Summary
Data errors are inevitable, causing results to be thrown off, and your technical team is likely unaware of them. Configuring the Google Analytics system is a collaborative endeavor requiring consistent measurement and assessment to maintain data integrity. Several of these appear on a startlingly regular basis. These common Google Analytics issues frequently have an impact on data tracking.
There’s nothing more reliable than Google Analytics to track my progress when conducting my business online! However, integrating Google Analytics can become a difficult and time-consuming process for my team and me. For this reason, expert help is frequently necessary to keep the business running efficiently.
I made this guide to go over several of the most typical Google Analytics issues you might encounter and provide solutions.
Campaign Errors
Other sources, such as search engines, ad campaigns, and social networks that send users to your site, are used as campaign sources. Errors in campaign sources are frequently associated with the setup of your social media campaigns.
Untracked Custom Campaigns
A custom campaign, rather than using Google’s default traffic sources, is a traffic source that you develop and track yourself. For example, you can monitor site visitors from a certain social media campaign. With this information at your fingertips, you can evaluate specific campaigns’ effectiveness and return on investment.
Adding little extensions called “Parameters” to your site’s campaign URLs can let Analytics know your visitor’s origin. Utilizing the correct Google URL Builder Tool and the Mobile URL Builder Tool can make things easier.
There are various factors that you may not track a custom campaign effectively. However, the majority will be because of erroneously manually entering parameters somehow. Here are some key points to consider.
Inaccurate URL
It’s possible that you copied or pasted the changed URL inaccurately. What’s the solution? Check your URL against your campaign using the builder tool once more.
Wrong Landing Page
You were probably in a rush or preoccupied. And you entered the incorrect URL in the builder tool and used an alternative landing page to create your unique URL. To solve this, obtain the accurate landing page URL for your advertisement and finalize it through the building tool. Compare it to the updated URL you modified during your advertisement.
“Referral” Source
Analytics recognizes your Facebook ad as a “Referral” source. If you did not provide parameters in your campaign URL when creating your ad, use the URL builder tool to test your URL.
Offline Campaigns Left Untracked
Radio announcements, print ads, and TV commercials are examples of offline campaigns. These adverts are not routinely tracked in Google Analytics since there is no digital engagement with them. You can’t afford to overlook data from these offline campaigns, as they could be crucial to your promotional strategy.
The simplest approach is converting offline campaigns into custom campaigns and using UTM codes to label and monitor them. Follow these simple steps below to turn offline campaigns become custom campaigns:
Create a custom URL to connect to your offline audience
Your offline campaign’s URL should be unique by placing a QR code with your custom URL on your restaurant’s tables.
Redirect Your Custom URL
You can redirect this custom URL permanently to a Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder-generated trackable custom campaign URL.
Track the Results
Track the results of your offline campaign just like any other custom campaign.
Errors in Cross-Domain Tracking
Various sites feature multi-domain or multi-sub-domain sales or conversion funnels. A funnel might take viewers from a blog article to a sales page and onto a third-party purchasing cart. There might be three different domains depending on setting up each step.
Cross-domain tracking is the process of tracking how visitors travel through these funnels. Failures in cross-domain tracking might result in multiple analytics issues. It can, for example, allow new sessions to be tracked when they aren’t new sessions. They’re returning visitors who are progressing through your funnel.
Errors caused by inadequate Google Analytics installation across several domains or subdomains might have devastating results for your data. When your sales funnel spans various domains, you’ll need to figure out how you’ll track your visitors’ activities.
You can use either Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager to implement proper cross-domain tracking. Analytics support serves as a guide for manually adding the required parameters. You can also use Google’s Linker Plugin to take care of it.
Code Errors
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It’s common among many business owners to have a specialized server environment wherein you host your website and want to use Google Analytics. Aside from counting on Google to transmit the analytics code via their system and facing a tiny delay in your website’s loading, you can do it yourself. Speeding up a little will resolve to present the analytics code from your server.
However, there are several causes why this could fail, yet many ways to successfully accelerate a slow site. You’ll need to configure a Cron Job on your system to generate efficient work. This is a scheduled process geared to refresh the locally hosted analytics.js code anytime Google updates.
If your Cron Job is possibly incorrectly configured, it can’t retrieve changes to.js from Google. Users on the opposite side of the world will not gain from your few millisecond load improvements if your site is marketed internationally. They may even face longer processing times.
Additionally, outdated browsers could use cached previous analytics versions and may not transmit accurate data to analytics. You should probably not host the Google Analytics code locally to address this.
Wrong Property Results
Possibly, you copied the source code from the wrong “Property.” This frequently happens if you supervise the same and many Google Analytics accounts or domains.
