Diagnosing Traffic Spikes and Canonical Homepage in Google Analytics (11/4/2020)

In Office Hours this week, we had several good questions. The title (here) doesn’t reflect the value these questions offer.

One of our member saw a spike in traffic to one of their pages. They assumed something was wrong. It turns out, something was VERY right. Follow the conversation to see us use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to diagnose the “problem” and find out why this ends up being a really good thing for their website.

Another question had to do with the canonical version of a homepage when entered into Google Analytics. What happens when someone enters the non-canonical version of the homepage into the admin/setup of Google Analytics? If it’s wrong, should you change it?

In a third question we discussed a notification from Google Analytics suggesting that someone wad doing something wrong: “The clutter of redundant objects make management of your Google Analytics account and property more difficult. We recommend removing redundant objects in order to keep your configuration as lean as possible.” When we delve into this topic, we determined that they did nothing wrong and to ignore this recommendation. In fact, Google recommends you create three views for each Google Analytics: one to test settings, one to backup, and one to use. In this case, they were all identical and that’s okay. No action necessary.