such type of metric is known as ‘key performance indicator’ or KPI as it helps in understanding the performance of my goals. You need to set up such type of KPIs for all of your goals.

 

4. Setup SMART Targets- Targets are numerical values through which i can measure the extent to which i have succeeded or failed in achieving a goal. Without targets and deadlines no goal is unachievable. For e.g increasing the traffic of the website is not a SMART target. Increasing the website traffic by 50% in the next 6 months can be a SMART target. Here i would like to point out one thing. Don’t solely depend upon your clients to decide target for you. Their targets are generally not SMART (“we want to double our site revenue in the next 3 months”, sounds familiar?) and you may end up looking like an incompetent SEO to them.

 

5. Get a written agreement from your client on the goals, goal values, funnel pages and Targets. This will save me from any future dispute/ disagreement on conversion tracking.

6. Create an account in Google Analytics in case there is no account set up. Click here to create your account.

 

7. Add another analytics account- If you already have an account in GA and you want to create another account using the same log-in and password then click here

 

8. Install the new (asynchronous) Google Analytics tracking code (GATC) to all the web pages on your website. You can get more details about the installation here.

 

9. Switch to the new (asynchronous) GATC if your site is using the the old urchin.js or traditional ga.js tracking code. The new code helps in reducing the page load time and retain visitor clicks that occur before the tracking code is loaded. You can get more details about migrating to the new code here.

 

10. Verify tracking code installation – Verify that the tracking code is correctly installed on all of your web pages. If you want to verify manually, view the source code of the page and search for ‘ga.js’.

 

11. Verify that you are receiving the analytics data in your reports- You should start receiving the data in your analytic report within 24 hrs of your tracking code installation. If you don’t see any data then something is wrong with your tracking code installation.

 

12. Get Administrative privileges of the GA account. I get administrative privileges of my client’s GA account so that I can later create goals, set up funnel pages, setup filters and use all the features of GA. If the client doesn’t have any GA account then I setup an account for him and add myself as an account administrator.

 

13. Grant others users access to your analytics report- I may need to provide access to number of people like my boss, client, senior management etc. I generally give them ‘view reports only’ access so that they can’t accidentally make changes to the account. You can learn more about granting users access here.

 

14. Set up Goals and funnel pages in your account- I set up all the goals and funnel pages which i discovered during my site audit and on which my client/boss agreed on. You can find more details about setting up goals and funnels here.

 

15. Add Google Adwords account to your analytics account- Through such integration I can analyze the behavior of the visitors coming from my Adwords ads. This is something which is not possible through Google Adwords reporting interface. You can find more details about Adwords integration here.

Related Post: Complete Guide to Google Adwords Analytics

 

16. Make sure that auto-tagging is enabled in Google Adwords account-when you manually tag your Adwords ads URLs, the GA Adwords reports show results only by campaign and keywords. When you enable auto-tagging, GA Adwords report provide detailed information about Adwords campaign. As soon as you link your Adwords account to your analytics account, auto tagging is enabled by default. But sometimes you may find the auto tagging disabled (may be someone in the past thought of manually tagging the Adwords ads URLs or didn’t know what he was playing with). More details about auto-tagging and how it affect your Adwords ad can be found here.

 

17. Make sure auto-tagging is working properly -There are many factors (like third party redirects, encoded URLs and server settings) which can prevent auto-tagging from working properly by dropping the GCLID parameter from the landing page URL. Dropped GCLID parameter cause GA to report Google Adwords traffic as organic traffic (generally direct traffic) rather than paid search traffic. Add ‘?gclid=test’ parameter to the end of the destination URL of your Adwords ad like http://www.yoursite.com/?gclid=test. Copy paste the modified URL into the address bar of your browser window and press enter. If URL of the resulting page doesn’t display ‘gclid=test’ then the auto-tagging is not working.

 

18. Make sure that Google Analytics can import cost data from Adwords – When you link your Adwords account to your analytics account the cost data (impressions, clicks, cost, CTR, CPC) from Adwords is automatically applied to all the website profiles of your GA account. But sometime it is not the case as some smart SEO in the past decided to disable the cost data import from Adwords. More details about importing Adwords cost data can be found here.

