Welcome to Part I of Edition No. 54 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
FYI: I’m on vacation next week. There will be no newsletters.
Contents
Tip: Google Alerts for Content Ideas
Analysis: How To Fight ‘Dark Social’
Tip: Google Alerts for Content Ideas
Are you using Google Alerts for content ideas?
(Surely some of you already are.)
But with AI stealing all the spotlight lately, it’s easy to forget some of the more conventional content creation resources.
Google Alerts is a powerful, free tool that can help you stay on top of trends, find content ideas and monitor the competition. By setting up targeted alerts, you can receive real-time email notifications when new content is published on relevant-to-you topics.
Here's how to set up a Google Alert:
Visit Google Alerts
Sign in with your Google account.
In the search box, enter keywords related to your niche or industry, such as "social media tips" or "Google Analytics 4".
Choose your desired alert frequency, along with the other settings at your disposal:
Click "Create Alert".
You can create multiple alerts for different topics, competitors or even mentions of your own publication or brand.
Did you find this tip useful? Share it to help spread the word.
Analysis: How To Fight ‘Dark Social’
SparkToro published an excellent study last week about the persistent and growing effects of “dark social” traffic on content analytics. (Specifically, in Google Analytics.)
Dark social is traffic that comes from a social media platform, but is attributed in as “Direct” traffic.
The resulting problem is that it’s easy to vastly underestimate the amount of traffic that social networks are driving to your site, and inversely, overestimate the amount of direct traffic (i.e. via bookmarks or someone directly typing a URL from your site in their browser).
I encourage you to read the entire article, but here are some highlights and analyses. At the end, I’ll share a plug-and-play tool I created to help combat this problem.
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