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September 29, 2020 By Erin Cafferty

Minimalist Dashboards, Google Rolls Back COVID Rules & The Ban on Political Ads Post-Election

Simplify Your Analytics Dashboard

We’ve all heard the adage “less is more,” but does it apply to dashboards? According to Urs Boller in this blog from Web Analytics for Developers, the answer is yes. I often get requests to build complicated Google DataStudio dashboards, with pages of metrics and a detailed glossary. I worry these create the same issue that Urs describes: Users don’t understand what dashboards mean, so they avoid using them. Making things simple encourages people to actually use the information they have. If you’re curious about how to adopt a more minimalist approach, Urs recommends three steps: Focus on user behavior, use your stakeholders’ language, and create dashboard templates. “This creates an analytics foundation which is both easy to understand and immediately allows everybody in our organization to start using the data and take actions.” Thanks to Craig Scriber for sharing this with me.

The GTM Feature We’ve All Been Waiting For

There’s always been room for improvement when it comes to Google Tag Manager, but this new feature is pretty handy.  GTM has now introduced the ability to export part of a container into another! This is great if you want to um, borrow, a particularly clever piece of tracking you set up for another site but don’t want to move over every single tag and variable. Head over to this article from Simo Ahava to find out how the new feature works and get step-by-step instructions (with screenshots included!) about how to select only the items you want to export. I already know this is going to make my life much easier.

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Filed Under: newsletter Tagged With: Ban on Political Ads Post-Election, digital marketing for election, Google Rolls Back COVID Rules on Ads, google tag manager, how NOT to set up your organization’s website data, Minimalist Dashboards, nonprofit seo, nonprofit websites, website analytics

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.

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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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