 

19. Add Yahoo search marketing account to your analytics account – GA don’t report cost data (impressions, clicks, cost, CTR, CPC) from Yahoo PPC ads and treat the traffic coming from it as direct traffic. There is no way to link your Yahoo account to your GA account. But i prefer to address this task as ‘Yahoo PPC integration’ to keep reminding myself how important it is. In order to track Yahoo PPC campaigns from GA you need to put special tracking code to their ad URLs. Say my Yahoo ad URL is http://www.abc.com/. Now to track the traffic coming from this URL i will have to add some variables (known as campaign variables) to this URL like http://www.abc.com/?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Yahoo_Ads. I highly recommend you to watch this presentation from GA conversion university to know all about campaign tracking.

 

20. Add Microsoft ad center account to your analytics account- Again there is no way to link your MSN PPC account to your GA account. But i prefer to address this task like this to keep reminding myself how important it is. MSN PPC campaigns are tracked just like Yahoo campaigns in GA through campaign tracking.

 

21. Make sure that you are tracking all the marketing campaigns – Make sure that you are tracking not just search marketing campaigns. If you are running other online marketing campaigns like e-mail campaigns, banner ads, affiliate programs etc then they should be tracked too.

 

22. Add Google Adsense account to your analytics account- Through such type of integration you get more information about your Adsense ads performance and you can use this insight to improve the ads performance. More details about Google Adsense integration can be found here.

 

23. Enable E-Commerce Tracking- Through e-commerce reports in GA you can get detailed information about e-commerce activity on your website like total revenue generated by the website, number of orders placed, average order value, e-commerce conversion rate etc. If you run an e-commerce website then not enabling e-commerce tracking is an analytics suicide. I highly recommend this presentation from conversion university to learn all about e-commerce tracking.

 

24. Enable internal site search tracking- Through internal site search you can determine how visitors search and what do they search for on your website. With this insight you can determine missing contents on your website i.e. the contents which should be there (as lot of visitors search for it) but are not there. By analyzing internal search reports you can improve the quality of search results for key phrase and can develop better user experience. You can also identify new keywords for your search campaigns. Click here to set up site search tracking for your website.

 

25. Apply filters to your website profile- Through filters you can customize GA analytics reports and segment data. One of the most important filter is the filter to exclude internal traffic (i.e. traffic coming from your own company). Internal traffic can easily inflate your website usage metrics (visits, bounce rate, page views, time on site etc) and therefore should be filtered out by GA. You can get more information about creating filters here.

 

26. Create filtered profiles- Filtered profiles are simply profiles and filters used together. I am not a big fan of filtered profiles but sometime i find them useful like when i need to track multiple sub domains through a single profile. This is something which is not possible through advanced segments or is it? Make sure that you maintain one unfiltered website profile before you create filtered profiles. This is because once the raw data has been processed by a filter, GA can’t re-process the raw data. So if you have accidentally applied a wrong filter to your main website profile then your lost data can’t be recovered. You can get more details about filtered profiles here.

 

27. Setup advanced segments – Advanced segments can be applied to historical data and to all analytics accounts and website profiles. This is their biggest advantage over filtered profiles and that’s why i like them. You can use advanced segments to filter out social media traffic, traffic from referring sites or just to unleash the power of the long tail keywords. You can create three awesome advanced segments for your website from here. To know more about advanced segments click here.

 

28. Setup custom reports-custom reports have same advantage as advanced segments. They can be applied to historical data and to all analytics accounts and website profiles. Unlike advanced segments they don’t disappear when you switch to other website profiles. My whole analytics dashboard is full of custom reports. I don’t generally use standard reports. You can download three awesome custom reports from here. To learn more about custom reports click here.

 

29. Create Custom Alerts using Google Analytics Intelligent Report-Through analytics intelligence you can monitor significant variations in your site traffic and other useful metrics like revenue and get automatic alerts when such variations occurs. You can download some important custom alerts from here. Click here to learn about creating custom alerts.

 

30. Track important externals links (like downloads, sign-ups, login, etc) through event tracking- An event is a user interaction with a web page element like videos or external links. GA can’t track such events by default as they don’t generate pageviews when they occur. You can set up event tracking in GA by calling _trackEvent() method each time the user interaction you want to track occurs. I wrote a post titled ‘event tracking Google analytics (simplified version)‘ which explains A to Z of event tracking and virtual page views in an easy to understand language. Check it out.

