Analytics can account for where your visitors came from

Why this matters

Analytics sorts every visit into a channel — search, direct, social, email and so on — and puts the ones it cannot work out into 'Unassigned'. A large unassigned share usually means campaign links are being tagged inconsistently, or a redirect is stripping the tracking parameters off them. The effect is that the channels which *are* recognised look smaller than they are, and whatever is being spent on the unrecognised one cannot be judged at all.

How to fix it

Start with your campaign links. Every paid, email or social link into the site should carry the same UTM parameters in the same spelling — `utm_source`, `utm_medium`, `utm_campaign` — and case matters, so `Email` and `email` become two channels. Then check your redirects: a link that goes through a shortener or an old URL often arrives with the parameters stripped, which is invisible unless somebody follows one all the way through. Google's Campaign URL Builder produces links that are consistent by construction, which is the cheapest way to stop the problem recurring.

Other trust checks

• Analytics keeps enough history to answer a question about last yearGoogle Analytics throws away the detailed data behind your reports after a set period, and the shortest option is the one every property starts on. Two months is not enough to compare this Christmas against last one, or to look back at what a campaign actually did. The headline totals survive, but the ability to ask a new question about an old period does not — and it cannot be recovered later, because the data is gone rather than hidden.
• Analytics knows what counts as a success on this siteA key event is how you tell Analytics that something mattered — a form sent, a purchase, a call button pressed. Without any, the property can tell you how many people came and nothing at all about whether any of it worked. Every question worth asking of analytics data is some version of 'did this bring us business', and none of them can be answered by a property that has never been told what business looks like.
• Analytics knows which page your visitors arrived onThe landing page is the first page of a visit, and it is how you tell which of your pages actually bring people in. Sessions recorded as '(not set)' are ones where Analytics never saw a first page — usually because the visit was measured before the page view arrived, or a single page application changed the address without telling Analytics. Those sessions still count in your totals but cannot be credited to any page, so the pages doing the work look less important than they are.
• Analytics reports on the same day your business doesEvery date in Analytics is drawn against the property's timezone, so it decides when 'today' starts and ends. A property reporting on a timezone several hours from the business means daily figures cut the day in an odd place — yesterday's sales include this morning's, and a comparison between two days is comparing two overlapping windows. It is easy to set when a property is created and almost never revisited.
• Browsers are allowed to fill in your formsSetting autocomplete to off tells the browser not to offer a visitor their own saved details. On a phone that turns a form somebody could have completed with one tap into a dozen fields typed with a thumb, and every extra field measurably costs completions. It is almost always inherited from a template or added years ago to stop a browser suggesting the wrong thing, and on a password field it is worse than useless: password managers ignore it, so the only people it stops are the ones typing by hand, who then choose something they can remember.
• Email cannot be forged from your domain (SPF)There is no record saying which servers are allowed to send email as you. That means someone can email your customers from your address, and it also means your own legitimate email is more likely to land in spam.

See all 122 checks