Читать книгу Google Analytics Integrations - Waisberg Daniel - Страница 3

On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

– Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher

Charles Babbage's quote is a succinct explanation of the term GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), which, in decision sciences, is commonly used to describe situations where inaccurate data is fed into a model, resulting in the production of equally inaccurate results. The same is true in this book's context: You must make sure you are collecting accurate data before you start using it.

In order to use Google Analytics as a decision-making tool, companies cannot afford to rely on partial, inaccurate, or otherwise misaligned data. Google Analytics must be set up properly to meet the measurement needs and business objectives of companies.

In this chapter you will learn some of the most important steps in order to have clean, organized, and accurate data. The chapter is divided in five sections, each representing a step when it comes to implementing Google Analytics in a website or app successfully:

1. Understanding the web analytics process: Before you implement Google Analytics, it is important to understand how the data will be used and how the collection and analysis of data relate to other business areas. This will help you decide on the data needs of your company and which metrics will be used to measure success.

2. Implementing and customizing codes: Once your data needs and success metrics are defined, you should start looking for the necessary Google Analytics customizations to implement on your website or app.

3. Setting up the Google Analytics interface: Following the code implementation, you will need to set up the Google Analytics interface to make sure it processes your data in the way you want.

4. Tagging inbound traffic: In order to accurately measure all your website or app traffic, especially marketing campaigns, you will need to tag inbound links with custom URL parameters called UTMs.

5. Managing the implementation: To ensure that your implementation is always tidy, you should always keep track of changes on your Google Analytics account.

Please note that this chapter does not intend to provide a comprehensive description of Google Analytics implementation methods and capabilities; rather, it focuses on the most important aspects required to build an accurate and organized data collection.