GA Checklist: Tracking Traffic Sources

This is something you want for sure to have it set up right. The main issue here is the Direct Traffic. Why? Well, for Google Analytics, any referrer that he can not understand (from Twitter applications to your RSS links, white-papers or software trials) is labeled automatically as direct traffic.

They say that you shouldn’t focus to get 100% accurate analytics data cause you will not get it. 95% accuracy will do it. However, I’ve seen cases where traffic sources data wasn’t even 30% accurate and that can hurt your business.

So, what is important to know about tracking traffic sources? They need special tagging. Your best friend for this action should be Google URL Builder. The new tags you will add to your links (you don’t need to change anything to your website) will allow Google Analytics to identify the real referrer so it will not go under direct traffic anymore.

You get to tag advertising, links you post on Twitter or any other social network, white-papers or your free trial. If you are going to use short-urls for promoting your content – which I recommend – you can always use for automation the Twitter Analytics GreaseMonkey script I wrote some time back.

Important

Don’t forget to tag all the links you put in your newsletter. Otherwise will be almost impossible to get reports on the success of your campaigns. Do it right and you’ll see your direct traffic dropping from 60% to 30%. But the 30% is more likely to fit the 95% accuracy rule… you brand awareness campaigns suddenly are more likely to perform.

The next thing you need to check for traffic sources is that, if you use Google Adwords, it is going to be linked to your Google Analytics account. For not having any troubles ever, just make sure that you create the both accounts using the same email address. This way you will have admin privileges and things can’t really go wrong. Check out this official tutorial for more details.

Troubleshooting

Duplicate content. Having tags on your links will suddenly create duplicate links for your website pages that might impact your SEO efforts. The secret is to use the hash mark (#) instead of the question mark (?) for tagging your links. LunaMetrics has a detailed article on how to do this.

This article is part of the Google Analytics Implementation Checklist series. Here are the articles from the rest of the series:

• Implement the right tracking code and make sure you track your whole website
• Setting up goals, funnels and ecommerce tracking
• Bonus tracking tips and hacks (filters, segments and others)