Roll-Up Reporting for Free Google Analytics Accounts

Roll-Up Property is a single property which aggregates data from multiple source properties. This might be useful for businesses that have multiple websites for different regions. In this case, they can safely track each of the regional sites into a separate Google Analytics property and also have a separate roll-up property to analyze a larger amount of data than you have in single-site properties.

Here is how the Google Analytics account structure would look like in case of using the roll-up property:

Goals vs. Funnels in Google Analytics

Goals and funnels reports are extremely useful for marketers. These reports help to evaluate traffic sources and campaigns, to analyze the user flow through the funnel before conversion, to find drop-off points and bottlenecks in the funnel. Google Analytics is tricky when it comes to funnel configuration.

Unlike many other analytics systems Google Analytics processes the goal and funnel data. It means that you cannot build a funnel report on historical data. you need to configure your goals and funnels first and only after this Google Analytics will start collecting data about funnel flow and conversions.

Data Sampling Issues in Google Analytics for Sites with a Higher Volume of Traffic

Google Analytics presents their data sampling technology is a way to present meaningful data on large data subsets (here is official documentation on this topic https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2637192?hl=en). However most of the medium-sized online businesses worry a lot when they get a notification that the report is built on 70% of their data and not 100%.

And they worry not without reason especially in case they analyze some small segments of their audience.

Data Studio Reports

Data Studio is the tool used on Google Marketing Platform for data visualization. It became extremely popular among marketers in the past couple of years. The main reason for its popularity is that it is very extremely useful for building Google Ads and Analytics reports. Actually it is recommended to use Google Data Studio instead of Google Analytics built-in functions.

Event Tracking with Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager is a great tool that has a lot of opportunities for event tracking. If you are not familiar with this tool and have not used it before start with reading this article about basic concepts of Google Tag Manager. In this article, I will explain how to configure event tracking using Google Tag Manager easily.

An event can be sent to Google Analytics with any trigger. The most common case for event tracking is a click on some button or link.

Using Google Tag Manager for Tracking Configuration on Thrivecart

Thrivecart is used by many businesses for building their sales funnels. They have many useful opportunities for digital marketers. However tracking implementation on Thrivecart is a pain. Thrivecart do not officially support Google Tag Manager.

Here there is the documentation on how to implement Facebook pixel and Google Analytics on Thrivecart.

Discrepancy in Transaction Data between Google Analytics and Shopify. Some Random Shopify Transaction are missing in Google Analytics

Discrepancy in data especially in the revenue and transaction number is often an issue for the ecommerce sites that use Shopify. Shopify has a document where they list some possible reasons of this discrepancy https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/reports-and-analytics/discrepancies. However these explanations are not very helpful because they do not contain any practical advice on how this can be fixed.

Tracking Video Events with JWPlayer and Vimeo

Video tracking for Youtube videos can easily be configured with build-in Google Tag Manager triggers. But other video players are not currently supported. Fortunatly most of the popular video players have JavaScript API which allows to create listeners and push data about video player events to dataLayer.

JWPlayer Tracking

JWPlayer has very detailed API reference here https://developer.jwplayer.com/jw-player/docs/developer-guide/api/javascript_api_introduction/

Landing Pages Report Issues in Google Analytics

Landing pages report in Google Analytics helps marketers to evaluate the performance of different landing pages,to identify high converting landing pages, to find landing pages with inadequately high bounce rate or loading time, to find landing pages which are not mobile friendly and answer many more specific questions with data.

However there are some issues that can prevent or make it difficult to get useful data from the Landing pages report.

Using UTM-Marks in Facebook

It is always important for the marketers to track the source of the traffic in Google Analytics. It is a very easy thing to do if you promote with the help of the Adwords. In this case it is enough to link your Adwords and Google Analytics accounts and all the data about traffic source, impressions, clicks and costs will be automatically imported into your Google Analytics property. But it you advertise with the help of other systems like Facebook you should use utm-marks to attribute your traffic correctly.

Google Tag Manager Basic Concepts and Implementation Workflow

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free service by Google that is used to configure different analytics, conversion tracking and remarketing pixels (Universal Analytics tracking code, Facebook pixel, AdRoll pixel, etc.)

If GTM is not used all these codes and pixels should be added to the source code of the website. This approach makes it very difficult to implement the pixels (only technical team can do this), difficult to debug (tools are available only for few systems like facebook, twitter and bing) and difficult to update (source code changes are required).

Tracking implementation for Single page applications (SPA)

Single-Page Applications (SPA) become more and more popular. They are built using Ember, React, Angular, Backbone, Meteor or something similar.

Bad news about SPA is that adding default Universal Analytics tracking code to such applications will not result in having any valuable data in the Google Analytics account. The reason is that SPA does not generate any pageviews by defaults and pageview hits are not send to Universal Analytics. If no customization is applied to the analytics tracking code one will have sessions with only one pageview and extremely high bounce rate.

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