Nic Tustin, BA Econ

Google Analytics

Nic Tustin — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 19:35:33 +0000

Use Digital Analytics to Grow Your Business

Digital analytics can help you understand how your customers are using your app or website so you can better meet your business and marketing goals. Digital analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing your website or app data. The main purpose of digital analytics is to help you understand your progress toward particular business objectives. First, you’ll need to:

Define a target metric needed to be successful.
Decide which business objectives you want to focus on.
Identify the metrics that drive the chosen objective at each stage of the customer journey.

How Google Analytics Handles Data

To start sending data to Google Analytics, first connect your website or app to Analytics. If you have a website, implement a tag on your website. If you have an app, use the Firebase SDK. Analytics collects and stores user interactions with your website or your app as events. Events provide insight into what’s happening on your website or app, such as page views, button clicks, user actions, or system events. By collecting data as events, Analytics combines app and web data in a common language in your reports. Many basic interactions with your website or app are automatically collected as events in Google Analytics. For example, the first time a user visits your website, the property logs this action as a first-visit event.

Create Your Google Analytics Account & Property

When you set up your Google Analytics account, you can use Google Analytics for website data, app data, or both together. The structure of your account is up to you, but it’s important to understand your options so you set up your account in a way that matches your business needs.

Setting Up Your Property

After you name your new account and property, you’re asked what your business objectives are. Selecting the best business objective for your business automatically creates reports relevant to your current business needs. You can also choose Get baseline reports that generate several life cycle reports, which may or may not be specific to your current business needs. Remember, you can always change and customize these reports later to make them even more specific to your business needs.

Set Up Your Website for Data Collection

After you create a Google Analytics account and property, you’ll create your data streams. If you have a website, you’ll create a web data stream and connect your website to Google Analytics using a tag. To connect your website to Google Analytics, create a web data stream. That generates a new measurement ID and tag for your website. The tag is a small piece of JavaScript called the Google tag, and it needs to be added to every page of your website. To add this tag to your website’s code, you have a few options:

Provide your measurement ID or Google tag to your website builder.
Use Google Tag Manager to add your Google tag.
Manually add your Google tag to your website’s code.

Using Google Tag Manager

If you already use or want to use Google Tag Manager, this should be the way you add your Google tag to your website. Google Tag Manager is a user-friendly solution for tag management. It allows you to efficiently add and update your website tags in a web interface to better understand conversions, site analytics, and more — without the need for web development experience. This makes tag updates much simpler for anyone who’s not familiar with coding their own Javascript. It works with both Google and non-Google tags.

Manually Adding the Google Tag

If you manage your website’s code, you can manually add the Google tag to your website by copying and pasting it into the code of every page of your website immediately after the element. Once added, this establishes the connection between your website and your new Analytics property and starts collecting data. Use this method if the following things are important to you:

You’re a web developer and prefer hard-coding your tags directly on your website instead of deploying them through an interface.
You don’t have time or resources to invest in ramping up a tag management system.
You only plan to set up a few simple tags on your website and don’t plan to edit or deploy new tags often.

Adding Your Measurement ID or Google Tag to a Website Builder

If you use a website builder or content management system, such as WordPress or Shopify, to manage your website, your method may vary. For some website builders, all you need to do is copy the measurement ID and paste it into your account. Other website builders require more work to add the code. When you’re creating a new web data stream and reach the step to install your Google tag, choose Install with a website builder or CMS to find specific instructions for your platform.

Enhanced Measurement for Web Data Streams

Finally, “enhanced measurement” is a setting that automatically measures many website interactions without requiring updates to your code. Keeping this option enabled lets you measure common web events like pageviews, scrolls, file downloads, and video views. You can always turn this option off later if you no longer want these events collected. You can also individually turn on or off specific enhanced measurement events at any point without needing to edit your code.

Set Up Your App for Data Collection

After you create a Google Analytics account and property, you’ll create your data streams. If you have an app, you’ll create an app data stream and connect your app to Google Analytics using the Firebase SDK (software development kit). Once you’ve created a Google Analytics account and property, you’ll create your data streams. If you have an app, you’ll create an app data stream and connect your app to Google Analytics using the Firebase SDK, or software development kit. Regardless of the operating system your app runs on, an app data stream connects your app to Google Analytics using the Firebase SDK, or software development kit. When you create an app data stream, Analytics creates a corresponding Firebase project and app data stream, and it automatically links the Firebase project to your property if your project and property aren’t already linked.

Measuring App Events

With the Firebase SDK in place and your app data stream created, several events are collected automatically, like first opens, in-app purchases, and screen views. These are common across apps no matter what the app is. You also have the option to collect any recommended events that are relevant to your business. Use the logEvent method to define and collect up to 500 different event names, with no limit on total volume.

Confirm Data Is Being Collected

Now that you have at least one data stream collecting data, let’s confirm data is successfully being collected using the Realtime report. In your Google Analytics property, choose Reports then Realtime. The Realtime report displays user activity during the past 30 minutes. If no data is showing, you can open your website or app so that you’re an active user. If data is being collected, you should see close to immediate real-time activity in this report.

Don’t See Any Data?

The Realtime report shows you data as people use your website or app. If you just installed Google Analytics for the first time, you must wait up to 24 hours for Google Analytics to process the data from your website or app and then display the data in the Realtime report. Additionally, when you don’t have a lot of users on your website, Analytics may apply thresholds to protect the identity of individual users. You can check if a threshold was applied using the icon next to the name of the report, Realtime overview, at the top of the page:

If you see this icon, then no thresholds were applied.
If you see this icon then a threshold may be applied. Click the icon to open the dropdown and check.

Verify Your Website Tags with Tag Assistant

You can also use Google Tag Assistant and the browser extension, Tag Assistant Companion, to determine whether your tag is implemented correctly. Tag Assistant is a debugging tool, and the optional (but recommended) extension provides additional debugging information when using Tag Assistant.

Manage Account Access & Settings

When adding new users, remember the structure of a Google Analytics account and that roles are inherited by default. For example, when you give a user a role at the account level, that user has the same role for all the properties in that account. Or you could give that user access only to a specific property by adding the user at the property level.

User Roles

Administrators: Full control of the Analytics account. They can manage users (add or delete users, assign any role or data restriction) and grant full permissions to any user, including themselves.
Editors: Full control of the settings of the account and its properties. But editors can’t manage users.
Marketers: Can create, edit, and delete audiences, conversions, attribution models, events, and lookback windows.
Analysts: Can create, edit, and delete certain property assets, like explorations. They can also collaborate on shared assets.
Viewers: Can see settings and data, and they can change the data they see in reports, like adding comparisons or adding a secondary dimension. Viewers can see new reports and collections in the left navigation, but they can’t make changes to the navigation.

Data Restrictions

Cost metrics from online advertising and marketing investments are unavailable.
Revenue metrics from customer purchases are unavailable.

Power Your Reports with Dimensions & Metrics

Events are the backbone of how Analytics collects and processes data. To give you the full picture of how customers interact with your business, Analytics also collects and measures a few pieces of data along with events.

User properties are attributes about who’s using your app or website that can help you better understand segments of your user base, like geographic location or device used.
Events are user interactions with a website or app that can be measured, like a video view.
Event parameters are additional pieces of information sent with events that can further specify an action the user took or add further context to the event, like the name of the video or how long the user watched it.
A conversion is an event that you consider important to your business, such as a purchase or a download. You may want to share conversions with your marketing platforms, like Google Ads.

Dimensions & Metrics

Google Analytics collects and compiles all this data into reports. To represent this data in these reports, Analytics uses dimensions and metrics. So what are dimensions and metrics? Dimensions answer the question “who, what, or where?” while metrics answer the question “how many?” For example, dimensions answer the question, “What device is most commonly used?” while metrics answer the question, “How many users visited my site yesterday?”

Navigate Your Google Analytics Account

Home: You’ll first land on Home, where you’ll find information that’s relevant to you and your property. The cards become more personalized as you continue using Google Analytics.
Reports: Go to Reports to view ready-made reports that answer common questions about how your users are interacting with your app or website.
Explore: Go to Explore to use advanced analysis techniques that go beyond the standard reports to help you uncover deeper insights about your customers’ engagement.
Advertising: Go to Advertising to analyze, understand, and improve your online advertising efforts.
Admin: Go to Admin to manage your account, property, events, and user settings.

Switch Between Accounts & Properties

If you have more than one account or property, you can switch between them from any page. Use the property selector at the very top of the page to choose from any of your existing accounts and properties.

Search for Reports & Insights

Want to find a specific report or insight? Use the search box at the top of your Google Analytics account to ask your question, such as “How many people came to my website last month?” When you select the search box, you’ll see recent searches and reports you opened as well as suggested queries you could ask. Start typing a new search or choose one from the drop-down items.

Manage Your Google Analytics Events

Events provide insight into what’s happening on your website or app, such as page views, button clicks, or user actions. Many common events are automatically collected once you connect your website or app to Google Analytics. If you have enhanced measurement enabled in your data stream settings, your property collects even more events automatically without any additional code needed. Remember, Analytics collects and stores user interactions with your website or your app as events. Event parameters are collected as well, which gives additional information about each event. For example, when Analytics collects a page view event, it includes the URL of that page as a parameter for that event. Events provide insight into what’s happening on your website or app, such as:

Clicks and page views on your website
Installs and opens on your app
User engagement and conversions on either platform

Default GA4 Events

Page Views: This event fires when the page loads
Scrolls: This event fires when the user scrolls to within 10% of the bottom of the page
Outbound Clicks: This event fires when the user clicks a link that fires a page on a different domain
Site Search: This event fires when the user performs an internal site search
Video Engagement: This event fires when a user starts, progresses, or completes a video
File Downloads: This event fires when a user downloads a file on the page
Form Interactions: This event fires when a user starts to fill in or completes a form

Recommended Events

Recommended events are those you implement, but which have predefined names and parameters already recognized by Google Analytics. Adding these events to your website or mobile app helps you measure additional behaviour as well as generate more useful reports.

Custom Events

A custom event is one whose name and parameters you define. A custom event lets you collect specific business data that Analytics doesn’t otherwise automatically collect or recommend.

