Dave Collins – Google and the Leatherman Model: It’s All in Your Hands – MicroConf Europe 2014

The MicroConf Europe 2014 Hub Page has notes on all the talks and additional information.

Webseite: SoftwarePromotions.com
Twitter: @thedavecollins

  • You are looking for hacks that save you time
    • Don’t get a leatherman and then only use one function – Google Analytics is a leatherman
  • Best partnerships are when both parties gain equal value from the relationship

Google Analytics

  • Most data is useless, because it does not tell you what to do in your business
  • Data is not insight – Data is not knowledge
  • “Don’t fill up on cheaper meats…”
  • You are limited by time & ability to absorb

Tip #1: Actionable Data

  • Focus on landing pages with high bounce rates

Tip #2: Tap into Google’s intelligence

  • Intelligence Events
    • You are getting more conversions from country X
    • You are getting dramatically less traffic from SEO
  • “Hidden” above the usual items in the navigation

Tip #3:

  • Audience –> Behaviour –> Engagement has useful analytics

Tip #4: Trends

  • Sometimes you need to accumulate data (week/month instead of day views) to see stuff

Tip #5: Segment

  • “Top 10 countries by visitors” is useless
  • “Top 10 countries by visitors with a page depth > 3” is way more interesting
  • “Acquisition by referrer” is not interesting, “Acquisition by referrer with more than 30 seconds on site” is

Google AdWords

Tip #1: Let your competition guide you

  • Target mentions of your competition (e.g. forums where your competition gets mentioned)

Tip #2: Remarketing the way it should be

  • Because your prospects get distracted by other stuff
  • Just do it – it is easy to setup
  • Do it better –> Brennan’s talk
    • Exclude users who already converted

Tip #3: Use your competition with auction insight

  • Shows you
    • how often you compete with your competition
    • How often you rank above/below them

Google Webmaster Tools

Tip #1: Data Highlighter

  • Tell them what elements on the website are the author, the title, blog post image
  • Improves the accuracy of information displayed in the SERPs

Tip #2: HTML Improvements

  • fix the issues Google tells you about
  • potentially increases traffic to your website

Tip #3: Search Queries

  • sort by impressions
  • average position on page 38? You should create better content for that

Tip #4: Links to your site

  • Who is linking to you? to which page? with which anchor texts?

Tip #5: What Google thinks you are about

  • Content keywords
    • don’t just look at what is there – look at what is missing
  • download the data, because you get more data in downloads

Tip #6: Show Google what you just did

  • “Fetch as Google” to see how it renders and then submit the URL to the index
    • e.g. really good blog posts
    • don’t use unless you have to/it is valuable (e.g. complete redesign)

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About Christoph

Christoph lives in Munich, Germany and is bootstrapping his own SaaS application as a part-time entrepreneur.

He likes to write on this blog about anything of relevance to single-founder bootstrapped software startups.

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