Category: Online Marketing

The importance of monitoring your online properties is not understated. By monitoring, you learn where your ad dollars are going and can see exactly how you’re improving.

However, figuring out what to report on can be just as difficult. Most tools at your disposal have more than you could ever need, and determining what those metrics actually measure can be complicated.

Ineffective reporting is almost as bad as no reporting. When you don’t know what’s going on, you make choices based on incomplete information. Here are three questions to ask about your metrics before writing a report:

Image Credit: violetkaipa / iStock / ThinkStock

1- What Does This Mean?

The single most basic question is often the most important. Even industry professionals ask the exact parameters for every tool they’re working with, on every single campaign.

Each tool measures slightly different things, and they often update their guidelines to reflect changes in the Internet. As a result, this should be the absolute first thing you ask about your monitoring tools.

You can’t have any effective report unless you know exactly what you’re reporting on, and what surprisingly vague word such as “visits” or “unique visitors” are actually measuring. For example, a visit could simply be clicking the page, or it could be when somebody has spent three minutes on the site. You could also have control over the definition, meaning it needs to be set before you get solid numbers.

Once you know what your metrics mean, you can begin to grasp your campaign performance.

2- Why Do I Need It?

Another important question, this one to keep your reports down to a manageable length. There are hundreds of metrics available for your website, and if you implement every single one, you’ll be drowning in data.

Sticking to a few key metrics means you can really drill down on how to improve them. What you monitor should tie in to the goals for your online strategy, with everything else simply being a distraction. If you’re only interested in increasing the number of prospects that visit your site, the number of shares your blog post got is less important than the percentage of new unique visitors.

Asking why you’re measuring something means you only get relevant data, allowing you to spend as little time reading reports as possible, and more time working on your company.

3- How Do I Use It?

In order to get the most out of your metrics, it’s important to know how to get the most out of it. Sometimes each page you’re monitoring needs a tracking cookie, while others automatically gather data. You could need to configure settings for what to include and exclude, to keep out non human users in your data.

Getting at least a basic understanding of what your tools can do is important for knowing what their limits are and what you can expect from reports. It also makes sure you’re maximizing your investments in analytics.

—

While nobody can tell you exactly what to report, keeping these three questions in mind when you set up analytics helps you get the most out of it. SharpSpring offers quality, simple to use analytics tools that make it easy to spend more time working on your business.

Go ahead and panic – there’s a ‘referral spam’ invasion underway!

Actually, there’s no need to panic, but this is certainly an issue for anyone who relies on their analytics to make business decisions.

What’s Referral Spam?

Referral spam is the result of spammers creating computer-generated footprints that simulate actual visitors to your website. This causes the number of visitors that Google Analytics reports to become artificially inflated.  These fake numbers creep into your Audience reports and your Acquisition reports making them less accurate – in some cases much less accurate. Referral spam is most evident in the Google Analytics Referral report, which can be located by following this path:  Acquisition > Overview > All Traffic > Channels > Referral.  Here, the referral spam presents itself as being sources of traffic to your website, but their domains will likely seem strange to you.

Why Are They Doing This?

They’re trying to trick you into visiting their spammy websites.  If you go to one of these URLs, you’ll either get directed to an online store, a marketing scam, or a website that will infect your computer with malware.

Is There A Way To Combat Referral Spam?

Yes, however you may never be able to get rid of 100% of the referral spam.  There are several strategies for combating referral spam, each with its own degree of effectiveness, so implementing multiple strategies is the best solution.

You can attempt to block referral spam from visiting your website in the first placed by either adding code to your website’s html, or by using WordPress plugins. These strategies, however, only help with part of the problem and they could cause unintended issues, for example: blocking beneficial bots, like those who discover your content and share it with others.

The other way to go about combating referral spam is to filter from within Google Analytics.  This can be done because there are some telltale signs that reveal them as fake.  For instance, there’s a portion of referral spam that claims to be triggering your Google Analytics code from a website other than your own.  Therefore, a good step towards reducing referral spam is asking Google Analytics to only report on traffic to your actual domain.  Another sign that that a reported visitor may be a result of referral spam is seen when a visitor’s screen resolution is reported as “(not set)”.  These visits can be filtered out as well. Finally, if you still see referral spam after implementing the first two filters, you’ll need to do hand-to-hand combat with the remaining offenders.  This is done by individually adding them to another filter you create.

Is There A Way To Clean Referral Spam From Past Reports?

Yes.  Similar to using Google Analytics filters, which only effects reports after implementation, you can also create Google Analytics custom segments that reach back in time to help clean up your past reports. Again, these won’t be 100% effective at eliminating the referral spam, but they will go a long way towards improving the accuracy of your analytics reports.

What’s Google Doing About Referral Spam?

Google hasn’t implemented anything specifically to combat referral spam, nor have they announced they intend to.  This is unfortunate. Hopefully they’re actually working behind the scenes to create a solution.  Meanwhile, they do have an existing feature within Google Analytics that may, or may not, help. They have a checkbox which reads “exclude all hits from known bots and spiders”.  This can be found in the Admin section, under View > View Settings > Bot Filtering.  This, however, shouldn’t be relied upon to fix the problem because it seems that nobody at Google is adding referral spam bots to their list of known bots.

If You’re Going To Take Action, Beware

Please be aware that there are best practices that should be followed if you’re going to attempt any of these strategies, so be sure to do your research in advance, or consult experts for help.  We, here at Prosar Inbound Inc., are available to assist you, so feel free to contact us.