Category: Google
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Understanding the Google Analytics Ecosystem
Back in 2005, Google Analytics™ was just a simple web traffic measurement tool. It measured hits to your website, and that was more or less it. Today, it’s part of a measurement and data analytics suite that’s capable of powering billion dollar businesses. Let’s look at the big picture, the overall Google Analytics system, and…
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Evaluating Alternatives to Google AdWords Keyword Planner
Google recently announced that it was throttling results in its AdWords Keyword Planner for low-paying/free users of its software. Penalized users will now receive general logarithmic estimates of keyword volume, rather than more exact estimates. For those SEO and SEM marketers who are not conducting extensive AdWords campaigns and spending big bucks, what alternatives do…
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Assisted Brain Writing with Google
Brain writing has come to the forefront again as a creative assistance tool. Companies are realizing brainstorming, as its currently handled, is deeply flawed, as I documented in Marketing Red Belt years ago. Why? Brainstorming suffers from group dynamics, most notably what I call the HIPPO problem: the Highest Individually Paid Person’s Opinion tends to…
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Google Analytics Is Not The Source of Modern Marketing Woes
I read with curiosity recently a piece on TechCrunch titled “How Google Analytics Ruined Marketing”. The author posited that Google Analytics’ focus on digital and last-touch attribution has ruined marketing. How? By strongly encouraging marketers to think in pre-defined digital buckets and about last-touch attribution only. The latter criticism is wrong; Google Analytics hasn’t used…
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The Google Analytics Report I Check Daily
Google Analytics offers a ton of useful information; we can understand nearly any part of our mid-funnel digital marketing business with it. However, the price of a massive buffet is too much choice: what should we pay attention to frequently? What should we pay attention to less frequently? One of my favorite quotes from Seth…
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Google Data Studio Part 3: Dashboard Strategic Best Practices
In this multi-part series, we’ll take a tour through Google’s newest digital tool, Data Studio. We’ll look at it from a marketer’s perspective, including: What Data Studio is and isn’t How to set up your first Data Studio dashboard Dashboard strategic best practices Part 3: Dashboard Strategic Best Practices Before starting a dashboard in Google…
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Video: How to Set Up Accelerated Mobile Pages Google Analytics Tracking
Accelerated Mobile Pages promise to make our sites faster and cleaner on mobile devices. Until recently, we had no way of tracking our visitors to these mobile-specific pages. Google just published its AMP Analytics integration instructions, so if you’ve got a WordPress site, watch this video. You’ll transform your regular WordPress blog into an AMP-ready…
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Find out what’s working via Google Analytics Spreadsheet Add-on
One of my favorite “secret” measurement tools is the Google Analytics Add-on for Google Sheets. This powerful tool lets you extract up to 10,000 records from your Google Analytics account in spreadsheet format. Your data becomes available to you in many rows and columns which you can slice and dice to find the insights you…
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Use Google Analytics to find digital walking paths
There’s an urban legend from several different colleges about how a school didn’t pave sidewalks in the first year of its new construction. The school simply let students wear paths in the grass and then paved over where they walked later, in order to create a campus that felt the most natural. While apocryphal, the…
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Upgrade to Google Universal Analytics
As promised, I migrated my website to Google’s new Universal Analytics and I thought I’d share the experience. I’d encourage you to do the same. It’s as completely painless a process as you can imagine, because Google cleverly revamped the Analytics interface a while ago. As a result, there’s not much new to learn –…