Dimensions & Metrics

Remember, Google Analytics collects and compiles all the data from events, their parameters, and user properties into reports using dimensions and metrics. Dimensions answer the question “who, what, or where?” while metrics answer the question “how many?” Events and parameters that are automatically collected already have associated dimensions and metrics that are created and available in reports. For example, if someone visits a page on your website, the event “page_view” is automatically collected. Along with the event, the parameter “page_location” is also collected, which tells you the URL of the page.

Custom Dimensions & Metrics

When you implement new and custom events and their associated parameters on your website or app, you start sending this new data to Analytics. In these cases, you must create dimensions and metrics that correspond to the data so they’ll be available in your reports. That’s done using custom dimensions and metrics.

Manage & Filter the Data You Collect

Cross-Domain Measurement

To avoid a break in reporting at this step, Jason can implement cross-domain measurement to report on the user journey across both websites. To implement cross-domain measurement, Jason starts in the Admin menu and selects Data Streams. Once there, he opens his existing web data stream and chooses Configure tag settings, then Configure your domains. He then creates a rule to include the domain where payments are processed.

Unwanted Referrals

Next, Jason wants to analyze the sources of his website traffic to see where customers are coming from before reaching his website. These sources – other websites that send customers to Jason’s website – are called referrals. When looking at the referral data, Jason sees some popular fitness blogs, as well as a few social media websites. But Jason also notices a lot of traffic coming from a website that he uses to manage his customers’ accounts. He doesn’t want to see these domains as referrals in his Analytics reports. Unwanted referrals are segments of traffic that arrive on your website through sources you don’t want included in your data, such as third-party tools that you use to manage your website and customer transactions. On Jason’s site, if someone is trying to log into their account but forgets their password, they’re taken to a third-party site to recover the account and password. Since this traffic isn’t referral traffic, Jason can create a rule so this website won’t be used as a referring website. To create this rule, Jason starts in the Admin menu and selects Data Streams. From there, he chooses his web data stream, Configure tag settings, and then List unwanted referrals. He then creates a rule to include the domain where customer accounts are managed. Custom dimensions and metrics are like default dimensions and metrics in your Analytics account, except you create them yourself.

Data Filters

Finally, Jason wants to make sure the data he’s analyzing only includes users shopping on his website, so he wants to exclude traffic from his own employees and website developers. This can be done using data filters. A data filter lets you exclude incoming event data from being processed by Google Analytics. This setting doesn’t affect historical data, which still shows on your property. After creating a data filter, you won’t see that event data going forward. This has a permanent effect; filtered data never reaches Google Analytics, so you won’t be able to recover it later. If you remove the filter, future data will be processed, but you won’t be able to recover what was already filtered out. To create a data filter, Jason again starts in the Admin menu and selects Data Filters. Next, he chooses Create filter and selects between the following two options:

Developer Traffic: Filter out activity from developers who use debug mode.
Internal Traffic: Filter out users with an IP address or range of IP addresses.

Manage Your Google Analytics Conversions

A conversion is any user action that’s valuable to your business; for example, a user purchasing from your store or subscribing to your newsletter.

Conversions

When you want to measure the conversion rate, first make sure the relevant user interaction is being collected as an event. This could be an existing or automatically collected event, or it could be a new custom event you create. After creating the event associated with the conversion, mark this event as a conversion by going to the Admin menu and selecting Events. There, you’ll find a table with your existing events and an option to toggle on Mark as conversion next to each event. If the event hasn’t yet occurred, it might not show up on the table right away. If that case, go to Admin, then Conversions. Select New conversion event, and enter the exact event name you want to mark as a conversion.

Understand Google Analytics Reports

When you want to analyze your data, start by visiting Reports in Google Analytics. In Reports, you can quickly check your core business metrics, then dig deeper into the areas you want to explore. When you first set up your Google Analytics property, you were asked to choose your business objectives. Based on what you chose, certain reports were created and shown by default in your reports navigation panel. But you can adjust these reports and add collections of reports at any time. To customize the report collections shown, you need the Editor role on the property. Once in Reports, at the bottom of the navigation panel, select Library. From there, add pre-created collections or create a new collection. Each property can have up to seven collections.

Get to Know the Predefined Reports

Let’s examine the default reports that appear when you visit Reports in Google Analytics.

Reports Snapshot

In Reports, you find the Reports snapshot that contains cards providing an overview of various data points and insights.

The Realtime Report

Use the Realtime report to monitor activity as it happens. This report displays events that took place within the last 30 minutes. The card-based layout is designed to quickly answer important questions about how users are currently interacting with your business. In this report, you can:

See whether a one-day promotion is driving traffic to your site or app
Monitor the immediate effects on traffic from a blog or social network post or tweet
Verify that the tracking code is working on your site or app

The Rest of the Default Reports

The rest of the default reports follow the same basic format, starting with an overview report and then a few detailed reports. To access these reports, select the links on the left side of the Google Analytics interface. By default, here are the reporting categories that will likely appear, along with a brief explanation of the questions they answer:

Acquisition: Where are your customers coming from?
Engagement: What content are your customers engaging with?
Monetization: What’s your customers’ shopping activity?
Retention: Are your customers coming back?
User Attributes: Who are your customers?
Tech: What technology are your customers using?

Filter & Compare Data in Reports

Remember, reports are made up of dimensions and metrics. Use the dimension values to filter and customize your data and gain specific insights.

Filter the Data You See

Report filters let you control what data is shown in your reports. They can help you understand your data, find trends, and drill into the details you care about. For example, use a report filter to only look at data for users in specific regions while the rest of the data stays hidden. To add a report filter, choose Add filter + near the title of any details report. Then create filter rules based on your dimensions.

Compare Data Next to Each Other

Within your reports, you can compare your data using the Add comparison tool at the top of each page. For example, to compare how users on different devices interact with your website or app, select Add comparison, and build a comparison for two device categories: desktop and mobile. You’ll find data for each comparison as well as for all users. Add a comparison to any of your dimensions, both default and custom. Or combine multiple dimensions in a single comparison.

Customize & Share Reports

As you know, you can filter data and add comparisons to get deeper insights into your data. If you customize a report and want to share it with someone else who has access to your Google Analytics property, choose the share icon in the upper right to generate a link to your report.

Use Explore for Advanced Analysis

Explore Your Data

Reports in Analytics can help you answer many common questions about your data. But if you want to go deeper, Explore contains a collection of advanced techniques that go beyond the standard reports to help you uncover deeper insights about your customer’s behaviour. Select Explore in the left navigation to go to Explorations.

Get to Know the Explorations Page

The Explorations page is the main landing page for your explorations. From here, you can create new explorations or use one of the available templates. You can also visit explorations you created in the past as well as those that other users shared with you. Explorations are private by default. If you’re the creator, only you can view and edit them unless you choose to share.

Exploration Templates

Explore is a powerful set of audience discovery and comparison tools. Easily drag and drop your dimensions and metrics to create explorations, and switch between a number of powerful techniques to see instant visualizations of your data. Let’s examine some of the templates and techniques available when creating an exploration.

Free Form

The free form presents data in a cross-tab layout, where you can arrange the rows and columns and add metrics you’re most interested in. You can also apply different visualization styles, including bar charts, pie charts, line charts, scatter plots, and maps. Can’t find the variable you want? Select the plus icon to view the full list of dimensions and metrics available.

Funnel Exploration

Funnel exploration lets you visualize the steps your users take toward a key task or conversion. This tool helps you identify sequences of key events and understand how your users navigate these steps. Learn where users enter your funnels as well as where they drop off.

Path Exploration

Path exploration lets you understand how people progress from one stage in the customer journey to the next. Like funnel exploration, path exploration explores the steps users take through your site or app. But while funnels only analyze a single, predefined path, path exploration is free-flowing and can follow any number of undefined paths, even ones you weren’t aware of or didn’t intend. For example, it could uncover looping behavior, which may indicate users becoming stuck.

Save & Share Explorations

When you first create an exploration, only you have access to it. If you create an exploration you want to share, choose the share icon in the upper right. If someone else shares an exploration with you, you have access to view it but can’t edit it. If you want to edit the exploration, create a duplicate by finding it on the Explorations homepage, choosing the three-dot menu in the row for that exploration, and selecting Duplicate. Duplicating an exploration creates a private copy that you can modify as needed.

Why Data Might Look Different Between Reports & Explore

Usually, you should find the same data in both Reports and Explorations. But sometimes you may notice differences in the data shown in each area. Here are a few reasons why:

Metrics and dimensions: Some metrics and dimensions available in Reports aren’t supported in Explore.
Processing time differences: If you set your date range to include data from the past 48 hours, you may notice slightly different results depending on when the data is processed.
Sampling differences: Reports are unsampled, meaning they’re based on 100% of the available data. Explorations, on the other hand, may be based on sampled data if the dataset is very large. If you do encounter sampling in Explore, try shortening the date range to reduce the impact.

Answer Business Questions with Standard Reports

Google Analytics offers a powerful set of reports that give insights into how users interact with your website or app so you can make informed marketing decisions.

Understand Users, Sessions & Events in Reports

There are three important metrics that form the foundation for reporting in Google Analytics.

Users: A person who visits your website or app
- Users represent the people interacting with your website or app. Analyzing user data lets you understand your audience demographics, interests, and how those users engage with your content over multiple sessions.
- To use an analogy, think of visiting a library. The user is the individual patron visiting the library.
Sessions: A group of user interactions within your website or app that take place within a given time frame
- A session groups a user’s interactions over a certain period, helping you understand the sequence of actions they took during a single visit.
- In this example, a single user has a total of three sessions: two sessions completed on a laptop device and one on a mobile device.
- Returning to the library analogy again, the session is the patron’s entire visit to the library, from entering the building to leaving.
Events: A specific interaction or occurrence on your website or app. For example, a pageview or transaction
- Event is the most basic unit of measurement. It represents the individual interactions users have with your website or app.
- In this example, across the three sessions, several events take place. For example, when the user adds an item to their cart, makes a purchase, or adds something to their favourites.
- Using the library analogy again, an event is the specific action the patron takes during their library visit: browsing bookshelves, checking out books, using the computers, etc.

