CXL WEEK THREE- DIGITAL ANALYTICS REVIEW

Finished week two with an interesting courses in the CXL mini degree program.
The next course was about Google Analytics audit

Topics Covered were:

1) How to begin to use the developer’s console to see all traffic being sent to Google Analytics.
2) The four Chrome extensions that will be absolutely crucial to your audits.
3) Quick tip: how to preserve navigation in the developer’s console.

For the GA audit, we’re going to use two of them quite a bit, and another one a little bit more, but the minimum that we will want is the Google Tag Assistant and Ads swerve’s data Layer Inspector Plus.
You get these from the Chrome web store. I’ll show you the URLs for those, that’ll be at the end of the lesson, but if you don’t have it installed, you’ll see an option to install it.
In my case, since I already have it, it says remove from Chrome, which I don’t want to do. The next one that I want you to install is the Ad swerve data Layer Inspector, which is a great great little extension that I use all the time, primarily for GTM debugging, but will be very useful in our GA audit as well.
And if you go to Ad swerve’s website, they have a blog post on how to use it.
The next one is the Google Analytics Debugger. This is a great tool that should definitely bein your Chrome extension bar, but we probably won’t use it that much in this class.
The next one is the GTMGA Debug from Thinkster. This is a really nice data Layer inspector type tool as well.
It does some of the same thing as Ad swerve’s does, but presents it in a slightly different view. Let’s look at these in terms of a real live website.
Here’s a website I visited recently, because I had to buy some accessories for the upright bass.
Let’s use the data Layer Inspector Plus to look at my journey through the site, but I can’t do that until I call up the developer console. I mentioned there is a way to call it up from Chrome.
Going to do a control shift I, and that calls it up, and I’m going to place this at the bottom of my screen. So we’re in the dev tools right now, and one thing that I really want to make sure you do is go to the settings and go to console and make sure that preserve log upon navigation is check marked.
And now, if I go to another website, another page, I can go back and look at everything that’s happened.
Now, most of the time, I will set this up so that info warnings and errors all show up. In this particular course, I may turn off warnings and errors, because we’re going to run out of space down here, since I don’t have this on a separate screen.
Let’s look at what the GTMGA Debug, which I said was similar to the data Layer Inspector Plus, let’s take a look at that.
When I first open this, I have to refresh the page so that GTMGA Debug starts tracking it. Now we’ll see something similar to what we saw with the data Layer Inspector Plus.
If I look at…Here’s the hit that gets sent to Google Analytics. I have the option, if I’m not sure what these things are, I have the option of parsing them, so I can see what’s there.
And notice that it’s not on Enhanced Ecommerce. If we had an Enhanced Ecommerce hit, we’d see it here.
And there’s what I primarily use this tool for, is debugging Enhanced Ecommerce, particularly in GA Audits. Now, if I go back to the console, this is coming from the data Layer Inspector Plus, and it gives me some of the same information.
Actually, it’s going to be the same information that we saw with the GTMGA Debug. Notice if I, again, don’t remember what all these two-letter items are, I can click here, and it’ll spell that out for them.
So DT is document title, for example. User language, I mean, that’s UL. So in both tools, you’ll have a way to split up what these two-letter acronyms are.
The difference between data Layer Inspector Plus is that it all shows up here in the console, and if you want to look at specific information, you have to open it, versus GTMGA Debug, it gives it to you in a slightly different, more legible format.
You may have noticed information here. This page here was not sent by GTM. Well, that’s nice to know.
And it was redirected at the server. We don’t have to worry about that. All right, so that’s data Layer Inspector Plus and GTMGA Debug.
The next Chrome extension we’ll look at is Tag Assistant, which we haven’t done anything with yet so far.
When I click that open, you’ll see that I have no information, because I haven’t enabled it yet.
By default, when you come to a website that’s not enabled, you actually have to physically enable it and then refresh the page.
And then it’s going to tell you lots of information, which we’ll go into quite a bit later, in the audit portion of the class.
But it’s telling us right now that it’s running Google Analytics, there is the property ID that it’s using.

Next you’ll learn to check key setup elements of the Google Analytics Property and View.

Topics Covered:

1) Verify some important settings in the Property view: default URL, referral exclusions, custom dimensions, Google Search Console, etc.
2) Verify view settings and the existence of specific views. A proper Google Analytics setup includes at least two different views, and specific settings within each one.
3) Verify that that raw view, if it exists, does not have blocking filters applied. The raw view is your safety net, so you don’t want to restrict the traffic going to it.

PII in the website you’re auditing is a major problem. Google can even delete all your data if it finds PII in your account. So let’s ensure your audit finds any PII that may exist.

Topics Covered:

1) Learn where and how to look for PII and how to look for it. (It can be hidden and hard to find.)
2) Learn at least one approach to mitigating PII using GTM, so PII never gets sent to Google.
3) Not all PII is truly PII — but you’ll see why you should probably treat it as if it were.

EEC implementation can be messy. We won’t look at the details of implementing Shopify, WooCommerce, etc., but you’ll learn how to audit some significant EEC setup issues in Google Analytics.

Topics Covered:

1) Verify that the Ecommerce checkout funnel is configured correctly, so that the site properly reports drop-offs between steps.
2) Using data Layer Inspector+ and GTM/GA Debug, you’ll learn how to discover if the EEC data is being captured correctly.