Using Google Analytics can allow website owners to monitor traffic trends, identify which parts of the website are performing well and determine which aspects need to be improved upon.
The scale of the data provided by Analytics makes it a webmaster’s best friend. War, as Napoleon Bonaparte said, is ninety per cent information. When battling for high rankings in Search Engines and fighting to draw social media users to your website information can be equally as important.
Recently Matrix Internet was asked to look at the Analytics account of a Dublin start-up in order to identify trends and provide insights based on the Analytics statistics. The business has an international scope and the owner was particularly interested in recent spikes in traffic coming from Russia.
Matrix quickly identified that this trend was down to bots. A bot is a software application that runs automated tasks over the Internet. In most cases, the task is to endlessly crawl through websites.
The image below shows the referral list during one particular week for the Dublin start-up when Matrix looked through the account. The websites listed are spammy sources of traffic, sending bots to crawl through the website. Most of them originated from Russia.
These bots heavily skewed the traffic statistics along with the bounce rate. This could’ve easily resulted in the business owner believing that his website was receiving considerably more traffic than it was. At the same time, the skewed bounce rate figures would’ve led him to believe that the website was failing to retain these visitors.
It’s as simple as ticking a box. No really, it is. Enabling this feature will allow Analytics to exclude all visits from known bots and spiders, known being on the operative word.
For all those bots and spiders clever enough to evade the Bot Filtering box, there’s the Referral Exclusion List. This involves manually adding the offending websites to the list so that from that date forward they won’t be included in Analytics statistics. Don’t be discouraged if that sounds like a lengthy task, it’s only slightly longer than ticking the bot filtering bots.
An IP address is a unique set of numbers assigned to each device on a particular computer network. It is recommended that a company should block their own IP address.
For example, here at Matrix we recently launched our new website and we wanted to measure its performance when compared to the old design. Having our own IP address filtered from the results was key as our developers and marketers would’ve spent quite a bit of time indeed on the website during this period. The last thing we would’ve wanted was our own visits to the site compromising how our visitors were reported by Analytics.
Any company that spends time on its own website from within an office should block the IP. At Matrix, we have blocked our own IP from all of our clients’ accounts, in addition to the IP address of the client themselves in order to ensure accuracy in reports.
Much like the previous two steps this merely involves a few quick clicks. Simply search “My IP Address” on Google and your IP will be revealed then add the IP Address as an excluded IP in the Filter section of the Administrative control panel.
Carrying out these three steps will enable greater accuracy within your Analytics account. If you’re still unhappy with the statistics delivered by this tool then Matrix Internet will be more than happy to examine your account and provide insights. Just get in touch.
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By Matrix Internet
By Conor McCaffrey