If you are using another page tracker that is not Google Analytics please reach out to your Freestar contact to let them know which tool you are utilizing.
What email address to use to grant access to Google Analytics
We will need you to grant access to your Google Analytics account to the following email: [email protected].
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 when it comes to monitoring, optimizing, etc. on your site. Please see below for some examples of what our Team uses Google Analytics access for.
If there is a drop in impressions on a specific ad unit or overall, part of the troubleshooting process to find out why is to first check pageviews to see if the drop correlates. If we do not have this information readily available to check off it can make investigating any drops in impressions take longer and potentially affect revenue if it is a bigger 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 look to 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 ever an issue with a specific browser so we can quickly determine any losses.
It’s important for us to understand a pub’s traffic as it pertains to location as well, especially for those with international traffic so 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 impression and revenue.
When testing new ad units we will check the before and after of important site metrics to ensure it is not causing any drops in exit %, 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 any it did not result in page load increases.
In addition to verifying any drops in traffic we also 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 and or quarterly business reports which allows Freestar and publishers to quickly see any changes month over month at a glance.
To understand a site’s traffic we may look into the referrer and or acquisition of how users came to the site. This also helps with understanding Core Web Vital scores (i.e.; does a site have a lot of search traffic) and any potential Google policy violations.
We will get familiar 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 (i.e.; homepage) and there are no ads there, we would make sure to call that out.
There are many other metrics that we find useful in ensuring we are able to fully monitor a site, but these are some of the most important ones.
