When the numbers don't make sense: Google Analytics tracking issues
While most of my work with my clients is related to building or fixing software, I often find myself helping them solve other related business problems. Frequently enough this includes data analysis, and with marketing teams that means Google Analtyics.
Here are a few that have come up recently that you may have struggled with, too.
Why does this page have weird referrals?
The client’s problem was that in a marketing system with numerous microsites for their own customers, they were seeing lots of referrals to customer X’s microsite that were ostensibly from customer Y’s independently hosted website. There were no links on customer Y’s website to customer X’s microsite, so where was this data showing up?
The answer comes from two facts:
- The microsites are hosted on a directory-like marketing platform, so you can navigate throughout the site to other customer microsites (based on geography or business type)
- Referrals are related to a session and not a specific page visit
The second is the key here. People were visiting customer Y’s website, clicking through to customer Y’s microsite, and then navigating to another customer X’s microsite. Their referral path started with customer Y’s website, so that will show up as the referral for visits on other pages.
How do we track LinkedIn ad campaign variants?
Several URLs are being shared using ad variations, there’s no clear way to track what traffic on a shared URL is coming from the ad itself. Using redirects doesn’t help because the redirect is not tracked as a referrer. Further, it’s a small hassle to set up.
Google campaign tracking
The solution is to provide links with Google campaign parameters (provided by the Google URL builder tool). By tracking the (1) overarching campaign, (2) ad source (e.g. LinkedIn), and (3) specific ad variant in the utm_ parameters (utm_campagin, utm_source, etc) the traffic to a given landing page can be broken down by unique source.
Viewing the data
The best way to view this data is by looking at the Landing Pages (under Behavior and then Site Content), choosing a landing page, and then modifying the dimensions. You can use a primary and secondary dimension, so once you’re looking at the data for a specific landing page you can select “Campaign” as the primary dimension and “Ad Content” as the secondary dimension, for example. Ad Content will show the value of utm_content which is where ad variants would be named.
You can’t make Ad related dimensions the primary dimension, however, so you’ll need to start with Campaign or Source.
A short aside about using landing pages vs. “all pages”: the campaign parameters for someone’s browser session on the site are persistent. So if I click on an ad with campaign “fall2015” that will attributed to my landing page and also each additional page I click on. This is why using the landing page to identify clicks from ads is important. I could click on an ad and navigate to another page that is the target of a different ad. If you look at ‘All Pages’ you’ll see my ad content tracked for that other page, even though its targeted by a different ad. Google Analytics is noting that a visitor on this page came to the site from the first ad campaign, regardless of how they got to the page. Using Landing Pages should isolate this to just site entry.