Get High at Work!

Google Analytics for Bloggers

Written by

Kevin Sandlin

in

We’re halfway through the Digital Marketing class here at General Assembly. One of the biggest challenges in the class is tackling Google Analytics, which is a big, hairy, complex beast of a tool that can either overwhelm you or totally guide you.

If you are or aspire to be a digital marketer, then you must embrace the beast that is Google Analytics, and learn how to use it, piece by piece. Why? Because if you don’t measure it, you cannot manage it, and measuring your web site and marketing metrics is the foundation of digital marketing.

To get over the first big hump that greets most beginner bloggers, I wrote a series of posts for GA on connecting your blog to Google Analytics.

  1. How to setup a Google Analytics account – It’s not difficult, but not nearly as easy as getting a GMail account.
  2. How to connect your Blogger account to Google Analytics – You’d think that, since Google owns Blogger, Analytics would be automatic, but you’d be wrong. Blogger has its own “Stats” package, but the numbers are always different from Analytics.
  3. How to connect your WordPress site to Google Analytics – Manually or with a plugin, and I highly recommend the plugin method. Dirt simple.
  4. How to connect your Tumblr blog to Google Analytics – This one’s the easiest by far. A few navigational clicks and copy/paste.

I was also planning to write a similar post on connecting Medium to Google Analytics, but it would have been a very short post, because you just can’t. I talked to the folks at Medium, and they said they were working on a couple of things in that realm.

  1. Using Medium to blog on a custom domain, instead of medium.com/@yourname
  2. Building their own analytics tools to compete with Google Analytics

You kinda have to take what the folks at Medium say pretty seriously. One of the founders of Medium was a founder of Blogger before Google acquired Blogger, and then that same guy went on to build a little company called Twitter. You know him better as @ev.

Comments

Leave a comment

More from Kevin

  • 6 Best Practices for Social Media Marketing Newbies

    This post originally published on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog. You’re just starting out actually marketing a business or non-profit organization using various social media channels and tools. You’re not a social media marketing expert yet, but you will be very soon. What’s your next step? It’s wise to start off with some boundaries…

  • Digital Marketing 101: Social and Search Paid Advertising

    This post originally appeared on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog. This post is the fifth in a series of six posts we’re calling “Digital Marketing 101,” in which we have broken up the General Assembly Digital Marketing class into six bite-sized chunks for those who are considering entering the digital marketing space, or who…

  • Digital Marketing 101: Owned Content Marketing

    This post originally appeared on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog.   In the first three parts of this DGM 101 series, we established that your marketing must start with your brand, and your brand is “everything you do.” Then you set up your web property and marketing plans so that you can measure everything…

  • Digital Marketing 101: Measuring Your Digital Marketing Efforts

    This post originally appeared on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog. “You can manage only what you measure.” There are many different versions of that mantra, and all of them hold true. Just as in fitness and weight loss, if you don’t start with a baseline, take regular measurements, and see what’s working, you can’t…

  • Old marketing vs. new marketing: the only difference is data

    I love finding old ads for products we used to own in our childhood or teen years, like this 1983 Jeep Grand Wagoneer. Classic! I also am a huge fan of the series “Mad Men”, which is the essence of old school marketing, better known as advertising. Back then, it was similar to the old…

  • It’s not you. It’s me.

    I led an all day seminar this past Saturday at General Assembly in Atlanta. This class was a 6-hour event in which we compressed the 60 hours of the GA Digital Marketing class down to 6 hours, lunch from Chipotle included. Here’s a good description of the class and here’s a follow up to the…

  • 3 things that make it hard to tell your story

    It is my business to help entrepreneurs and small businesses tell their stories. Telling your story with great, compelling, consistent content builds trust among your audience, and helps them know that you have a solution to the problems they face every day. Most entrepreneurs don’t think they can tell their story, and they also don’t think…

  • Why to Tell Your Story

    I’ve written recently about telling your story and how to keep telling your story ad how some stories write themselves, but haven’t really delved into some deeper reasons to tell your story, so here’s the “why” of telling your story, both your personal story and the story of your business. I spent the day today on…

  • The Seven Things You Must Do to Win at SEO

    This post originally appeared on the General Assembly blog. Most non-developers are completely ignorant of, if not intimidated by SEO. Even some software developers won’t go near it. SEO has been called “black magic,” “dark art”and “pseudoscience,” most likely because if you happen to get it right, you win all the Googles! And everybody wants…