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Setting Goals for 2018 [Our Actual KPIs at Jeffalytics]

January 11, 2018 by Jeff Sauer Leave a Comment

Today, I am going to publicly share with you our traffic and list growth goals for Jeffalytics in 2018.

Not only that, but I’m also going to share with you where I go to keep track of these results, and a plan for how I think we’ll reach these goals.

When I first got started blogging at Jeffalytics, way back in 2012, I had an idea to transparently publish my traffic goals on the blog each year. For the first two years I published these reports, but fell off the wagon in recent years. For reference, here are my previous goal setting posts.

  • 2013 Goal Setting
  • 2014 Goal Setting
  • 2014 Recap

Now that my audience has grown, I wanted to do a new goal-setting post. I think it will help many of you understand how I approach using analytics in growing a business.

Sound good? Let’s do this!

Traffic growth goals

Traffic at Jeffalytics has been flat for the past several years, and that’s something that I aim to change in 2018. Why is it flat? Because I have published less often, and the posts I do put up are not substantial, search optimized content.

Well, that’s going to change in 2018, particularly with the 90 day challenge. We will be publishing more often, and the content will have search engines fall back in love with me.

We’ll be bffs in 2018, to the tune of doubling our time together (twice as many sessions).

Yes, my goal is to double website traffic at Jeffalytics.

See my specific traffic numbers here.

List growth goals

Our list growth goal is very similar to the traffic growth plan. We plan to double our email subscribers in 2018, through a combination of optimizing email capture rates, and growing our baseline traffic numbers.

See my specific list goals here.

Our plan for accomplishing these goals

To accomplish our goals, we will be undertaking four major projects in 2018, one per quarter.

The first quarterly project is our 90 Day Challenge, which we announced last week. This challenge involves publishing 90 videos + 90 blog posts in 90 days. It’s going to be a lot of work (it’s already shaping up to be the most ambitious project I’ve ever been involved with, and we haven’t released a video yet), which means that it will deliver awesome results.

It’s the things that take 3x the work that deliver 10x results.

Each quarter after that, we will take on another project, and will let you know when those are ready to rock through this email newsletter.

So if you want to see the full plan for how we will get this done, check out our latest blog post on Jeffalytics.

And leave a comment or word of encouragement. I’d love to hear from you.

Filed Under: Google Analytics

Holiday Campaigns – Two Quick Analytics Reminders

November 23, 2017 by Jeff Sauer Leave a Comment

This week I just wanted to send a quick reminder – make sure you properly track all of your upcoming campaigns (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Holidays, etc.) in your analytics tools or e-commerce systems.

Of course, for students of Analytics Course, this reminder is probably obvious. But it’s always good to remember the fundamentals.

There are two reasons why this reminder is so important right now:

1) Most companies are only focused on the execution of the promotion. They don’t even consider their future measurement needs.

Instead of tagging campaigns, they want to get the product mix right. Or they are focused on making sure their carts work for the 70% off deal (but only until X quantity is ordered) that they forget to build a system for tracking success.

2) Someone will ask how the promotion went, and you need to have answers.

Yes, even if it’s not “required” to have a measurement plan for a promotion, people will want answers once the holiday buzz wears off. Companies will want to know if Black Friday was profitable. They will want to know what messaging worked best. They will want to do better next year.

They will want analytics. And if you don’t have anything to share? It won’t do a lot of good to blame your project plan (or lack thereof).

So here are two quick things you should track in any campaign you run this holiday season (and year-round, of course).

1) Use UTM/Campaign Links Liberally

Every email, paid ad, remarketing ad, promoted post, social message, etc. should have at least 3 UTM parameters attached to them so you can track activity in Google Analytics.

Source/Medium/Campaign at a bare minimum. Source is who sent the campaign (likely your company name if it’s a promotion you’re running). Medium is how you sent the message. Campaign is the name of the campaign you sent (this helps distinguish between each message).

Bonus points if you use the UTM Content variable to distinguish the text used in your ads.

Why do this? Because these simple parameters are required for any level of meaningful traffic tracking or insights into your campaign performance.

Pro tip: DO NOT use UTM parameters for your internal campaigns. It messes with your reports and causes inaccurate visitor and session counts.

2) Use promotion codes or unique products to track Black Friday or Cyber Monday deals

Another obvious tip. If you want to easily track success of a promotion, make the data easy to gather. If you create a new product in your shopping cart for the promotion, pulling sales data will be very easy. You can even tie this out to your UTM campaigns in Google Analytics ecommerce reports.

Creating a unique promo code works as well. Last year I tracked Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales by offering a unique code. It’s easy to pull a sales count by simply seeing how many people redeemed that code.

It’s something I had to do today, actually, as we discussed whether we would have a 2017 Black Friday Promotion. On our internal planning call, I said “let me look at the coupon code to see how we did last year.”

It took 3 minutes to find the answer, and we had a projection within 10 minutes.

That’s so much better than saying “how did we do last year?” and hearing crickets.

