CHAPTER 1

Analytics Audit & Tracking Inspection

Growth audits are comprised of a series of smaller audits broken down under different departmental functions. We’ll start with the analytics audit. Analytics are vital to understanding performance. You don’t know what you don’t know, and analytics programs provide valuable insights into how prospects and consumers engage with your brand. In this section, we’ll cover everything you need to know in order to conduct a thorough analytics audit, including how to check your event tracking setup and website performance/visitor engagement.

TRACKING

A key component of any analytics audit is to make sure that you’re tracking how users engage with your brand online.

Check installed marketing tag and tools

Begin your analytics audit by checking your installed marketing tags and tools. Marketing tags (otherwise known as pixels) are pieces of computer code that gather data about how people behave on your website. These metrics might include time on site or pages visited. The tags relay that information to your analytics platforms, which then aggregate and analyze the data. There are several great tracking tools out there, the most well-known of which is Google Analytics. We like SumoMe for growing your email list and Hotjar for capturing exactly where users scroll and click. Hubspot is useful for customer relationship management (CRM), and VWO is fantastic because it allows you to conduct A/B testing without needing to code or develop any programs yourself. Then, of course, there’s Facebook Pixel, which provides consumer insights and enables ad retargeting. You’ll likely use a combination of these to ensure you’re getting as in-depth a picture of consumer engagement as possible.

Now, here’s how to ensure the appropriate tags and tools are installed: 

STEP 1 Get these two Chrome extensions:

Google Tag Assistant - to check if Google tools are installed properly and Ghostery - to see what other tracking, analytics and advertising tools are implemented on the site.

STEP 2 Review the tracking tags loaded through Google Tag Assistant or Ghostery.

Once you’ve installed Google Tag Assistant or Ghostery, you should begin seeing which tracking tags are loading and what they’re capturing. And here’s a bonus: you can use these same tools to figure out which programs your competitors use and make sure you’re capturing the same (or better) data.

Check current tracking via Tag Assistant 

A conversion event refers to any digital, customer-initiated interaction. Events include adding to cart, buying a product, or signing up for a newsletter. Sharing a page on social media, filling out a form, commenting on a post, and even page views count as events. 

These events are the meat of your marketing data. You want to know which pages and channels convert so you can double down on what’s working. 

Here’s how to ensure your conversion events are tagged and tracked: 

STEP 1

Enable the Tag Assistant and hit “record.” Tick the “follow recording links across tabs” option. Then refresh the page.

STEP 2

Review which profile IDs are loading. You can check this again later to verify that you’ve been given access to the right account.

STEP 3

Walk through the customer journey. Now that you’re recording via Tag Assistant, you’ll want to walk through the steps of a site visitor that turns into a customer.

STEP 4

Review log. Now that the journey is recorded, review the log and make sure all key tags are firing for the relevant stages in the customer journey.

Check a conversion event in Facebook Pixel Helper 

STEP 1

Open the Facebook Pixel Helper.

STEP 2

Look for your recent action. With the email example, we fired a Lead event by submitting an email address. If we had fired something more complex or custom, we’d see the attributes here as well. 

STEP 3

Repeat the process for every conversion type on the site. 

Cross check event tracking in Google Analytics 

It’s important that conversion events are visible in your analytics account so that your data can be integrated into your broader insight-gathering capacities. You’ll also want to make sure your events are firing more often than they should, as this will pollute your data. 

STEP 1

Open Google Analytics and select Real Time on the left nav bar

STEP 2

Click the Events tab.

STEP 3

When the Events tab opens, you’ll see a real time view of the last 30 seconds. You’ll also see details for Event Category, Event Action, and Active Users. 

STEP 4

Test your event triggers by walking through the customer journey and you should see each event fire in real time. If any fire more often then they should - revisit the implementation or enlist a developer to help.

How custom events can solve common event-tracking problems

As you review your event tracking systems, you may discover that some conversion events aren’t immediately available as goals in the Google Analytics platform. When you encounter these, create custom events to track specific activities like document downloads, starting a video, playing an audio track, or interacting with a particular widget.

As an example, let’s say we have a free demo call-to-action (CTA) button on the DAY 33 homepage. When visitors click the button, a new lead window opens. But when we checked Google Tag Manager, we noticed clicking the button doesn’t trigger a recording of that event. Because clicking the button fires an interstitial element, it doesn’t actually open a new page, and Google wasn’t recognizing it.

We can get around that barrier by creating a custom event that Google Tag Manager that would recognize and capture. If you need to create custom events, we highly recommend getting your developer to add the code to your website. 

WEBSITE PERFORMANCE

In this section, we’ll show you how to audit the current performance of your website to help you identify acquisition and conversion opportunities. 

Find where your traffic is coming from

Once your events are being tagged correctly, turn your attention to traffic location to discern whether you’re driving traffic from the markets you seek to serve. If there’s a discrepancy, you need to know about it as soon as possible to figure out where you’re misfiring in your messaging. To check your traffic location: 

STEP 1

In Google Analytics go to Audience Tab, then click on Geo, and Location.

STEP 2

Next, look for underperforming locations that get much traffic (maybe they’re getting too much ad budget) and over performing locations that get little traffic (you should either start advertising there or if you already are, then move more ad budget there). 

