What is Google Analytics Audit
A Google Analytics audit examines the installation and configuration of Google Analytics on a website. The accuracy, relevancy, and organization of web analytics data are audited.
An expert should ideally be hired to audit a company’s Google Analytics account.
One error that managers frequently observe is assigning the assignment to a junior employee or a web developer.
This is a sign of a bigger problem: web analytics is neglected.
Don’t undervalue a sound data strategy’s impact on a marketing team’s ability to use Google Analytics (GA). Read more about Google Analytics here.
Having an internal audit may work if your company is smaller and has fewer resources and data inputs.
Internal traffic, spam sessions, and improper tracking codes are filtered via a proper GA audit.
In a GA audit, tracking codes are installed on the website, and the data collected is compared to data from other analytics tools to ensure that it is accurate.
The right goals are established, and conversion monitoring is set up to count the number of conversions on the site and ensure they align with the client’s objectives.
The channels, pages, goods, and services that contributed to the sale are also identified using specific GA attribution models.
Having access to such essential data enables the company to make more profitable business decisions.
Reviewing and adjusting the various Google Analytics settings to meet your marketing objectives is the process of doing a Google Analytics audit, which should be done by a professional.
When Google Analytics Audit Should be Performed
An examination of your web analytics can be beneficial in several situations, and these should be:
- Before launching a new website, do not mistake launching your project and figuring out how to measure metrics later.
An audit may ensure that you have the appropriate measuring plan for your strategic business goals when you launch your new website.
- Immediately following website modifications. It is possible to ensure that your data collecting continues unabated and intact by auditing your website after updates and adjustments.
You added a video and altered the button designs on one of your most important landing pages. Check to see if you can determine how these modifications affect your ROI.
- As soon as you decide to enhance your marketing budget. Refraining from scaling your marketing based on hunches or inaccurate information would be best. Before making any financial decisions, you should first audit your data.
- The moment analytics and sales tools show differences. Any differences of more than 5% should be able to be satisfactorily explained.
One error that marketers make when problems develop is continuously introducing new web analytics solutions without having one set up correctly.
Since there are now more tools to monitor and maintain, this doesn’t address the root problem and makes everyone’s job more difficult. Using the fewest tools available to do the tasks is unarguably better.
- Auditing should be done often. While the information mentioned above pertains to when something has occurred or is about to happen, it is also advisable to routinely monitor your Google Analytics at least once a year.
Avoid the error of setting up web analytics measurements and failing to monitor them periodically. Repeated audits are part of a maintenance plan and can be completed more quickly.
One concept is having weekly, monthly, and quarterly inspections to ensure your data is functioning. For your clients to know exactly what to check and how frequently, it’s better to provide a governance plan.
How can a Google Analytics Audit benefit your company?
1. For organizations, routine inspections can provide several advantages. These comprise:
2. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Alignment: By routinely analyzing your analytics, you can ensure that the data you’re measuring align with your overall company objectives.
3. Improved Data Trust: The sales and marketing teams may trust the data from Google Analytics because data sources have been verified as trustworthy.
4. Discovering Fresh Options for Understanding: The chance to sit back and examine your operations from a different angle is presented by an audit. Finding new opportunities is often the result of this.
5. Efficiency Gains: Your data’s problem spots are brought to light via an audit. Analysis might move more quickly and simply once you’ve fixed problems. New hire onboarding might also be made simpler.
6. Fostering an Approach that is Data-driven: A process-driven approach to thinking is promoted within your marketing team by routinely evaluating your metrics. Consequently, new ways of problem-solving and thinking using data are stimulated.
How can you ensure your Google Analytics Audit highlights business possibilities and threats?
Never begin a Google Analytics audit without first comprehending the business context if you want to maximize the results. You won’t be able to successfully evaluate the tool if you are unclear about the KPIs or targets your data aims to monitor.
Think carefully about what you’re attempting to measure and achieve with your audit to ensure it has the most significant possible impact.
Explain in detail which indicators will serve as your main KPIs and which ones will aid in overall measurement.
Review the discovery process’s current and desired user journeys, and consider how enhanced data might enhance your performance.
Once the person doing the audit is clear on these goals, it is possible to lay out the strategy for using Google Analytics to gauge the worth of websites and identify areas for optimization.
What Essential Elements go into a Successful Google Analytics Audit?
Every web analytics implementation specialist has a Google Analytics checklist in their toolkit.
It typically changes to ensure everything is in order as they work with more and more clients. Naturally, analysts with more expertise will have a better-honed set of checks.
Making sure data is pertinent, thorough, and organized after dozens of audits are essential. In addition to helping your clients become data-driven, it is best to emphasize technical configuration strongly.
This division makes the recommendations more business-focused and implementable. Connecting tracking actions to future business results is more straightforward for business stakeholders.
