Lumar allows you to integrate your websites Google Analytics data into a crawl, to gain unique insights and identify issues with traffic driving pages.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, goals and user behavior. It is a free tool for website owners but is also available as a paid for service called Google Analytics 360.
From 1st July 2023, Google Analytics 3 (or Universal Analytics) will no longer collect data, and you will need to move across to Google Analytics 4. Google will continue to collect data in Google Analytics 360 (or 360 Universal Analytics) for another year. Read more about Universal Analytics going away.
Why Integrate Google Analytics with Lumar?
Integrating Google Analytics data with Lumar allows you to further enrich reports, by being able to:
- Investigate non-indexable, redirected and broken pages generating organic search traffic.
- Quickly identify orphaned pages getting organic search traffic.
- Use our 250 metrics with Google Analytics data to create customized reports.
To get these reports, Google Analytics needs to be added as a crawl source to a Lumar project.
How To Set Up Google Analytics in Lumar
1. Navigate to the Connected Apps page by clicking the user options in the top right of the screen and choosing ‘Connected apps’.
2. Click on the ‘+ Add account’ button.
3. Login to your Google Account which has the Google Analytics profiles you want to include.
4. In the Connected Apps page, you can manage which Google Accounts are connected in Lumar.
5. Once a Google account is connected, navigate to the Sources settings (step 2) in the project you want to include Google Analytics data.
6. Choose the Analytics Source (a blue tick will appear when selected), and then click on Google Analytics 4 (or Google Analytics 3 if you are a GA 360 customer).
7. Select the Google Analytics property that you want to use in project crawls. You can use the internal search function to help find the right property if you have many. Please note that GA3 allowed you to filter properties by the hostname which made finding the right property easier. Unfortunately this does not exist in GA4, so you have to identify the correct property by the name.
Once you have selected a property, you can use the following filters to alter the URLs which are extracted by Lumar:
- Date range: The default is 90 days, but you can also select from a number of preset values or just type your own custom value.
- Minimum sessions: This allows you to group data by the minimum number of organic search sessions to a page.
- Minimum page views: Set a minimum number of page views to exclude URLs without a lot of activity.
- Filter: The default here is organic search, but you can also select Google or Bing Organic Search Landing Pages, or All.
Please note that if you are using GA3, you will only have the option to select a date range, and minimum number of visits.
8. That’s it, Lumar will now fetch URLs in the selected Google Analytics view during the crawl. You can now finalize any other settings and run or schedule the crawl.
Google Analytics Metrics Extracted
The following metrics are extracted from Google Analytics:
- Visits – Note that GA4 uses sessions rather than visits. In Lumar we have kept this as visits to avoid confusion for our customers when moving from GA3 to GA4. We will update this to match GA4 in the future.
- Bounce rate
- Page Load Time
- Pageviews per Visit
- Time On Page
Switching from GA3 to GA4
If you’re currently using our GA3 integration, you will need to update your projects to use GA4 before GA3 stops collecting data on 1st July 2023.
You won’t have to re-authenticate your Google Account to start using GA4. Once you have set up GA4 in your Google Analytics account, you can go into your projects, go to Step 2 and follow steps 6, 7 and 8 from the ‘How to set up Google Analytics’ section above.
API Limits
The Google Analytics Data API for GA4 has hourly and daily rate limits per GA4 property.
When a crawl is started, Lumar will continue to make API requests for data until the daily limits are reached. When hourly limits are reached, Lumar will pause the API requests until the next hour. For crawls with a large amount of data this may result in crawls taking longer to complete.
The amount of data can be reduced by limiting the date ranges, or increasing the minimum number of Visits/Pageviews.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Lumar choose the protocol and hostname for the URLs in Google Analytics?
When the filter is All Pages, we use the pageLocation field in GA which captures the full URL. For all other filters based on landing pages, we combine the hostName and landingPagePlusQueryString fields in GA to generate the URL.
How does Google Analytics work with Lumar?
Google Analytics data can be added to a Lumar crawl with the following steps:
- A client connects their Google account in Lumar.
- The client then chooses the Google Analytics property they want to include in a crawl.
- Lumar requests data from the Google Analytics API.
- Lumar crawls URLs found in the Google Analytics data and saves certain metrics for each URL found in Google Analytics (see “Google Analytics metrics extracted” above) which are then available in reports.
The client can’t see the Google Analytics profile they want to use in a crawl?
This is usually due to the Google Account which has been connected. If the Google Analytics profile has not been set up in the connected Google account then it will not appear in the list.
How can the Google Analytics data be extracted?
The Google Analytics data can be extracted by visiting the Pages in Analytics report. All the Google Analytics data crawled by Lumar can be exported to a CSV with metadata and other on-page SEO signals.
To visit the report in Lumar simply go to the relevant project and input “Pages in Analytics” in the ‘Search reports’ bar in the top left corner of the screen. Alternatively, once in the relevant project, navigate to Source Gap and then Analytics, and ‘All Reports’.
Is it possible to add multiple Google Accounts to Lumar?
Yes, Lumar allows multiple Google Accounts to be added. Also, any profiles in Google Analytics will be consolidated into one list in the Sources settings.
For example all the Google Analytics profiles under seo@gmail.com and marketing@gmail.com would be consolidated into one list in the Analytics Source settings in a project set up.
Is it possible to add multiple Google Analytics properties to a single Lumar project?
No. You can only attach a single Google Analytics property to a Lumar project.
Can Lumar help with Google Analytics line limits in 360?
No, Lumar will not help in this situation. Google Analytics API will still use the same sampling thresholds as in the UI. For more information around line limits and sampling thresholds please read the following guide.
Any Other Questions
If you have any further questions about Google Analytics and Lumar don’t hesitate to get in touch.
