There's a lot of well-publicised, attention-grabbing new features available in Universal Analytics. However, as you know, we're not one to only focus on the headlines - we love the finer details. In our continuing series of blogs on Universal Analytics, here we focus on a less well known benefit - the simplication of certain tracking configuration controls.
What does this mean?
In a nutshell, Google Analytics is very configurable - there are lots of built-in settings which can be tweaked to suit certain business models, websites or marketing strategies. In the Classic version of Google Analytics you needed to add extra lines of code to the main GA script to achieve this. In Universal Analytics, you can make this magic happen with a few quick clicks around the interface. Let's go through what you can change, in the interface, using Universal Analytics.
Session Settings
As was the case with Classic Analytics, Universal Analytics, by default, ends a users’ session after 30 minutes of inactivity and ends a campaign after 6 months.
The big difference in Universal Analytics is the ease with which you can change these default settings, removing the need to update the actual tracking code. You are now able to define both the session and campaign timeouts in the Session Settings.
You can find these within the Admin section under Tracking Info:
The session timeout can be set to any value between 1 minute and 4 hours. You may want to consider increasing the session timeout if, for example, you have lots of interactive content that is likely to engage users for long periods of time. Or decreasing the session timeout if you have an app that you know people might dip and out often, e.g. a dating app. Similarly, if your site automatically logs out users after a period of inactivity, you may wish to match the session timeout with the login timeout.
The campaign timeout can be set to any number of days up to 24 months and should reflect the amount of time you anticipate your campaign will be relevant for.
Organic Search Sources
If you receive a significant amount of traffic from search engines that are not included in Google’s default search engine list then this configuration control is for you.
Analytics will, by default, attribute any traffic coming from a referrer with a domain matching a search engine on the list that’s using the correct query parameter, as traffic from organic search.
Although the most popular search engines are included on the list, there are many more that are omitted, for example several of the main UK ISP’s default search engines aren’t present, meaning traffic from these search engines will be reported under referrals rather than organic search.
This is now controlled in the Universal Analytics interface, within the Admin section under Organic Search Sources.
To add a new search engine you simply click +Add Search Engine and enter its domain, and the query parameter. You then have the option of naming the search engine and adding a URL path if relevant.
Referral Exclusions
This configuration control simplifies the process of removing unwanted referrers from your referral traffic report.
Universal Analytics will automatically exclude the domain you use to set up a new property from your referral traffic, removing the issue of self-referrals (another small benefit of UA!).
Other instances where this feature can be used include excluding third party shopping carts, ecommerce transaction portals or domains included in cross-domain tracking.
Adding in the relevant exclusions will prevent a new session starting when, for example, a user returns to your site from a third party shopping cart. Adding in referral exclusions therefore impacts the number of sessions that you will see reported.
To add additional referral exclusion you simply:
Navigate to the Referral Exclusion List, again under the Tracking Info in the Admin panel.
Click +Add Referral Exclusion
Enter the domain you wish to exclude.
Analytics will then ignore any referrals from the added domains, continuing the original session and maintaining the original source information when a user goes from your domain, to the excluded domain, and back again.
Search Term Exclusions
The final configuration control covered in this blog allows you to exclude certain keywords from the organic search traffic reports. When set up, if a user finds your site using one of these terms, their traffic appear as direct traffic rather than organic search traffic.
As with all of these configuration controls, you can add the exclusion in the Tracking Info section of the Admin panel, this time under Search Term Exclusion List. Once there, you simply click +New Search Term and enter the term you wish to exclude.
The most obvious reason for using this feature is to exclude your company name or domain from the search reports, as the intention in these instances is almost always to navigate to your site as though it were directly. Unfortunately the efficacy of this feature will inevitably be greatly reduced as it will not affect any traffic that is currently reported as not provided, in most cases this will continue to cover the majority of your organic search keywords.
So there you are; feature that will likely see less adoption (at least immediately) than the more attention-grabbing ones, but for anyone whose every played around with modifying Google Analytics code, you'll know this is a real boon! If you need any help or advice on how to best upgrade to Universal Analytics then just get in touch and ask for a geek.