Is Your Google Analytics Installed Properly?

In this week’s Office Hours, we troubleshot a installation of Google Analytics, so see why it was not reporting data.

This is a very common problem. In this case, it was made worse from my incomplete directions. Often times an installation of Google Analytics goes wrong and it no longer reports information.

One member of the Colony encountered this problem (which, again was due to my incomplete directions- so don’t blame her). In this week’s Office Hours, we used some tools to troubleshoot the problem and fix it.

It all started thanks to our weekly SEO dashboard in Google Analytics. This is a weekly “audit” (of sorts) I recommend everyone send themselves. It’s designed to catch problems before they get out of hand. That’s exactly what it did, this time! The Colony member saw their traffic dropped to zero and they wanted to find out what went wrong.

We started by checking the installation of the Google Analytics code on the website. One way to check this is with the Realtime report in Google Analytics. If you visit the site, but don’t show up in this report, you need to question whether or not your code is actually installed in the fist place. In this case, it wasn’t so we knew there was an installation problem. After that, the fix was easy.

In addition to this valuable question, we also talked a very fast WordPress theme, one member found. This theme performed very well with page speed tests.

I concluded the conversation with a plea to not overlook the value of a monthly report to evaluate what’s working (and you should do more of) and what’s not (so you can improve it or do it less) within your SEO campaign.