In today’s highly digitalized world, collecting and analyzing website data is a critical element of any business’ digital marketing strategy.

Google Analytics is going to be a critical element of every digital marketer’s toolkit because it provides in-depth consumer data. It can tell you everything, from which mobile devices customers use to visit your website, to which activities users take on your website before converting (e.g. submitting a form or making a purchase). You can use these insights to optimize your website for marketing campaigns.

In order to get the most out of Google Analytics, you need the correct settings and filters to ensure that the data you’re getting is actually the data that you want. Here are five Google Analytics tips for getting the most out of your data.

1. Create Google Analytics Filters

   Filter out data from geographic areas that aren’t related to your target audience. For example, if you’re a local Vancouver business and you serve only the local community, you should filter out website traffic from other cities. Doing that ensures that data in your Google Analytics account is relevant to your business. Otherwise, you may have irrelevant data in your data set.

   For example, if you don’t filter out website traffic from irrelevant geographic locations and you see that your overall website traffic has been trending upwards, you may think that your website performance is improving when in reality the additional traffic may be spam or otherwise extraneous. This misrepresentation of data can give you an inaccurate understanding of your website performance, which can affect your marketing or business decisions down the road.

2. Block Out Your IP Address

   An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label (such as 192.0.2.1) that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two main functions: network interface identification and location addressing.

   Google Analytics will collect and number all website visitors using their IP addresses. Be sure to filter out and exclude the IP addresses of all your personal devices from your Google Analytics account so you don’t skew your data with your own website visits!

3. Included Brand Search Terms as Direct Traffic

   When a user lands on a website from a search engine such as Google, the user is considered an “organic visitor” in Google Analytics. When a user enters a website directly in a browser and lands on the website, the user is considered a “direct visitor”.

   Some users may search for your brand name in Google to find your website. While these users are considered by default as “organic visitors” in Google Analytics, these users should actually be considered “direct visitors” because they are searching for your brand directly on Google before landing on your website. You can specify certain keywords as brand terms in your Google Analytics, so users that visit your website after searching for these terms are considered direct visitors.

4. Exclude bots and spam traffic

   Bots and spam traffic are essentially fictitious website visits. Collecting website traffic from bots and spammers skews your Google Analytics data because this traffic isn’t “real”. To exclude website traffic from known bots and spiders, you can check the “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders” box in the Google Analytics Settings.

Google Analytics is one of the most easy-to-use, robust, and free analytics tools on the market. You can capture and analyze vital website data such as the geographic location of your website visitors, or which pages your visitors have visited. But in order for your data to be useful, your data has to be “clean”. By taking the four steps above, you can improve the quality of your Google Analytics data by filtering out traffic that is fictitious or irrelevant, as well as your own website visits. With these filters and settings, you’re more likely to gather useful data that you can turn into actionable insights for your business.