The Minimum Level of Analytics Tracking Your Website Needs
Happy New Year!
I can’t believe how fast 2023 went by. Now when I date something where the year isn’t auto-inserted, I need to remember to put “24” at the end. Wild.
Here’s a New Year’s resolution you can put in place this week to kick off your business’ year the right way: relying on more than just your website platform’s built-in analytics tracking.
If you use a platform like WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, etc., the main drawback is the inability to add IP address filters. This is important because if your marketing and sales teams are on your website a lot — which they likely are to perform their responsibilities — their “in-house” visits distort the visitor count shown by your platform. Other analytics metrics like time on page and bounce rate are also affected.
Another drawback of website platforms’ analytics dashboards is that they will never be as flexible and full-featured as apps that are dedicated to nothing but analytics, such as the industry standard, Google Analytics.
Here is the minimum level of analytics tracking your website needs:
Google Analytics 4 (GA4). This is the current version of Google Analytics, which recently underwent a big transition from their legacy product, Universal Analytics (UA). Over the past year or so, many in-house marketing teams — and agencies on behalf of their clients — have worked to move analytics tracking from UA to GA4. Google has made this easy for most businesses; some may require settings customization to make it “apples to apples” from the old dashboard to the current one.
Google Tag Manager (GTM). After “go to market,” Google Tag Manager should be what you think of when you see the acronym GTM. This tool, which works with GA4, allows you to set up and track website conversion events that are specific to your business. One GA4 event type — which is not included in GA4 by default — that GTM unlocks is “generate_lead”, such as from a meeting or appointment booking. I discuss in more detail how GA4 and GTM work together in this recent post.
Some points to consider if you’re on the fence about implementing or upgrading to GA4:
Perhaps the biggest benefit of GA4 over Universal Analytics is that it requires a single code injection on your website. With UA, when you wanted to add Google Ads tracking to existing GA tracking, you needed to add an additional line of code to your site. This was true of other Google products as well — requiring more time from your webmaster or marketing agency for implementation and testing to ensure nothing broke after each change.
While AI (led by ChatGPT) has cut into the share of web traffic that would have gone to search engines in 2023, according to StatCounter, as of November 2023, Google still owns over 91% of search engine market share worldwide. Given than GA4 includes robust data collection — from search history as well as YouTube history and sites that partner with Google — this means the data collected in your GA4 property are as far-reaching and granular as you could want from an analytics solution.
GA4’s data collection includes basic as well as advanced settings to integrate with Google Ads, allowing for highly personalized ads. Here’s more on this from one of our favorite YouTube channels for website analytics help, Loves Data.
GA4 is Google’s most flexible analytics platform to date when it comes to metrics tracking and reporting options. Its new Explorations section offers both common report templates and a “Blank” report canvas that you can build from scratch. While this new section has been maligned for its poorer user interface versus the UA platform, the “pro” to this “con” is that the sky is the limit for dimensions that you can track.
The best part: cost is not a barrier to entry.
GA4 and GTM are free, so there’s no cost to getting them going on your website, other than time. And while there are many free resources to help you do this, if you’re looking for a personalized done-for-you solution, that’s what we offer with our website conversion tracking service. This service also includes custom conversion event tracking setup — so that you can open your Events report tab in GA4 and always know how your call-to-action buttons/links and end-of-funnel landing pages are doing, and make website and campaign adjustments as needed to maximize the ROI from your marketing spend.
