How to Audit Your Google Analytics UTM Governance with Google Data Studio

Today, let's walk through an exercise for improving your Google Analytics governance. So, one of the challenges that we've had and seen with clients is that their uh data going into the Google Analytics instances, not particularly clean. And when your data is not clean, what happens is it ruins your attribution modeling, ruins your ability to understand what's working and uh what you should be doing more of, what you should be doing less of. So today let's walk through some ways to diagnose that to see just how bad the problem is. I'm gonna go into um Google Data Studio to do this.

Now, you can do this programmatically. I've written some code that does this for you know a bunch of Google Analytics accounts all the time at you know at once. But for you, no coding, no like crazy math or anything like that, just very straightforward. One Data Studio dashboard that you can assess like what's going on with your Google Analytics account. So let's go ahead into Data Studio now.

First thing we need to do, of course, is we need to connect uh to our data. So let's go ahead and connect to Google Analytics here. Okay, so we've got our Google Analytics account loaded up here, and uh the table is going to start building itself. Now, this is not what we want to start with. We want to start with our source medium because when things go wrong with Google Analytics, it's typically because of source medium.

Uh the UTM codes are either not there or they're incorrect, or and we've seen this a lot, you've been using UTM codes on links on your website to your website, which is a terrible thing to do because it basically deletes uh the previous attribution data. Never ever use UTM codes on your own website linking to yourself. So let's find source medium in this list. Drag this in here, replace our page title there. Great.

And for the metric, I'm just going to use sessions from a scope perspective in Google Analytics 3, which is what this data is. What somebody does in any given visit to our website is a session, right? No matter how many pages they go on, it is a session. And where that person came from during that session is the source meaning that we care about. When somebody came to our website for that particular visit, where did they come from?

So I'm gonna use sessions as my metric here instead of new users. Yeah, we get about 25 on a page here. So let's just change the uh the selector there. And maybe just for visibility for ease of viewing, let's change this to bar uh to bar graphs for the metrics and put a number on that. Great.

So we're done. This is essentially the report that we care about. This is our traffic to our website and what source mediums it's using. Now, if we want to make this a little bit uh more user-friendly, uh, if we need to show this to other folks, uh, we might want to, for example, shrink this down a little bit here, and maybe add a uh date control so that people can choose what date range. Let's go ahead and do that.

And then we can switch our date range. Let's do year to date, see what I've done on my website. Now, what I see, first source medium, email, cool. Second, organic search, cooled. Third is direct none.

This is a category which basically Google says we don't know what it is. So we're going to assign it this bucket. Fourth is my social media uh shares in my emails. The fifth is not set. So this is a problem here.

This one shows me that something's gone wrong in my UTM tracking when I have a not set like that. So I need to hunt down uh what where this is happening and fix it so that I uh stop getting this not set. I suspect, I think it's in my social media shares, but I'm not sure, so I need to go and check to make sure. The sixth one is clearly spam, right? This is something that um this is randomly generated garbage.

And this is probably not me, so I don't know that I have a problem here, but it is definitely coming in uh not great. We have organic search from Bing, Twitter clicks, LinkedIn clicks, uh clicks from my website, uh my link shortener, uh duckDuckGo, that's interesting. Um that's not a search engine I spend a whole lot of time on, but clearly it is showing up for uh some percent of my audience, Facebook and so on and so forth. So already, oh, here's a bot traffic one. That's clearly garbage.

Now here's another one where I've got a not set, that's a problem. I need to go hunt that down. And just looking down through the list here, there's like this one menu drop down not set. That means I've got something in one of my menus on my site that shouldn't have UTM tags at all, right? Breaking my rule.

No UTM tags to your site, on your site, from your site. Uh and we can keep going. So, this is what you'll you look for. You look for things that are clearly wrong, and you want to buy sessions because the the worst something is like this one here, number five, where there's a not set and it's the number five referrer of traffic to my website. This is a problem.

This is a really bad problem. Uh, and I need to fix this sooner rather than later. Um, because so many sessions uh come with that faulty uh attribution. So this is a very simple, straightforward report. Build it for yourself and then start going down the list and say, do I recognize this?

Do I know where this is coming from? Um is this something under my control? Like this is clearly under my control, and I need to fix it. Um, other things like this spam here, that's not under my control. I can't fix that.

The best I can do is you know, just leave it there and maybe filter out or ignore it if I don't want to be reporting on it. But I would bet you if I ran a full attribution model, uh, it would probably show zero conversions because it's junk traffic. Do this and then start hunting down where you think those problems are. And this will help clean up your Google Analytics uh attribution data incredibly, like overnight. It'd be much, much better.

We can talk other uh another time about things like how do you I identify and isolate your direct traffic, because that is important. But get the basics down first. So thanks for watching and I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Need help making your marketing platforms, processes and people work smarter?

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