Do you want to get most of your web analytics tools? Make sure that you do not miss any important data points that can contribute to understanding and optimizing your web usage.
Data points that are essential for most websites are listed below. All these data points can be send to any analytics system such as Google Analytics or Mixpanel.
All the information about simple user on-site activities is tracked by Google Analytics by default.
Tracking of these events is important in case you have any technical docs or instructions on your website. These events can be used to retarget highly engaged audience with your remarketing campaigns as well as for traffic quality evaluation purposes.
Users performing these actions should be treated as leads.
This will help you to understand the points users navigate away from your website.
Technical problems can damage your overall site performance. That is why it is really important to track error pages and navigation pathes to these pages. Tracking problems in the first step in solving them.
Some javascript errors can prevent users from performing a conversion. Tracking can be configured to send information on javascript error together with the error message and page path on which the error occurs.
This can be used for goal configuration and analysis. Any information from submitted form can be attached to this data point. But one should keep in mind privacy policy of the tracking system (e.g. Google Analytics does not allow to collect any personal data about users: emails, credit cart numbers, etc.)
It is really important to understand if there is something that prevents users from form submission together with the reasons why they exit conversion funnel.
These are the most common events for tracking. With Google Tag Manager click events can be send to any web analytics system without making any changes to the source code of the website.
These events can bring you important insights on the content your users are most interested in.
Data Points for E-commerce Websites
Google Analytics enhanced e-commerce made it possible to collect get preconfigured reports for valuable information about product performance and user interactions during check-out. Full documentation on enhanced e-commerce features can be found here https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6014841?hl=en
But you need to keep in mind that same data points can be send to Mixpanel, Adroll, Perfect Audience, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
User views a product in a listing.
User clicks on a product in a listing.
A view of product details. This is an important data point for dynamic remarketing campaigns.
This is an important data point for remarketing campaigns.
Some of the e-commerce sites have an option to compare two or more products.
User views an iternal promotion banner for a product.
User clicks on an iternal promotion banner for a product.
This data point can also be used for dynamic remarketing purposes as well as for product perfirmance analysis.
Any errors that happen on add-to-cart event can prevent user from conversion so it is crutially important to measure any errors on these events.
Each step in the checkout funnel should be tracked together with extra information such as payment and shipping methods, products in cart, etc. This information will be used in the reports to build and analyze checkout funnel and dropoff on each step. Remarketing audiences can be created to retarget people who have passed a specific checkout step but did not complete the transaction.
Detailed information on transaction should be send to analytics at this datapoint: transaction total, tax, shipping cost, list of products purchased with detailed information for each of them, payment method used, etc.
Sometimes errors on the last step prevent users from conversion. These errors must be tracked.
Sometimes errors on the last step prevent users from conversion. These errors must be tracked.
Partial and full refunds must be tracked.
Besides tracking a list of e-commerce events different kind of product attributes must be tracked at each data point: product category, manufacturer, type, size, color, etc. This information can be used for detailed analysis or building your audiences later.
Data Points for Content-Heavy Websites
Measuring engagement is the keystone for any content-heavy website. Normally it is not possible to measure the performance based on conversions such as registrations, form submissions or adds to cart. That why a variety of events needs to be measured here.
User views an article or any other content type teaser in a listing.
For most content heavy website it is really important to measure how users interact with the content. Scrolling and reading events are very helpful here. They can be send to analytics together with information about content type, category, author, tags, page length and any other custom parameters you have on your website and want to use in analysis later.
If you have videos on your website it certainly makes sense to collect the information on users' interactions with your video content. Most players like youtube and video allow to use APIs in order to catch video interaction events and send them to analytics.
This event shows user's interest in the suggested content.
User views an iternal promotion banner for a content type.
User clicks on an iternal promotion banner for a content type.
Some content sites have an opportunity to add a content type to a favourite list for later reading. This event can be used for dynamic remarketing to re-engage the user later.
Some content sites have an opportunity to follow an author. These events can be used to analyse the success of the content contributors.
Somtimes errors or extra long registration forms prevent users from registration. This data must be tracked.
Successful login events and errors should be tracked.
Like, tweet, share, retweet and other social inerations must be tracked to measure engagement.
It is also a good idea to assign a value to each interaction event and use it to get engagemant rate value for sessions, traffic sources, etc. later.
Other Tracking Features
The main idea of userId tracking technic is to connect sessions of the unique users across devices. For this purpose, each user needs to get a unique identifier in your system. In practice, this is possible only when users register on your website and start actively using it after. If you have a e-commerce site and most users user checkout-whithout-registration option for transaction it does not make much sense for you to add this feature.
If you have several websites on different domains or use third-party software on a different domain for checkout, registration, subscription or any other purposes you definitely need to configure cross domain tracking. If this is not done your user sessions will get broken and you will not be able to get any valuable information on your marketing channels performance.
If you have one-page website or your users are not supposed to navigate through your site this will be useful for you.
Google Certified (GAIQ) Web Analytics professional with strong technical background and deep understanding of how to combine great design, compelling content, well-crafted code and analytics to create an intuitive and engaging experience for all users.
