Data Quality Dashboard

Website analytics data is used to inform decisions and drive tools (especially when evaluating email and digital ad campaigns). Bad data can cause big problems.

This Google Analytics dashboard will help you spot common problems with your data.

It'll help you to spot any issues with your traffic sources, bounce rate, campaign tracking (including email and paid search), self-referrals, ecommerce tracking, duplicate transactions, and more.

To use this dashboard:

  1. Sign in to your Google Analytics account

  2. Click on this link: Data quality dashboard

  3. Follow the instructions for adding it to your Google Analytics account

  4. It will then live under 'Customisation - Dashboards' at the top of the left-hand menu in Google Analytics. 

Please note: not every website is the same, so creating one size fits all dashboards isn't easy. For that reason parts of the dashboard may be blank for you. Once added to your account you can edit this dashboard as necessary.

Page Error/404 reports

It's frustrating for users to encounter error pages on your site. That sort of thing could also cost you visitors, subscribers, and sales.

This Google Analytics custom report will show you how big a problem this is on your website. It'll also help you to put things right.

To use this report:

  1. Sign in to your Google Analytics account

  2. Click on these links:

    1. 404 report - internal traffic

    2. 404 report - external traffic

  3. Follow the instructions for adding them to your account

  4. These reports will then live under 'Customisation - Custom Reports' at the top of the left-hand menu in Google Analytics

Please note: these reports work on the basis that the <title> element of your 404 page contains any of the following - 404, page not found, nothing found for, page not available, or page unavailable. If your site is set up differently you'll need to edit the report accordingly.

How to use these reports

When you open the report you will see a list of pages that people were trying to get to, and how many times they've been seen.

If you click on any of these you will see the previous page they were on (for internal traffic) or their traffic source (for external traffic).

If someone encountered a page error having come from another page on your website then chances are there's a badly formed link you need to fix.

If they came from an external source then the dodgy link is probably in an email/another website/on social. In that case you might try and request someone fix the offending link. If that's not possible, and if it's a big deal, then maybe set up a redirect to point those users in the right direction.

Please also bear in mind that you'll probably never get your 404 page errors down to zero. They could be caused by human error (ie someone typing a URL incorrectly) or an error with the server or the user's connection.