Welcome to our monthly cycle!
Are you tired of searching and looking for Web analytics news? No wonder – dozens of articles from the field are published daily. Checking them all by yourself requires a lot of time – that’s where we come in!
While sipping Yerba Mate, we go through the Internet for you to find the most interesting and noteworthy articles in the field of web analytics. Keep up to date with all the new on web analytics with us and be sure to come back every month!
Exclude unwanted internal traffic from employees – News # 1
Outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic forced many companies and employees to switch to home office. Therefore, many employees enter the company website from their home computers and sadly this can mess up your user and session data. This creates additional traffic on the site, which is collected by Google Analytics. Such traffic is often unwanted.
Therefore, it is crucial to exclude such traffic properly. Simo Ahava, in a post on his blog, described one of the ways to effectively exclude internal traffic. This solution is based on the use of an additional parameter in the url:
- Employees visiting the website add a special parameter to the URL.
- In GTM, the value of this parameter is captured and passed using a custom dimension in Google Analytics.
- In Google Analytics, we can use a filter to exclude traffic (hits) that contain this custom dimension.
For more details on how to configure such a solution exactly, please visit Simo’s article on his blog:
Use A / B testing to get higher organic positions and improve user experience – News # 2
We associate A / B testing primarily with CRO activities. However, it can also apply to SEO activities. Evan Hall in his article presented an interesting approach to the implementation of A / B tests for SEO using free tools such as Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics. If you want to test how your SEO changes will appeal to users, and above all search engines, be sure to start conducting A / B tests in your activities!
Read Evan’s article for guidelines on how to implement such tests step by step.
Ups and downs in a life of analyst – News # 3
Do you know this feeling when you go in to check your GA, and suddenly there are strange jumps or falls? Before you look for reasons in technical problems and settings, think about something else.
When analyzing data, always remember about different circumstances that happen every day. They may have a bigger or smaller impact on how users behave and use your website. It is always good to look at data with context in mind.
Google Analytics offers a built-in solution in the form of annotations. They allow us to add various types of text notes that give our data context and also you can see them displayed on charts in Google Analytics reports. Annotations in Google Analytics have some limitations, for example, the need to add all annotations manually, in each data view. The standard version of Google Analytics also does not provide API access that would allow you to automate the annotation.
There is, however, a solution to this. In this article linked below, we can read in detail how to use Google Sheets and Google Data Studio to build an annotation system similar to Google Analytics. Read the article below:
Duplicated pageViews and missing transactions are causing you headaches? Contact us and we’ll be happy to help you make sense of your data. Use the form to get in touch with us!