The first thing any GA implementation should include is two profiles: a working profile and a ‘raw’ unaltered backup profile. One day that raw profile will save your bacon.
The ‘raw’ unprocessed profile is one in which the data has not been modified in any way when configuring the profile settings or by adding filters.
You should always have such a set of data available so that you can sanity check anything else you do against a pure source. And you will also have a backup in case anything you do in your working profiles messes up the data.
How to Set Up a Raw Profile
When setting up a raw profile you should enable ecommerce and configure search where relevant (but do not strip the search parameters). Doing this will just enable more reporting, no data will be changed.
You should not configure the profile to ignore any parameters and you should not configure the default page. Doing either of those would modify the data.
Off the top of my head I cannot think of any filters that you would dare to apply to this profile. You don’t want to filter anything out, and you don’t want to use filters to change data.
So definitely NO excluding of IP addresses, or changing all the URIs to lowercase. This raw profile is precisely the one you would want to cross-check against when debugging such filters.
What to Do if You Only Have One Profile
If you only have one profile set up for the site at the moment, check whether any filters have been applied, or if the default page or any parameters to ignore have been configured. If none of the above have been done, then this profile should become your raw profile. It will contain historical data in the raw form, so it makes sense to keep this valuable resource intact and create new working profiles instead.
If this is the case, I recommend editing the name of the profile to make it clear what it is. It’s probably called something like ‘www.mydomain.com’, which will sort nicely to the bottom of most lists. So I would just add a function and warning to the end: ‘www.mydomain.com (raw data – do NOT change)’
If you haven’t got a profile like this already, you need to set one up as soon as possible. I recommend sticking the date of the next day at the end of the name when configuring this profile so that you can see at a glance when the data begins.
Setting up Goals in a Raw Profile
Although you should not have any filters applied to your raw profile, it’s possible to configure goals. In the days when GA was limited to four goals per profile I used to use this profile for housekeeping and debugging goals, such as the goal for the 404 page, so as not to us up slots in the main working profiles.
I’d recommend having at least that goal configured here. The ‘Reverse Goal Path’ report will then have a full, un-modified set of data to work with when you need it to go looking for internal sources of bad links. But I would also configure such a goal in one of the main working profiles these days and configure an Intelligence alert for its conversion rate. This is data is something you need to have in front of you, not hidden in a profile you seldom visit.
How the Raw Profile Can Help You or Save The Day
For most purpose the raw profile is one that sits in the background collecting all the data. It’s not a profile most people would want to see.
You’ll need the raw when configuring filters which do things like include or exclude visits of some kind. By comparing the new filtered figures with the un-filtered version you will be able to sanity check whether the difference is credible or whether you need to re-check your filters.
You’ll also find the raw profile useful if you find a situation in which a parameter you have stripped out by using the ‘ignore parameter’ setting suddenly turns out to have a use. For example, you would normally strip session ids out of a working profile. But it’s conceivable that at a later date you might want to be able to find all the sessions which encountered some error page and create a segment in order to track what other aspects those visits have in common.
Finally, you’ll also be very grateful for the raw profile if you ever make a mistake with a filter and discover days later that it has trashed some relevant data. You won’t be able to undo the damage in the working profile, but at least you’ll have the raw data to fill in the gaps in an external report…
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