Keeping a close eye on analytics is important for any website. It’s especially crucial when you’re launching a brand-new web presence, though, because both problems and opportunities need to be identified quickly.
Before you can get useful statistics from Google Analytics, though, you have to make sure a few important settings are in place. Otherwise, the data you get could be very skewed – and the conclusions you come away with might not be the right ones.
To help you avoid common blunders in this area, today we want to point out four crucial Google Analytics settings the need to be put in place for any brand-new website…
#1 Tracking Code Installed on Every Page
Depending on what kind of platform or CMS your website is built upon, you might have to manually install Google Analytics or work through a plugin. A good web design team is going to handle these details for you, but it’s worth double checking to make sure you have tracking code installed on every page.
If you don’t, some visits to your website might not be recorded. The last thing you want, when you’re trying to create a profitable web presence, is to have “blind spots” in your analytics data.
#2 Owner and Designer IP Addresses Filtered Out
When your website has first been launched, you and your creative team are likely to be the most frequent visitors and users. You might spend several minutes, or even hours, on a single page while evaluating an image or piece of content.
If you forget to filter out the IP address from your computer, or the ones your designers use, you could get incredibly skewed information on website engagement. This is the online equivalent of chasing your own shadow, and it’s a big time waster.
#3 Conversion Goals Installed and Tested
You probably want your website to generate some kind of conversions. Maybe you’re looking to attract buyers who place orders through your pages, or want them to fill out a form so they can be contacted by a member of your sales team.
Because these conversions lead to new revenue, you’ll want to track them (and in some cases, the steps leading towards them) in great detail. Make sure Google knows what you’re aiming for so you can see whether you’re getting the right results.
#4 Home Page Set to Display Custom Reports
The best way to get the information you need from Google Analytics is to use it regularly. A lot of business owners don’t like to log in, though, because they feel overwhelmed by the reports and statistics that are displayed.
You can get around this problem by customizing your Google Analytics home page. Set it up so the stats and reports you want to see show up right away. That way, you can get the data that is relevant to your business without spending a lot of time digging through submenus.
It’s nearly impossible to optimize your website for visits and conversions without good analytics data. But, you can’t get that all-important data until your website and account settings have been properly configured.
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Don’t overlook these four important tweaks, or the information you get about website visitors that comes your way.