March 30, 2015

Analytics Tips: How Google Analytics Notification Highlight The Right Errors to Fix

Google Analytics Notification

Since the days of Urchin and Omniture, business managers have been seeking analytic diagnostic tools to better understand the increasing. The irony is that analytics solutions were originally a diagnostic tool for website development long before digital marketers discovered their utility for strategies like SEO, paid search, and social media.

But as analytics usage grow, so does the need for better alerts. Google introduced an alert tool, Analytics Notifications, that opens a descriptive window in the upper right corner of the analytics account screen. The notification alert monitors technical problems with the analytics tag on a given account. The monitor notes two aspects essential to basic analytic functionality: data quality and configuration settings.

One of three color coded squares appear in the alert bell in the upper right. Each square highlights the urgency of data quality and configuration issues. Each square contains the number of notifications, so you can understand the scale of each issue. A red notification is the highest priority, reserved for issues such as missing tags on pages, poor filters, abundance of self referrals in the reporting data, and double tagging on pages.

A yellow notification cautions on issues such as compatibility with Adwords and adsense account. A blue notification is the lowest level of notification priority. It is meant to note recommended actions that could be changed easily and are not a mandatory change to support the functionality in Google Analytics.

Once the notification message appears, users can address the given issue, then have one of four update categories available: ignore, check again, details, and action links.

  • The ignore feature allows the user to ignore notifications and continue usage with the Google Analytics UI.
  • The check again feature is designed to have Google verify that changes have actually fix the problems that came up in the notification works.
  • Detailed offer solutions for the notification.
  • Action links provide a link to fix the noted feature.

There are a number of additional ways to support the notification feature. For example if you make changes to the website that you like to share with all the teammates, you can annotate the notes in Google Analytics using the annotation manager. The annotation manager is designed to share updates and keep a journal of changes that goes on to fight. This can also highlight the impact of data and help analyst strategize from the reporting.

All in all, pay attention to these notifications when you next login into your account, and see how to organize your fixes to improve your reporting results.

One comment on “Analytics Tips: How Google Analytics Notification Highlight The Right Errors to Fix”

  1. […] A manual search of a page for an analytics is acceptable for simple sites with a page or two; For sites with a large number of pages, a few tools are available to make verification easier. One easy tool is the notification alert. Located in the upper right of the screen, the notification alert reflects what should be corrected in the settings (You can learn more about each indicator here in this Zimana post) […]

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