Google Analytics Bloated Data

2
votes

I manage an internal website and we recently implemented campaign tracking for our emails and homepage links to see where traffic comes from.

I set up the URLs using the Google URL builder.

The data we're receiving is very bloated. We ran a test URL with 8 people, and we received 129 "views", with an average of 9 views per day for over a month. No one clicked this link after the first day.

Our average session times were about 30 minutes, which is very strange.

My questions are:

  1. how does google track campaigns? If you use a tracking URL, does the cookie track views for any organic views after that?
  2. Is there a tool we can use to only track first time visits using a campaign URL?

Admittedly, I'm fairly new to Google Analytics, but no one on our marketing analytics team was able to help.

1
google-analytics

1 Answers

0
votes

Since you used the Google URL builder I don't think you have made any mistakes there. However I strongly think that the bloated data is due to Bot traffic in your account. And yes, the bot traffic does increase average session duration.

So here's a set of steps I'll suggest:

1) Create 3 views in Google Analytics (It is a best practice): Unfiltered, Master, Test

2) Check for Langauage spam and weird referrals in your report.

3) Add filters to "Test" view to remove these bots & spam referrals. You'll need to write a regular expression for each of these filters. Also make sure you have enabled "bot filtering" in view settings for master & test view. (I am leaving Unfiltered view as it is our data backup in case if anything goes wrong.)

4) Check your traffic for next few days and try doing the URL test again and see the results.

5) If the results in Test View are correct, then apply the same filters to "Master" view.

I hope this helps.