Content Marketing Fundamentals [Updated 2024]

On July 27, 2022January 19, 2024 By DaveIn Business, marketing, seo1 Comment

Nobody gives a f*ck about your behind the scenes bollocks, and nobody is googling to find out about the industry award that you won (and paid about 10k to enter).

Create content that’s relevant and of interest to your target audience

Content marketing and inbound marketing is kind of, the new SEO. Google, as we’ve heard a million times, loves great content and great content attracts genuine links.

Create a blog and social media profiles that you’re customers will want to subscribe to – because they’re interesting!

The process is easy, the execution can be a bit of a b@stard to do though.

Identify your target audience
Find out where they hang out online e.g. which Reddit forums and Facebook groups etc
Identify your target audience’s common questions and pain points
Use a tool like SEMRush to ID low competition search terms regarding the questions & pain points
Create useful, in-depth copy/posts that helps your target audience
If resource available, create videos for YouTube based on posts that get most traction
Create short videos suitable for social – with captions!

For blog content, see if you can match the topics you’ve found, with specific keywords, ideally with the highest volume.

Check the search engine results pages (SERPs) and identify any keywords which have “weak” or somewhat irrelevant results.

It’s a bit beyond the scope of this post, but look to optimise your blogs for “rich snippets”, by using lists and html tables.

To check for keywords, you’ll need Keyword Tool like SEMRush to do this, or search “free keyword tool”.

Keep each blog post specific to one or two keywords.

You can also promote your blog posts with outreach, although some content marketing gurus, say you’re better off investing all your time in creating content, rather than promoting it.

For Reddit, you can use this great Reddit Keyword Tool, to identify the most common topics of discussion, in a given forum/subReddit.

The backbone of good content, is that, well, it’s actually good – well written, easy to read, full of visual assets if possible.

When it comes to blog posts, make the content scannable with lists, bullet points and images. If you have the resource, infographics are always a good addition to a blog post.

Statistics are also a great way to attract links and citations from other websites. For example, if you work out the average price of a [given product or service] in the UK, it’s relatively likely to attract links. If you sell UK holiday homes or used campervans, you might work out the average price of new camper van, or the cost per holiday of an overseas holiday versus a holiday home.

Help, Help, Help, Sell

Gary V’s book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook is a bit old now, but the adage of setting up a sale several times, before trying to promote your service or product is still valid, in my opinion.

The “jab” in the book title, is the useful or entertaining content aimed at your target audience

The “right hook” is a blog and/or social media post that aims to sell a product or service.

jab jab jab right hook book cover — Image Source

Consider:

Would you follow a social account or blog that’s just trying to sell you a service or product?

For example, if an accounting software company has a Facebook account that just promotrs its software directly in every single post, not many people will be interested. However, if the Facebook page posts about tax saving tips, digital marketing for small businesses etc it’s likely to get more engagement.

I’d also avoid lots of

Behind the scenes posts.unless you’re an established brand, nobody gives a shit

Virtue signalling posts

You might follow a brand or company on social media etc, that just promotes itself, if you already know the brand, or if you’re interested in working at the company.

However, unless you’re an established brand, or you create content just for recruitment purposes, then it’s generally best to create blog and social media posts that help, entertain, and/or interest your target audience.

Establish yourself as an authority in your niche, with helpful & insightful content
Drew Griffiths (2022)

It can definitely help to promote discounts and offers on social platforms and blogs, but that’s generally the that’s the “right hook”, whereas the “jab, jab, jab” relates to the helpful, insightful content that should take up about 75% of all your posts.

If you’re in the business to business sector for example, you can gain brand awareness and an online following by providing posts that provide helpful advise on SEO, PPC, Social Media Marketing, Digital Marketing Tools etc. If you’re just trying to directly sell your office chairs, or accounting software in every single blog and social media post, you’re probably not going to get a large, engaged, following.

Don’t Post Links all the Time on Social Media

Social media platforms, from Facebook to LinkedIn, all want to keep users, on their platform. Links will tend to take people onto different websites, and as a result, posting links to your blog etc, will tend to kill your organic reach (the amount of people who see your social media post).

