Most Common Google Analytics Configuration Issues (In-Depth Overview)
By Silver Ringvee · Dec 14, 2016 · updated Nov 7, 2019 · 2 min read
Google Analytics is a super powerful tool for tracking and analysing your website visitors.
It’s safe to consider it an industry standard, 74.5% of top 100k websites are using Google Analytics to keep an eye on their online business.
While most of us know what Google Analytics is, and the basic setup is really straightforward and simple, there are still tons of things that can go wrong or missing in the process.
This series of articles is providing you with an in-depth overview of the most common problems in Google Analytics setup, we are also going to give you a bunch of guidelines on fixing them!
After going through, and taking actions based on this series, you can be quite sure you have a top-notch GA setup which you can rely on when making important business decisions.
To keep it nicely structured and easy to navigate, we are going to divide articles about common Google Analytics issues into categories and sub-categories. That will also help us keeping everything regularly updated.
Structure of the series
Text will become a link once the article is published.
Property level Settings
- Basic setup and tracking snippet »
- Snippet position
- Universal Analytics
- Property definition
- Sending Pageview
- Default URLs
- Integrations »
- Search Console
- AdWords
- Advertising Features
- Other integrations
- User-ID »
- Setup
- Creating the view
- Custom Definitions »
- Custom Dimensions
- Custom Metrics
- Scopes
- Reports
- Segments
- Referral exclusions »
- Payment gateways
- In-Page Analytics »
- Enhanced link attribution
View level Settings
- Which views are needed and why
- Main
- RAW
- Test
- Business-specific
- Basic view setup
- Default URL
- Time zones
- Default page
- Query parameters
- Site search
- Filters
- Excluding unwanted traffic
- Creating custom views
- Manipulating data
Goals and Funnels
- Which KPI-s should be goals
- Must know about goals
- Goal setup
- Goal Type
- Conditions
- Value
- Destination
- Funnel
Event Tracking
- Which actions should be tracked as events
- Categorizing & Labeling events
- Event Tracking setup
- Google Tag Manager
- Event values
- Outbound links
- Non-interaction events
E-commerce Tracking
- E-commerce vs Enhanced E-commerce tracking
- Duplicate transactions
- Enhanced E-commerce settings
- Brand tracking
- Category tracking
- Checkout Labelling
Other Settings
- Campaign Tracking
- UTM parameters
- Email campaigns
- Referral traffic
- Campaigns in referrals
- Organic in referrals
Should you need help with your Google Analytics setup, check out our services. We’ve got you covered.
The list is being updated as new articles are being published, or if new issues come up.
Everyone is welcome to share their ideas on common Google Analytics issues not listed here. Post them in the comments or on Twitter @reflectivedata
written by
Silver Ringvee
Silver Ringvee is an expert in both traditional digital analytics and user behavior analysis. Besides analytics, Silver also has a strong experience in A/B testing and web development. Over the years, he has worked on over a hundred websites helping them become more profitable using various data-driven solutions.
We love AI, but this article was written by one of our experts.
discussion
17 comments
Jacki
Oct 10, 2017
Hello! This is my 1st comment here so I just wanted to give a quick shout out and tell you
I really enjoy reading through your articles. Can you suggest any other blogs/websites/forums that go over the same subjects?
Appreciate it!
Harriett
Silver Ringvee
Oct 15, 2017
Have you checked our analytics resources page? http://reflectivedata.com/analytics-resources/
Paras Chakash
May 3, 2017
I really like the series so far, is it still active? No new posts in a while!
Keep it up, guys!
Silver Ringvee
Oct 15, 2017
It sure is active. New stuff coming soon!
Peter Logman
Apr 17, 2017
Hey guys, nice series. When is the next post going to be published, though? Should be about the needed views, right?
Susan Makerman
Jan 23, 2017
I find myself coming back to this series over and over again. Thank you for sharing the good information with the world!
Paras Chakash
May 3, 2017
Same here! I think there’s not enough Google Analytics content out there…
Julia Matšeo
Dec 30, 2016
Thank you for the series. I’ve been reading all of the posts so far and really recommend everyone to do the same.
One thing that would be nice is a note on how to do something using Google Tag Manager, too!
Anthony
Dec 20, 2016
Just finished the first article in the series, and I must admit, it is good! Really looking forward to next one.
PS! Please do one on GTM, too!
Silver
Dec 26, 2016
Thanks, Anthony, there are now more articles published.
Kari
Dec 18, 2016
Looking forward to the custom definitions part, really haven’t found a good in-depth tutorial on this, both custom dimensions and metrics. I’d also like to see how you guys suggest measuring customer lifetime value, as it seems to me this is something Google Analytics doesn’t support by default. I guess it does but for apps only? Anyway, I think something great is coming soon!
Fernando Peres
Dec 17, 2016
Hopefully you are going to add some descriptive screenshots and guidelines, I find Google’s docs rather complicated and developer oriented, although based on a good tut even a marketing person like myself can do most of the things. So I hope something great is coming here.
B.B
Dec 15, 2016
Like the idea, just don’t make another entry-level click-bait. High hopes, still.
Tyler
Dec 15, 2016
Okay, now this seems like a lot of work. Are you going to write an article on every headline, on every first level list item or second level even?
Anyways, looking forward to it.
T
Silver
Dec 16, 2016
At least one article per first-level list item. Will go into more detail if the topic is more complicated or if there’s higher interest amongst our readers.
Luis
Dec 15, 2016
Hey guys, when is the first article going to get published? And what’s the expected schedule for the following posts?
Silver
Dec 16, 2016
Hi Luis, First article is being written as we speak. You can expect it first half next week. Follow us on Twitter @Reflectivedata to get posted!