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How to Get Google Analytics Certified: Step-by-Step

Published December 14, 2018

Every digital agency and internal marketing group needs a Google Analytics expert. Since you are reading this post, you’ve probably decided that you want to be that expert. Or maybe you’ve been “volunteered” for that role by your team!

Either way, congratulations! Mastery of Google Analytics is an important milestone in becoming a proficient digital marketer. A good start is to become certified by passing the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) exam. In this post, we walk through the process, step by step, of getting Google Analytics certified.

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Digital Marketing Reports - The Key Components

Published December 11, 2018

Whether you do digital marketing for an agency or an internal team, you probably need to create monthly reports summarizing the performance of your campaigns. These reports showcase the successes of your marketing strategies and highlight where improvements can be made. There are tons of marketing metrics out there-- it’s hard to know what to include in your monthly report and how to display the data. And the results themselves might get lost-- even if you’ve massively improved campaign performance -- if you don’t present the data in a way that your team comprehends and engages with.

In this post, we’ll look at some of the key components of digital marketing reports that add the most value for your clients and colleagues.

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How to Share Access to a YouTube Brand Account With Your Agency

Published November 20, 2018

Businesses of all sizes are expanding their use of YouTube videos for marketing and customer support. But, how do you share access to your business YouTube account with other people who work with you - especially your agency?

 The key is to use a Google Brand Account to host your YouTube videos.  Brand Accounts are Google’s solution for businesses that need to share and collaborate on managing a brand across Google properties.

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What Are The Right KPIs for Your Business Objectives?

Published April 12, 2018
In geometry, a square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not a square. In digital marketing, all Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are metrics but not all metrics are KPIs. Misunderstanding that logical distinction might be the most common reason for poor KPI selection.
 
Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean you should if it doesn’t directly relate to a current business goal. Moreover, for any business goal, there might be more than one suitable KPI that speaks to it.
 
That’s why KPI selection is a critical part of digital marketing strategies that has a direct impact on effective reporting. In fact selecting and showcasing the right KPIs may be more important than any other factor except for data accuracy. You are what you measure.
 
Choosing and measuring the right KPIs enables and encourages campaigns and initiatives that lead to sustainable growth and digital success. However measuring the wrong KPIs, may incentivize the wrong types of outcomes for long term success.
 
If you are struggling with choosing the right KPIs for your business, don’t worry, it’s a process! In this blog post, we are going to cover a very basic set of five questions you can ask yourself about your website and organization that will help you identify which KPIs are right for you, and more importantly, why.
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Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

Published March 7, 2018
Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) is a term you encounter all the time when working on advertising optimization. There is even a Google Analytics metric named ROAS and you can use Target ROAS as a bidding strategy in AdWords.
So, what is ROAS exactly? To start, the ROAS formula is defined as the ratio of the revenue generated by advertising over the cost of that advertising.
 

ROAS measures how much of your advertising spend you got back in revenue. ROAS is never a negative number because in the worst case your ads produced 0 revenue and ROAS would be zero.

So, what's a good ROAS? The answer is that it depends on the operating margins, cash flow, and other aspects of your business. In this post, we examine how to know what your ROAS needs to be and how to use (and not misuse) ROAS as a guide to managing your advertising spend.

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Understanding Direct Traffic in Google Analytics
14 April, 2015 | Blog
When the client first came to you, you talked up the value of Google Analytics. You emphasized the importance of seeing where your traffic was coming from. You went on and on about how Google Analytics can show traffic sources to pinpoint whether people came from search, social media or a specific site referral, and how valuable this data was. You sold them on it, so much so that your client looked forward to receiving that first report, the magical day when they would finally understand where visitors were coming from.
But then the report came, and it looked like this:

 

 

It showed that 10% of your client’s traffic came from “(direct)/(none)”. What does this label mean? How do you explain Direct traffic to your client? Better yet, how do you explain “none”?
Let’s take a closer look at understanding Direct traffic in Google Analytics and how we can address it with clients.
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Understanding the Referral Report in Google Analytics
11 March, 2016 | Blog
Digital marketers spend a lot of time focused on PPC and SEO campaigns in order to drive desirable traffic to a website. The phrases we’re ranking for and bidding on get meticulous attention, so much so that we often forget about some of the other ways that visitors find us.

We put a tremendous amount of the effort we put into reviewing organic search data and PPC campaign performance in analytics. But how closely do we monitor referral reports?

If that’s not a channel you review regularly, you may be missing out on seeing traffic that is coming directly from links you’ve obtained around the web, local business listings, news mentions, and more. Many times, links are only considered as a means to an end, a metric that Google uses in determining how to rank sites in the SERPs (search engine results pages). But the fact is, many of a site’s links may be directly contributing to its traffic.

In this article, we’ll review how to look at referral reports in Google Analytics, and some of the many ways to use that data to better inform your web marketing decisions.

 

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Evaluating Google Analytics Traffic by Hour & Day
2 June, 2016 | Blog
Remember how your mom told you not to stand too close to the television because it might hurt your eyes?

The same rules can apply to data. If you’re too close, you may miss the patterns and trends that are crucial to understanding your website’s performance. You can’t judge a site’s performance looking at data in the bubble of a single day, you must consider any day’s traffic compared to the days before and after.

Google Analytics makes it fairly easy to analyze trends over long periods of time. But it also allows you to stand right in front of that TV, to look at more granular levels of time, right down to the hour.
There’s a better way to get that close to the data, without burning your retinas. We’ll cover how to analyze traffic effectively in today’s post.
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