What’s worse than bad analytics data? Not knowing you have bad analytics data! Today we are going to cover some common horrifying pitfalls that wreak havoc in your analytics data, making it a bloody mess.
NB: This is an article and podcast from Fuel
1: No analytics on your booking engine
No explanation needed. Fix this.
2: No revenue recorded
How to diagnose the cause:
- Determine whether there is tracking on the confirmation page
- Check to see if all of the eCommerce tracking code is being passed – this is not the default GA script
How to fix:
- If you find that the eCommerce tracking code is on the page, but not working, you might need to work with your booking engine company to make sure that their eCommerce variables are what is passing in the right places to Google.
3: Extra revenue/traffic recorded
Causes:
- Call center bookings
- Internal test bookings
- Property wi-fi login traffic
How to fix:
- Filter out IP address going forward
- If possible, create a segment that excludes this traffic, based on something unique to the traffic
- Geo location
- Network domain
- Specific landing page
4: Not every page of content on your site is tagged
How to diagnose:
- More than likely you will find this out because you just sent a slew of traffic to a page, and then don’t see it in your content reports
- Use auditing tools such as Screaming Frog, Observe Point, WASP, etc. to audit the entire site.
- Use debugger tools when viewing page to confirm that analytics code is present (or missing, in this case).
How to fix:
- Work with developer/agency to ensure all parts of the site will get tagged automatically going forward
- If automatic tagging of some sections of the site is not possible, make sure that going forward that analytics code is added BEFORE a page is made live
5: Duplicate analytics code/inappropriately triggered code
How to diagnose:
- Look for a suspiciously low bounce rate
- If you see a 3% bounce rate, something is definitely askew
- Debugger tools like Omnibug, Google Tag Assistant, Google Analytics Debugger, ObservePoint TagDebugger, etc. will show you how many analytics calls are being triggered
6: Cross-domain tracking doesn’t work/not implemented at all
How to diagnose:
- In the acquisition channel report, do you see your domain as a referral of traffic?
- Do you see most/all revenue attributed to either your domain or “direct” traffic?
How to fix:
- In the admin console, ensure your domain is listed in the referral exclusion list
- Add special “linker” code to the core GA script throughout the site
- Click all the links to the booking engine and look for the linker parameter in the URL
- Proof like crazy
- Actually make a test booking to verify that it’s working
- Check out the blog post: https://www.fueltravel.com/blog/google-analytics-cross-domain-tracking-hotels/
How to fix:
- Determine how duplicate code is getting triggered (hard-coded somewhere specifically or Tag Manager incorrectly executed)
- Determine if a non-pageview event is artificially lowering the bounce rate, such as a popup being served
Takeaways:
- Always look at your analytics data with a critical eye. Chances are that if something looks too good (or bad) to be true, there’s probably something not tracking correctly.
- Use the tools out there
- Ask for help