 

31. Schedule Google Analytics reports to be emailed automatically to you and others. You can instruct Google to send analytics reports to you and others daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly. You can find more details about scheduling emails here.

 

Checklist for advanced Analytics Users

32. Enable first touch attribution – Overide GA default campaign attribution by tagging utm_nooverride=1 at the end of the destination URL of all the marketing campaigns like Google PPC, Yahoo PPC, Bing PPC, email marketing campaigns, etc. For e.g. http://www.site.com/index.php?utm_nooverride=1 . You can get more details about first touch attribution here.

 

33. Exclude certain query parameters from the GA report like session IDS, sorting parameters etc. Click here for more details.

 

34. Make sure your website profile is collecting Site speed data in your analytics. This will help you measure and reduce page load time. Click here for more details.

 

35. Use custom variables to segment your data further. For e.g you may be interested in knowing how many non-signed visitors abandon your shopping cart or which category of blog posts are more popular among your visitors. To get most out of custom variables you need to understand your visitors’ interaction with the website. Click here to know more about custom variables.

 

36. Measure the effectiveness of your branding campaigns. Following are some excellent resources worth checking out:

 

37. Track multiple sub –domains through a single profile- You can do this by using following advanced filter:

Filter name: Append hostname to request URI):
Advanced Filter:
Filter A ==> Extract A Hostname (.*)
Filter B ==> Extract B Request URI (.*)
Output to ==> Constructor Request URI $A1$B1
Field A required Yes
Filed B required Yes
Override Output field Yes
Case Sensitive No

 

 

38. Make sure that the cost data is separated among several website profiles. Apply custom include filter to each website profile for which you are running a campaign in Adwords:

Filter type: include
Filter field: Campaign Target URL
Filter Patter: (Enter the domain for which you are running an adwords campaign like seotakeaways.com)

 

39. Set up video tracking in Google Analytics- Video tracking through analytics is not easy. In order to track say product videos of a website in Google Analytics your developers need to work in the flash video source file and create some action script which can do following tasks:

Task-1: When a Video Play button is clicked -> It calls the _gaq.push ([‘_trackEvent’,’Videos’,’Play’,’Video_title’]); module and pass the title of the video as the value to the ‘video_title’ variable. So for example if title of the video is ‘Women’s Remix Cardi’, then value of the ‘video_title’ variable will be ‘women’s Remix Cardi’. Similarly if title of the video is ‘Women’s Remix Dress’, then value of the ‘video_title’ variable will be ‘Women’s Remix Dress’.


Task-2: When a Video stop button is clicked -> It calls the _gaq.push ([‘_trackEvent’,’Videos’,’stop’,’Video_title’,Video_length]); module and pass the title of the video to the ‘video_title’ variable and length of the video played to the ‘video_length’ variable. So for example if length of the video played is 118 seconds, then value of the video_length variable will be 118.

 

40. Use a hash (#) instead of a ? in your campaign tracking URLs using _setAllowAnchor method to prevent your pages with tracking code from being indexed by Google. Remember Google doesn’t index anything after the # sign. You can find more details about _setAllowAnchor method here.

 

41. Track multiple sub domains through a single profile – Click here to find more details.

 

42. Track multiple domains through a single profile - Do this only if your web session or checkout process span across several domains. Click here to find more details.

 

There are lot more things you can add to your Google Analytics checklist depending upon your situation. But I won’t talk about them as they are not very often required. If you want to know what else may benefit you then you should check out this list. This tool is very much a work in progress. If you have more cool n analytics-ninjanga tips then please share in the comments below.

 

If you like this tool then you should subscribe to my blog and follow me on twitter.

 

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Himanshu Sharma About the Author: is the founder of seotakeaways.com which provides SEO Consulting, PPC Management and Analytics Consulting services to medium and large size businesses. He holds a bachelors degree in ‘Internet Science’, is a member of 'Digital Analytics Association', a Google Analytics Certified Individual and a Certified Web Analyst. He is also the founder of EventEducation.com and EventPlanningForum.net.