Use Reports to Answer Common Questions

Google Analytics offers various methods to better understand user site or app engagement, campaign effectiveness, and optimization strategies so you can identify better results for your digital marketing efforts.

Use Acquisition Reports to Understand Site or App Traffic
- Google Analytics lets you know where website traffic comes from and how it changes over time. By analyzing acquisition reports, for example, you can identify significant changes, such as a 70% increase in cross-network traffic, and investigate the underlying reasons for these changes.
Analyze Campaign Performance Using Sessions to Improve Results
- Analyze the performance of different marketing campaigns by examining metrics like engaged sessions and key events. By comparing metrics across campaigns, you can identify strengths and weaknesses, such as lower engagement and fewer key events, and make informed decisions to optimize campaigns for better results.
Explore Optimization Strategies to Maximize Campaigns
- Leverage the insights from Google Analytics reports to optimize your campaigns. For example, optimize landing pages, consider reallocating budget between campaigns, or refine campaign audiences to improve overall performance and maximize campaign impact.

Use Key Reports to Understand How Users Interact with Your Business

Google Analytics has reports that you can use to understand how users interact with your site or app. The following are some examples and the questions they can help answer.

Acquisition Reports

Analytics contains premade acquisition overview and associated detail reports:

Traffic reports help you understand where your website and app visitors are coming from, and whether the user is new or returning
User acquisition reports help you gain insights into how new users find your website or app for the first time.

They answer questions like:

Are your marketing efforts attracting new users to your website or app?
How are new users finding your website or app for the first time?
Are your re-engagement campaigns bringing people back?
Should you continue with or adjust your marketing strategies?

Engagement Reports

Analytics contains a premade engagement overview report summarizing your engagement data as well as associated detail reports. This collection of reports can help you compare key engagement metrics over time, understand which pages and screens people visit, and identify the features they interact with. The engagement reports answer questions like:

Which pages on my site get the most traffic?
How has engagement changed since making improvements to a page?
Which pages drive the most conversions?

Visualize Your User Journeys in Explore

Advertisers want deeper insights into consumer behaviour to make better business decisions. Explore offers different exploration techniques to help map your customer’s journey.

Explore Data in More Detail

Explore is a powerful set of audience discovery and comparison tools that goes beyond standard reports to help you uncover deeper insights about your consumer’s behaviour. Easily drag and drop your dimensions and metrics to create explorations and switch between a number of powerful techniques to see instant visualizations of your data. When you want to examine your data in more detail, you can use Explore to:

Quickly perform ad hoc queries
Easily configure and switch between techniques
Sort, refactor, and drill down into the data
Focus on the most relevant data by using filters and segments
Create segments and audiences
Share your explorations with other users of the same Google Analytics property
Export the exploration data for use in other tools

Free Form Exploration

Use free form exploration to identify anomalies in website data, investigate their causes, and take corrective action. This leads to more accurate and meaningful insights into website performance.

Free form presents data in a cross-tab layout where you can arrange the rows and columns and add the dimensions and metrics you’re most interested in. You can also apply different visualization styles, including bar charts, pie charts, line charts, scatter plots, and maps.

If you’ve defined custom dimensions or metrics for your business, as with standard dimensions and metrics, these will also be available in Explorations.
- For example, a game developer might use a recommended event that tracks when a user spends virtual currency. They could also define a custom dimension or event parameter for a level. Then, they could use a free form exploration to learn the level players tend to spend the most virtual currency on, which could be an opportunity to facilitate in-app purchases or in-app advertising.

Free form exploration can help answer questions like:

How do I identify anomalies on my website or app?
How can I compare multiple metrics side by side or in a way that is most visually appropriate for the business?

Funnel Exploration

Use funnel exploration to understand user progression and track how visitors move from one step to another on a website, like in a checkout process. This allows for a deeper understanding of user behavior and can inform optimization strategies, such as focusing on a particular device category driving more engagement, like desktop traffic or mobile.

Funnel exploration helps you visualize your users’ steps toward a key task or conversion. This tool helps you identify sequences of key events and understand how your users navigate these steps. Learn where users enter your funnels and where they drop off. Funnel explorations answer questions like:

How are users progressing through a specific set of criteria or steps, such as a checkout funnel?
How do prospects become shoppers and then become buyers?
How do one-time buyers become repeat buyers?
Which device categories (desktop, tablet, mobile) should we focus on?

Path Exploration

Use path exploration to analyze how users navigate through different pages or events on a website. This insight can help optimize the customer journey and drive more users towards desired actions, such as entering a conversion funnel.

Path exploration helps you understand how people progress from one stage in the customer journey to the next. Like funnel exploration, path exploration shows the steps users take through your site or app. But, while funnels only analyze a single, predefined path, path exploration is free-flowing. It can follow any number of undefined paths, even ones you weren’t aware of or didn’t intend. Path explorations answer questions like:

How do users move through various pages or events on your site?
What paths or funnels are common behaviors?
How do I find the top pages new users visit after landing on the homepage?
How do I discover actions users take after an app exception, for example, after an app crashes?
How can I uncover looping behavior that may indicate users are becoming stuck?
How do I determine the effects of an event on subsequent users’ actions?

Cohort Exploration

A cohort is a group of users who share a common characteristic. For example, all users with the same Acquisition Date belong to the same cohort. Cohort exploration allows you to explore the behavior of groups over time on your app or website. Cohort explorations answer questions like:

What groups of users are getting app errors on specific devices?
How is product quality affecting user retention?
How many users experienced an error and subsequently uninstalled your app?

User Lifetime

The user lifetime technique shows how your users behaved during their lifetime as customers of your site or app. The user lifetime technique can help you identify:

The source, medium, and campaign that drove users with the highest lifetime revenue, as compared to revenue only for the selected month
The active campaigns that are acquiring users who are expected to be more valuable, with higher purchase probability and lower churn probability, as calculated by Google Analytics predictions models
Unique user behavior insights, such as when your monthly active users last purchased a product from your site or when they were last engaged with your app

Segment Overlap

The segment overlap technique lets you compare up to 3 user segments to quickly see how those segments overlap and relate to each other. This can help you isolate specific audiences based on complex conditions. You can then create new segments based on your findings, which you can apply to other Explorations techniques and Google Analytics reports. The segment overlap technique can help you answer questions like:

What’s the overlap of desktop users versus mobile users who subscribed to my site’s newsletter?
What’s the intersection of my Returning Users, Mobile Traffic, and High Spenders segments?

Use Key Events to Grow Your Business

With Google Analytics, you can monitor key interactions on your site that are having the most impact on your business so you’re better equipped to make strategic adjustments to target your audience.

Google Analytics Event-Based Data Model

Before learning about key events, it’s helpful to review how Google Analytics collects and reports event data.

Your website or app sends information about user interactions to Google Analytics, which are captured and reported as events.
- As a reminder, there are automatically collected events and events that you must take action to collect. See the About Events article in Resources at the end of this module to learn more.
Not all events are equally valuable to your business. In Google Analytics, you can mark important events, such as a newsletter sign-up, product purchase, or app download, as key events.
Measuring events as key events can help you identify opportunities to optimize your marketing and improve your site or app experience for these valuable actions.

Google Analytics Conversions are Now Key Events

Previously, important events that were marked as conversions in Google Analytics were measured differently from how Google Ads conversions are measured, leading to discrepancies between Google Ads and Google Analytics. From now on, events that measure actions that are important to the success of your business are called key events. These key events, when shared with Google Ads, will be considered conversions, facilitating more accurate performance measurement of ad campaigns and enabling better-informed marketing decisions.

How Can I Measure My Most Valuable Events?

To monitor specific events that are most important to your business, you can measure them as key events in Google Analytics. You can find key event metrics within Reports and explorations so you can better understand what’s driving the most value for your business.

Measure and visualize different interactions happening on your website or app

Google Analytics allows you to identify and measure specific interactions on your website or app through events. Key events, such as signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase, are particularly crucial as they represent valuable interactions that can be easily measured across various reports in Google Analytics.

Use key events to create conversions to maximize your overall strategy

By using key events to create conversions, you can track and analyze the performance of your ad campaigns, understand their impact on business value, and optimize bidding strategies in Google Ads.

Analyze key event metrics and learn what actions drive more value for your business

Key event data can be found in reports such as traffic acquisition as well as pages and screens. This enables you to analyze channel-specific or page-specific contributions to key interactions on your site or app. You can use the behavioral data from your key events to improve the user experience across your websites and apps.

Use key events to enhance your business

To track the actions most critical to your business, set them up as key events in Google Analytics. Key events highlight important interactions on your website or app, such as creating an account, submitting a request for a quote, or making a purchase.

The following are some business questions that key events can help answer:

How can I measure an action that’s particularly important to the success of my business?
Is my site experience effective at driving key events?
What are the actions that lead to a purchase event?
- For example, how do actions like form submissions or pdf downloads ultimately impact purchases or sign ups for my business?
Are social posts effective in driving key events?
How do I measure the total revenue from purchases, in-app purchases, subscriptions, and ad revenue?

Collect eCommerce data

If you want to mark eCommerce events as key events, note that these events require additional implementation. To collect eCommerce data, you need to add eCommerce events to your website or app or in your Google Tag Manager container. Because these events require additional context to be meaningful, the events aren’t sent automatically. Once you add the events and someone uses the website or app, you’ll start to see eCommerce data in Google Analytics. You can also add parameters to eCommerce events to provide context for the ways in which customers interact with the products or services you sell.

