Digital Strategist by heart. I do SEO and Analytics
How should you structure your Google Analytics account? We have all heard it a million times when it comes to AdWords accounts and ads – but Analytics? And why should you care? Because it could save you potential headaches and, the best part, makes implementations and debugging a walk in the park. Let me break down how Google Analytics Views should be set up.
I love Google Analytics. It is my favorite weapon when it comes to measuring success and knowing what is going on with my clients websites. But there is one thing that keeps on destroying my, yes my, data. Bad bots and stupid spiders. If you’re using Google Analytics you should log in to your account right now and navigate to Administration followed by Reporting View Settings.
Check the Bot Filtering box which enables Google Analytics to exclude all hits from known bots and spiders. BOOM!
I’m not saying that this is a perfect solution. There is a lot of bots and spiders messing up a lot of peoples data and we need to take action before our ones and zeros turns into soup (no one likes soup – unless it is a steak called soup). After enabling Bot Filtering, review you referrals. If you see bad bots or stupid spiders skewing your data, it is time to make some neat segments that you can use when you’re looking at historical data.
Our digital marketing strategy is… Our digital audience is moving towards… Brand X just launched a digital magazine…
Just stop it.
I’m telling myself to stop calling it digital. It’s 2014 and everything is digital. If it is not, it is furniture, buildings or food. The rest should pretty much be online and connected. Made available.
2013 was the year of the real-time analysts. Analysts making the content economy move forward from the digital sphere of awareness and social awkwardness. Thanks to savvy growth hackers our content marketing selfs turned the content economy upside down on its head.
Or…
Buzzwords exist with the sole purpose of intimidation. Or better yet, to make people outside of our own business or field of knowledge feel small. Make us stronger, wiser, more advanced and, hopefully one day, thought leaders for a buzzword.
Screaming Frog is a very handy tool that I use for multiple purposes. One of them is verifying if the Google Analytics Tracking Code, or GATC, is properly installed on the website I’m working with. Let’s go through how with a couple of easy steps.
It’s fun to measure things. The downside is that people and services know that we like to measure things and, therefore, they want to charge us for every small bit of data we would like to collect. And as we are a curious kind, mankind, we want to measure and learn from every aspect of life. As I’m into web analytics, I sometimes think about what I would like to measure instead of what I actually CAN measure. And as I use SlideShare from time to time, without paying for a PRO Account – I still want some kind of idea of what’s happening over at SlideShare.
Enter, StatCounter.
I’ve been working with the Searchmetrics Suite for over a year now. There are a lot of SEO tools and services online, but Searchmetrics have been one of the few I really liked and then spent time working with. For an SEO, the Suite is really good. I want to show you the features that make the hair on my arms rise and my heart pound a little bit faster.
I will go through the free version of Searchmetrics Suite so that you can start using everything, right away.
Today I’m down in Helsingborg (Sweden). I’ve been speaking about Google AdWords and Facebook Ads at Mindpark for about 30 companies from my point of view when it comes to search engine marketing: Just push your ads live already.
Before you get me all wrong and start ranting about how it takes a minute to set up, years to learn and a lifetime to master, relax. I told the audience that as well. But my point was, and is, that a lot of businesses needs a kick in the butt. A push in the right direction. Get up, get going and then get stronger – wiser – better.
I love social media. It enables me to connect with industry peers, find new interesting connections and keep up with, pretty much, life in general. But I don’t understand this whole follow me – follow you – follow back – thing we’ve got going on. I got fed up with the discussion of the most followers equals the bigger man/woman. Mainly because your following count can be played like a game and the real game is called engagement. Which doesn’t come with buying followers. Numbers.
When I started using social media I connected with everything. I was following a brand selling smoked fish in Canada and connecting with random strangers on Linkedin. Until I realized that my whole network was a clutter. And I had to change that. The following step was to clean up my social media profiles.
My god, that took ages!
Is SEO a good career choice as of late 2013? I would say so. SEO is still very important and more brands understand that they need to be digital if they want to succeed. I see a shift where, before, marketing teams had one or two “digital marketers” and now it’s getting more and more integrated. Everything is more or less connected to the web these days. From sales, customer services to the CEO tweeting.
And all types of content needs to be optimized. Because search engines are still (or should be) the largest traffic source for almost any website out there!
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