Personal blog of Prasad Ajinkya
Some months back, I noticed a trend in the Google Analytics data of all the sites I monitor. It was Referral Bots leaving behind a spammy domain with the hopes of the webmaster will visit that domain out of curiosity. I wrote about this Black Hat tactic of Referral Bots as well.
Continue reading “A new player in Referral Bots – social-buttons.com”
Completed the Mobile App Analytics Fundamentals course by Google in the Google Analytics Academy. I think it’s a fantastic idea to create small courses on all the new product features to educate the large community of users using this free tool.
Google has launched yet another course for understanding how Ecommerce data can be reported and used within Google Analytics.
The course builds on top of the other two courses, and starts simple. However, it builds onto some of the more complex features that Google has rolled out with Analytics. This goes to show how much of product education and support might be required for users to truly appreciate a product.
Google launched one more basic course for anyone who wants to roll up their sleeves and get into analytics. If you want to become an awesome data driven developer/growth hacker, then I would strongly recommend this course. It really opens up your eyes to using the platform not only for web analytics but also as a data storage and analysis tool for mobile and offline events.
This time around I was a bit more serious about the course, and gave it a decent shot. The test is fairly simple, however going through all the video provided is strongly recommended! I found some of them very useful.
If you are a frequent visitor of Avinash Kaushik or Justin Cutroni’s blog, then you would breeze through this course and enjoy it. If not, then boy do I have this awesome course for you to attend!!
Google Analytics blog came out with a brilliant new post which every marketer should read. This at the same time when they launched their new course and a shiny new infographic to go alongside. I have included the infographic on this blog, however do follow the link, it should convince you to sign-up for this course.
For students or career seekers, these courses are a god send since they also provide you with a certificate. Do not miss these courses folks!!
Google Analytics updated their UI and offered a new feature for all the free users. This lets a site owner see the interests of the site’s audience. What this means, is that from now on you can actually track what kind of an audience is viewing your site, and what kind of content are they going to like.
For those of you who haven’t enabled Audience Interest yet, here is the help document.
Check out the Interests screenshot of this blog
A quick look will let you know that the top segment of visitors are technophiles, so how can we use this data to drive higher engagement or even traffic to the site?
Now that you know what kind of an audience frequents your site, write more of that type of content. I used to post frequently about Games, however the data that you see before you clearly suggests that I should write more on Tech, Updates in Technology and even Arts!!
Having a site with a broad interest range has it’s traps, this tool will help you get out of that trap and identify your niche … a niche which clearly works for you!
Look at the Age Demographic of your site. Correlate that with your Audience interests. Is the copy you are using on the site apt for this demographic?
Would you be a grammar nazi on a blog where a young audience base visits to read about the games you have played? I guess not. Would you watch writing the f*** word when you know your audience is 35+ yrs and the main interest group is Finance? No again. Would you swear at badly written code with sample snippets and screenshots on a blog such as this? Yes!!
Sometimes in creating content for our site, we do not necessarily close the feedback loop that is available by such data. This is a big mistake that serious content marketers need to avoid.
A high traffic site needs to do two things –
Easier said than done! Getting new visitors is the simpler part, there are multiple ways for doing that … social sharing, optimizing content, buying clicks, etc. However, now that the user has visited your site, how do you keep them coming back?
Well, keep writing about subjects which are of interest to the user, and do that on a regular basis! I was tempted to blog about multiple games that I have been playing in the past week, but the data that I have seen shows that I need to focus more on articles such as these instead of Gaming … oh, well!!
This tool can also be used to generate relevant traffic for your site. If you can find sites which have similar audience profiling, then you can start connecting with that target audience either by Display Ads or by participating in that community and developing your cred. Google has a great product to do this, it’s called Doubleclick, which lets you plan your Display Campaigns properly.
However, using this tool you can also find sites which have similar interest profiling for their audience. Once you have narrowed down to a list of 10-15 sites, go ahead and see how to acquire traffic from them! If the audience cannot come to your site, then you might as well take the site to them!!
This tip is useful for you especially if you have configured Goals on Google Analytics. Goals could be a simple metric such as getting more than 3 Pageviews per Visit, or it can be a purchase on your online store.
If you are familiar with the standard set of Advanced Segments that Google Analytics has, then you would know that there is a Converters segment. This is a segment of all the traffic that converted to a Goal that you have configured in Analytics.
Obviously, increasing the number of Goals would be a metric for you and your content strategy. The Converters segment alongwith the Audience Interest report will help you find the audience which is converting the most.
Digital marketing is moving closer to traditional marketing paradigms (the 4Ps, Audience Demographics). The good part about this is that data is immediately available as opposed to conducting surveys which consume a lot of time and money (and of course a few summer interns!).
What about you, how useful do you find the Audience Interest report in Google Analytics? Do share your thoughts!
Google launched a course last month on Digital Analytics Fundamentals. It’s a great course for all people who are interested in learning the basics of Digital Analytics. If you are interested in web and love data analysis, then I would recommend that you sign up for this course and go through the simple set of videos.
The course also had a assessment test with a Certification of Completion (yes, I graduated .. yayy!). The test is fairly simple if you go through the course or have been working with Google Analytics. However when you have a busy work week, you often tend to procrastinate these things … such as I did for the last day!!
However, this is a great starting point for anyone who wants to learn Web Analytics.
And, here’s my certificate of clearing the course! Unfortunately, this is linked to the Google Account that gives the test, so it’s not available to view for the public!