Items Viewed: The number of times a specific product has been viewed.
Items Added to Cart: The number of times a specific product has been added to a cart.
Items Purchased: The number of units for a single item included in purchase events.
Item Revenue: The total revenue from items only minus refunds, excluding tax and shipping.
Purchase to Add-to-Cart Rate: of the people who added a specific item to their cart, what % actually purchased it?(lead to purchase rate)
- Formula = Purchase (less)/add-to-carts (more) x 100
Purchase-to-View-Rate: of the amount of times an item was viewed – what % of people converted? (Overall item conversion rate)
- Formula = Purchases (less) / Item Views (more) x 100
View-to-Add-to-Cart Rate: Of the times an item was viewed how many times was it added to the cart (demonstrates intent/can be used for re-targeting purposes)
- Formula = add to carts (less) /views (more) x 100

Customize the Reports on Your Property

Google Analytics offers a comprehensive suite of tools for tailoring and customizing reports that cater to your unique business requirements, allowing you to make informed decisions using deep data insights.

Customize Reports to Highlight Data Important to Your Business

With custom reports, you can create a curated view of data in your Google Analytics property. Each property can have up to 150 custom reports. Customizations include:

Changing the dimensions
Changing the metrics
Changing the charts
Saving a filter to the report
Creating a summary card
Linking or unlinking the report

Customizing reports vs. creating explorations

Let’s compare customizing reports, which tailor familiar metrics to your needs, and creating explorations, which actively analyze and discover deeper insights into customer behaviors.

Customize a report

Customize existing reports to highlight information important to your business beyond what’s surfaced in the built-in reports.
You can save a custom report for information you return to and review frequently.

Use an exploration

Use an exploration for more active analysis and to uncover deeper insights about your customers’ behavior.
You can use explorations to create ad hoc queries and quickly drill down into the data.

How can I answer X using a custom report?

You need admin- or editor-level access to customize detail or overview reports. As such, while following along in the demo account, you won’t see the customization options shown in the video. However, you can customize reports in your account, provided you have admin or editor permissions.

Edit existing reports

Customize existing reports by accessing the report customization screen, where you can modify dimensions, metrics, and chart types according to your preferences. For example, in the traffic acquisition report, you can easily change the primary dimension from session default channel group to session source/medium and adjust chart types to suit your analysis needs.

Customize reports to address specific needs

Google Analytics offers a range of built-in reports, but sometimes, the questions or insights you seek may require customization. The result is a tailored analytics experience to focus on the metrics and dimensions that matter most to your business, enabling more informed decision-making and deeper insights into performance.

Create custom reports from scratch to meet specific analysis requirements

This process involves selecting relevant metrics and dimensions, including custom ones if necessary. For instance, you could create a custom report that includes metrics like sessions, total users, purchases, and total revenue alongside a custom dimension like member level to analyze user behavior based on membership tiers.

Use customized reports to enhance your business

Some business questions that can be answered using custom reports include:

What is the conversion rate for specific events or key events?
Which marketing campaigns contribute the most to key events?
How are our products performing in terms of views, clicks, and purchases?
How many customers come to our site via organic search and buy online?

Customize a report

Your web team is rolling out an updated user experience for your website with the aim of increasing engagement. You want to track how engagement increases across all your traffic sources. Let’s learn how we might customize the Traffic acquisition report to see how the average engagement time per session changes following the updated site experience.

Customize report: Select the pencil icon to open the Customize report screen.
Report template: While we could create a custom report from scratch, we’ve opted to customize it from the Traffic acquisition template.
Report filter: As the updated user experience is only on our website, we’ve included a filter for Platform exactly matches ‘web’ to ensure we’re only looking at the impact of these changes on web traffic.
Charts: For this particular report, using a customized report allows for hiding the Bar Chart in favour of an expanded Line Chart to assess the impact on engagement.
Average engagement time per session: We’re using the Average engagement time per session to evaluate whether the site changes resulted in a change in user behaviour.

Create Collections for Your Business

Collections help you organize reports into meaningful groups so you can make the best decisions for your business.

Collections Organize Business Insights for You and Your Team

Report collections are a set of predefined reports. Google Analytics users can create their collections to include any report. By customizing collections and topics within collections, reports will be customized for all those with access to the account. Report collections are filtered based on the information provided during setup. Some predefined reports include the app developer collection, games reporting, and life cycle.

App Developer Collection

Provides summaries of key metrics about the apps you connect to Firebase and automatically appears when Google Analytics for Firebase SDK is added to a connected mobile app.

Games reporting

Provides game-specific information to measure customer behavior across the user funnel and automatically appears when you have at least one app data stream associated with a games app in the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store.

Life Cycle

Provides an overview of each stage in the customer journey from acquisition to retention. All Google Analytics properties start with this collection by default.

How can I create collections?

You need admin- or editor-level access to create collections. As such, you won’t see the collections options shown in the video in the demo account. However, you can create collections in your account, provided you have admin or editor permissions.

Organize Your Existing Reports

Collections in Google Analytics provide a means to organize reports into meaningful groups based on subjects, intended audiences, or other criteria. This organization helps users navigate through reports more efficiently, especially when dealing with many reports.

Create & Edit Collections

Editors or administrators can create collections by selecting predefined templates or starting with a blank collection. They can add or remove reports, rearrange them within topics, and save the collection. Collections can be updated with new reports or modifications as needed.

Publish Collections

Once a collection is created or updated, it must be published to make it available to users with access to the Google Analytics property. Publishing makes the collection live and accessible in the leftmost navigation menu for all users.

Enhance Your Business with Collections

Some additional business use cases for collections include:

Organizing and sharing meaningful reports with various teams
- For example, group reports with insights specific to marketing or product teams.
Organizing by specific geographies
- For example, if you have key markets for your business that you regularly report on with various cuts of data.
Organizing by important Google Analytics user behaviors
- For example, you might have a collection of reports looking at form submission behavior related to your various on-site forms, such as users’ requests for more product info or newsletter signups.

Group Users With Segments and Audiences

Using segments, you can view and analyze a specific set of users from your target audience who are most valuable to your business.

Analyze customer groups with segments

A segment is a subset of your Google Analytics data that can be used in Explorations. Segments allow you to understand the unique behaviors and needs of different customer groups, leading to a deeper understanding of your customers. Here are a few common use cases.

Identify your most valuable customers

Segments let you isolate groups like customers who spent over $100 or customers who made repeat purchases. This helps you understand who your best customers are and their behavior — such as the content or items they view and the items they purchase — which helps you refine your marketing efforts.

Find website strengths and weaknesses

Segments can reveal which parts of your website perform well for different audiences. For instance, you might see that visitors from social media convert better on product landing pages designed with eye-catching visuals.

You could use segments to evaluate your purchase funnel. For example, you can look at users who added high-value items to their basket and compare those who ultimately purchased with those who abandoned the cart.

Tailor marketing campaigns

A segment focused on users who came from paid search can reveal how ads impact user behavior on your site. This information can help you refine the ad message or landing page to improve conversion rates.

Create and apply segments

Segments are created and viewed within Explore. They allow you to analyze groups of users, sessions, or events based on the characteristics you define — for example, sessions from organic search or users who made a purchase. Once created, you can apply segments to your explorations and quickly analyze different aspects of your data.

Within Explore, you can compare user segments to quickly see how those segments overlap and relate to each other. This can help you isolate specific audiences based on complex conditions, such as the intersection of new users, purchasers, and a summer promo campaign.

Using segment overlap to draw insights

With the segment overlap technique, you can compare up to three user segments to quickly see how those segments overlap and relate to each other. With the aforementioned example in mind, let’s see what insights you can draw using this technique.

You can compare lines one and two to see that while New Users who saw the summer promo did purchase, more purchases came from those who saw the summer promo that were not new users (i.e returning users). With this insight, you might consider adjusting this summer promo campaign’s targeting to focus on returning users. You might also consider evaluating how this summer promo campaign compares to other campaigns in terms of the breakdown of purchases between different device types to further refine targeting.

Defining audiences

Audiences are groups of your users who share the same attributes. You can share audiences with the advertising products you use, like Google Ads, to market to specific groups of users.

Audience

In Google Analytics, an audience is a group of users from your site and/or app who share one or more characteristics you define and can be created from scratch or from a segment you’ve already created. For example, audiences may be based on users who’ve generated similar behavioral data or who share demographic or other descriptive data (e.g., same age group, same gender, or were acquired by the same campaign).

Anytime a user visits your site or app, and their behavior and/or descriptive data match your audience conditions, then that user is added to the audience. Analytics backfills audiences with up to 30 days of data, if that data is available. If you’ve already had users who fit your audience definition during the last 30 days, then your audience will be populated with users right away.

Audiences can be shared and activated on ad platforms like Google Ads and Display & Video 360. You can also use audiences in reports and in comparisons and explorations to understand how different audiences engage with and behave on your sites and apps.

Predictive audience

A predictive audience has at least one condition based on a predictive metric. Analytics generates predictive metrics by modeling the data you collect (if you collect the required minimum amounts of the necessary data) and predicting which of your users will behave a certain way. The predictive models evaluate your data to figure out things like which users are likely to make a purchase, which users are likely to stop using your site and/or app, and how much revenue users are likely to generate.

Predictive audiences are helpful when you’re trying to figure out whom to spend your marketing budget on — anybody who’s ever made a purchase or just the users who are more likely to make a purchase in the next seven days.

How can I view specific sets of users? Which are most valuable?

Use segments to analyze audiences and compare how differently they interact with your site or trends in behavior.

Create segments: Segments can be created from scratch or based on pre-built suggestions. For example, a segment for users who have previously purchased apparel items from a store can be created by selecting the Purchasers pre-built suggestion and adding a condition for item category containing apparel.
Build audiences from segments: Segments can be converted into audiences for ad remarketing or bidding purposes. This can be done by enabling the Build an audience option in the segment settings, specifying the membership duration, and saving the audience. Additionally, audiences can be created from selections in Explore reports or from scratch using the audience builder in the admin section.
Use audience triggers: Audience triggers are events that fire each time a user is added to an audience. These triggers can be set up to provide additional insights into user behavior, mark key events, or create conversions for Google Ads optimization.
Create audiences from explore reports and audience builder: Audiences can also be created from selections in explore reports, such as funnel abandonment segments, or from scratch using the audience builder. The audience builder allows for the creation of custom audiences based on specific conditions, such as users who triggered certain events and those who did not.

Use segments to enhance your business

The following are some business questions that segments can help answer.