Look for traffic trends

Move on and check how the traffic to your site has changed over time and compare it to a previous period 

To check your traffic location: 

Pay attention to any recurring trends, and how different factors such as events and seasonality affects traffic to your site. 

Gather user demographics 

Use this report to learn about the share of age and gender groups that visit your site. This can help you tailor your messaging and creatives, as well as help you develop audiences you’d like to target in your ad campaigns. 

Check your goals setup in Google Analytics

At this point, you’ve checked your tags, verified conversion event capture, and are drawing good data on your traffic. Now it’s time to check your goal recording settings: 

STEP 1

Go to Admin tab and then Goals.

Here you can see all goals that have been set up. 

STEP 2

Select a goal to check if it’s set up properly. 

Check performance of traffic by device type

To stay competitive in the digital age, you need a mobile-friendly site that drives increasing volumes of mobile traffic. Here’s how to gather that all-important data: 

STEP 1

Under the Audience tab in Google Analytics, scroll down to the Mobile option. 

STEP 2

Select Overview. 

Check new vs. returning traffic 

Are you building a loyal following? You can check by looking at your new vs. returning traffic. Here’s how: 

STEP 1

From the Audience tab in Google Analytics, scroll down to Behavior.

STEP 2

Under Behavior, click New vs. Returning. 

Returning users usually engage more with your site and convert at a higher rate. This is because they already know your company and trust you more.

Find your most popular pages 

It’s always helpful to know which pages generate the most engagement. To find out: 

STEP 1

Go to the Google Analytics Behavior tab.

STEP 2

Scroll down and click Site Content, then click All Pages. 

The data you see will provide an idea of where to focus your efforts in terms of user experience and conversion testing. For instance, if one piece of content or a specific page drives more conversions than others, you’ll know to leverage that resource more often to bring visitors into your funnel. 

If your 2000+ words article has an average time on page of 30 seconds, it’s a sign that something’s not right. Maybe the beginning is boring or it’s just not what visitors expected after reading the title? Or the text is structured in a way that discourages people from continuing to read it?

Which pages people land on the most 

If you’re driving paid traffic to your site, you should aim to send it to custom landing pages to deliver the most relevant content. This report will show you which landing pages perform best and which need your attention. 

STEP 1

Go to the Google Analytics Behavior tab. 

STEP 2

Click Site Content, then Landing Pages. 

In the example above, the second page converts over 38x worse than site average. It’s a clear sign that this is not a good point of entering the site if we aim for conversions. We should either send traffic to other pages or optimize this one so that more people will convert after landing on it. 

Investigate performance by channel

Next, see which channels are driving the most traffic to your website and how they are performing. You’ll not only analyze your top traffic sources, but also see how each channel performs compared to one another. Here’s how to view performance by channel: 

STEP 1

Open Google Analytics and click on the Acquisition tab.

STEP 2

Select All Traffic, then Source/Medium. 

From this report we learn that almost 80% of our revenue comes from Google search traffic (organic and paid). Best converting channel is Bing but brings little volume of traffic so it is a good idea to get the most out of it’s ad platform. 

Performance by channel tracking is essential to your marketing audit: You need to know whether there are huge differences in traffic and conversion by channel. Without that information, you end up over investing in underperforming strategies and miss opportunities on higher-converting campaigns 

Use sensible UTM naming conventions 

If you don’t take the time to establish a clear, ubiquitous naming system, you’ll find it difficult to track data and gather meaningful insights.

Start with a simple naming convention, but as your marketing efforts become more complex, you’ll likely need to move to an ID model. Our system at DAY 33 uses “T” for tests, “A” for audience, and “C” for any creative materials we use in our AdWords tests. Therefore, a given test might be named T-1-a1-c1. This makes it easy for relevant team members to collaborate and follow what’s going on. 

Make sure UTM parameters are pushed into your CRM 

UTM tags help you track leads so you can nurture them throughout the funnel. Oftentimes, marketers are clueless as to what happens to leads once they sign up. Meanwhile, the sales team sees an influx of prospects without any information about where they came from. UTM tags can provide both with important context. 

To complete this step, check if your landing page builder supports hidden fields. If so, you’ll want to create hidden fields for utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign. 

*NOTE: For pushing UTMs into your email service provider (i.e MailChimp) you’ll want to create a few new list fields and use a simple jQuery script shown here.

Check page load speed 

Loading time is a key factor deciding if people will abandon your page prematurely. Each second of delay in page response strongly affects website conversion rates and your SEO rankings. 

To check how fast (or slow) pages load we use GTmetrix, which gives us information about page load, page size and the amount of requests that are being pulled from your website. 

We use GTmetrix because it uses fully loaded time, which is more accurate than onload time displayed by other tools such as Pingdom. Fully loaded time is the point after the onload event fires and there has been no network activity for 2 seconds 

You can also view load times in Google Analytic. Simply go to Behavior Tab, then select Site Speed and Page Timings, you will see the average page load speed and which pages load too slow.

Getting started with your analytics audit 

Now it’s time for you to give it a try. Here’s a quick recap of the tools you’ll need and what you’ll need to check during your analytics audit.