Editors Note: Today we are kicking off a new feature, Weekly Wisdom. Each week we will feature someone in our industry offering valuable insights via video on a variety of topics related to SEO, PPC, Content and Social Media. So, check out the blog each Tuesday for fantastic and useful information, and to see which industry insider will be featured.
Today's video by Ross will help you with reattributing your Google Analytics and Search Console traffic. You can watch the video or read the transcript below. TRANSCRIPT TRANSCRIPT Analyzing Search Reports: Other and Not Set Methods to Reclaim Website Traffic A Strategy for GA: UTM Parameter Dealing with Dark Social Google Analytics: Prevent Overinflated Direct Analyzing Search Reports: Other and Not Set So you're doing your end of month reporting, and you're going down looking at things month on month, year on year, feeling proud of yourself. You've got some kind of general upward trending movement right? Then you look at your channel reports and all of a sudden you see this thing called, 'other' and you're like, 'other? What the hell is other?' And then you think, 'well, I only really care about organic search, I'm just gonna scroll down and see what's going on there.' And then all of a sudden you see this 'not set,' and you're like 'in the name of the wee man, what is not set?' And then, of course, staring down the barrel of a gun is not provided too. Much like that better twisted ex-girlfriend of yours, it's been an on-off weird relationship the last couple years since Google introduced that. The thing is, as SEOs, our data informs our strategy, and our strategy is really everything. So if the data that GA's giving us is completely broken, then technically our strategy is broken as well. Methods to Reclaim Website Traffic Therefore we're gonna look at a bunch of methods to reclaim that traffic, and rebuild it. First thing's first, if I was to go to our website, typeamedia.net, now you have to share that through something like Slack. The URL that it provides, guess it drops you straight back in, but I really want that to tell me that that's come from some sort of messaging app. But then I click on my analytics, it says that it’s come through direct and the medium is none and it doesn't actually know where it's come from. The same thing happens on Messenger, WhatsApp, etc, etc. So the question is how do we get around that? So other things are things like redirected traffic, so if we jump out of this again, we recently had a cite from a dot agency which is a super cool hipster name that no one could get right or actually link to, and then we migrated it with the 301 redirect over to typeamedia.net. Problem with that as well it's a no secure URL being 301 redirected up into secure. So again when you look at your analytics, it also thinks it's direct, which is kind of pointless. And the same thing goes for a lot of different traffic sources like things coming from a third party social network, going through weird redirects, traffic from apps in general. All of this is getting lumped into "direct" or it’s being put as "not set", and ultimately "not provided". If you're looking at your organic traffic and your direct traffic, and there's a negative correlation between the two, despite you not actually doing a lot of, let’s say above the line advertising and never tried direct, this is probably something that you'll wanna have a look into, because it’s probably just being misreported in Analytics. A Strategy for GA: UTM Parameter So the way we get around that is using this thing called term tagger. It's something created by Google Analytics, it's really useful.
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