Case Study: Using Google Analytics to Dig Below the Surface - WhatTheyThink

Commentary & Analysis

For their New Year’s marketing resolutions, many companies are committing to making better use of Google Analytics to track their traffic and evaluate their marketing efforts. Google Analytics can be a powerful tool, but if you don’t dig deep, it can be misleading, too.

By Heidi Tolliver-Walker

For their New Year’s marketing resolutions, many companies are committing to making better use of Google Analytics to track their traffic and evaluate their marketing efforts. Google Analytics is a powerful tool, offering deep insights into traffic volumes, traffic sources, audience flow, and more. But if you don’t dig deep, these tools can be misleading, too.

Take the example of a print vendor that in 2022 committed to boosting its content marketing. It revived its blog and started posting on a weekly basis. After building a significant content library, it decided to see the impact its efforts were having.

The results were worth cheering about.

• The blog was getting a lot of traffic—thousands of views every month.
• Prior to investing in fresh content, the company’s ratio of direct vs. organic traffic was 60:40. After the company started posting more blogs and SEO-optimizing them, the ratio reversed—40% direct traffic vs. 60% organic traffic.
• The same five or six posts on the same two topics were consistently in the top 10 in page views. These were not topics the company had put on its marketing content calendar (these posts were several years old), which...

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