While the standard settings in Google Analytics are helpful in most cases, some metrics may require a little tweaking to make sure your data in Google Analytics is recorded as accurately as possible.
Here are three common problems that could impact your website's data and what you can do about them.
Ever heard the saying "time is money"? Well, in the world of Google Analytics, time is data! If your website's user sessions are timing out, you could be missing valuable insights into how your visitors are interacting with your website.
A "session timeout" occurs when a user doesn't interact with anything on your website for 30 minutes. This ends their current session and any further interactions will be counted as a new session. The problem is any user engagement data collected during the original session is lost when this happens.
So what's the big deal?
Imagine this: someone spends a lot of time reading an article or watching a lengthy video on your website, but their session times out before they can take any further action. Now it seems as if this user is less engaged with your content, which means you might be missing out on some crucial insights as to what's keeping your visitors interested.
Another issue is when users leave your website open in a browser tab for an extended period without interacting with it. This leads to a new session created every 30 minutes by an unengaged user, which skews your data and makes it harder to understand visitor interaction.
Once you increase your session timeout length, you can be sure that all your website visits and visitor behavior are recorded accurately. GA4’s default session timeout length is currently set to 30 minutes. You may consider increasing your session timeout length to 1 hour to allow more time for GA4 to track your visitor engagement accurately.
Bots are everywhere, and they're not just for sci-fi movies. They're also on your website, messing with your data.
Bots are automated software programs designed to perform specific tasks on the internet. They are becoming increasingly prevalent and some are specifically designed to cause confusion or harm.
For example, bots can mimic human behavior by visiting websites and generating fake page views, clicks, and other metrics. This can skew your analytics, making it difficult for you to accurately measure page popularity, website traffic, and understand the behavior of your actual visitors.
Lucky for you, GA4 automatically excludes known bots across the internet, so you no longer have to set filters to target those pesky bots manually. And while it's not 100% accurate, Google's detector does an excellent job of sniffing out potential bot activity to ensure your website's data remains free and clear from suspicious visitor behavior.
However, it's important to be proactive in reviewing your GA4 reports for unusual activity, such as a high number of pageviews from a single source or unusual spikes in traffic. If this happens, you'll want to set up filters to target the suspected bot activity.
Internal traffic typically comes from people within your organization. While this traffic can be useful to monitor in some cases, it can also be difficult to distinguish internal visitors from actual visitors.
This one’s actually a pretty easy fix! Excluding internal traffic from your data is easy enough. Simply set up a filter to tell GA4 to overlook your organization’s IP address. This ensures that your data only reflects external visitors, providing a more accurate picture of how your website performs in the real world.
We hope you found these solutions helpful and will take advantage of GA4's analytical power. Doing so will help you serve up a better online experience and provide more inspiring content to parishioners seeking a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ and his Catholic Church. That's technology in service of evangelization!
We want to hear from you! Share the creative ways your parish, school, or ministry uses your analytics data to serve your community better.