The provision of detailed measures to remedy concerns is another crucial component of a Google Analytics Audit report.
Steps to Make your Google Analytics Audits More Doable
An actionable document that a professional can review and make adjustments to is the entire goal of a Google Analytics audit.
It’s crucial, as said earlier, that the document complements your overall business strategy.
Some of the factors you should consider include the following:
What interactions do customers currently have with the website and other touchpoints?
How should they conduct themselves in the future?
What style do the naming conventions take?
What procedures will be developed after the initial implementation?
What is the scaling plan?
What long-term goals do you have for the website?
Who will analyze data in what way?
Google Analytics Audit Checklists
No matter the size of your business, a regular Audit of your Google Analytics system is necessary to ensure the reliability of your data.
The Auditing Process Guide
Four significant areas with some overlap best describe the audit’s key takeaways:
– On-Page Audit
– Internal Data Quality Audit
– Conversion Measurement Audit
– Traffic Sources and Site Activity Review
However, while most of these audit requirements apply to Universal Analytics (GA3) and Google Analytics 4, a few won’t be for businesses that only use GA4. The following should be aspects of your sites that should be a checklist for Audits:
- On-Page Audit of the Site
An on-page audit entails visiting your website and checking that Google Analytics is correctly installed and that no user experience issues prevent you from gathering valuable data. Some of the highlights here are:
- Initial Tag Presence: No information from a specific page may be collected if tags are missing. Tags correctly installed and firing are required for any page interaction you want to track.
Remember that your tags might be fired by a tag management tool like Google Tag Manager or hard programmed directly onto your website (GTM).
A Google Tag Manager audit may also be necessary if your tags are supposed to fire through GTM but aren’t. Google Analytics tags and consistent tag versions should be deployed on all site pages.
- Compliance with Vendor & Privacy
Google mandates that tags be set up according to a specific syntax and that disclosures, such as a legally-binding privacy policy, be made on the website.
Google Analytics may truncate or reject data if specific standards are not followed.
Depending on the visitor’s region, you can also break the data protection legislation.
Companies have been forced to use consent management platforms to comply with data privacy policies, allowing consumers to specify their preferences for analytics monitoring and cookies.
You must ensure that your tracking conforms with your multiple consent profiles authorized, non-authorized, and partially authorized as part of your audit to ensure that you don’t break significant laws like GDPR, CCPA, LGPD, and others.
It’s risky and error-prone to test your website’s privacy compliance under different consent states. Automating the procedure is the most secure method to keep your testing consistent.
- Timing of Page and Tag Loads
Auditing your page and tag load times is crucial since they have a significant negative impact on your site’s performance in several ways, leading to problems like:
Low Analytics Abilities
Google Analytics may not run on a website if users browse away from it before it has finished loading, which lowers visitor numbers on specific sites.
Unreliable Data Comparison
When various parts of your site load tags in different places (such as at the top or bottom of the page), additional data collection errors may result.
In this case, a page that loads noticeably quicker or slower than another may result in unequal measurement in your reports.
Issues with the User Experience
The user experience of a page depends on how quickly it loads, and a slow load time is a primary cause of page abandonment. Your pages’ loading speed is influenced by the web tags you use.
Data loss due to slow load times or inconsistent tag insertion must be accounted for in your audit.
Note: Other Key Areas to be Checklisted are split into the below points.
- Internal Linking
Broken links and redirects make users angry and lower user satisfaction on search engine results pages.
Broken internal links on your website may deter users and reduce the amount of data you have access to, even though they are not directly related to your analytics system.
According to best practices, there should never be a page-not-found error (400-series) on a website, and redirects (300-series) should only be used sparingly. All links ought to lead to regular pages in the ideal world.
If your audit has a sizable number of redirects, check your company’s redirect policy and eliminate as many internal redirect links as possible.
A redirect may not be necessary if you update the internal site linking to connect directly to the terminal page.
- Multiple Tags
Duplicate tags, like missing tags, might complicate your data quality because they risk inflating your metrics.
In the worst situation, a single page view might be counted more than once, giving the impression that the page is much more popular than it is.
Conversion rates may appear lower than they are if pageviews are artificially inflated. Make sure that if you do, all tags appear to be loading multiple requests as you would anticipate.
If you have duplicate analytics code deployed on the same page, ensure it is not being used.
Duplicate tags are frequently caused by Google Analytics event tags that are fired as a second-page load tag from within Tag Manager.
- Set Up Conversion Reports
You can view your site’s performance relative to the objectives you have established in the Conversion Reports area. As was previously discussed, Google Analytics goals are crucial, and you should have them outlined explicitly.
You can determine whether or not your visitors are meeting your goals by looking in the Goal Overview tab.
This section will show your aims’ specificity or generality level. If your goals fall outside of this range, you can examine, modify, eliminate, or add some of them.
Your objectives should be balanced to make it simple for you to assess the state of your company or website, as the case may be.
