Analytics for marketing

Which numbers to watch and which to leave alone

The rule we use ourselves is one sentence: a number is worth watching if you would do something different when it moves. If your post impressions go from eight thousand to twelve thousand and on Saturday you do exactly what you were going to do anyway, that number is not a number for you, it is a feeling.

Three numbers that are almost always misleading. First the follower count, which only says how many people pressed a button one day and says nothing about today. Second impressions and views, which are an input and not a result, and which on Telegram even rise with age without a single new reader. Third the average position in Search Console, which is the worst of them because it looks like a precise figure.

Google itself has written down how that number is built: the position shown in the Performance report is the topmost position a link to your page held in results, "averaged across all queries" in which your property appeared. Which means that the moment your page starts showing on page three for one new phrase, the average position gets worse without anything having got worse. If your monthly report uses that number as a measure of progress, the report is lying to you.

Keep instead one number per channel that is attached to a decision: for search, clicks on the pages you wrote in order to sell; for social, the number of conversations started; for email, clicks on a tagged link; for advertising, the cost of one real enquiry. Four numbers. If your report holds more than that, nobody reads the rest.

What UTM is, and what you lose without it

A few words you attach to the end of a page address so that when someone clicks the link, Analytics knows where the link was. Without them, a click from an Instagram bio, a click from a channel post and a click from your email signature all land in the same anonymous row, and you can no longer say which piece of work paid off.

Google publishes the list of parameters, and two points on that page are rarely repeated anywhere else. First, Google says plainly that whenever you add parameters you should always use utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign; the rest are optional. Second, two of the parameters on that list, utm_creative_format and utm_marketing_tactic, are in Google's own words "not currently reported in Google Analytics properties". You can set them and never see them anywhere.

A third point that confuses most people: Google states that UTM parameters are omitted from the Landing page + query string and Page path + query string dimensions and are instead populated in Page location. So if you went looking for your campaign tag in the pages report and could not find it, nothing is broken; it is somewhere else.

And the discipline everything depends on is clerical rather than technical: one name per place, always the same one. Write instagram once, Instagram another time and insta a third, and you have built three separate rows in the report, none of which is the real number. A plain file recording which name you use for each channel matters more than any analysis tool.

Why the Analytics number never matches the Search Console number

Because they count two different things and neither of them is broken. Search Console looks from Google's side: someone clicked your link in search results. Analytics looks from your site's side: a page opened in someone's browser, the measurement code ran, and a message went to Google's server.

Several things can happen between those two moments. The user can go back before the page finishes loading. A browser or an extension can block the measurement script. And most of all, Search Console counts Google Search only, while Analytics counts arrivals from everywhere. That is why comparing the two number to number is a meaningless exercise; the meaningful thing is to compare each one against its own history.

Each answers a question only it can answer. Search Console tells you which phrases people searched, saw you and did not click; no other tool has that, and it is the place from which page titles and meta descriptions should be corrected. Analytics tells you what happened after the visit and where people came from. If you work with both, the lessons on Search Console and Google Analytics 4 in this section open up the tool layer in more detail.

Before you trust the number, check the measurement itself

The most common reason a chart drops suddenly is not a real drop; it is measurement that broke. And the worst version is the silent one: no error is logged anywhere, the report arrives every day, only the numbers are smaller.

Three things worth checking once a month. That the measurement code is still on every page, including new pages and checkout pages. That the script file actually returns a 200 and not a 404; you can see this in the server log or in the browser's network tab. And that the page cache is not serving an old copy of the HTML pointing at an address that no longer exists.

That last item is the one we learned the hard way, and it is written out in the first-hand section of this page. The short version: when your site's HTML sits in a cache layer for weeks, any change to the name of a script file can cut measurement off, and you will see it not in the report but only in the server log.

A monthly report somebody actually reads

One page. Any longer and nobody reads it, and you yourself will not have the patience to build it next month.

The four channel numbers you chose above, each beside last month's number rather than standing alone. Under them two lines about what changed and one guess at why, marked plainly as a guess. Then one thing you intend to try next month. And at the end, one line about what you do not know; that line is what separates a report from an advertisement.

What is not in the report matters too: charts nobody makes a decision from, screenshots of tool dashboards, and any number whose origin you cannot state. If you cannot explain a number in two sentences, it has no business being in your report.