You already know you must cater to Google – the search giant owns 92% of the global online search market. This means if you want to be found, you need to be listed on Google and pay attention to its Analytics. This monitoring tool provides detailed information about your site’s audience, acquisition, behavior, and conversions both historically and in real-time.
Of course, you’ll need to understand the Measurement Protocol to make it work. Here’s what you need to know.
What Is Measurement Protocol?
Google Analytics Measurement Protocol is a developer tool to enable HTTP requests for raw user data to be sent directly to Google Analytics. This provides power-user data about exactly how users interact with your website, regardless of the device or environment. It helps developers create a clearer picture of web visitors and tie the data to offline behavior and more accurately track conversions.
It goes deeper than simply copying and pasting code into Webmaster Tools, but it’s still a simple process. In fact, Google’s forum has a step-by-step guide for setting it up, and there are templates for a variety of in-depth parameters, including:
Page Tracking
Using page tracking, you’ll gain more data about page visitors. This is the basic payload type and will have the most batches sent to the servers.
Event Tracking
With event tracking, you’re looking for engagement on-page elements, like video plays, download clicks, and other important conversion events.
Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking
Ecommerce is where you’ll really open the potential of Measurement Protocol. You can measure product impressions, actions, purchases, refunds, checkout steps, promotions, transactions, and more.
Email Tracking
Emails are important, and tracking them helps bridge the gap between your app, website, and offline channels. Because emails include HTML, you’re able to track them using similar coding.
These robust tools sort your information automatically to make it more digestible for your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database and other tools. All you need to do is correctly format your hits for validation.
Sending Hits and Payloads to Measurement Protocol Validation Servers
Be aware that you won’t get HTTP error codes for malformed or misaligned data. It’s up to you as the developer to properly format and define all parameters before sending to the Measurement Protocol Validation Servers. Otherwise, it’ll be unable to interpret the data.
There are also data limitations to understand. Each web property you own has a 10-million-hit limit each month. Beyond that, you’ll need to upgrade your account to Analytics 360. There are also limits of 200,000 hits per user per day and 500 hits per session.
Get Started with Google Analytics Measurement Protocol
Sign up for Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools – that’s the first step. Once you’re set up with your website, head here to get started with Measurement Protocol.
You’ll find the basic templates, along with instructions to personalize them to your own custom data sets. That’s all there is to it.
From there, you can build the JS scripts to turbocharge your Google Analytics.
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