Keto Diet Products Example

If you were running a business selling Keto supplements and foods. You can study the Keto subreddits and Facebook groups, and you’d probably find that there are lots of questions regarding keto desserts.

Jump onto SEMRush, or another SEO Tool and find search terms, and potential headings for blog posts – that have a low level of competition – i.e. it’s relatively easy to rank for.

Create in-depth keto dessert blog content that’s better than what already exists.

Optimise the content for the search terms that you’ve identified on SEMRush.

Reformat the content for social media. Captioned videos tend to do well, as these are the least popular form of content – social media is full of images and text posts, so it’s a bit easier to stand out with a video.

Consider creating a free eBook about keto desserts. Promote the eBook on social media to “warm up” your target audience to your brand* Remarket your products to those that download the eBook.

Create a serious of posts & videos regarding the best keto desserts, the best sweeteners and the best supplements to help with sugar cravings.

*It’s difficult to sell products, particularly high value products to people on Facebook, Instagram etc, as they’re not actively searching for something to buy. Best practice is said to be, create an offer e.g. an eBook, Webinar etc that’s directly of interest (and NOT necessarily directly about your product) and advertise it to your target market on social media – Then remarket to those that engage with your advert.

Hope this blog post helps!

I know the irony about in-depth, long format content that I’m touting in this post, but please bear in mind, I’m writing this on my lunch and I’m not trying to sell anything. Well, unless you want to buy an MMA T-shirt.

Examples of Great Content Marketing

HubSpot YouTube Channel

The channel covers how to put together powerpoints, how to create videos for your small business and lots of marketing fundamentals for business owners

Daniel Foley Carter Linkedin

Daniel posts about tips on how to optimise your SEO, SEO mistakes to avoid and some very high level, useful SEO techniques and strategies to adopt.

Net World Sports

Net World Sports have a great range of highly visual buyers’ guides, size guides and a regularly updated blog.

How to Add Sub-Category Pages – Magento 1

On June 23, 2022September 26, 2023 By DaveIn MagentoLeave a comment

This is a post to remind me how to add sub-category pages on a specific e-commerce site, but most of the instructions are universal to M1

Go to Catalog – Manage categories

Leave on “All Store Views”

Click into folder you want to put a sub-category
Press “Collapse All” at the top to keep folders tidy

Highlight the Category/Folder you want to add the new sub-category into
Click the “+ Add SubCategory” button (blue)

For a new sport category, click “”NWS UK” and then “+ Add Subcategory”

First Tab – if the H1 is too long for the menu – populate Category Name and Category Heading differently

eg.

First Tab – General Information

– is main tab to fill in –
URL Key, meta title, page title (name), meta description

– “Include in Navigation Menu” – “NO”

Second Tab – General

Define Filter menu for left of page
“Filter Select Mode”
– Enable Selected Filters with the drop down menu

Add “price” as a filter
Add anything else relevant

“Display Settings” Tab

-Products only

Is Anchor – “Yes“
Make a note of ID Number of sub cat.

“Category Products” Tab

Add with product ID or search by name – then tick checkbox on left
Position – uses box on the right. Add in tens – 10, 20, 30, not 1,2,3*

*This makes it easier to add new products in order. If you order everything 1,2,3,4 etc, then you have to change all the order numbers when you add in a new product. Whereas if you order them 10,20,30, then you can add a new product with an order number of 15 and it will sit 2nd.

!Don’t drag the category folders into other folders!

Remember to enable the new Sub-category on the first tab when it’s ready!

Double check – “NO” in “include in menu”
Check added category products – not related products

For personal reference

Remember to keep on “All Store VIews” when adding to es and de too

Responsive Images with Inline CSS

On June 20, 2022July 14, 2023 By DaveIn Adobe Illustrator, Business, marketingLeave a comment

This is how I create images that are full width in desktop devices and mobiles etc.

