Settings
As long as your script has been implemented and your cookie settings are correct, you are ready to start collecting analytics data. However, there are other settings that can improve your data, so let’s look at some of the additional settings.
Tracking settings
Go to “Data sources/Analytics” and then select “Settings/Tracking” in the sidebar menu.
The first setting is how to track page views. The default setting is “When url changes”, which is SPA compatible.
The other two options are "Never, only manual tracking" (you can read more about manual tracking here) and "When page is loaded". Since the url can change without the page being reloaded, the setting "When url changes" is appropriate for most use cases.
Only if you have pages where you don't want to track changes to the url without reloading the page should you use "When page is loaded". For example, if the url changes when visitors select search filters and you don't want to track that.
Another default setting is to track downloads and outlinks, but that can be turned off.
There are several more settings on this page, and for each box that you can check, there is a tooltip that explains the setting.
Some of the settings on this page are limited by license level, and these include E-Commerce, Crash analytics, Form analytics, and Media analytics.
The site search settings are useful if you want to know what the visitors are searching for on your website.
Knowing what the visitors are searching for is extra important if your search function isn’t the greatest, as the search words will tell you what to focus on for the optimization. For example, you may find that the visitors are using other search words than you were expecting, as they are using synonyms or you are using internal names for your products.
Lastly, you are also able to exclude some information, such as IP addresses.
For the IP addresses, you may want to exclude visits made by those that are working with the website, and maybe other colleagues, as they tend stay on the website a lot longer and can skew your data (affect your average visit duration, number of actions, etc.).
Again, there are tooltips to help you.
The tracking settings are the basic settings for analytics, but there is a lot more you can do. A good way of getting more from your analytics data is to create goals, so let's move on to goals.
