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The Importance of Website Analytics and the Dangers Ahead – Don’t be an Ostrich

THE EXISTING THREAT

Ostrich with head in sand

Smart SME businesses understand that meaningful measurement of website visitor levels and behaviour is an essential tool.  This data guides them on the impact of changes in their marketing, which form of marketing is working best and how to increase the cost effectiveness of their online lead generation.  

Most SME businesses which say “We only have a website because it’s expected” or “my website only needs to be a brochure site” are ostriches burying their heads in the sand and damaging their businesses by doing so.   They operate at a severe disadvantage to competitors who optimise their website’s lead generation.

THE IMMINENT THREATS

Google have said “Universal Analytics will no longer process new data in standard properties beginning 1 July 2023. Prepare now by setting up and switching over to a Google Analytics 4 property.”

Two key issues stemming from this are:

Goals setup in the existing universal analytics are not automatically ported to GA4.

Google have provided a tool to copy Goals from your Universal Analytics Property to be Events in your GA4 Property, but have said that “The following types of goals can’t be automatically migrated and won’t appear in the tool: Pages/Screens per session goals, Duration goals, Smart goals, and any goal that uses regular expressions.

Therefore, if you currently have analytics goals in any of these categories, they will need to be setup manually in GA4.

Goals based on Average Session Duration or Pages/Screens per session are often referred to as engagement goals:  They signal an overall threshold of engagement rather than the completion of a specific action.  For non e-commerce websites with poor contact information capture (currently)  these goals can be very useful measures. 

Google Ads Linking

Optimising the cost effectiveness of your Google Ads (was Google Adwords) campaigns requires linking it to your website analytics so that you can see how these paid visitors are behaving.  This alerts you to changes needed in the targeting of your advertising and the content of your website.  It also enables analytics to provide you with information on the exact search queries that resulted in website visits. 

To make this monitoring as effective as possible, goals setup in analytics can be ported back into Google Ads once the two are linked.

But Google Ads can only link to one instance of analytics.  Therefore, any business running Google Ads needs to decide when to move the linking form the universal analytics to the GA Property.

A SIMPLE BUT SIGNIFICANT ERROR

If a GA4 property is added to a website which already has universal analytics, you may think that it will gather data using the existing analytics code on your website – it won’t.  GA4 needs you to make changes in the coding on your website so that both forms of analytics collect data from now on.

THE CHANGING PICTURE

GA is not a modification of the Universal Analytics, it is a completely new system – designed to enable Google to flexibly alter features if privacy and security developments require it.

This means that we can expect significant changes in GA4 over the next year or so. 

It is clear that, for at least the next year, we should expect:

  • GA4 to still have bugs and missing features. 
  • Systems such as Google Search Console to change to integrate with GA4
  • Cracks to appear in Universal Analytics as external factors change but it does not necessarily get updated.

SEARCH PHRASE (‘QUERY’) INFORMATION

For businesses for whom search ranking is a focus – with an SEO programme probably being implemented – the search query information in Google Search Console is massively useful.  In addition, by linking a website Search console to its Google Analytics account, this information is available in Google Analytics.

The data provided tells you for each listed search phrase:     

  • How many times a page on your website appear in the search results
  • The average position in which a page on your website appeared
  • The number of website visits (clicks)

What’s more the data can include info on search phrases where the average highest position of a page on your website was more than 100.

For many years, those of us who provide SEO services for clients have battled with Google to obtain good quality search query information on the appearance of our clients’ websites in search results.  Therefore, the introduction of a new analytics system naturally raises concerns in this area.

In Universal Analytics, Search Console data is provided for landing pages, countries, devices and queries.  In GA4, data is currently only available for queries and organic search traffic.  Watch this space ……

NEED HELP?

Many SME businesses may feel that they can implement and use Google analytics without the need for external assistance.  But if your business just wants the insights with management and reporting from your analytics outsourced, then I may well be your most affordable source of that service.

The key reasons for this are:

Pricing:

  # I am a co-founder of Resilient SEO https://www.living-streams.co.uk/core-services/specialisms/resilient-search-engine-optimisation/

Drop me, Tony Thornby, an email or message me in LinkedIn if you would like to have a chat about what you need that you might like to outsource to me.