Documenting Your Own Setup

Written for whoever comes next

Every measurement setup contains decisions that are invisible once made.

A filter excluding an address, an event named oddly, a report built for one question, a date after which the figures change.

Somebody arriving later sees the result and not the reasoning, and the usual response is either to leave everything alone out of caution or to change something that was deliberate.

Two pages written now prevents both, and today is the natural moment since the setup has just been rebuilt.

What the two pages contain

• What is measured and where.
• What each conversion means.
• What was excluded and why.
• Where the records live.
• What changed, with dates.
• Who has access.

The third is the one nobody writes and the one that causes the most confusion later. An exclusion looks like missing data to anybody who does not know it was chosen.

Name what each conversion actually counts

Since the names are not self-explanatory.

An event called contact could be a form submission, a click on a link to the contact page, or a telephone tap, and all three are plausible.

Write one line per conversion saying exactly what triggers it and what it does not include.

Form submission on the enquiry form only, not the newsletter signup, not the callback request, is a complete definition.

That is what lets somebody in two years reconcile the number against reality rather than guessing.

It also catches the case where two events overlap and are being double counted, which writing them out reveals.

A worked example

A business took over a site from a previous supplier and found the analytics showing about half the traffic they expected.

Nothing was documented, so several weeks went into establishing whether the tag was broken.

It turned out a filter had been excluding an entire province, added years earlier during a campaign and never removed.

One line in a document would have saved the investigation and, more importantly, would have prompted somebody to ask whether the exclusion still made sense.

It had not made sense for four years.

The figures had been wrong throughout and nobody had known enough to doubt them.

Record the dates of changes

Which is the part that makes historical figures readable.

Every change to what is measured produces a step in the data, and a step with no explanation is investigated repeatedly.

Keep a short dated list: what changed, when, and what effect to expect.

The switch at the end of this month is the obvious first entry and it will not be the last.

Adding a line takes seconds at the time and reconstructing it later is frequently impossible.

This is the same list as the one recording site changes, and keeping them together is better than keeping them apart.

Write down where things are

Since half of what a successor needs is location rather than reasoning.

Which account, which property, which login, where the exported archive is, where the monthly spreadsheet lives.

Whether the tag is installed directly, through a manager, or by a plugin, since that determines where somebody looks to change it.

And where the search console is and whether it is linked.

None of that is interesting and all of it takes the better part of an afternoon to work out from nothing.

Say what is deliberately not measured

Which prevents somebody helpfully adding it back.

We do not track scroll depth, we do not record video plays, we do not use a heat mapping tool, and we removed the second analytics account in June.

Each of those was a decision, and without the note it reads as an oversight to the next person.

The same applies to reports that were deliberately stopped, since a helpful successor will recreate them.

Two lines saves somebody a day of work they should not do.

It also saves the conversation where they explain the improvement and you explain why it was removed on purpose.

Keep it with everything else

In the same place as the hosting details and the redirect list.

A document about the analytics stored inside the analytics account is not available to somebody who cannot get into the account.

Plain text or a document, in the business's own storage, accessible to more than one person.

Date it, and review it annually alongside everything else in the business that gets looked at once a year.

A document nobody can find is the same as no document, which is the usual failure here.

Tell one other person where it is, since that single conversation is what makes it findable at all.

Write it as though you are leaving

A framing that produces a better document than trying to be thorough.

Imagine handing the whole thing over tomorrow to a competent person who has never seen your business, and write what they would need on their first morning.

That question naturally produces the locations, the definitions, and the exclusions, and naturally omits the detail nobody needs.

It also surfaces the things only you know, which is exactly the category at risk.

The same framing works for the rest of the business, and the analytics setup is a manageable place to practise it.

The counter-case

Documentation goes stale.

A note describing a setup that has since changed is worse than none, because it is trusted and wrong.

Keeping it current requires the discipline of updating it whenever something changes, which is exactly the discipline nobody has.

And for a very simple setup, the whole thing fits in three lines rather than two pages, which is a good outcome rather than a failure to be thorough.

Length is not the objective here, and a short accurate note beats a long one nobody maintains.

Write what each conversion counts, what was excluded and why, where everything lives, and a dated list of changes.

The two pages

1. List what is measured.
2. Define each conversion precisely.
3. Record every exclusion and why.
4. Say where everything lives.
5. Note what is deliberately absent.
6. Start a dated change list.
7. Store it with the hosting details.

Step three is the one that prevents the expensive mistake, since an exclusion nobody documented becomes a permanent distortion that everybody trusts.

The general habit is covered in what you learned that should be written down.

Frequently asked questions

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