You just need to use:

max-width: 100%;
height: auto;

Good info here on W3 Schools


      
            <img src="image-address.png" 
style="max-width: 100%; margin-bottom:0; max-width:1000px; height: auto;"
         alt="relevant description of image" >

Change the “max-width” to whatever you want the max width of the image to be on a desktop device.

For personal reference, this is the exact code I need for my own website with pre-built classes:

 <div style= "margin-bottom:20px;" > 
      <div class="content-item">
            <img src="image-url" style="max-width: 100%; margin-bottom:0; max-width:1000px; height: auto;"
         alt="relevant description of image" >
      </div>
  </div>

Here’s another example that I used today (july 2023!)

  <img src="drews-sexy-image.jpg"  style="width:1000px; max-width: 100%; height: auto; padding-top:25px;" alt="Basketball hoop dimensions" />

In the code above^ – the image will be 1000px wide on desktop, and the width of the screen on smaller devices

Padding-top, just puts some white space above the image

By the way – when you set image sizes to % – this represents the % of the block that the image is contained within

Viewing Code From another website

On February 1, 2022March 22, 2022 By DaveIn marketing, seoLeave a comment

Thanks to all the external sheets, this has become tricky.

I’ve been using this technique, because I’m an SEO Executive, developing pages for our Magento site, without any dev help – so I’m using existing pages and robbing bits of code to help me layout images properly.

This is for personal reference – so apologies if it doesn’t work for you (let me know)

Right click – Inspect Element

Click the pointer near the top left of the inspect element window – or hover in the code until the area you want to copy is highlighted.

In the elements window, find the element you want to rob the code for and hover over it with the pointer

Move upwards, until the entire section is highlighted – if you move upwards with the pointer and it selects the element/section above, then you’ve gone too far, so move down one

Right click – Copy – Copy Element

Paste into your own code

Note – unlike me (I’m updating the same site as I’m stealing code from) if you are trying to get the code form another website, you’ll need to get the style sheet.

Right click on the webpage and “View source” – then look for:

and click the link after “href” – that should take you to the CSS sheet

Semantic Search & SEO – Using Python and Google Colab

On January 18, 2022January 18, 2022 By DaveIn Business, seoLeave a comment

Semantic search adds context and meaning to search results. For example, if someone is searching for “Lego” – do they want to buy Lego toys, or see a Lego movie or TV show (Ninjago is great). Another example might be “Tesla” – do people want to see the latest self-driving car, or learn more about Tesla the scientist and inventor?

How to Optimise for Semantic Search

Make sure you understand search intent and any confusing searches like Tesla(inventor or car?), Jaguar (car or animal?), etc
Look for structured data opportunities
Optimise internal links – especially if you are using a “Pillar Post” and “Cluster Page” structure
Follow traditional on page SEO best practices with headers, meta titles, alt tags etc

Tools for Semantic Search

SMA Marketing have done a cool YouTube video about Semantic Search and they recommend tools including:

Wordlift
Frase
Advanced Custom Fields for WordPress
Google Colab with a SpaCy

Before you publish a post – look at the search results for the keyword(s) you are optimising the post for. Check in incognito in Chrome to remove most of the personalisation of the results.

For any answer boxes or snippets, you can click the “3 dots” to get information about the results:

As well as the snippets, you can click the 3 dots next to any organic result. Here’s another result for “MMA training program pdf” with some additional information:

With this in mind – if you are looking to rank for “MMA training program pdf” then you will want to include the search terms highlighted in the “About this result” box: mma, training, program, pdf and ideally LSI keywords “workout” and “plan”.

It’s also a good idea to scroll down to the bottom of the SERP and check out the “related searches”

Take a look too at any breadcrumb results that pull through below the organic listings. Combining all this information will give you a good idea as to what Google understands by your search query and what people are looking for too.