How can I identify customers who are no longer purchasing in the same volume as they normally have because a competing business is offering the same type of product at lower prices?
How can I create a segment of users who visit certain pages so I can target just those users with a remarketing campaign?
How can I see a subset of users who have previously purchased or users who added items to their shopping carts but didn’t complete a purchase?
How can I see subsets of sessions originating from a particular campaign during which a purchase occurred?
How can I see what landing page and traffic source users who spent more than $100 came from?

Use Analytics Together with Google Ads

Using Google Analytics and Google Ads together can help you make more informed campaign and marketing decisions.

Link Google Analytics to Google Ads to make more informed decisions

You can link your Google Ads account to your Google Analytics property (including subproperties and roll-up properties) to see the full customer lifecycle, from how users interact with your marketing (e.g., clicking ads) to how users finally complete the key events on your website or app (e.g., making purchases, consuming content). By linking Google Analytics and Google Ads, you can use your Google Analytics key events to create conversions, which are shared between the two products for reporting consistency and bidding optimization. This facilitates more accurate performance measurement. The benefits of linking Google Analytics and Google Ads include

Cross-Channel Measurement: Measure the role of each channel on behavior, including key events on your site. This includes the impact of both your paid and organic marketing efforts. Further, Analytics supports cross channel attribution as a signal for ads bidding which can improve ROI. For example, attributing credit across organic search, paid search and referrals.
Detailed behavioral reporting: Understand detailed reporting on how users, from a given campaign, behave on your site or app. This allows you to optimize the user experience for customers who engage with your ad.
Unlocking powerful audiences for ads targeting: Linking enables the creation of highly targeted, powerful audiences based on specific user behaviors within Google Analytics, that you can then use to optimize ad campaigns and increase conversions.

Why and how do I link with Google Ads?

Maximize your marketing impact by linking Google Analytics to Google Ads. Watch this video to learn the benefits of linking and the steps to connect these platforms. You can optimize your marketing effectiveness by linking Google Analytics and Google Ads.

Complete the linking process: To link Google Analytics to Google Ads, navigate to Admin in Google Analytics, scroll down to Product links, select Google Ads links, then select the blue Link button. Choose the Google Ads account(s) you want to link, confirm the selection, configure settings, and select Submit. It may take up to 24 hours for Google Ads data to appear in Google Analytics after linking.
Access the advertising Section in Google Analytics: By linking Google Analytics to Google Ads, you can access the advertising section in Google Analytics to understand how users interact with your ads, track conversions, assess campaign performance, measure return on ad spend (ROAS), analyze attribution, and understand user journey paths.
Use Google Analytics data in Google Ads: Linking allows you to use Google Analytics data in Google Ads to inform and optimize targeting and bidding strategies. You can implement conversion-based bidding and audience remarketing based on Google Analytics audiences.

Link your Google Ads to your Google Analytics property to enhance your business

Linking your Google Ads to your Google Analytics property can help you answer business questions like “If I link Google Analytics to Google Ads, how can I:

Inform and optimize my targeting and bidding strategies?
Better understand how users interact with my ads and assess campaign performance?
Analyze the performance of my Google Ads conversions to make informed decisions?
Measure ROAS?
Analyze attribution and understand user journey paths?
Reengage users based on their behavior in my app or on my website?

Analyze Your Marketing Data in the Advertising Section

Using Google Analytics with Google Ads provides greater insights into your high-value user journeys.

Advertising section

If your property has product links with advertising or publishing tools such as Google Ads, Google Analytics has new reports and data that focus on advertising and publisher performance, including paid marketing conversions, attribution data, and more. This dedicated space in the Advertising section found on the left-hand navigation menu helps marketers monitor and analyze campaigns with efficiency.

The following reports are available in the Advertising section.

Advertising snapshot: The Advertising snapshot provides an at-a-glance view of campaign performance and customer journeys. Use these cards and reports to answer questions like:
- How many conversions did each campaign drive?
- What roles did prior referrals, searches, and ads play in the customer journey?
- How much time passed between a customer’s initial interest and their purchase?
Conversion performance report: Evaluate the outcomes of your marketing efforts with the Conversion performance report. This report shows all conversion counts and lets you select a Google Ads account and its conversions to evaluate performance across channels.
Attribution paths report: Attribution is the act of assigning credit to different ads, clicks, and other touchpoints along users’ paths. Attribution paths help you understand your customers’ journeys across app and web, and the value of each touchpoint along the way.
Attribution models report: Use Attribution models to compare the rules that determine how credit is assigned to touchpoints along users’ paths. Compare models side by side to see which best fits your unique business needs.
Planning reports: Observe channel reports from linked products to help plan your next bidding strategy. In these reports, you can:
- Understand historical performance across channels
- See more detailed data for each linked product
- Identify events you may want to use to create biddable conversions for ad campaign optimization
Publisher ads report: The Publisher ads report can help you understand how your ads are performing and monetizing on your site or app. This report shows ad exposure metrics and estimated ad revenue data.

When and why would I use the Advertising section?

The Advertising section can help you monitor key interactions on your site.

Access comprehensive reports and data in the Advertising section of Google Analytics: Analyze touchpoints and performance across advertising and publisher activities.
Use attribution modelling as a core tool for assessing marketing performance: It enables the assignment of credit for key events to different ads, clicks, and factors along users’ paths.
Understand customer journeys: Explore alternative attribution models, such as data-driven attribution, to understand how interactions at various stages of the purchase journey contribute to conversions. Visit the Advertising section to effectively attribute credit to marketing efforts and analyze customer journeys.

Use the Advertising section to enhance your business

The following are some business questions that the Advertising section can help answer.

How can I analyze my performance across different advertising and publisher activities?
How can I assess and attribute the marketing performance of specific ads?
How can I assess interactions at various stages of the purchase journey that contribute to conversions?
What campaigns are working and which channels are driving revenue?
What is driving people to subscribe to the app?
Which channels are driving conversions?
How much conversion credit does each dimension value receive over a selected date range?
How effective are my campaigns in driving key events?

Step 1: Advertising snapshot

You start with the Advertising snapshot report as it allows you to check your business metrics quickly and then dig deeper into the areas you want to investigate further.

Go to the Key events by Primary channel group (Default Channel Group) insights card as it gives you an overview of which channels are driving key events. You can see that users visiting your site directly and those arriving from organic search have driven the bulk of your key events in the year to date. However, select View all channels to dig deeper into all channels including the value of your paid ad campaigns.

Step 2: All channels

By selecting All channels, you’ll be taken to the All channels report, where you can look at the data in more detail.

The data visualizations, line, and bar charts show how much credit each dimension value (channel in this example) receives over the selected date range. As with other reports in Google Analytics, you can change the date range, key events, and apply filters.

Step 3: Key events by Campaign

You can change the dimension of the report from the Primary channel group (Default Channel Group) to the Campaign dimension to see how the specific campaigns you’ve run this year have performed and the key events they’ve driven. You could further refine by selecting a specific key event. Here, we’re looking at how these campaigns have driven purchases.

Step 4: Results and insights

The table shows data broken out by the selected Campaign dimension. By default, the report is sorted by campaigns with the highest number of key events. You can change this by selecting the down arrow next to one of the other metrics.

The top row of the data table provides an overview of how the selected key event(s) performed during the selected date range. It shows the totals for the following metrics:

Key events: The number of times users triggered a key event
Ads cost: The total amount paid for ads
Cost per key event: The total cost divided by the number of selected key events
Ads clicks: The total number of times users have clicked on an ad to reach the property
Ads cost per click: The average cost you paid for each click on your ads
Total revenue: The sum of revenue from purchases, subscriptions, and advertising
Return on ad spend: The revenue for selected key events divided by the total cost for ads

This allows you to see exactly how many key events a specific campaign drove as well as the cost and the revenue generated, making it easier to decide where to reallocate budget between campaigns.

Control How Data Is Used in Google Analytics

In today’s measurement landscape, businesses need to navigate new challenges to understand the complex, multiplatform journeys of their customers — all while prioritizing user privacy.

Manage how data is collected in your property

Rising consumer expectations and changing industry regulations have set higher standards for user privacy and data protection. This has led many businesses to revisit how they’re managing data in their Google Analytics accounts.

To help businesses manage this data, Analytics provides a variety of features and controls that allow customers to govern how data is collected, stored, and used – all of which can be adjusted at any time.

Control how data is used in Google Analytics

Let’s look at some key components of Google Analytics that allow you to measure unified user journeys across websites and apps while also keeping up with the evolving privacy landscape.

Data collection and privacy controls in Google Analytics

Let’s take a look at some of the data collection and privacy controls available in Google Analytics.

IP addresses: Google Analytics doesn’t log or store individual IP addresses, so there’s no need to change any settings.
Data retention period: Set the amount of time before user-level and event-level data stored by Google Analytics is automatically deleted from Analytics servers. The setting does not affect reports that rely on aggregated data.
Consent Mode: Once implemented, Google’s tags will dynamically adapt based on the consent status of your users, only using measurement tools for the specified purposes when consent has been given by the user.
Disable collection of Google Signals Data: You can enable or disable collection of Google Signals Data on a per-region basis. If you edit Google-signals settings and disable collection for a region, Analytics maintains any historical data you’ve collected, but no additional data is collected after the time of the change.
Granular location and device data: You can enable or disable the collection of granular location and device data on a per-region basis.
Ads personalization: Ads personalization can be controlled in Property Settings to enable or disable it for users from any supported countries and/or U.S. states.

Choose whether data is used for ads personalization

You can control whether data collected from end users for any property may be used for ads personalization via the advanced setting to allow for ads personalization.

To configure ads personalization settings, see the Advanced settings to allow for ads personalization article in the Resources section.

Property-level: In the property settings of your account, you can disable ads personalization for an entire property, which causes all incoming events for that property to be marked as not for use in ads personalization.
Country-level: If you need to set the ads personalization setting for your property at the geographic level, you can enable or disable this setting by country. In the United States, you can adjust the setting at the state level.
Event or user property level: For further control, you can adjust ads personalization for a specific event type or user property in your Google Analytics property. For example, exclude specific events or user properties from being used to personalize ads and only use that data for measurement purposes.
Individual event or session: You can manage whether an individual event or session is used for ads personalization. For example, to obtain consent before enabling the setting, you can dynamically disable ads personalization at the beginning of a session and on each subsequent event until consent is obtained.

