Google Analytics Health Status Checker

Google Analytics Health Checker - Video Transcript

In this video we present the Google Analytics Health Status tool from Analytics-Toolkit.com.

This is the ultimate audit tool for your Google Analytics setup. You can use it when taking on a new client to make sure their tracking doesn’t have major issues. It’s also a good idea to routinely check the status of all websites, just in case the latest site update broke your tracking. In short – use this tool on every analytics account you work with, in order to make sure you are working with good data.

The tool checks your settings, does analysis on your data and looks for signs of issues. It currently does more than 30 different types of checks in a matter of seconds. This would normally take a trained web analyst at least half an hour to complete.

The checks are split in several groups – general, site search, goal tracking, AdWords campaign tracking, e-commerce transaction tracking and more.

You get a detailed audit report containing status and description for each check performed. When an issue is detected, you are presented with a detailed description and recommended fixes.

Now, let’s proceed with an example. First, select the view you want to check. Then, tick all options that apply to the website. In this example it is an e-commerce site, they are advertising on Google AdWords and they also have other advertising campaigns.

Then, press “Check Health”. The results usually take around 10 seconds to appear.

First, we see the General section. It contains checks for the Google Analytics code and its placement, whether visits are tracked, whether site speed sample rate is good enough and others.

As you can see, the messages are informative and propose fixes, where such are not self-explanatory. In this case the tool suggests the usage of the siteSpeedSampleRate variable to fix the issue.

Then follows the Google Adwords section. As we can see campaigns are properly tagged and cost data is imported, but there is a big issue with discrepancies between ad clicks and visits to the site. This is not a definite fail, but since it is still something that can be a sign for several different issues, our tool shows a WARNing sign, so that you can consider investigating further.

You can see some other passes and fails in the site goals and e-commerce sections. Not all our checks print out a message. Some of them will only display something when they produce a fail or a warning.

That was our Google Analytics health status tool. We hope it’s useful in helping you follow best practices and evaluating your analytics data integrity.

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