Semantic Search & NLP

This is a bit techy, but thankfully, the guy at SMA Marketing (thank you if you’re reading this) has put together a file/load of python code that does most of the work for us. You can find it here – https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1PI6JBn06i3xNUdEuHZ9xKPG3oSRi1AUm?usp=sharing#scrollTo=uatWEoHp5nxZ

Hover over [1] and click the play icon that appears (highlighted yellow in screenshot below)

When that section has finished loading and refreshing, scroll down to the “Installation tensorflow + transformers + pipelines” section and click the play icon there.

When that’s finished doing it’s thing, scroll down again, and add your search query to the uQuery_1: section:

add your query and then press the “play” button on the left hand side opposite the uQuery_1 line

You should then see the top 10 organic results from Google on the left hand side – in the form of a list of URLs

Next, you can scrape all the results by scrolling down to the “Scraping results with Trafilatura” section and hover over the “[ ]” and press play again:

Next, when the scraping of results is done – scroll down to “Analyze terms from the corpus of results” section and click the play button that appears when you hover over “[ ]”

Next! when that’s done click the play button on the section full of code starting with:

“df_1[‘top_result’] = [‘Top 3’ if x <= 3 else ‘Positions 4 – 10’ for x in df_1[‘position’]] # add top_result = True when position <=3 “

Finally – scroll down and click the play button on the left of the “Visualizing the Top Results” section.

On the right hand side where it says “Top Top 3” and lists a load of keywords/terms – these are frequent and meaningful (apparently) terms used in the top 3 results for your search term.

Below that, you can see the terms used in the results from 4-10

Terms at the top of the graph are used frequently in the top 3 results e.g. “Mini bands”

Terms on the right are used frequently by the results in positions 4-10

From the graph above, I can see that for the search term “resistance bands” the top 3 results are using some terms, not used by 4-10 – including “Mini bands”, “superbands” “pick bodylastics”

If you click on a term/keyword in the graph – a ton of information appears just below:

e.g. if I click “mini bands”

It’s interesting that “mini bands” is not featured at all in the results positioned 4-10

If you were currently ranking in position 7 for example, you’d probably want to look at adding “mini bands” into your post or product page

You can now go to the left-side-bar and click “Top 25 Terms” and click the “play icon” to refresh the data:

Obviously – use your experience etc and take the results with a pinch of salt – some won’t be relevant.

Natural Language Processing

next click on “Natural Langauge Processing” in the side-menu

Click the “play” icons next to “df_entity =df_1[df_1[‘position’] < 6]” and the section below.

When they have finished running click the play icon next to “Extracting Entities”

Click “play” on the “remove duplicates” section and again on the “Visualising Data” section

This should present you with a colourful table, with more terms and keywords – although for me most of the terms weren’t relevant in this instance 😦

You can also copy the output from the “Extracting the content from Top 5” section:

Python Google Colab — Then paste it into the DEMO/API for NLP that Google have created here:

https://cloud.google.com/natural-language#section-2

You can then click the different tabs/headings and get some cool insights

Remember to scroll right down to the bottom, as you’ll find some additional insights about important terms and their relevance

The Google NLP API is pretty interesting. You can also copy and paste your existing page copy into it, and see what Google categories different terms as, and how “salient” or important/relevant it thinks each term is. For some reason, it thinks “band” is an organisation in the above screenshot. You can look to improve the interpretations by adding relevant contextual copy around the term on the page, by using schema and internal links.

Quickly Scrape SERP Results for SEO

On December 23, 2021June 22, 2023 By DaveIn Business, seoLeave a comment

Go to Google.com

Press CTRL+D to bookmark the page

Add it to your bookmarks bar if possible

Copy the code below:

javascript:var a = document.getElementsByTagName('a'), arr = '';for(var i=0; i<a.length; i++) if (a[i].ping && !a[i].href.includes('google'))arr +=('<p>' + a[i].href + '</p>');var newWindow = window.open();newWindow.document.write(arr);newWindow.document.close();

Right click on the bookmark and click “Edit”

Where it says “URL” paste in the code

Rename the bookmark “URL Extractor”

Save the bookmark

That’s it!

