Dave Collins – Google and the Leatherman Model: It’s All in Your Hands – MicroConf Europe 2014

The MicroConf Europe 2014 Hub Page has notes on all the talks and additional information.

Webseite: SoftwarePromotions.com
Twitter: @thedavecollins

• You are looking for hacks that save you time
  • Don’t get a leatherman and then only use one function – Google Analytics is a leatherman
• Best partnerships are when both parties gain equal value from the relationship

Google Analytics

• Most data is useless, because it does not tell you what to do in your business
• Data is not insight – Data is not knowledge
• “Don’t fill up on cheaper meats…”
• You are limited by time & ability to absorb

Tip #1: Actionable Data

• Focus on landing pages with high bounce rates

Tip #2: Tap into Google’s intelligence

• Intelligence Events
  • You are getting more conversions from country X
  • You are getting dramatically less traffic from SEO
• “Hidden” above the usual items in the navigation

Tip #3:

• Audience –> Behaviour –> Engagement has useful analytics

Tip #4: Trends

• Sometimes you need to accumulate data (week/month instead of day views) to see stuff

Tip #5: Segment

• “Top 10 countries by visitors” is useless
• “Top 10 countries by visitors with a page depth > 3” is way more interesting
• “Acquisition by referrer” is not interesting, “Acquisition by referrer with more than 30 seconds on site” is

Google AdWords

Tip #1: Let your competition guide you

• Target mentions of your competition (e.g. forums where your competition gets mentioned)

Tip #2: Remarketing the way it should be

• Because your prospects get distracted by other stuff
• Just do it – it is easy to setup
• Do it better –> Brennan’s talk
  • Exclude users who already converted

Tip #3: Use your competition with auction insight

• Shows you
  • how often you compete with your competition
  • How often you rank above/below them

Google Webmaster Tools

Tip #1: Data Highlighter

• Tell them what elements on the website are the author, the title, blog post image
• Improves the accuracy of information displayed in the SERPs

Tip #2: HTML Improvements

• fix the issues Google tells you about
• potentially increases traffic to your website

Tip #3: Search Queries

• sort by impressions
• average position on page 38? You should create better content for that

Tip #4: Links to your site

• Who is linking to you? to which page? with which anchor texts?

Tip #5: What Google thinks you are about

• Content keywords
  • don’t just look at what is there – look at what is missing
• download the data, because you get more data in downloads

Tip #6: Show Google what you just did

• “Fetch as Google” to see how it renders and then submit the URL to the index
  • e.g. really good blog posts
  • don’t use unless you have to/it is valuable (e.g. complete redesign)

-Christoph