Google Analytics and targeted campaigns.

Hi, all! This week, I have some interesting projects going on, and I wanted to share them with you and invite you to join me.

On Monday, July 22nd (and 29th), 2013, I’ll be starting a two part class on Google Analytics at Princeton Public Library. This is my first opportunity to talk publicly about the power of GA, and I’m really excited. This series will be focused on getting started for beginners, but if you are like me you know that even seasoned experts learn something new in a beginner’s class, so please come out and join us from 7-8:30 in the Tech Center at PPL.

Google Analytics v2.0 (Photo credit: vrypan)

Google Analytics is an insight engine. By adding a little bit of javascript to each of your pages in your site, you tell Google to track activity on your site that can lead to insights about your content. Because you can learn where your audience is viewing your content from, you can tell if you need to focus more on local content or remote content. Because you can tell what your most popular content is, you can focus on the issues that matter to your audience most. Because you can track which pages are being visited specifically, you can learn how effective a particular link or advertisement is or not. These are just a few of the things that you can do with Analytics, but over the next two weeks we will learn many more.

I’m using Analytics in work with a client right now in order to tell if a particular ad campaign is effective or not so that they can focus their money and energy in the most productive way. If we are using two different methods or advertising channels to get people to take the same action, let’s say to click a link or watch a video, we can tell easily after a week of clicks which method was more effective and by how much. We could also look at visits in two comparative time periods to see if one method was more or less effective than another during a particular month or season. Outdoor advertising might not work as well as other methods during a very cold winter month, for example. With Analytics, we don’t have to guess or assume that to be true, we could deduct that from the data.

If this is interesting to you, please consider yourself invited! If you’d like to see what other classes and content I like to teach, or if you’d like to have me come to your organization to speak or consult, please visit the Presentations and Topics page.