Test the URL Extractor – do a Google Search and then click on the Bookmark you’ve just created

You should now have a new tab with all of the URLs listed in it

Change your Google Search settings to show 100 results – you can just copy and paste the tab full of extracted URLS into Google Sheets

Once in Google Sheets, you can easily extract the Meta Titles, Descriptions and keywords

You just need to find and replace the URL in these formulas:

=importxml("https://blackbeltwhitehat.com","//title") =importxml("https://blackbeltwhitehat.com/","//meta[@name='description']/@content") =importxml("https://blackbeltwhitehat.com/","//meta[@name='keywords']/@content")

=IMPORTXML("https://blackbeltwhitehat.com/","//h1")

Google Analytics 4 – Quick Notes & Introduction

On December 23, 2021June 26, 2023 By DaveIn Analytics, BusinessLeave a comment

Image Source (google.com)

An Analytics account is your gateway to Analytics. An account can include multiple properties and property types, but a property can belong to only one Analytics account.

A property lives within an account. Properties are the containers for your reports based on the data you collect from your apps and sites. It’s the level at which Analytics processes data and where Analytics can connect with other Google products, like Google Ads.

A data stream lives within a property and is the source of data from your app or website. A property can have one or many data streams.

Info taken from the GA 4 Course here

The guiding principle of account structure

When structuring your Analytics account, remember this guiding principle: Each property should represent a specific user base.

Use separate properties to collect data from each user base you’re interested in understanding better — for example, a specific brand or region.

The new version of Google Analytics – Google Analytics 4 – has less pre-made reports and users are prompted to customise their own dashboards and use the search function.

You can literally ask questions, using the search bar. Which is fun.

Instead of pageviews and sessions, GA 4 is built around events.

Pre-configured reports are limited in GA 4. It’s a good idea to have Universal Analytics in addition to GA4

You can’t yet link GA 4 to Search Console

You can Can store raw data in BigQuery

when you install GA4 on your site, the reports don’t import data from GA universal – start from scratch – no historical data is passed over to GA4 when you install it on your site.

GA4 is Built Around Events.

Events:

You can track pageloads, elements clicked, product details, and loads more

Parameters:

Parameters are info that are sent to GA4 with the events.

Eg. Pageview is sent to GA4 with URL of the page, page title and the referral details

Automatic Events:

First Visit – first time someone visits site (this even populates the new user report too)

Page View – same as normal pageviews

Session Start – new session after 30 mins of inactivity

User Engagement – starts whens someone on your site for at least 10 secs

Enhancement Measurement

GA4 automatically tracks:

Scrolls – 90% of a page

Outbound Clicks –

Site Search – search queries

Video Engagement – for embedded YouTube videos

File Downloads

To edit the Enhancement Measurement reports go to “Data Streams” in the Admin area:

Click on data stream and check to see that “Enhanced Measurement” is switched to the on position. If you click on the cog icon, you can then switch different measurements on and off.

They’ll be set to “on” by default.

There are advanced settings for pageviews and site search – just click “Show advanced settings”.

Recommended Events

Google provides a list of recommended events for all websites and apps, and then by industry.

Retail & eCommerce

Jobs, Education, Local Deals & Real Estate

Travel

Games

Custom Events

Custom events allows you to name your events.

Google’s naming convention is probably best to copy – [action]_[object/item]

For example, if you create an event to track when people rate your website, call it:

Rate_item

Instead of

Product-rate

Add parameters such as product, item_id and rating – so you know which product is rated and what rating the user gave it.

You’ll need to register the parameters as custom dimensions or metrics

To make a new event – in the left hand nav/side bar – click –

Events – Create Event – Name the event

Enter the parameters to tell Google when to trigger the new event

E.g. page_location – contains – thank-you

Click “create” in top right corner.

You can create brand new events in Tag Manager – rather than basing them on existing events

Data Settings>Data Retention

By default GA4 only stores data for 2 months – in the Admin area, you can change this to 14 months.

Go to Admin>Data Settings>Data Retention and change it to 14 months on the drop down menu.

