Tapping into the world of Digital Analytics -> How good is your data?

5 min readNov 7, 2020

Have you ever found yourself if the data you are looking at is actually the right data? Over the past 15 months of working at AIESEC International, this has been the question I’d ask myself over and over again.

One of the biggest management cliche quotes ever is a famous saying of Peter Drucker: “What gets measured gets managed.”, but what if the data you are using isn’t measured correctly or is not showing you the right story? What if there’s a whole set of things you are measuring, but it’s not really what you think it is?

A lot of the people relying on Google Analytics are relying on bad data. No, not because Google Analytics is awful. Because their configurations are broken. That’s why you need to conduct a Google Analytics audit.

Personally, I have always been very scared of tapping into the topic of data quality and audit of data inside of my GA account, but recently I’ve had a chance to go through an amazing curriculum on this topic with my CXL mini-degree program, and what to bring you a couple of most useful tips and tricks I learned.

The key focus of my learning was centered around answering the following three questions:

Am I collecting all of the data I need?
Can I trust the data I’m collecting?
Is anything broken or tracking/reporting incorrectly? Why?

Making sure your settings are done well

A first step in ensuring your data is set up and working properly is making sure that all of the setups of your Google Analytics account is done properly. Here are some key checks and questions you should ask yourself to ensure your property and view settings are done right.

Property Settings

Within the Property column of the Admin section, key questions you should ask yourself:

Is the default URL set up correctly? (well, this one is pretty obvious)
Do you have Google Search Console enabled and linked properly? (definitely less obvious, but really helpful — this would enable you to see how your website is behaving when it comes to Google searches and bring you a ton of useful insights to help you understand your traffic better and improve your SEO)
Have you enabled demographics and interest reports? (another extremely useful setup, allowing you to properly manage and understand your audiences and build your user personas)
Is “enhanced link attribution” turned on? (Enhanced Link Attribution improves the accuracy of your In-Page Analytics report by automatically differentiating between multiple links to the same URL on a single page by using link element IDs.)

View Settings

View settings are crucial to allow you to control the different setups of data display and grouping, here are some key questions to ask yourself while checking here:

Do you have raw data and a test view setup? (It is very important to have more than one view in your Google Analytics properties, because if you want to apply new filters and test new things, you can first test it and then if anything goes wrong you can always revert the changes, by using a different view that wasn’t touched before.)
Are all of the important settings to allow you to harness all the relevant information set and turned on: (Are your Views set up correctly? Is e-commerce tracking turned on? Is site search tracking turned on?)
Are you filtering out internal traffic? (Is the office IP address filtered out? Are the IP addresses of your affiliates filtered out (e.g., agencies, freelancers, etc.)? Is your home IP address filtered out? Are the IP addresses of remote employees filtered out?)
Are your Goals set and tracking properly?
Have you configured your custom and default channel groupings? (Content Grouping is a powerful tool on Google Analytics and it allows you to group your content into a logical structure that reflects how your business is setup. For example, you can have groups indicating the different target audiences that you are trying to reach with your website, so then you can compare aggregated statistics for each group.)

Resolving Common Issues

Check out this amazing checklist of common issues and how to resolve them provided by CXL by checking out this link: https://cxl.com/blog/google-analytics-health-check/#step-3-common-issues

Most Common Tracking Issues

Here are some basic ones I found very useful, you can always refer to the full list of common tracking issues provided by Google here.

Incorrect filter settings. Incorrect filter settings can affect the data you see and can inadvertently filter all data from your reports. In most cases, this occurs when users apply multiple “Include” filters.
Missing Pages. To identify pages that are missing your Google Analytics code, you can look for irregularities in your data. Or, you can use a tool like Google Analytics Checker. Once you’re sure that every page of your site has the code, you need to ensure it’s the latest (asynchronous) code.
Cross-domain tracking. I’ll quote Chris Mercer from MeasureMarketing and his explanation in the course here

It’s called “cross-domain tracking,” and it could come into play if your client’s site has multiple domains as part of their funnel or buyer’s journey. In these cases, you’ll absolutely want to setup cross-domain Tracking.
If you’re using the traditional Google Analytics (boring) try doing this. If you’re using Google Tag Manager (you should be) it’s faster to do this.”
For example, your checkout process might be on a different domain. Unfortunately, Google Analytics uses first-party cookies, which can be read only by the domain that issued them.
So, in order to do cross-domain tracking, you need to share cookie information with the different domains involved.

Practice Makes Champions

Don’t let yourself be tricked by your own data. Go through your GA setup today and make sure that your data collection and processing is done properly. Here are some valuable resources that will help you go deeper in the topic:

About the Program

About CXL — CXL Institute is a leading training provider on all things data-driven marketing. You can learn more about CXL by visiting this page.

About Digital Analytics mini degree — The Data Analytics mini degree at CXL is a power-packed program to learn in-depth skills for the Google suite of analytics tools to become a data-driven specialist who can set up any needed tracking and turn data into insights and money. You can learn more about the mini degree by visiting this page.