Overview
If you use another page tracker that is not Google Analytics, please let your Freestar Point of Contact know which tool you use.
What email address to use to grant access to Google Analytics
We will need you to grant your Google Analytics account access to the following email: analytics22@freestar.io
How to grant Freestar Google Analytics Access
Follow the instructions here to add a new user to your account.
Why do we need access to Google Analytics?
Our team uses Google Analytics for many reasons, including monitoring, optimizing, and other tasks on your site. Below are some examples of what our team uses Google Analytics access for.
- Suppose impressions drop on a specific ad unit or overall. Part of the troubleshooting process is first to check page views to see if the drop correlates. Suppose we do not have this information readily available to check off. In that case, investigating any drops in impressions can take longer and potentially affect revenue if it is a larger issue.
- Similarly to the above, we look at device category traffic to determine any new recommendations and what units to focus extra time on. For example, if a publisher has only 10% mobile traffic, we may suggest new ad units and tests that are more aimed toward desktop first to generate the most revenue for a publisher. Looking further into browsers is often helpful if there is an issue with a specific browser so we can quickly determine any losses.
- We need to understand a pub’s traffic regarding location, especially for those with international traffic, so that we can monetize accordingly. For example, if a site goes live without a CMP and traffic is 50% EU, we’d want to alert the publisher of drops in impressions and revenue.
- When testing new ad units, we will check the before-and-after of important site metrics to ensure they are not causing any drops in exit percentage, bounce rate, average time on page, session time, etc. For sites that grant us access to the Site Speed metric, we also look at this metric following a change to ensure it did not result in page load increases.
- In addition to verifying any traffic drops, we incorporate page views into daily analysis to determine the impressions per page (IPP) and RPM.
- Outside of impression, revenue, and network performance, we include the main Google Analytics metrics (page views, sessions, time on page, RPM) into monthly or quarterly business reports, allowing Freestar and publishers to see any changes month over month at a glance quickly.
- To understand a site’s traffic, we may look into the referrer and acquisition of how users came to the site. This also helps understand Core Web Vital scores (i.e., a site has a lot of search traffic) and potential Google policy violations.
- We will familiarize ourselves with a site’s content to ensure monetization is fully optimized. For example, if we find a section in Google Analytics that counts for 20% of traffic (e.g., the homepage), and there are no ads there, we would make sure to call that out.
There are many other metrics that we find helpful in ensuring we can fully monitor a site, but these are some of the most important ones.
What's Next