The post Google Analytics appeared first on Nic Tustin, BA Econ.

Branding

Nic Tustin — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 15:08:45 +0000

What is Branding?

Branding is creating a unique identity for your business so that consumers associate your brand with your products or services. Strong brands go beyond products, selling experiences and ideologies. Everything from social media to packaging can reflect your brand. Stay true to your brand. Use clear brand standards that match your website, so that if a user clicks a CTA, their email experience will be seamless with their web or mobile app experience.

More than just a logo or name.
It’s about the perception a brand creates.
Differentiates the company from its competitors.
Creates customer loyalty.
Adds value.

What is a Brand?

A brand is the identity and story of a company that distinguishes it from competitors offering similar products or services. Branding aims to establish a strong presence in the minds of the target audience, making the company their preferred choice. Brands effectively communicate a company’s vision, clarifying its purpose and values. Furthermore, a brand encompasses the overall experience a person has when interacting with a business, whether as a shopper, customer, social media follower, or simply a passerby.

The Role of Branding

Brand Equity: Reinforces brand value through memorable, reliable experiences.
Differentiation: Helps the brand stand out from competitors in a crowded market.
Enhanced Recognition: Consistent branding builds consumer familiarity and trust.
Message Consistency: Ensures that every communication reflects brand values and personality.
Unified Brand Identity: Creates a cohesive brand image across all platforms.

Creating a Memorable Brand Name

Memorable: Easy to recall and recognize
Distinctive: Differentiates from competitors
Relevant: Reflects brand’s essence, values, or offering

Types of Brand Names

Abstract
Suggestive
Descriptive
Acronyms

Tips for Creating a Name

Think long-term and avoid trends
Consider pronunciation across languages and cultures

Branding vs. Marketing

Branding and marketing are both essential for business growth. Branding creates a company’s identity, while marketing communicates that identity to drive sales. As a business expands, both branding and marketing may develop strategies and tactics to support different goals. Branding efforts typically support the company’s story and identity, while marketing efforts promote products and customers to boost sales.

Branding	Marketing
Develops the brand identity	Develops campaigns that connect the brand to products, mission, and goals
Builds customer trust with story	Builds customer trust with actions
Strategies and tactics to support identity and story	Strategies and tactics to support products and campaigns
The story about why your company exists	Supports brand story with specific initiatives
Focus on how an audience feels about your company	Focus on what an audience does with your company

The Importance of Branding

Your organization’s brand is arguably one of its most important assets. It gives your business an identity, makes it memorable, fosters customer loyalty, and supports marketing and advertising efforts, while also instilling pride in your employees.

The post Branding appeared first on Nic Tustin, BA Econ.

Email Marketing

Nic Tustin — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 04:25:10 +0000

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing uses email to promote products/services and incentivize customer loyalty. It is one of the most effective marketing tools, extremely important to their overall marketing strategy. Almost all professional marketers agree it has an excellent ROI, and most customers prefer email over other communication forms. It can play a pivotal role in lead generation, brand awareness, building relationships and keeping customers engaged.

Advantages of Email Marketing

Email marketing can build audience relationships and drive traffic to your desired locations. You can segment your emails by demographics to send targeted messages. Additionally, email marketing software can run A/B tests on subject lines and calls to action and easily send out emails using templates.

Disadvantages of Email Marketing

While email marketing seems like the perfect way to reach out to customers, create new prospects, and grow important business relationships, there are some drawbacks. Here are some of the significant downsides to email marketing campaigns:

Spam: Many emails are never seen due to spam filters or are deleted by users.
Size: Large emails may not load, causing potential customers to lose interest.
Competition: Standing out amongst competitors may require additional investment.
Engagement: Maintaining audience engagement can be challenging.
Design: Emails may display poorly on different devices and operating systems.
Cost: Additional fees may be incurred for images or exceeding word counts.

Email Marketing Types

Email marketing encompasses various types, each with a distinct purpose and approach to audience engagement. By exploring these different types, you can develop the most effective email marketing campaign tailored to your company’s needs.

Confirmation Emails

Confirmation emails are sent to users who have recently signed up for email newsletters or made an online purchase for the first time. These emails serve to confirm that the signup or purchase was successful and that the user’s information has been received. Confirmation emails can also include calls to action, prompting users to take further steps.

Event Invitation Emails

Event invitation emails are marketing campaigns designed to boost attendance and awareness by announcing special events like product launches, seminars, and other noteworthy occasions.

Lead Nurturing Emails

Lead nurturing email campaigns target a specific audience with a series of emails aimed at building interest and pushing them towards conversion. These campaigns typically focus on a group that has already expressed interest in a particular product or service, providing them with additional information or relevant promotions to move them from consideration to purchase.

Email newsletters are a great way to engage with your audience and promote your business. They can be used to share valuable and relevant content regularly, including new products and services, blog posts, articles, and customer reviews. Newsletters typically include a call to action, encouraging the reader to visit your website or take another desired action.

Promotional Emails

Common marketing email campaigns, typically generic and sent to a broad audience, are used to maintain brand awareness and may subtly promote new products and services. These campaigns can take various forms, such as offering discounts, special promotions or showcasing the latest stock to encourage purchases.

Seasonal Marketing Emails

Businesses frequently capitalize on holidays and special occasions like Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day to connect with customers and potential customers, informing them of upcoming sales and promotions.

Survey Email

Customer feedback is invaluable for businesses. Sending feedback surveys shows customers that their opinions are valued and that the business is committed to providing an enjoyable experience. Businesses can then use customer feedback to improve their products and services.

Welcome Emails

A welcome email is used to introduce a business to potential new customers. It typically encourages them to learn more about the product or service and may offer a trial or other bonus.

Use Images & Visuals to Boost Engagement

Visuals, including images and video, are more eye-catching, memorable, and effective than text-based content. People remember visual content better than text. Using visuals in email, especially when prompting readers to take action, is crucial for engagement.

Personalize Your Email Campaigns

To achieve effective email personalization, marketers can leverage email marketing automation, list segmentation, and third-party integrations. Even in the early stages of building your email list, segmenting your subscribers into different categories can be very beneficial. List segmentation allows you to personalize content for specific groups of subscribers, leading to improved response rates and higher engagement.

Customer Data: Send targeted campaigns to VIP customers or customers who haven’t purchased in a while.
Demographics: Customize messages based on age and gender.
Geographic Location: Target specific markets and promote location-based information while excluding subscribers in areas where the content is irrelevant.
Market: Segment users by industry or market interest and tailor content to their specific needs.
Past Activity: Analyze past open and click-through rates to understand what content resonates with specific segments and personalize future campaigns accordingly.
Workflow Activity: Create campaigns for subscribers at different stages of the sales funnel.

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Web Development

Nic Tustin — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 03:44:45 +0000

What Is Web Development?

Web development, also known as website development, refers to the tasks associated with creating, building, and maintaining websites and web applications that run online on a browser. It may, however, also include web design, web programming, and database management. Web development is closely related to the job of designing the features and functionality of apps (web design). The term development is usually reserved for the actual construction of these things (that is to say, the programming of sites). The basic tools involved in web development are programming languages called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and JavaScript. There are, however, a number of other programs used to “manage” or facilitate the construction of sites that would otherwise have to be done “from scratch” by writing code. A number of content management systems (CMS) fall into this category, including WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, TYPO3, and Adobe Experience Manager, among others.

What Are the Most Common Programming Languages?

The most common programming languages involved in web development are:

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
JavaScript

Types of Web Development

There are three main types of web development: front-end development, back-end development, and full-stack development.

What Is Front-End Development?

Front-end development involves the “client-facing” side of web development. That is to say usually, front-end web development refers to the portion of the site, app, or digital product that users will see and interact with. A Front-End Developer, therefore, is responsible for the way a digital product looks and “feels,” which is why they are often also referred to as Web Designers. Front-End Web Developers focus on translating website design and visual ideas into code. A front-end Software Developer takes the design ideas created by others on web development teams and programs them into reality, acting as a bridge between design and technology.

Front-End Developers will usually need to possess a solid understanding of programming languages, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, as well as frameworks like React, Bootstrap, Backbone, AngularJS, and EmberJS. Responsibilities of a Front-End Developer would include creating responsive websites (that look and function well on any device), conducting website testing and fixing any bugs detected along the web development process, and ensuring site structure follows SEO best practices.

What Is Back-End Development?

If Front-End Developers are responsible for how a digital product looks, Back-End Developers are focused on how it works. A Back-End Developer creates the basic framework of a website before maintaining it and ensuring it performs the way it should, including database interactions, user authentication, server, network and hosting configuration, and business logic. Working behind the scenes – or server-side – Back End Developers are concerned with the systems and structures that allow computer applications to perform as desired.

The primary responsibility of Back-End Developers is to ensure the functionality of the site, including its responsiveness and speed. To do that, Back-End Developers have to know how to build servers with modern frameworks (while developing custom APIs and serving static websites and files), and how to manage databases and data on a web server.

Typically, Back-End Developers use server-side programming languages, including PHP, Ruby, and Python, as well as tools including MySQL, Oracle, and Git.

What Is a Full-Stack Developer?

A Full-Stack Developer is someone familiar with both front- and back-end development. Full Stack Developers usually understand a wide variety of programming languages and because of their versatility, they might be given more of a leadership role on projects than developers who specialize. They are generalists, adept at wearing both hats, and familiar with every layer of development. Obviously, employers want to hire Full-Stack Developers – according to an Indeed study, they are the fourth-most in-demand job in tech.

If the title is contentious, it’s in the generalist nature of the position. Developers who specialize in the front-end or back-end often bristle at the notion that someone could be equally adept at both – the expression “jack-of-all-trades, master of none” comes to mind.

“My defensive tendencies are normally put on high alert when I hear that magic phrase (‘full-stack’),” wrote Front-End Developer Andy Shora. “Stacks are a lot bigger than what they used to be, and being able to claim one has acquired refined skills at every layer of web development is certainly not a small claim. Does this mean you have a broad range of skills or you specialize in everything?”