My business thrives on referrals, so I really appreciate recommendations to people who would benefit from my help. Please feel free to endorse/forward my LinkedIn Profile to your clients, colleagues, friends and others you feel would benefit from SEO, PPC or Web Analytics.

 

 

  • http://Website Sandy

    Hey himanshu it is good to see you back. This post is awesome and also make me think how much i need to learn about GA. Will you be writing follow up posts which explains all the items in the checklist in great detail. I don’t understand official documents much and you have the unique ability to explain difficult concepts in a simple manner. That’s why i really like your version of event tracking. Hope to see more from you. Once again, excellent Post.

    • http://seohimanshu.com/about-himanshu/ seo himanshu

      I will write more about analytics in the future.

  • http://Website newseo

    I am glad you come up with this post. I was looking for something like this checklist for a long time. I manage half a dozen websites and this checklist will come handy. Could you elaborate on editing GATC. Can you please suggest me a good resource on video tracking. Thanks.

  • http://www.websitestrategies.com.au Ashley Bryan

    wow, thats a significant and detailed list. Much appreciated, I’m going to use it to ensure my own procedures in this area are up to spec.

  • http://Website reema arora

    Hey great word…keep on posting more related to web analytics.

  • http://Website Avinash Sinha

    Hi Himanshu! Its an awesome post. I am lucky that i found this post in the very beginning of my career. I have just started working on Google Analytics. I have print out this post and put it onto my wall for easy reference. I look forward to see more from you.

  • http://Website Steven Anson

    Great post as always. Himanshu can you please write something on first touch attribution.

  • http://Website James

    Thanks very much Himanshu for this excellent post. Its a solid reference for anyone who uses GA every day.

  • Jacqueline

    If the website has good design and content but if the analytics key has not been set up, then you lose lot of traffic and people visits.

    To reduce the bounce rate is very important process of Google analytics. Bounce rate can be the number of visitors who immediately close your webpage and move to some other. Google analytics is one of the best software to measure the bounce rate of a webpage.

    Thanks..

    • http://www.yahoo.com/ Klondike

      Hey, that’s the greastet! So with ll this brain power AWHFY?

  • http://seo-harmony.com Pavlicko

    Himanshu, Great tip on making sure to check adwords/analytics auto-tagging setup by adding ‘?gclid=test’ to existing urls. It’s such a no-brainer, yet I never even thought about doing that – I usually check the analytics the following day, but this makes perfect sense.

    Very helpful when you’ve got automated redirects happening across the site – found a couple of pages where that would have been a problem, and fixed them immediately.

    As a side note, do you feel it’s still necessary to add the ‘?utm_nooverride=1′, since Google is showing attribution paths in analytics now? And would that still work if I have auto-tagging on?

    Thanks!

    • himanshu

      I see no harm in using utm_nooverride=1 for non-adwords ad links (just to reinforce first touch attribution as i am not sure how Google handles non-adwords ad links). Please bear in mind that auto-tagging is only for Google Adwords and we also need to track Bing PPC, display advertising and other marketing campaigns. Sometimes we also track ad URLs via multiple analytics softwares like omniture, web trends etc. So manually tagging URLs is inevitable most of the time.

  • http://www.valuequest.co.in suman patra

    Hi Himanshu, very rarely I have come across such a nice article. When I started using Google Analytics, I was very overwhelmed. So much to do but where to start from! Well if had such a nice check list with me, life would have been easy. I have learnt the hard way, and I have done things as per the list. Nut still I have bookmarked your blog.
    Now my question: I am working with one of my client for whom I am also running adwords data, should I keep their raw unfiltered data linked with adwords cost data or not? or keep 2 raw unfiltered profile – 1 linked with the cost data and other without linking?
    Usually I keep the raw data profile linked to the adwords cost data. But I wanted to know the norms on this.

    • http://www.seotakeaways.com/ Himanshu

      You should always keep on raw unfiltered profile, one filtered profile and one test profile. Use test profile to do all of your testings like testing new goals, filters etc. In this way you can keep your main filtered profile bugs free.

  • GMR Website Maintenance

    Excellent Post! Thanks for sharing these details. I too use Google Analytics and your article has indeed proved to be very useful.

    • seohimanshu

      Glad you like the post