Digital analytics spring cleaning tips
Spring is a great time to clear out what’s no longer useful including your digital analytics setup.
Clean tracking improves data quality, site performance and decision-making.
Start with these high-impact areas.
Review user access first
Remove unnecessary access to protect your tracking setup because users with high permissions can change configurations without your knowledge.
Where to check
- Google Analytics > Account Access Management
- Google Tag Manager (GTM) > User Management
What to do
- Confirm each user still needs access
- Downgrade most users to Viewer
- Remove vendors and external partners when their work ends
Clean up Google Tag Manager
Remove unused elements to prevent conflicts and slow load times because too many tags can conflict with each other and slow down your website.
Where to check
- GTM > Workspace
What to do
Remove:
- Universal Analytics items (measurement ID starts with “UA-”)
- Paused tags
- Triggers not connected to tags
- Old campaign tags and pixels
Update the Cookie Domain Cleaner variable. View Optimizing cookie domains and cleaning Google Tag Manager for a streamlined umn.edu experience.
Audit your GA4 setup
Update your tracking setup to match new features and current goals.
Where to check
- Admin > Data display
Use this tool
- Analytics Playbook’s GA4 Audit Dashboard
- Select your GA4 property in the top-right dropdown
What to review
- Data quality
- Are you collecting data from your staging/test domains?
- Do you have self-referral issues?
- Acquisition accuracy
- How many sessions are "Unassigned"?
- Are you separating paid social from organic social?
- Use consistent UTM parameters to improve reporting and our UTM Builder Tracking Sheet.
- Event tracking
- How many events are you recording?
- Do you have more than 3-5 key events?
- Pages
- Do you have case issues?
Learn more about topics like this by joining the DAL-U Community of Practice. For questions, reach out to [email protected].
Happy analyzing!