Since July 2013, I have been publishing weekly tips on the official Google Analytics Google+ page. I try to keep them very actionable, i.e. something that you can do right after reading the tip. They usually have two paragraphs explaining how to do something, a link for more information and an image showing how to get there or the results you will get.
Some of the tips receive more interaction than others and I believe this is a reasonable proxy for how valuable they are, so I decided to find out the Top 10 tips and share them in one single post. That got me thinking about how to rank the tips… here are the factors that I considered:
- Post timing: since I consider this a column, like in any other publication it has a specific day/time. I always post on Wednesdays mornings (London time), so I am assuming there is no seasonability affecting the number of interactions I get.
- Reshares: since resharing a post will propagate the message and generate many other +1’s (which I can’t possibly have access to), I am multiplying reshares by 3.
- +1’s: good indicative of how valuable a post is.
- Comments: sometimes I get very interesting comments, which add to the tip, but mostly they are just like +1’s, just a short comment. So I am just counting them.
- Clicks on links: I could count the number of clicks on links shared on the posts, as they are all created with Google’s URL Shortener, but since the objective of the post is to be self-sufficient and help people do something right now, I am ignoring the number of clicks
- Post age: there may be an influence by the post age, but since the last post I am analyzing was posted over a month ago, I am assuming it got most of the interaction it will get.
So here we go, the top 10 Google Analytics tips I shared in the last 6 months… and don’t be shy, if you like any of the tips feel free to share them 🙂