Sign in to your Google Analytics account to inspect your code and see if it matches everything you’ve set on your site. Next, proceed to the following sequence: Admin, Account, Property, Tracking Info, and Tracking Code.
However, if you’re operating a WordPress Analytics plugin like Yoast’s Analytics, visit your WordPress Dashboard and proceed to Analytics, Settings, and General. After that, you must confirm your ID, revalidate, and save your changes.
The method of launching your source code doesn’t matter. If data shows up in the records of the incorrect property, you’ll change it to the correct one. Unfortunately, this may entail a hard job, especially when the implementation is done manually.
Alarming Low Bounce Rate (Under 20%)
The average bounce rate relies on the site’s activities, but it’s not relatively rare to see 60 percent to 80 percent. So if your bounce rate has suddenly plummeted to single figures, it’s time to reinvent the wheel.
Ensure that your site doesn’t have two copies of the identical source code in the same property. This happens with WordPress.
In some cases, if you establish an Analytics plugin with the matching property ID as the code snippet in the theme settings. You can remove one or both of them or change one to fit different Google Analytics account users.
Another option is to ensure the Google Tag Manager isn’t installed with a standalone version of the Google Analytics code. You’ll get two triggers if you include Tag Manager active and the source code established on your website.
Chatbox or popup windows open on the matching page are triggers sent to Analytics. These additional “events” must be set as “non-interplay events.”
Clash With Other Scripts On The Same Page
It’s fairly usual for a website to have JavaScript code operating on one or more pages. As a result, it’s critical that you double-check that embedded code variables don’t match Google’s use, or you’ll have issues.
Conflicting JavaScript programs on the same page can crash one or both. You might have configured Google Analytics, and a third-party account registration page is running on your site, for example.
It’s impossible even to realize it as you encounter a problem. Other programs may rewrite cookies in a visitor’s browser, resulting in a fake or unregistered page session via Google Analytics.
When the original Google Analytics Script is put on your webpage, you may encounter no issues. Unfortunately, issues may arise when you customize the elemental tracking code. To solve this, you must install the Analytics Debugger for Chrome to inspect the code installation on any website.
Tag Manager Errors
There’s a problem if you’ve just started using Analytics on your webpage and haven’t seen any data within 24 hours or more.
Unpublished Tag Manager Container
You can create a website Account for any Tag Manager you want to administer. It would help if you next constructed a Container upon creating the Account. Google Tag Manager’s Container is where your system and related tags are stored. Next, apply the Tags for specialized functionality after establishing your new Container.
When the Tags updates in a Container have been made, errors occur, but the latest version still hasn’t been published. Before the updates take effect, you must upload your modified Container with the new or amended Tags.
Tags Not Charging
Google Analytics’ Tag is a little element of a JavaScript system that communicates unique user information from the networked domain. In addition, it sits on the Google Analytics servers. You can apply the Tags to your code fragment as needed from the Tag Manager Interface. And this will eliminate the need to apply the alterations to your system code manually.
Let’s say you created the latest Tag but didn’t publish it. It would help if you published your Container every time you make changes to it when you create the latest Tag or change an old one. You’ll get the accompanying window if you select the publish button in the upper right corner.
Another problem is after you’ve applied an overly specific URL command to a Tag. For instance, in “http://www.yourbusiness.com,” your URL rule says fire. For “https://www.yourbusiness.com” or “http://yourbusiness.com,” your Tag will not run. Return to your Tag and update it to enable the relevant domain variations to fire. Remember to publish again!
You may have added an incorrect Tag Manager Container containing the tracking code. Chrome’s Tag Assistant should assist you in determining the source of the issue. However, if you encounter this, it isn’t established at all!
For more information, read How to Preview and Debug Tag Manager.
Fix Google Analytics Errors For A Successful Business!
There’s no denying that Google Analytics is a useful tool for businesses to identify their clients’ interactions and site visitors truly. On the other hand, recognizing and correcting errors is not a black-and-white process.
Every Google Analytics implementation is different, and troubleshooting difficulties can be time-consuming and difficult, especially when a management process is complicated. Do you want your business to operate smoothly and produce the data insights you need to make smarter decisions? You must study Google Analytics inside and out!
Did you enjoy reading this article? Learn more about Google Analytics, plus other helpful guides I’ve made:
- What Are Responsive Display Ad Campaigns And How To Set Them Up?
- How To Use Google Analytics: A 2022 Beginner’s Guide
- Referral Paths In Google Analytics: What Can You Learn?
Don’t forget to leave a comment below with your insights. Feel free to share and let others understand how valuable it is to learn and use Google Analytics.
