Google Analytics is a software service that you can use to analyze your website’s performance. This tool gathers data from your website, Google, and your visitors. It then conveys the data visually through graphs so that you can easily see how your business is growing.

When you configure Google Analytics accurately, it’s a powerful tool that can provide information about your visitors (e.g., what pages they visit on your website). This information can help you understand what’s working well with your website and site visitors and optimize.

Today, we’ll be talking about how we can configure our Google Analytics account the most efficiently.

1. Debar Spider and Bot Traffic

When using tools like Google Analytics to track visits to our sites, we need to make sure that we are excluding bots and spiders. I’m sure whoever has looked at Google Analytics has seen some bot traffic. Research indicates that at least 25% of web traffic is from bots and spiders.

Google itself makes a nice tool in Google Analytics: go to Admin > View > View Settings and there’s a little box that says Bot Filtering. This extracts data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau. It also pulls from a list of known spiders and bots to filter out any automated scrapers that might otherwise make up the bulk of your traffic or your sales.

2. Establish Goals

Setting up goals helps you actually track your success. To set up goals, go to Admin > View > Goals and then New Goal.

There’s a variety of different types and levels of goals. The type of goal you want to set up is dependent on what you want to accomplish in your business and what you’re trying to get out of it.

When the goals have been rightly defined, you can work through the extra steps necessary to make sure that you have accurate information.

3. Sift Personal traffic and spam

We want to make sure that our rankings are based on accurate information. If we have inaccurate data, we’re going to have a hard time making accurate business decisions. If we don’t make accurate business decisions, we’re not going to see any results.

One way to filter out your own traffic is to use view filters. To do this, go to Admin > View > View Filters. Then, select the custom option and add filters tailored specifically for your IP, maybe your office IP or home IP.

4. Connect To Google Search Console

These are two powerful resources of reporting and information, and we want to make sure they can talk to each other. Google

Google Search Console provides a lot of valuable data regarding our organic search: what search queries, specific pages, how they’re performing, the average position, and lots of other information.

First of all, make sure you have your Google Search Console account set up. This will help to integrate with Google Analytics much easier. After all, it’s impossible to connect the two if you haven’t set up your Google Search Console.