Analytics Blog Posts

Analytics

If you’re not in GA all day every day, it can be difficult to know where to look for things. And it’s even more intimidating given that Google changes their navigation pretty regularly and renames their reports on occasion too. Here are a couple tried and true methods I’ve found to get what I need… Read More

Analytics

Marketing reports damage my car. Sometimes, when I walk out of a meeting, usually a quarterly or monthly There-Is-A-Very-Important-Person-In-The-Room kind of meeting, I head to my car. I close the door. I crank up the radio. Then I punch the roof as hard as I can while screaming “fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.” Most of the time, that’s because… Read More

Analytics

Any marketer worth their salt knows how critical it is to measure the right performance metrics and to be able to trust that data implicitly. Nowhere is this more true than in digital marketing, where the expectation is for (nearly) flawless measurement across users, sites, campaigns, and devices. In doing dozens of web analytics audits… Read More

Analytics

NOTE: This is not legal advice. We are not lawyers. It’s also not the only thing you’ll need to do to reach GDPR compliance for your business. Cookie consent is only one portion of GDPR compliance. Please consult legal counsel before implementing this solution. Another note: This solution works for cookies fired from inside the… Read More

Analytics

Imagine with me for a minute you’re being asked to give credit for a marketing result: A download of a killer asset, a lead form fill, a meaningful sales opportunity. What’s “fair”? First touch? Last touch? Well, I hope one of the two, because that’s what’s being sent to Salesforce by default from your web… Read More

Analytics

Here’s the latest excerpt in the upcoming analytics e-book on cross-channel opportunity gap analysis. Another reminder: We’re using Google Analytics and a few other third-party data providers here to unearth long-term SEO opportunities and PPC opportunities, but the tool you use isn’t as important as the process of discovering what channels and tactics work for… Read More

Analytics

This is another excerpt from an upcoming e-book on finding actionable, cross-channel opportunities in your data. We use Google Analytics (GA) for this, but you can use any platform. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: The tool you use isn’t as important as the discipline of combing through data regularly and finding something… Read More

Analytics

If you want a play-by-play guide on how to use Google Optimize, Google has a whole help center for that. But if you’ve been using Google Optimize for any time at all, you’ve probably noticed there are a lot of lessons that fall outside the purview of that help center. And you have to learn… Read More

Analytics

This is an excerpt from a forthcoming analytics e-book from Portent entitled Finding Cross-Channel Opportunity Gaps & Closing Them. Ever wonder how effective (or ineffective) your marketing channels are today? Do you get the feeling your paid initiatives are wasteful? Do you have a hunch your content calendar isn’t getting you anywhere organically? Do you… Read More

Analytics

Let’s be honest, Google Tag Manager can be difficult to understand. I remember the first time I tried to set up GTM. I thought it would be like any other Google product I worked with in the past —straightforward and intuitive. Oh boy was I wrong! In what became a cautionary tale, long before Portent… Read More

Analytics

What’s a good conversion rate? I get this question a lot, and not just about conversion rates. I always say “better than what you have now.” That earns me a glare that could sterilize cockroaches. At the same time, I shove toothpicks into my toes to dull the sharp pain this question causes in my… Read More

Analytics

What would ya say, that ya do here? If the answer is online marketing in any way, shape or form, you know the importance of having analytics configured correctly on your site. If you need help convincing anyone, take them over to Portent’s handy Marketing Stack Explainer. But wait, there’s more! Whether you’re in direct… Read More

Analytics

This is a companion blog post for my talk at MozCon Local next Tuesday on Powerful Ranking Reports using Google Data Studio. I won’t go into nuts and bolts here — I’ll save that for those who can make it out to the show. But I will go into the new frontier for ranking data… Read More

Analytics

Data is great……sometimes. Data can also be maddening and make you want to go all Office Space on the nearest printer. These days businesses have an abundance of data at their fingertips. That makes knowing how to sift through information an essential part of every marketer’s existence. Personally, Google Analytics (GA) has been making my… Read More

Analytics

UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module. The name is a holdover from back in the day before Google Analytics (GA) was around. Urchin was a web analytics program acquired by Google back in 2005, which marked the beginning of GA. UTM codes are simple snippets of code appended to the end of URLs that communicate… Read More