Today’s tips are on two Google Analytics best practices.
In order to make the most informed data-backed decisions, and also be able to track your marketing efforts better you need to use Google Analytics to its fullest potential.
#1 Goal Tracking
In Google Analytics you should be tracking any and all conversions on your site via goal tracking.
Goals allow you to have all of the session data for the users who converted on your site.
The easiest way to set up goals is with thank you pages. With any form that you have on your site once a user fills it out, they should be redirected to a thank you page.
Not only are thank you pages the easiest goals to set up, but they are also another point that you can get another conversion seeing as they just converted they are more likely than anyone else to convert on something else.
A thing I often recommend is to get people who fill out a form (a newsletter subscribe for example) to follow your business on social media from the thank you page.
#2 Use annotations
Whenever you make a big change on your site, like a website redesign or refresh, big site navigation changes, or if you launch a big marketing campaign you should add an annotation in Google Analytics.
You can add an annotation from any report with a line graph.
Right under the graph is a gray down arrow.
Click that arrow and then off to the right-hand side will be a “+ Create new annotation” link. Click on that, add the annotation for the change that happened and the date that it happened.
That way when you are looking back on your data you don’t have to remember when you launched a new campaign or made a change on your site.
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