While that perception persists, there still is an increasing number of tech professionals who consider themselves Full-Stack Developers. According to a recent Stack Overflow survey of Developers, 48.2 percent consider themselves Full-Stack Developers.

What’s unclear is whether Developers are now expected to possess a broader skillset, or if Developers are taking it upon themselves to understand functions at both the front-end and back-end. Either way, it’s becoming increasingly important for aspiring Developers to have a foundation in both.

“For most people hoping to break into web improvement, you should center around working up an establishment in both front-end and back-end advancement first,” recommended Software Engineer and Tech Writer Muhammad Anser. “At that point, you can float towards a claim to fame later on.”

And with demand for Developers expected to grow 15 percent by 2026 (for 24,400 new jobs), much faster than the U.S. average rate of job growth, there may not be a better time to dive in and learn more about all the layers of Web Development.

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How to Create a Marketing Campaign

Nic Tustin — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 02:20:06 +0000

Marketing Plan

Define a structured strategy to achieve business/marketing goals.
Serve as a roadmap for aligning activities with objectives.
Creates focus, resource efficiency, and alignment across teams.

Marketing Objectives

Specific approaches to achieve objectives. Clear goals that guide efforts.

Specific: Identify clear targets (e.g., “Increase market share in North America”).
Measurable: Use quantifiable metrics (e.g., “Grow email subscribers 25%”).
Attainable/Achievable: Given current resources/market conditions.
Relevant: Tied to broader business goals.
Timely/Time Bound: Define a timeframe for achieving objectives.

Value Proposition

Unique value your product offers that solves a problem or meets a need.

What customer problem does the product address?
How does it create better value than competitors?

Positioning Strategy’s Outline

Target Market Perception: Define how want the audience to see your product
Key Benefits & Values: Identify the main benefits that will attract the target market.
Competitive Positioning: Analyze competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Highlight your product’s superior attributes.

Identifying Competitive Advantage

Features that make a product unique and attractive
Helps build customer loyalty
Provides leverage for marketing campaigns

Partnerships & Alliances

Strategic collaborations to amplify reach and resources.
Allows companies to share resources and risks.
Enhances credibility and visibility.

Types of Partnerships

Co-Branding: Collaborate with an established brand to leverage trust and reach.
Influencer Collaborations: Partner with influencers to target niche audiences.
Distribution Alliances: Work with retailers to expand market presence.

Marketing Budget & Resource Allocation

Distribution of financial resources.

Digital Advertising: Social media, PPC, and display ads.
Content Creation: Videos, blogs, and infographics.
Events and Sponsorships: Trade shows, webinars, or community events.
Considerations for Budgeting: Focus on high-ROI activities. Setting aside funds for contingencies/testing.

Implementation Timeline

Implementation schedule and performance measures.

Organizes tasks for efficiency.
Ensures accountability and progress tracking.

Implementation Plan Example

Weeks 1-2: Conduct market research and finalize campaign strategy.
Weeks 3-6: Roll out digital and social media campaigns.
Weeks 7-8: Monitor performance and adjust campaigns based on metrics.
Week 9: Conduct customer surveys to gather feedback.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Metrics to evaluate marketing success.
Enables data-driven decisions.
Identifies areas for improvement.

Summary of the Marketing Plan

Objectives: Clear, SMART goals to guide efforts.
Strategies: Well-defined value proposition and positioning.
Action Plans: Specific tactics for achieving objectives.
Budget & Timeline: Efficient allocation of resources and timely execution.
KPIs: Metrics for tracking and refining strategies.
Outcome: Cohesive approach to achieving business success.

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Smartsims: How to Beat Music2Go Marketing

Nic Tustin — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 14:51:35 +0000

What is the Music2Go Marketing Simulation?

Music2Go marketing simulation is a platform by Smartsims designed to explain and illustrate the core marketing terms and concepts. Concepts are introduced as the simulation progresses throughout the rollovers. Users are responsible over price, retail margin, sales forecast, sales promotion, product development, product launch and advertising decisions.

Music2Go Ranking

Total Marketing Contribution (TMC): $1,301,753,652
Marketing Contribution (MC): $319,076,997
Music2Go Single-Player (2024/2025): 1^st
Music2Go Single-Player (All-Time): 2^nd
Date: April 2025
Rollovers: 8

Fanshawe College Report

Music2Go Hints & Tips

Your goal is try to increase your Marketing Contribution so that it is higher than your competitors. Lost sales shows how many more units could have been sold if a given firm had ordered more stock. This is unsatisfied excess demand for a product.

Increase Market Share

Decrease Retail Price
Increase/Improve Advertising
Increase Distribution Coverage
Increase/Improve Sales Promotion
Spec Improvement Development

Increase Profitability

Cost Reduction Development
Decrease Retail Margin

Retail Price

The recommended retail price range is a guideline. You can price higher or lower than this, but be aware it becomes harder to cover your costs if you price too low, and you may lose market share if you price too high.

Retail Price	Music	Gaming	Fitness
Sensitivity	High	Low	Medium
Retail Price ($)	$101	$147	$67

Retail Margin

Distribution Coverage is the proportion of consumers who can buy a product in the places that they normally shop. Even though having a lower Retail Price would create more sales, there became a need to strike a balance between an above average price Retail Margin to ensure Distribution Coverage was not neglected.

Distribution	Music	Gaming	Fitness
Sensitivity	High	Medium	Medium
Retail Margin (%)	30%	30%	30%

Sales Forecast

The Forecast Demand is an estimate of the likely size of each market segment for next year. Enter your sales forecast for the year ahead to determine required inventory. A Sales Forecast (Units) goal can be to increase market share by a percentage each rollover.

Forecast Market Demand This Year * Current Market Share * (1 + Percentage Increase)

Advertising

Product Awareness is the percentage of potential customers who remember your product and would mention it if asked to list some specific headphones. This is affected by how much you spend on Advertising, how efficiently you allocate it across the media channels, and how much past accumulated advertising awareness there is for a product. This was calculated by multiplying the Media Viewing Habits by the Advertising Media Reach to decide on an optimal advertising mix. Focusing on one or two advertising strategies created the highest amount of Awareness for the allocated budget.

Advertising	Music	Gaming	Fitness
Sensitivity	Medium	Low	High
Budget ($)	$8,000,000	$2,000,000	$9,000,000
$500,000	Radio	Radio	Digital Media
$1,000,000	Radio	Print	Digital Media
$1,500,000	Radio	Print	Digital Media
$2,000,000	Print	Print	Digital Media
$2,500,000	Print	Print	Digital Media
$3,000,000	Radio	Print	Digital Media
$3,500,000	Radio	Print	Digital Media
$4,000,000	Digital Media	Print	Digital Media
$4,500,000	Digital Media	Print	Digital Media
$5,000,000	Digital Media	Print	Digital Media
$5,500,000	TV	TV	Digital Media
$6,000,000	TV	TV	Digital Media
$6,500,000	TV	TV	Digital Media
$7,000,000	TV	TV	TV
$7,500,000	TV	TV	TV
$8,000,000	TV	TV	TV
$8,500,000	TV	TV	TV
$9,000,000	TV	TV	TV
$9,500,000	TV	TV	TV
$10,000,000	TV	TV	TV

Sales Promotion

Sales Promotion is a rating from 1 to 100 which indicates the effectiveness of each product’s activities. This is based on a combination of the sales promotion expenditure and the promotion mix effectiveness. Each promotional activity has particular relevance to certain stages of the product life cycle. New products start in the Growth phase then over the next six rollovers they gradually transition from to Mature, and eventually the Decline phase.

Sales Promotion	Music	Gaming	Fitness
Sensitivity	Medium	High	Low
Budget ($)	$5,000,000	$8,500,000	$2,000,000

Music Segment

Product Cycle	Growth			Mature			Decline
Allocations	Year 0	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3	Year 4	Year 5	Year 6+
Trade Shows	20%	15%	10%	5%	7%	8%	10%
Sales Force Training	20%	15%	10%	5%	5%	5%	5%
Premiums (Gifts)	25%	30%	35%	40%	35%	30%	25%
Website / Social Media	10%	10%	10%	10%	10%	10%	10%
Point of Purchase Displays	15%	17%	18%	20%	20%	20%	20%
Rebates	10%	13%	17%	20%	23%	27%	30%

Gaming Segment

Product Cycle	Growth			Mature			Decline
Allocations	Year 0	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3	Year 4	Year 5	Year 6+
Trade Shows	20%	15%	10%	5%	7%	8%	10%
Sales Force Training	30%	27%	23%	20%	20%	20%	20%
Premiums (Gifts)	20%	27%	33%	40%	35%	30%	25%
Website / Social Media	15%	13%	12%	10%	10%	10%	10%
Point of Purchase Displays	15%	17%	18%	20%	20%	20%	20%
Rebates	0%	2%	3%	5%	8%	12%	15%

Fitness Segment

Product Cycle	Growth			Mature			Decline
Allocations	Year 0	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3	Year 4	Year 5	Year 6+
Trade Shows	15%	12%	8%	5%	5%	5%	5%
Sales Force Training	25%	20%	15%	10%	8%	7%	5%
Premiums (Gifts)	5%	12%	18%	25%	23%	22%	20%
Website / Social Media	25%	23%	22%	20%	18%	17%	15%
Point of Purchase Displays	25%	25%	25%	25%	25%	25%	25%
Rebates	5%	8%	12%	15%	20%	25%	30%

Development

The Product Specs is a rating from 1 to 100 that measures how close your product is to an ideal product in each market segment. You may have dumped obsolete inventory units if you improved your product with product development. Your existing stock of finished goods is sold off cheaply to an overseas market because consumers prefer to buy your latest product designs. This usually results in an inventory disposal loss, but this is likely to be lower than the inventory holding cost of storing all those finished goods and the cost savings of improving your product design.

Cost Reduction Development for every product.
Spec Improvement for every product.

