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Jessie594

: What can be messed up by letting the data flow into a Universal Analytics Account without fully customizing Universal Analytics first? I haven't finished taking the "Digital Analytics Fundamentals"

@Jessie594

Posted in: #GoogleAnalytics #UniversalAnalytics

I haven't finished taking the "Digital Analytics Fundamentals" course yet; I'm concerned that if I don't understand everything before I implement it on my companies site that I'll permanently screw something up;

I've used Google Analytics in the past, and I've noticed that you can only set a certain number of goals and I'm not even sure if you can change them after that. My boss is pushing for me to finish some tickets related to the marketing of our sites, but I'm concerned that if I do this too soon, I'm going to permanently screw something up with the Analytics account.

In particular, today I'm going to add our website to the local business directory websites; some of these are free and some of these are not free.

The following are local business directory websites I had in mind:


Google Local Business Directory
City Search
Superpages.com
Best of the Web Local Search
patch.com
merchantcirlcle
yelp
Bing Places for Business
Yahoo Local Listing: Business Directory Listings


If I understand correctly, a local business website is a referral source, which makes it sort of a Marketing Channel? And with Marketing Channels you have to monitor them to make sure that your getting your ROI on them, so you aren't paying for marketing (a listing) that isn't bringing you any business.

I've seen several sites that advise you NOT to setup Google Analytics until you have your goals setup and implemented on your site.

What parts are absolutely essential to setup first?
(off the top of my head I can think of excluding people from within your own organization from the Analytics, and setting up goals)

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@Megan663

The biggest mistake with analytics is not having any. It is far better to have some insight into your data, even if it isn't perfect, than to be running a website with no visibility into what your users are doing.

Nothing is "absolutely essential" to set up before you enable Google Analytics. Something like excluding your staff is a nice to have, but it certainly isn't essential. Your own personnel will account for a small fraction of your traffic anyway.

Goals can be added at any time in the future. There is no reason to make sure all your goals are defined ahead of time.

The best Google Analytics customization is events in my opinion. I log events for things like user signup, video playing, and interaction with important widgets. But even that is something that can be added and adjusted once analytics is already live.

Don't let fear of getting it wrong paralyze you from action. Enable it and refine it if you see something that isn't working as well as you would like.

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