Google Analytics is arguably the world’s most popular web analytics tool. It regularly features on year-end lists of the most useful or popular analytics tools and has lots of great ratings on review websites. There’s a good reason for that too – Google Analytics is feature-packed, gives you access to tons of data, and is completely free to use. It is the ubiquitous, indispensable analytics tool that everyone should learn how to use.
Unfortunately, however, it is also sometimes wrong. For example, Google Analytics may sometimes record incorrect conversions and combine them with good ones to give you a skewed and incorrect number of conversions. If you’re a sucker at calculating metrics – and who isn’t – then any metric derived using conversion count will be off.
Let’s see if we can help shed some light on why Google Analytics might show you false conversions and how you can prevent this from happening, since “off” is not what you want your metrics to be.
We will talk about:
a transformation, according to googleis a completed activity related to the success of your business. A purchase is an example of a simple conversion, such as signing up for a newsletter. However, you don’t have to limit yourself to these activities. Just as you can count a person spending a certain amount of time on your website or watching a video, such as a conversion, entering the checkout process can count as a conversion.
There are two ways to track conversions in Google Analytics using actions and goals. Transactions are tracked automatically when you set up eCommerce monitoring. Goals are available outside of the bag, but you have to set each goal individually. This can increase your workload, but gives you much more flexibility in what you can follow. It is also the reason why Goals are useful even if you have an online store, but you can’t say the same for transactions and non-ecommerce websites.
How to Set Goals
Google Analytics makes goal setting easy. You can go to: Admin > View, find a list of destinations you follow and the button that allows you to add a new destination. When setting a destination, you can choose a template or set a custom destination. With a custom goal, you can set your goal type and goal details.
Goal types are especially important as they allow you to choose what you want to count as conversions. For example, with the event type, you can set something that happens to count as a conversion. Because a conversion is an action, this may seem like the perfect type of goal for a conversion, but it’s sometimes prohibitively difficult to implement.
Why Is Goal Type More Important in Troubleshooting Incorrect Conversions?
It is easier to set the target target type. For example, by tracking how many people come to the payment page, you can track how many people enter the payment process. By tracking how many people came to the order completed or thank you page, you can track how many people completed the purchase.
This dependence on the goal conversion type is often the main reason you see false conversions in Google Analytics. Any effort to prevent false conversions in Google Analytics will likely start with checking for certain things about goals.
Everything in order – you need to make sure you only watch the relevant pages. Where you can check this is in the Reverse Destination Path window. go Conversions > Goals > Reverse Goal Path and notice the leftmost column.
This section of the list contains Target Request URIs that represent the target completion location – you’ll be familiar with the URIs once you’ve identified the targets. When a website visitor lands on these pages, the goal will be counted as completion, in addition to the number of conversions.
Check if all URIs sound familiar to you. If you find something that doesn’t belong there, it’s a sure sign that you’re going to see some false conversion results. Find the appropriate target and fix the URI.
Next, you should find out if you have users coming directly to your conversion pages without going through the appropriate funnel. There are many different reasons why this happens:
Before you find the cause of the problem, you need to determine that you have the problem. The way to do this is to go to segment generator – Admin > View > Segments – and creating a one-step sequence that begins when the user’s first interaction arrives on a conversion page.
This segment will show you how many (if any) instances of this have occurred. To dig deeper and get a little closer to what’s going on, head over to: Reports > Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium. There, you will be able to select the segment you created from a list and apply it to the entire number of visits. You’ll see how many users matched the criteria and where they came from.
From there, you can start taking concrete steps to prevent these issues from causing false conversions. So you can pause ads that lead directly to conversion pages. You can nofollow links. You can dig deeper into any of the issues, such as missing tracking code, using different versions of Google Analytics on different pages, or time zone settings causing the session to double at midnight. You will be in a big hunt.
Sometimes, you accidentally add a link to your conversion pages where they shouldn’t be on your website. This way, a user can visit the page by clicking the link instead of taking an action that redirects them to the page. Because you set the goal type as a goal, Google Analytics still counts it as a conversion.
The easiest way to tell if this is a problem is to use a website crawler to identify links on your website. screaming frog it’s a popular choice – you can use it for free and you don’t have to do a lot of research to find out something is wrong. After running Screaming Frog, you will be in red as long as you see a conversion page in the results list. This tool will also help you find which pages are linking to your conversion pages – all you have to do is look at the Links tab.
Let’s wrap it up!
Any analytics tool is only as good as the data it lets you see – Google Analytics included. And even if it’s the world’s most used web analytics tool, it doesn’t always mean it’s right. It doesn’t have to be his fault, but sometimes it will.
Either way, you’ll be in for some detective work if you notice that you’re getting incorrect conversions in Google Analytics, or if you have reason to suspect this might be the case. However, if you’re looking for accurate metrics and even the slightest deviations are a concern, you can understand what’s going on from the Analytics tool or with the help of third-party tools.