Brief Run Down of GA4 Reports (in the left hand side-menu)

REPORTS

Acquisition Reports – Where are visitors coming from? Looks at channels e.g. organic, and New Users Vs Returning Visitors

Click the “+” above the table, to add an additional dimension

1. Click the + above the table on one of the reports:

2. Add an additional dimension to the table, e.g. Page/Screen > Landing Page

Engagement Reports – What are visitors doing on your site?

To see pageviews and users per page:

Reports>Engagement>Pages and Screens

Monetization – New term for eCommerce Reporting in GA 4

See what items people are buying and how much money their spending

Retention – Looks at new users/visitors and returning visitors. See what percentage of different cohorts come back to the site etc

Demographics – Where are people based and what type of people are coming to your site?

Tech – what computers, tablets and phones are people using?

EVENTS

Conversions – conversions can be customised. But typically include “Begin_checkout” and “purchase”

All Events – basically less important events – compared to conversions. Include clicks, scrolls etc.

EXPLORE

Analysis – There is a Template Gallery (top right of screen)

You can look into funnels, acquisition etc and get cool reports

CONFIGURE

Audiences – you can build different audiences by location, device etc and analyse them

Notes from the GA4 Course from Google

Google uses identity spaces to track users.

How to use data streams

Remember, a property is the container for your reports based on the data you collect from your apps and sites.

A data stream lives within a property and is a source of data from your app or website.

Once you’ve identified a user base you’re trying to measure, create a property for that user base.

Then create a data stream for each of the ways these users interact with your business. For example, if you’re an app developer, you could create one data stream for your iOS app, one for your Android app, and one for your app’s marketing website.

Conversions are events that are assigned a value – such as a purchase, a lead or a download.

To mark events as conversions

In the left-hand side-menu, go to the bottom option “configure” – then “go to admin”

Click “events”

You can now turn on events like 100% scroll, to conversions.

Modelled Conversions

Browsers that don’t allow conversions to be measured with third-party cookies have conversions modeled based on a website’s traffic. Browsers that limit the time window for first-party cookies have conversions (beyond the window) modeled.

Some countries require consent to use cookies for advertising activities. When advertisers use consent mode, conversions are modeled for unconsented users.
Google

Identity Spaces

When trying to understand user journeys, Analytics can use several different user identifiers, such as the IDs you assign users logged into your website, Google signals, and device ID. These groups of identifiers are called identity spaces.

Reports & Explorations

Free From Exploration

The free form exploration allows you to visualize your data with flexibility and ease.

To conduct an ad hoc analysis, just drag and drop the variables you’re interested in onto a canvas to see instant visualizations of your data. Don’t see the variable you’re looking for? Select the plus icon to view the full list of dimensions and metrics you can use.

This tool presents your data in a cross-tab layout, where you can arrange the rows and columns as you like and add the metrics you’re most interested in. You can also apply different visualization styles, including bar charts, pie charts, line charts, scatter plots, and maps.

If you spot a significant data point, right-click on that data point to easily create an audience or segment from it and use it in other explorations. If you use the line chart visualization, you’ll see an automatic feature enabled called anomaly detection. This feature uses machine learning to identify outliers in your data according to your parameters.

Funnel Exploration

Funnel exploration lets you visualize the steps your users take toward a key task or conversion. This tool helps you identify sequences of key events and understand how your users navigate these steps. You’ll be able to see where users enter your funnels, as well as where they drop off.

You can use this information to improve your site or app and reduce inefficient or abandoned customer journeys. You can also easily create audiences of users based on where they enter or exit the funnels you define.

With this tool, you can define up to 10 steps in your funnels, up from five steps in UA properties’ Custom Funnels. Plus, you can now analyze both closed funnels (where users must enter at the beginning of the funnel) and open funnels (where users can enter the funnel at any point).

Path Exploration

Path exploration lets you understand how people progress from one stage in the customer journey to the next.

Like funnel exploration, path exploration uncovers the steps users take through your site or app. But while funnels only analyze a single, predefined path, path exploration is free-flowing and can follow any number of undefined paths, even ones you weren’t aware of or didn’t intend. For example, it could uncover looping behavior, which may indicate users becoming stuck.

