WHO’S CHECKING YOU OUT?

The Netbyte team is back at the wheel and ready to roll after a few weeks recharging our batteries. We’re all about an open and honest approach, so we won’t pretend things are perfect. Some of us have a few post-Christmas kilos to lose and all that time off has left us a little introspective.

Perhaps that’s not a bad thing. Most people are pretty sporadic in their approach to self-evaluation. I’m not talking about the extra kilos now. I’m back in business mode and thinking about our digital presence. When clients come to us, it’s usually because they want their digital marketing to work harder for them. We talk to them about their business goals and strategy, where they want to be. We take a look at where they are starting from, then recommend an online journey.

There are many tools to help us with an online audit but perhaps one of the most widely used is Google Analytics. We enjoy its beautiful reports and dashboard features and our engineering clients just seem to devour the data.

One irritating issue that gets in the way of accurate site traffic measurement is spam. Sadly Google Analytics is plagued by spam populating the language field. Our clients want to know which language visitors to their sites identify with, but often they are faced with results that looks like this:

Results 3 and 5 are most unhelpful, even dangerous if clicked on. They do not accurately reflect the traffic on the site but are the result of Google Analytics being hacked.  If you drill down further by ‘city’ a lot of the sessions are attributable to Russian users, something common across all the sites we host.

John Hibbit offers a great fix for Google Analytics users in The Digital Marketing Blog: http://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/blog/2016/12/16/donald-trump-is-in-your-google-analytics/#gref

We are grateful to him for sharing and hope we’ve also helped a little by spreading the word along the way.  After all, it’s important you know who’s checking you out.

If you want to know more, please call me on 021 745 415.

Scott Wilson

Managing Director