Those are your two easy tips for tracking promotions this holiday season

It’s simple. It’s easy. And you will thank yourself next year.

Filed Under: Google Analytics

Why the New Google Analytics User Management Policy is a Terrible Idea

October 10, 2017 by Jeff Sauer Leave a Comment

The other day I noticed something in Google Analytics that might be worthy of your attention. It’s a change to the way Google displays users in an Analytics account. Here’s the notice, which you may have seen in your account as well.

This message seems harmless at first glance. You may even be excited about this change if you only have “user” level access to an account. But I’m actually quite frightened by this extra bit of transparency that Google has introduced. Let me explain.

First of all, most Google Analytics accounts have more than one user accessing them. The more traffic a website gets, the more people who want access to the data. I’ve worked on websites that get 5 visitors a day, as well as websites that get over 1 million visitors a day, and every time there are multiple users who can access the Google Analytics account. And most of the time, they aren’t aware of each other.

This is because Google Analytics only shows you the names of other users in an account when you have permissions to add/remove users from an account. If you don’t have this level of access, then you can’t see who else has data access. All you see is the ability to remove yourself from the account.

This makes sense. User information is kept on a “need to know” basis, which is the perfect policy for account security, privacy and confidentiality.

But it is also the source of frustration for many users, especially those who lose access to their Google Analytics account or want to make changes.

Transparency makes communication easier?

If you read the official Google announcement of this change, they state the change is designed to “foster collaboration among users.”

That sounds simple enough. But when you read between the lines, you probably wonder “why now?”

To me, it feels like Google is sick of answering support tickets from people who don’t know how to increase their level of access. They are passing that burden on to the people who own the Google Analytics account.

And in a way, that’s justified. Their support team can only answer so many “OMG, I can’t login to my account. PLZ HELP ME!” emails before making a proactive change.

To get an idea of the volume of support tickets Google receives each day, consider this: I added a chatbot to Jeffalytics for a few weeks. After scrolling half way down an article, the bot would engage a visitor and offer to help.  I received around 100 inbound messages. The majority of them were asking me how to recover their Google Analytics account!

Many thought I worked at Google. Multiply that by a billion, and you can estimate Google’s actual support volume.

This change puts communication burdens onto the account administrators. And for some organizations, that’s ideal.

But my experience says this is going to be a disaster.

I don’t like this change: here’s why

My experience is from an agency environment. I worked with hundreds of clients, and most clients had many agencies working with them. I have had access to thousands of Google Analytics accounts over the years.

Who knew I had that access? Just the company’s administrators and me (and students from my in-person courses, because I didn’t have the ability to edit out my account list like I do in Analytics Course).

That’s how it should be.

Nobody should know that I have access to an account, and I shouldn’t know that others have access to the account either.

Why? Because information in the wrong hands becomes political.

Agencies doing a bad job? A client brings a consultant in to audit their work. With this change, the agency would be tipped-off that to that fact.

Employee doing a bad job? This change will make them paranoid.

Internal politics? This “transparency” will only lead to more misunderstanding.

There are many scenarios where it’s nobody’s business who has access to a Google Analytics account. There are few scenarios where a situation becomes better with this knowledge in the open.

This policy change is forced transparency, in a world that doesn’t need it.

A handful of companies may welcome this change. But most will be worse off with this level of transparency.

Google’s created a problem, and the workaround is not very practical

At this point, I should be clear on something from Google’s official announcement. The level of transparency they are implementing is not for your entire account, just most of it. I’ll do my best to explain without making your head explode.

Google Analytics has accounts, properties and views. I drill this into everyone’s head in Analytics Course, so you are probably quite aware of this fact.

This new transparency means that a user who has “read-level” access to a view can see everyone else who has access to that view. AND everyone who has access to the parent property. AND everyone who has access to the full account.

So basically, they can see everything and everyone in the account. The solution around this would be to create multiple views, and control access to users at a view level.

You could create a view called “Employees” and one called “Agencies” and one called “Super secret shady stuff” that nobody knows about. Then you can control access at a view level.

But you probably already know of the problem with this approach. If you created all of these views for this purpose right now, you would have no historical data to make them worthwhile. You would be creating a carbon-copy of the exact same account, with no utility beyond obfuscating the names of users.

You’d put a bigger burden on Google’s servers, reporting services, and support teams.

All to avoid forced transparency nobody even knows they need

This isn’t sitting right with me.

But I have an obvious alternative solution: allow transparency for anyone with edit and collaborate privileges, but leave read only access alone.

The reasoning is simple: if you trust someone to edit or collaborate in your account, you trust them to see who they are collaborating with.

If you only trust someone to read and analyze your data? Then you probably don’t trust them all that much. They should be kept at arms length.

Simple solution to a problem that nobody knew they had. Except for all of those people blowing up my chat-bot over the past few weeks.

What do you think? Am I blowing this out of proportion?

Would love to hear your thoughts on this change below.

Filed Under: Google Analytics Tagged With: user management

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