Author: Silver Ringvee

Google Analytics, the most widely used tool for gathering data from your website usage, comes with pretty good setup out-of-the-box and will serve the needs for most basic users. Once your website becomes more sophisticated and starts getting more traffic, the default setup just won’t cut it anymore.

Luckily, changing the settings of your view in Google Analytics is rather straight forward. In this article, I am going to cover the setup I use on most websites and will give go into some more detail on the most important settings.

Let’s admit, analytics can be hard. We are taking a step to make it easier, putting together a dictionary for analytics-related terms and definitions. Take a look and contribute to the list of terms!

Today, it is safe to say that AI and machine learning are here to stay. At least every third trending submission on Producthunt has something to do with AI. These systems are becoming more prevalent in every industry, and logically, online business is no exception.

At Reflective Data we believe that every analytics platform should make sure that their users find what they are looking for as fast as possible. By figuring out and setting up Google Analytics views, you can make it much easier and faster to analyze a specific part of your website.

Going to Google Analytics and find the right report to give you the information you need is fun and all but sometimes you need it quick, on the go.

This is where Google Analytics In-Page Analytics comes into play. It is built to give you a really quick overview of the basic metrics of your website, on your website!

This article is for everyone that has Google Analytics installed on their website but especially for those who use data for their business decisions. (All of you should)

Experts at Reflective Data have seen and conducted audits for hundreds of Google Analytics setups, and we must say that the picture could be much better. In fact, there’s hasn’t been a perfect setup, yet.

Google Analytics is strong in tracking all sorts of traffic sources. By default, it can make sure if the user came from a social network, search engine, advertisement, email or came to your site directly (typing in the URL or using a bookmark).

While the basic channel determination is quite good, you should still consider configuring based on your business, as Google really couldn’t make a one-size-fits-all solution here. Web sites are just too different, and that’s a good thing, right?

In fact, you can re-configure the entire channel determination system, but in this article, we are going to cover the part that’s related to referral traffic. More specifically, the traffic that Google considers a referral but it actually isn’t.

Google Analytics Custom Definitions are essential additions to every Analytics setup that has been tailored to a specific business. And they all should be.

The basic setup provides you with plenty of dimensions and metrics but there are things that are specific to your business and need some manual configuration in order to be tracked properly.

This is exactly what Google Analytics Custom Definitions are good for – including non-standard data in your reports.

Google Analytics, an analytics tool of choice for most of us, counts hits, page views, sessions and users.

That is clear, but did you know that users are not necessarily different users/people but could as well be the same person just using another device.

Well, it really depends on your business and other specific conditions like advertising methods but there are still a few common tools that you should integrate into your Google Analytics setup.

This article is part of Most common Google Analytics issues (in-depth overview) series.