As a business person or, marketing consultant there is probably no better free way to measure your marketing impact than to use Google Alerts & Google Analytics together. (And who doesn’t like free, right?).
What is Google Alerts? (The Jelly)
Google Alerts allows you to “get email notifications any time that Google finds new results on a topic you’re interested in. For example, you could get updates about a product you like, find out when people post content about you on the web, or keep up with news stories. (Google Alerts Help)” You can also use Google Alerts to monitor:
- mentions online of the name of your company
- online appearances of your key employees names
- if you are a consultant… the name of your clients
- your competitor’s names.
And really it’s the first of those last four uses of Google Alerts (mentions online of the name of your company) that will make for a tasty combination with an often little used Google Analytics feature.
What is Google Analytics? (The Peanut Butter)
Google Analytics, if installed on your website, gives you insight into your site’s visitors and their interaction with the content on your website. It can also show you where (most) of the visitors to your site originated.
To make the most of this tasty marketing data sandwich we want to combine Google Alerts with Google Analytics. How do we do this? Read on as we get to the final piece of our PB&J Data Sandwich.
Annotations, Annotations, Annotations (The Bread)
A really neat and often underused feature in Google Analytics is the annotations. This is the bread of our sandwich. Annotations help you document anything you would like to understand that might impact your site. For example, your company was written about in the local business press. Did that article, also released online, result in sending some traffic to your site or, even help make a new lead or sale?
Now when you receive a Goggle Alert set up for your company/product name you can have an annotation added in Google Analytics to see if there was an impact on the traffic visiting your site. It might also lead you to decide (from the example above) to do more or, less public relations work with the local business press.
This post originally appeared as a LinkedIn Today post: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140810233858-12507477-google-alerts-analytics-better-together