This is the first step of our cooperation, which includes making data reliable. We can’t grow the business significantly if we can’t rely on the data we receive about end clients. Therefore, we start by checking the analytics. My clients usually use the following tools for analytics:
- Google Analytics / Google Analytics 4
- Mixpanel
- Amplitude
- Google Search Console, Ahref
- Hotjar / LuckyOrange / FullStory / CrazyEggs
Apart from analytics tools, they use Google Tag Manager or Segment to manage tags on the website.
When I notice that some events or users’ traits are not measured in analytics, I recommend implementing them. I’m usually the person who executes or talks to handle this work with the engineering team.
The following elements can be implemented for Google Analytics within this step:
- events, goals, funnels
- basic e-commerce tracking and enhanced e-commerce tracking in GA
- custom metrics, custom dimensions and calculated metrics
- integrations with external tools such as Google Search Console, Google Ads, and Optimise.
- referral exclusion list, filters, content grouping
- custom reports, dashboards and custom segments, and so on.
- cross-domain and cross-device tracking (clientId, userID, cookies)
Another important aspect of this step is data accuracy verification. After implementing events and users’ properties, we want to be confident that it shows truthful information. Therefore, I manually check them to see if they are correct.
Once we understand that the data is correct, we move to the next step -> CRO audit.