Google Analytics is a great web analytics tool which reports on website and mobile app usage. Commonly, Google Analytics is used to report on website traffic, visitor behavior, visitor demographics, goal conversions, etc. To trust the data though, you really need to first make sure that you’ve correctly installed Google Analytics on your website. In the article, we’ll cover some of the basic things to look for in determining whether Google Analytics is working correctly on your website.
Traffic Check
First thing first, you need to check if you Google Analytics account is tracking traffic to your website. The best way to do this is to access your Google Analytics account and look for traffic. If you see no traffic, then it may be the case that your Google Analytics code isn’t installed.
Code Check
Now, you can check to see if the Google Analytics code is installed correctly. To do this, you can view the page source code (right click on the page and choose “view source”). Here, you’ll want to search the source code for the Google Analytics tracking pixel, OR, for the Google Tag Manager tracking pixel depending on how you installed the code.
Or, a bit easier, you can download the Google Analytics code checker for Google Chrome which will tell you without the need for checking the source code. If you prefer the Firefox browser, there’s one for that too here.
Check for Self Referrals
One of the most common issues to look for with Google Analytics is that there are self referrals in your reports. For example, let’s say your website is mywebsite.com. You’ll want to view the referrals report to make sure that your website domain (mywebsite.com) does NOT appear as a referral. If it does, you’re missing Google Analytics tracking code on some of your pages.
Check Your Goals
Have you setup goals to tracking in Google Analytics? Goals usually represent leads and ecommerce sales. Here, you’ll want to go through and check that each of your goals is working correctly. Do so by check the goals report and ecommerce report in Google Analytics.
Conclusion
It’s always best to ensure that Google Analytics is installed and working properly on your website before using the data within. After all, bad data is worse than no data at all.