My Top Five Google Analytics Things to Do. CXL Digital Analytics Minidegree review: Week 4

5 min readJun 13, 2021

It’s week 4 of my CXL Institute Digital Analytics Minidegree and this week is the Google Analytics Audit with Fred Pike.

The Google Analytics Audit course was a great follow-up to the intro and intermediate GA courses with Chris Mercer. Fred Pike takes the concepts from Mercer’s courses and shows you the good, bad, and ugly use of Google Analytics in the wild. Pike does a great job of explaining why not to do something and showing examples of best practice and GA implementation that could be improved. The CXL description of the course promotes participants will:

“Get a structured approach to diagnose and fix any account so you can trust your data and make the most of your digital marketing dollars.”

If your Google Analytics property is not set up and maintained, then the data and any resulting insights you gain, will be suspect. And no one wants to base business decisions on bad data.

The most important thing to audit — events. Pike explains that events are the “heart and soul” and Google Analytics and that if you are doing an audit of GA, this is the most important thing to look at.

What to know when auditing events:

Do the actions and labels make sense?
The only thing worse than no events, is too many events. Everything can’t be important.
Are there events that should be tracked that are not being tracked?

My top things to do in Google Analytics.

After completing the Google Analytics Introduction, the Google Analytics Intermediate course, and the Google Analytics Audit course, I decided to put together a list of all the things that, in my opinion, were the most important tips and things to do when using Google Analytics.

Tip 1: Avoid Data Loss: Create a Backup Raw Data View

In Google Analytics, a view is where your reports live, and views have multiple options to set rules that will affect how you will see your data. A major limitation of views is that they only collect data from the time they are created and moving forward. There is no look back view. That is why the first thing you should do when setting up Google Analytics is create a backup raw data view.

Once you create this view, leave it alone! In case you filter anything out of other views, you will always have this goal and filter-free view as a backup and for a baseline comparison. It’s just there in the background collecting data.

Tip 2: Connect your Google Search Console Account to Google Analytics

Go to your Admin and Property settings and connect your Google Search Console account to your Google Analytics account. Google Search Console will allow you to see the organic search keywords that bring traffic to your site. You will be able to see the clicks, impressions, CTR and average position for each term. Connecting Search Console will also unlock the reporting section under the Acquisition tab in GA.

Keep in mind, that Google Search Console is only going to show you the organic search info for Google, which while it will most likely represent most traffic for your site, it is not 100% of your search traffic.

Tip 3: Understand what the Google Analytics terminology means.

If you are responsible for using Google Analytics to glean valuable insights that will drive the digital marketing decisions you make for your business, you must know what everything means. You will be asked to define these things when presenting your reports — so know what you are talking about. A few need to knows:

What is a user?
How long is a session?
What is bounce rate?

As you learn what these things mean, go the step beyond and learn what they mean for your business.

Tip 4: Use UTMs

A primary use case for Google Analytics is learning where your website traffic is coming from. UTMs, or little parameters that you add to the end of a URL is how you do that. UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module and using them to tag your website traffic is critical for digital marketing. UTMs help you make sense of your traffic, by allowing you to customize traffic as it comes into your site.

UTMs need to know info:

There are 5 UTMs tags: Source, Medium, Campaign, Content, Keyword. While you may not use all five — source, medium, and campaign are the most commonly used.
Source = where your traffic comes from
Medium = how it got there
Campaign = what is the traffic about, what are you promoting
Content = what was in the ad or content that go them to the site
Keyword = the keyword that the user clicked through to get to your site
Be consistent with your use of UTMs. You can develop something that works for you — but using UTMs should be a given. A UTM parameter strategy is the cornerstone of successful measurement of your digital marketing activities.
Case matters. If you use the exact same term in your parameters, but the first letter is uppercase in one instance and lowercase in another — Google will split that traffic in your results. Create a naming convention that is easy to remember and share it with your team. Even if your team is only you, keep a file that documents your naming convention and keeping things consistent will be much easier.
Don’t use spaces between words. Decide if you will use and underscore or a dash to separate words. There are proponents and arguments for each all over the Internet, but I prefer the dash, as does Chris Mercer, the instructor for the CXL Institute Google Analytics Beginners course. Dashes make it easier to see that there is a space there, especially when using a spreadsheet.
As wonderful as UTMs are for tracking website traffic — avoid using them for internal site traffic. On-site UTMs can break referral traffic of how a user got to the site and will trigger a new session.

Define your top Google Analytics things to do

While there are some basics for every set up and things to do (events and raw data view), your use of Google Analytics will help define what things are most important to you for the overall goal of your website and the questions you want to answer with your data.