Plus, you can define paths using either a starting point or an ending point. This helps you understand how users got to a certain step on their journey and shows you what they did after.

Segment Overlap

Segment overlap lets you compare up to three user segments to quickly see how those segments overlap and relate to each other. This can help you isolate specific audiences based on complex conditions. You can then create new segments based on your findings, which you can apply to other exploration techniques and Google Analytics reports.

Copy taken from the Google Course here.

Explorations are private by default. If you’re the creator, only you can view and edit them unless you choose to share.

Understand the Analytics property structure

You can use GA4 properties exclusively for web data, exclusively for app data, or for both app and web data together. No matter what your setup is, it’s important to understand how to structure your new Analytics property.

Introducing data streams

Data streams are a feature of GA4 properties that allow you to connect a single Analytics property to the various places where your users interact with your business. For example, a company that has both a website and an app would need a separate data stream for each platform to combine their reporting and insights into a single Analytics property.

Once you have set up your GA4 property and data stream(s), you can add different events.

For an eCommerce store, Google recommends setting up:

Google Analytics 4 filters are applied at the property level, and affect data from all data streams in that property. All reports for a property use the same filtered data.

Analytics collects and stores user interactions with your website or your app as events. Events provide insight into what’s happening on your website or app, such as page views, button clicks, user actions, or system events.

Conversions

It’s easy to create conversions, from events.

Got to EVENTS in the side-bar/menu on the left of GA4, then “All events”.

You can then mark existing events as conversions:

See also:

GA 4 SEO Reports – for step by step instructions on setting up some useful SEO reports in Google Analytics 4

Data Studio – Quick Tips (Advanced)

On December 22, 2021December 23, 2021 By DaveIn Business, Data Stuido, marketingLeave a comment

Speed Up Data Studio Reports (Significantly) – Extract Data

To speed up your reports – you can “Extract Data” and cache it.

It can help to have 2 copies of the report up – so you can see which metrics and dimensions you need to select when adding the data to extract and cache (also a good idea to test the extract data method on a copy of the report in case you faff anything up)

Go to “Add Data” in the top menu-bar

Click on “Extract Data”

Choose the data you need – eg Google Analytics

Add the dimensions and metrics you need for the report
On the Right hand side – click to turn “Auto Update” on
Select “daily”
Click “Save and Extract”

Sometimes you have to faff around a bit with the dimensions – Google Analytics doesn’t seem to like caching a dimension, but still goes super-quick if you cache the metrics only.

Edit in Bulk

If you want to edit all of the charts or tables on the page, in “Edit” mode, right click – go to “Select” and then choose “Tables on page” or whatever type of chart, scorecard or table you’ve selected.

This works instead of CTRL clicking or SHIFT clicking – but you can only change charts or visualisations of the same type at the same time. You can change the style, add a comparison date range etc.

Brand Colour Theme in Data Studio

Click on “Them and Layout” at the top of the screen and then, near the bottom right click “Extract Theme from Image” – you can then upload your logo and choose a theme with your brand colours.

If your shite at presentation like me, this is helpful.

Copy & Paste Styles

In Data Studio – If you want to copy a style from a chart or table, right click it, then choose “copy”

Click another chart/table and the right click – Paste Special – Paste Style Only

Add Chart Filters to an Entire Report

If you want to add a filter to all the data in a report, then it can be a pain going through the charts individually.

Right click on a blank part of the page –

Click “Current Page Settings”
On the right hand side – click “Create a Filter”
Choose or create a filter to apply to all the page

To add a filter to multiple pages

Right click on a blank part of the page
click “Report Settings”
click “Add a filter” in the right side-menu

Add Elements to All Pages of a Report in Data Studio

If you want to add a header and date range selector, for example, to all the pages in the report – add the elements to a page, then right click on the element – and choose “Make report-level”

Quickly Align Elements in Data Studio

Click and drag to select all the elements

Right click – choose “align” – “middle” to get everything inline horizontally

To get an equal space between all the elements, so they’re spaced evenly:

– click and drag to select the elements

– right click – select “Distribute”

– “horizontally” to space evenly across the page, or “vertically” to distribute evenly in a vertical manner.