Spec Improvement	Music	Gaming	Fitness
Sensitivity	Medium	High	Low

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Nic Tustin — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 18:44:53 +0000

How Does Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is about helping search engines and users discover your content. When building your website, create it with your users in mind, aiming to make it easy for them to find and explore your content. Google is a fully automated search engine that uses programs called crawlers to explore the web constantly, looking for pages to add to its index. You usually don’t need to do anything except publish your site on the web. The vast majority of sites listed in our results are found and added automatically.

How Long Until I See Impact in Search Results?

Every change you make will take some time to be reflected on Google’s end. Some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months. In general, you likely want to wait a few weeks to assess whether your work had beneficial effects on Google Search results. Keep in mind that not all changes you make to your website will result in a noticeable impact on search results. If you’re not satisfied with your results and your business strategies allow it, try iterating with the changes and see if they make a difference.

Help Google Find Your Content

Google primarily finds pages through links from other pages it has already crawled. In many cases, these are other websites that are linking to your pages. Other sites linking to you is something that happens naturally over time, and you can also encourage people to discover your content by promoting your site. You could also submit a sitemap, which is a file that contains all the URLs on your site that you care about. It might be important for you to opt out your site as a whole or sections of it from appearing in search results. Google supports various ways that let you opt out of crawling and indexing of your URLs. While ads are a part of the internet and are meant to be seen by users, don’t let them become overly distracting or prevent your users from reading your content.

Organize Your Site
Use Descriptive URLs
Reduce Duplicate Content
Avoid Distracting Advertisements
Write Good Link Text
Control Your Snippets

Make Your Site Interesting & Useful

When you’re setting up or redoing your site, it can be good to organize it in a logical way because it can help search engines and users understand how your pages relate to the rest of your site. Don’t drop everything and start reorganizing your site right now though. while these suggestions can be helpful long term (especially if you’re working on a larger website), search engines will likely understand your pages as they are right now, regardless of how your site is organized. Parts of the URL can be displayed in search results as breadcrumbs, so users can also use the URLs to understand whether a result will be useful for them. Google learns breadcrumbs automatically based on the words in the URL, but you can also influence them with structured data if you like a technical challenge. Try to include words in the URL that may be useful for users. Having duplicate content on your site is not a violation , but it can be a bad user experience and search engines might waste crawling resources on URLs that you don’t even care about. Creating content that people find compelling and useful will likely influence your website’s presence in search results more than any of the other suggestions in this guide. While “compelling and useful content” can mean different things to different people, content like this generally shares some common attributes, such as:

Easy to Read: Write content naturally and make sure the content is well written, easy to follow, and free of spelling and grammatical mistakes. Break up long content into paragraphs and sections, and provide headings to help users navigate your pages.
Unique Content: When you’re writing new content, don’t copy others’ content in part or in its entirety: create the content yourself based on what you know about the topic. Don’t just rehash what others already published.
Up-to-Date: Check in on previously published content and update it as needed, or even delete it if it’s not relevant anymore.
People-First: Be sure that you’re writing content that your readers will find helpful and reliable. For example, providing expert or experienced sources can help people understand your articles’ expertise.

Expect Your Readers’ Search Terms

Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content. Users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic. Anticipating these differences in search behavior and writing with your readers in mind could produce positive effects on how your site performs in search results. However, don’t worry if you don’t anticipate every variation of how someone might seek your content. Google’s language matching systems are sophisticated and can understand how your page relates to many queries, even if you don’t explicitly use the exact terms in them.

Link to Relevant Resources

Links are a great way to connect your users and search engines to other parts of your site, or relevant pages on other sites. In fact, the vast majority of the new pages Google finds every day are through links, making links a crucial resource you need to consider to help your pages be discovered by Google and potentially shown in search results. Additionally, links can also add value by connecting users (and Google) to another resource that corroborates what you’re writing about.

Link text (also known as anchor text) is the text part of a link that you can see. This text tells users and Google something about the page you’re linking to. With appropriate anchor text, users and search engines can easily understand what your linked pages contain before they visit.

Links can provide more context on a topic, both for users and search engines, which may help demonstrate your knowledge on a topic. However when you’re linking to pages outside of your control, for example content on other sites, make sure you trust the resource you’re linking to.

Influence Your Title Links

The title link is the headline part of the search result and it can help people decide which search result to click. This title text can also be used for the title that’s shown in browsers and bookmarks. You can influence the title links in Search by writing good titles: a good title is unique to the page, clear and concise, and accurately describes the contents of the page. For example, your title could include the name of your website or business, other bits of important information like the physical location of the business, and maybe some information about what the particular page has to offer for users.

A search result typically has a description of the target page to help users decide whether they should click the search result. This is called a snippet. The snippet is sourced from the actual content of the page the search result is linking to, thus you have complete control over the words that can be used to generate the snippet. Occasionally the snippet may be sourced from the contents of the meta description tag, which is typically a succinct, one- or two-sentence summary of the page. A good meta description is short, unique to one particular page, and includes the most relevant points of the page.

Optimize Site Images

Many people search visually, and images can be how people find your website for the first time. As you add images to your site, make sure that people and search engines can find and understand them. When you use high quality images, you give users enough context and detail to decide which image best matches what they were looking for. Use images that are sharp and clear, and place them near text that’s relevant to the image. The text that’s near images can help Google better understand what the image is about and what it means in context to your page. lt text is a short, but descriptive piece of text that explains the relationship between the image and your content. It helps search engines understand what your image is about and the context of how your image relates to your page, so writing good alt text is quite important. This helps Google and users associate the image with text that provides more context to what the page is about. If your website includes pages that are primarily about individual videos, people may also be able to discover your site through video results in Google Search. Many of the best practices for images and text also apply to videos:

Create high-quality video content, and embed the video on a standalone page, near text that’s relevant to that video.
Write descriptive text in the titles and description fields of a video (the title of a video is still a title, and so you can apply the best practices for writing titles here too).

Promote Your Website

Effectively promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject, and also by search engines. You can do this in many ways:

Social Media Promotion
Community Engagement
Advertisement
Word of Mouth

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Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Nic Tustin — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 18:31:09 +0000

What is Search Engine Marketing?

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a digital marketing strategy used to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). It refers to paid search advertising and is also alternately referred to as paid search or pay-per-click (PPC).

Google Ads
Microsoft Ads

Why is SEM Important?

With an increasing number of consumers researching and shopping for products online, search engine marketing has become a crucial online marketing strategy for increasing a company’s reach. In search engine marketing, advertisers only pay for impressions that result in visitors, making it an efficient way for a company to spend its marketing dollars. As an added bonus, each visitor incrementally improves the website’s rankings in organic search results. Since consumers enter search queries with the intent of finding information of a commercial nature, they are in an excellent state of mind to make a purchase, compared to other sites such as social media where users are not explicitly searching for something. Results are immediate with SEM. It is arguably the fastest way to drive traffic to a website.

How SEM Works

In paid search advertising, sponsored ads appear at the top of and on the side of search engine results pages to gain more visibility and prominence than the organic results. In your search results page, you will come across various company ads whose keywords match the keywords in your search. These ads appear in prominent locations on the page – along with the other search listings that match your keywords. The paid listings are highly relevant to your specific search, making it likely that you will click on them. Text-only ads are easy to produce. Marketers enter a headline, text for the body of the ad, a call-to-action and a URL for the hyperlink. Search engine marketing is considered by many to be the most efficient way to spend marketing dollars. When setting up a campaign within an SEM network, the marketer is prompted to:

Conduct keyword research and select a set of keywords related to their website or product
Select a geographic location for the ad to be displayed within
Create a text-based ad to display in the search results
Evaluate the cost per click (CPC) of given keywords

Create Ad Copy

Most forms of SEM will allow you to create headlines, descriptions, and ad extensions. Start with compelling headlines that really speak to the search intent behind the keywords you’re targeting. Next, highlight unique selling points in your description so that searchers can get a sense of what they can expect when they click on your ad. Ad extensions are an effective way to maximize your ads with relevant content that enhances the user experience. Some examples of ad extensions are sitelinks, phone numbers, callouts, structured snippets, and in some cases, user ratings.

Optimize Landing Pages

Ensure your landing pages are relevant to the ad copy that got your users there in the first place. This will boost ad rank and quality score (your potential to rank higher while paying less for target keywords), increase website traffic, and ultimately improve conversion rates. Some simple ways to improve your landing pages is to include clear calls-to-action (CTA), implement responsive design for mobile users, optimize page speed, and quality content.

Improve quality score to lower the total cost of ads showing up.
Add extensions like sitelinks to highlight specific web pages, callouts to highlight specific features, call extensions for phone numbers, or even customized URLs to improve click-through rates (CTR).
Implement remarketing to reinforce brand awareness and ensure your ads are staying top of mind as they continue browsing onto other apps or pages.

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Wealth Management

Nic Tustin — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 15:08:28 +0000

Need Help with Wealth Management?

Wealth management combines several financial services to address the needs of affluent clients. Wealth management brings together tax planning, wealth protection, estate planning, succession planning, and family governance. Using a consultative process, the advisor learns information about the client’s wants and their specific situation. I’ll tailor a personalized strategy that utilizes a range of financial products and services.

Should I withdraw more than the minimum from my RRIF?
Which account should I withdraw from first in retirement?
How do I make a plan for the family business?
How do I maximize my charitable giving?
How do I create an income in retirement?
Should I own assets jointly?

Book a Virtual Meeting

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Tax Planning

Nic Tustin — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 14:58:41 +0000

Need Help with Tax Planning?

Tax planning encompasses not only the timely submission of income tax returns. It includes strategies such as investing in appropriate accounts, and strategically withdrawing funds to minimize tax liabilities. I am dedicated to aiding you in comprehending and minimizing the tax ramifications associated with your investment choices, earnings, and other financial endeavours. My goal is to ensure compliance with Canadian tax regulations while maximizing available credits and deductions.

How do I fund my retirement in the most tax efficient manner?
Should I save in my name or my spouse’s name?
How do I pay less tax on my investments?
How do I pay less tax over my lifetime?
Should I set up a holding company?
Should I set up a corporation?
How do I pay less tax today?

Book a Virtual Meeting

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