If you run an online store, you should compare your sales to the targets you’ve set for Google Analytics. Although they don’t have to align, these two must correlate significantly.
A good range is between 90% and 95%. If the figure is noticeably less, you should double-check your e-commerce implementation, transaction parameters, and other factors.
To make sure your objectives are being achieved, event-tracking is advised. We cannot comprehend and adjust to our visitors’ interactions without adequate event tracking.
Setting custom alerts can also assist you in keeping a careful eye on your data to prevent data loss and find any issues that require debugging, in addition to event tracking.
- Develop Acquisition Reports
You may find out where your visitors clicked or the sources of your site traffic in your Google Analytics Acquisition Reports.
The categories (channels) into which Google distributes its traffic include direct, organic search, email, social, sponsored search, display, referral, affiliates, and other advertising.
Although navigating these traffic statistics may be challenging, you should check your (direct)/(none) traffic.
Your (direct)/(none) traffic also includes people who arrived at your website via links for which Google has no information and those who typed the URL address straight into their browsers or clicked on a bookmark.
Click Acquisition in your Google Analytics account’s left-hand menu. Pick All traffic from the drop-down option. Next, select Source/Medium. You may find your (direct)/(none) traffic in the table if you scroll down a little.
Verify that your (direct)/(none) traffic is greater than 25%. If so, this indicates that more than a fifth of your traffic originates from Neverland, which is a problem that needs to be resolved.
Even though you cannot prevent visitors from accessing your website directly or through a bookmark, you can limit visits to your website using shadow links by carefully categorizing the URLs that you (or your team) share with people.
- Specify objectives and track them
Without clearly defined goals, it is challenging for a firm to prosper. Your business and website’s type will determine the kind of objectives you can set.
You are the only one with the relevant knowledge about the requirements of your enterprises; thus, goal-setting cannot be presented broadly.
It would be best if you defined goals in Google Analytics that are specific to your business, even though every firm is unique.
This will enable you to gauge the most crucial information and KPIs and determine whether you are on the right course.
A specified activity, such as downloading a lead incentive, providing their contact information, or completing a purchase, can be measured using goal tracking, which enables you to monitor how frequently your site visitors take that action.
Don’t miss setting up goal tracking within GA, advises Rodriguez, because, without it, you’ll never know if your traffic is converting.
- Check and Remove URL Query Parameters
In Google Analytics, when a query parameter is added to a URL, a new page is reported for that URL. This can lead to thousands, if not millions, of pages being recorded, which makes it more challenging to obtain precise statistics.
Selecting the parameter that alters the page the most is necessary. Exclude any parameter that doesn’t sufficiently change the page.
Log in to your Google Analytics account like how you would filter for site search.
Navigate to Admin > View > View Settings. List each phrase you wish to exclude in the box labeled Exclude Query Parameters.
Note that the box can only include 250 characters, which should be sufficient.
- Set up and integrate your Google Adwords account
The performance of your website and ad data can be quickly reported inside the Google Analytics Adwords report by connecting your AdWords account.
Additionally, you can import metrics and objectives and link them to the eCommerce reports (if you have an eCommerce store).
You can then leverage the remarketing statistics and multi-channel funnel reports from Google Ads.
Then click Property> Google Ads Linking under Admin.
Then select Add New link group. Click Continue after selecting the Google Ads group you want to connect to.
Add a title to the link group.
Set all of the Property’s views that you want to include Google Ad data into ON. Select Accounts to Link.
- Use the Add-ons and Plugins for Google Chrome.
You don’t need access to the Google Analytics account to check if analytics is appropriately installed, which is one advantage of the extension.
In addition to the Google Chrome extension, you should download and use Chrome plugins like the Google Analytics Debugger and Chrome Tag Assistant to streamline your work.
Chrome Tag Assistant is one of the most popular plugins to aid in a Google Analytics audit. The plugin quickly identifies frequent problems using Google Analytics code setting and setup. Google Analytics Debugger is the other plugin that we advise using.
It gives you a complete overview of each tracking beacon while assisting with code checking and debugging.
- Check for possible leaking data.
You will probably find more illegal tracking technologies on your website while you do an audit for the collection of Google Analytics data.
It’s a warning sign you need to handle immediately if an unauthorized technology sends sensitive data to unauthorized locations or third parties.
Additionally, you can learn how unapproved tags get onto your site by using the Tag Initiators report (often through piggybacking).
Final Thoughts
There are many other checklists an auditor should take note of that will guide in properly reviewing a Google Analysis; truthfully, great audits take time and effort.
Providing you with the Google Analytics Audit template in this article has helped simplify the process of conducting a thorough Google Analytics Audit.
Remember that excellent Analytics data is needed for exceptional marketing initiatives.
An analytics audit is an initial stage in your marketing campaign ROI calculation.
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