Data is undoubtedly the new oil, but much like oil it can be dirty, needing to be cleaned and refined before its any good. Your data fuels your business and the cleaner it is the more power it gives the marketing team to make the most efficient decisions. Below are just some of the points you should be watching out for in your Google Analytics to make sure you’re getting reliable data.
Vanity Metrics
Vanity Metrics is measuring metrics that don’t result in your end goal being completed. Most business owners want sales or sign ups or some form of action that allows them to either build a funnel or start the sales process. You need to measure end goals rather than vanity metrics. A vanity metric might be facebook likes, website visitors, the size of your email list. These are all great number to keep an eye on but if its not driving qualified leads to your sales team the only thing they are going to do is make you feel good.
Measure your end goal
Measuring Robots
The amount of google analytics accounts that have robots adding useless traffic is phenomenal, nobody can get rid of 100% of robot traffic but there are measures you can take to reduce it significantly. The most important one is turning on, “exclude traffic from known bots” in your google analytics setting and adding filters from referral spam.
Remove robots and add spam filters
Segment Your Traffic
To get actionable data you have to measure it against something, while measuring the number of end goals is great, if you can’t segment your data into different mediums as to how visitors found you it will become very difficult to make informed decisions. You should always segment your traffic to understand how that medium is performing.
Make sure you can segment and attribute conversion
100% Accuracy
100% accuracy is never going to happen, you will always have some form of robots skewing the exact result. Also we would find a lot of SaaS companies have a sign in button where existing customers come back to the site to login. Its possible to build views based on previous actions but if cookies are wiped from someones laptop that will skew your view.
The external world will affect your data
You need to be able to make the best informed decision in order to reduce risk and scale, make sure your data is as clean as possible so when you are making a data driven decision you can be sure you’re correct, at least to the point that you are perhaps 3% / 5% out.
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