Audit your GA setup

Audit your GA setup

1. Create a Google Analytics health checklist to evaluate your setup.

In putting together your checklist, ask, Am I collecting all of the data I need, Can I trust the data I’m collecting, and Is anything broken or tracking/reporting incorrectly? Why?

2. Analyze your Account, Property, and View settings.

For example, within the Property column of the Admin section, check that the default URL is set up correctly and that you have enabled demographics and interest reports. Within the View column, start by ensuring your Views are set up correctly, and that ecommerce tracking is turned on.

3. Compare your GA setup to the most common Google Analytics issues.

These are: Google Ads account is not connected. Google Ads auto-tagging is not used. Time zones do not match. PPC keywords IDs are visible on landing pages. Manual UTM tags are not used. Site search and category search are not enabled. You’re not tracking mailto: links. The homepage filter is not being used. Log spam is not filtered out. Error pages are not being tracked. Duplicated ecommerce data is not filtered. You have a bounce rate of less than 10%.

4. Investigate your GA issue tracking by looking for missing pages, different data in your shopping cart tool, and cross-domain tracking issues.

Other common tracking issues that Google has published include using incorrect snippets, extra whitespace or characters, viewing the wrong account, and incorrect filter settings.

5. Check your Google Tag Manager to make sure that your tag is firing, the filter settings are correct, and the container is published.

If the tag isn’t firing: check if you have unpublished changes, your triggers are too specific, and your triggers are configured incorrectly.  Wrong filter settings: When you apply multiple Include filters, you can accidentally end up filtering all data from your reports. Unpublished container: Before adding the tag, be sure you’ve published the container. Changes you make to a container aren’t saved until you’ve published it.

6. Run through your GA setup checklist annually.

As time goes on, new issues can arise.