Welcome to Part I of Edition No. 35 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
I apologize for the lateness of this (non-)Tuesday edition. The letter N has stopped functioning on my keyboard, which has made writing long blocks more complicated than I could have imagined. A sad excuse for being two days late, I know.
Highlights from Friday’s updates:
TikTok’s Bad News for Instagram
Facebook Adds Feed-Customizing Options
‘Multisearch’ Analysis Impossible in GSC, GA4
Contents
Tip: The Easy Way To Understand GA4 Definitions
Analysis: The Free Tool That Will Tell (Almost) Everything You Need to Know About Your Site’s Performance
Tip: The Easy Way To Understand GA4 Definitions
Whether you’re a Google Universal Analytics aficionado, or Google Analytics 4 is your first foray into the world GA, some of the platform’s definitions can be confusing.
For example, bounce rate in UA has a completely different definition from bounce rate in GA4.
And what about users? The default “users” stat in UA is “total users” while in GA4 it’s “active users,” which doesn’t exist in UA.
Those are just two examples.
How, then, are we supposed to keep all these straight?
You could, of course, Google definitions every time you’re unsure, or you could do this:
In your Google Analytics 4 dashboard, go to “Explore.”
Click “Blank” or “Free form” or go to any existing report.
In the Variables column, click the + next to dimensions. (You can do the same exact process with metrics by clicking on the other + further down in the screenshot.)
Any dimension that’s underlined has a definition available if you hover over it.
While there are some terms without definitions, they tend to be self-explanatory, such as Device. Otherwise, you can Google them.
Now you have a quick and easy way to extract most dimension and metric definitions in one central place.
Did you find this tip useful? Share it to help spread the word.
Analysis: Using Lighthouse to Analyze Your Site’s Performance
“Web Vitals is an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web.”
In plain English, this means that the better your site performs from a speed and UX perspective, the better chance your content has to rank high on SERPs.
One tool that helps you measure this is called Lighthouse. I’m going to show you how you can use it to analyze your site’s CWV’s performance, plus some other items.
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