The team at Google Analytics provides weekly videos, answering questions from users around the world. This week’s post was 36 minutes long ?!?! and knowing how valuable your time is, we thought we’d watch the video for you and report back on the latest news. You’re welcome.
- What is the best way to track social media referrals? Through an advanced, custom segment in Google Analytics. Re-writing your URLs to track these referrals can actually hinder your data, not help it. Also use custom alerts to proactively know right away when major increases from social media channels occur.
- How do you know what your BAD keywords look like? – Use your internal site search reports and organic search keywords to determine what keywords are bringing traffic to your site, and if any of them are irrelevant to your business. If you find “bad” ones, adjust your SEO strategy and tweak your meta tags.
- Why is my Exit rates showing 0%? Why did I think this one was important and relevant to all? Well, because this is a BUG in Google Analytics. Yes, Google might be everywhere but they’re not perfect. From our experience, if you see data that looks too good (or bad!) to be true, it might just be. Question the data, look deeper into it, and contact Google if you see a problem in your analytics (but don’t hold your breath on a call back).
- How should I track testing and production environments? Google recommends actually using separate code if you need to track your development site from your live site.
- How does Webmaster tools provide data different than Google Analytics? One major piece of data is being able to see impressions and clicks to your site in Webmaster Tools for certain keywords, as well as what position they were in the search engine when it was clicked on and viewed.
- What is the best way to track PDF downloads? Google recommends using Event Tracking, which helps to keep everything organized and segmented in your reporting. If you’re going to track them as Goals as well, use the fake pageview method and make your fake pageview naming structure clean and easy to follow.
- How do I find what keywords visitors are using on their mobile phone to arrive at my site? You can find this data by going through the Traffic Report> Keywords and then click “Segment” at the top of the Google Analytics user interface and then click “Mobile”.
If you have an intern with some time on their hands, check out the full length video below.