You can also tidy up individual tables to align the columns vertically – right click and select “”Fit to data”

See our Data Studio Fields & Filters blog post – https://businessdaduk.com/2021/12/15/data-studio-fields-filters-notes/

Data Studio – Data Blending

On December 15, 2021December 17, 2021 By DaveIn Data StuidoLeave a comment

Bit of a ball ache to work out

There are a few ways to blend data, here’s my fave:

Go to “Resources” in the main menu at the top
Click “manage blended data” option
Click “Add a Data View”
Choose a Data Source e.g. Search Console
Then “Add a Table” and include another data Source for blending – e.g. GA
or click “blend data” on an existing table or chart – and select another data source
Choose a common “key” to both data sources e.g. “Date”
Choose the metrics you want from each Data Source – I wanted to get daily revenue into my search console reports:

Using the blended data above, I can now add Revenue from Google Analytics to my search console reports. I have to remember however, that the revenue is simply attributed to each day and not any queries

**Update to the screenshot –

add a table filter to get organic only revenue from GA.

To be able to filter Revenue to organic only – you need to add a “Dimension” to the table on the right – click the “+” next to “Add dimension” in the GA data and then “Default Channel Grouping” – you can then create a filter in the report:

Blending Search Console Data in Data Studio

Another common reason to blend data – is to get average position data from Search Console “Site Impression reports, added to “URL Impression” data:

URL impression vs site impression

Incidentally –

the main difference between Data Studio Search Console URL Impression Vs Site Impression data – is that Site Impression contains the Average Position metric and URL Impression contains the Landing Page metric. So when you’re blending the data from both sources, make sure you have “Landing Page” as a metric and “Average Position”.

Data Studio Fields & Filters – Notes

On December 15, 2021December 15, 2021 By DaveIn Data Stuido, marketing, seoLeave a comment

Once you’ve created a field – add it to your chart as a Dimension

Mixed Case URLs

Having a mix of URL cases in the letters can faff with your data as D.S. might think each capitalisation variation is a new URL:

Click on the Data Tab to the right – then “Create new field” or “Add a Field”

Name the field “Lower Source” type in “LOWER(“
Then add “Source” from “Available Fields” to the left

Click “Save” and add “Lower Source” to the table as a Dimension

Concatenate Data

Create or “Add a Field”
In the Formula box type “CONCAT” and then select the fields you want to use
Close the formula with the final “)” and save it

Internal Site Searches – Extract Search Query

Make the data look nicer and get the search term on its own in the table.

Select to a “Add a Field”
Use REGEXP_EXTRACT formula to pull out the search terms and get rid of “/search?q”
Use the REGEX shown below:

Search Queries – Pull Out Questions – What, Why, When?

Create / Add a New Field
Add REGEX as shown below and save

Add New Field as a Dimension to the table
Create a table/data Filter so that you include only table rows that equate to “True” in the new dimension/column

CASE Formulas in Data Studio

CASE formulas are basically “If this, then do that” formulas

When X happens, Then do Y

You can use the CASE Formula to classify and group channels together

For example:

WHEN query matches “who”, then display text “Who?” in the table

In the Formula – you need a “catch all” default for when nothing is true in the criteria
If the search doesn’t contain “who, what, why” etc. then:
ELSE “others”

So if the search term, doesn’t match any of the REGEX criteria – classify it as “others”

Add the new field – to the table or report

Date Ranges & Filter Controls

Taken me ages to work this out – I’ve only just twigged:

You can add Comparisons, Search Boxes, Drop Down Menus and all sorts to your Data Studio Reports

For controls and filters to work – you need the chart or table to have “Default Date Range” set to “Auto”

See my post about REGEX for SEO here.

If you want a pre-made Data Studio template, you can send me some money and hope for the best.