Welcome to Part I of Edition No. 41 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
Contents
Tip: How To Share GA4 Explore Reports
Analysis: Planning for a Social Media Holiday
Tip: How To Share GA4 Explore Reports
If want something more customized than the standard GA4 Reports dashboard, but don’t have the time to set up an elaborate Looker Studio dashboard, then explorations are your happy median.
How do you share them with others, though?
Go to the Explore tab in the left popout menu
Notice that in the “Type” column, all the silhouettes are a single, “hollow” figure. This means these reports are all private to me and me only.Enter the exploration you want to share with others, and click the double silhouette with the + at the top right
At this point, you’ll see the “catch” of sharing with others (more on this below)
Now you’ll see a double-silhouette on the Explore page, which means that anyone else with access to your property can access the report.
More on that “read-only” catch: While the Explore tab is convenient for creating easy-to-access, customized reports, it has some major cons:
Even if others have access to the report, they can’t edit it. That includes the date range. So if the last time you, as the report owner, accessed the report was two months ago, whatever date range you left the report on will remain.
Not very useful for someone seeking updated data.You can’t schedule emailed reports.
[Correction: When I emailed this edition, I had a typo that stated “You can schedule emailed reports.”, which would obviously be a pro and not a con. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.]
How can you overcome these issues? Copy the report, which will save it privately to your Explore dashboard, allowing for all the customization your heart desires.
This, however, brings up another issue:
Once someone copies the report and makes it their own, they’ll no longer benefit from any updates you make. You’ll be editing two different reports that have no way to “communicate”.
All things considered, explorations are great for individual tracking, or creating “baseline” reports that others on your team can edit and make their own.
But if you’re looking for a collaborative, easy-to-share dashboard, Looker Studio is worth the time investment.
Did you find this tip useful? Share it to help spread the word.
Analysis: Planning for a Social Media Holiday
As we fully enter the trenches of the holiday season, it seems like a good time to review some best practices for temporary staff shortages. Specifically in the area of social media.
How do you continue to produce relevant social content for your audience without having some (or all) of your social team online?
And how do you strike the balance between keeping things running without investing too much energy in posts that most people won’t see anyway since they, too, are likely to be on vacation?
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