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You are here: Home / newsletter / Data on a Budget, Running Better Search Ads & New Help With GTM

October 8, 2019 By Erin Cafferty

Data on a Budget, Running Better Search Ads & New Help With GTM

One of my favorite shows, The Great British Baking Show, is back on Netflix. While watching this season, it struck me that host Paul Hollywood seemed to mostly give handshakes — a reward for a contestant’s top-quality baking — to men. Investigating this theory led me down a data rabbit hole.

First, I found Buzzfeed documenting all of Paul’s handshakes. But Buzzfeed wasn’t quite giving the whole picture because women tended to go father in the competition than their male counterpoints. Then, I found Wikipedia graphing how individual contestants performed. This would make it possible to chart the ratio of male/female handshakes for individual episodes! I had to cut myself off there, though (my husband wanted to finish the episode).

Although my current theory remains unproven, I was impressed by the data already available online. Do you have any theories you’ve been longing to prove?

Exploring Engagement Beyond “Likes”

This was such a great article to read, especially with the news of Instagram hiding “likes” swirling around. While measuring engagement is helpful for reporting purposes, it’s important to think about engagement as more than just “likes.” This article got me pondering the importance of looking at content as a whole package — rather than a single post or article — and how to quantify those important intangibles, such as thought provoking-ness.

Data Storytelling: Focus on Impact

Data can be hard to come by for notoriously budget-conscious nonprofits. So, the data you have needs to tell a compelling story. Jose Cruz, executive director of Barrio Logan College Institute, makes a good point about taking your analytics and garnering insights from it in a meaningful way: “Too often, nonprofits talk about how many people they’ve served, and not about how they’ve helped the people they’ve served.” Use data to tell your story about how your organization is affecting change and making an impact. Remember, it’s about the people, not the numbers.

Get Better at Search Ads

Excellent advice all around from Avanish Kaushik (AKA the original web analytics guru). He insists that your organization’s PPC strategy should be focused on search queries rather than keywords… and I’m not here to argue with him. Here’s his reasoning: “keywords (/phrases) are what you bid on, search queries are what humans type into the search engine.” When you obsessively optimize for impressions rather than clicks, you’ll be left disappointed, and, likely, not much to show for it. If you have a Google Ads grant or are using paid search as part of your year-end fundraising strategy, this article is definitely worth a read.

Google Tag Manager Gets Easier to Use

Let’s cut through the noise of this article — GTM created an open platform for individuals and organizations alike to share their tag templates. Why should you care? Because you can customize these templates to easily implement tags on your own website. Before this platform, “if your business needed to implement a partner tag that wasn’t already integrated with Tag Manager, getting that tag up and running would take a lot of manual work.” The new Community Template Gallery is a godsend.

… And It Includes Help with the Facebook Pixel

As part of this new Community Template Gallery, GTM guru Simo Ahava launched a Facebook Pixel integration. So, if you’ve ever slammed your laptop shut in frustration trying to get your Facebook Pixel to run correctly through Google Tag Manager, well… there’s finally a framework for that.

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Filed Under: newsletter Tagged With: Avanish Kaushik, data analytics, data storytelling, digital marketing, engagement rates, google tag manager, nonprofit, Pay-per-click, search queries, website analytics

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