Five videos of five actions clients can take with Google Analytics

There is a lot to communicate in modern marketing and our methods haven't kept up with the times. I often find myself giving trying to solve problems by phone and email; methods which turn out to be unnecessarily time consuming and open to miscommunication 

I want to show a different way to communicate analytics actions to a client. I use a tool called Screenr. It is a simple desktop video capture service, like a Flip camera for your desktop.

Using Screenr I find I can very quickly communicate and educate around specific topics. It is perfect for clearly showing clients how to take control of analytics.

I have put together five videos of five actions clients often need to do with their own analytics, to show you how powerful a quick video communication tool can be and provide inspiration for making your own.

As a agency-side search marketer, I am often called on by clients for elementary and repetitive troubleshooting and data analysis. This normally takes place over the phone or email and in some cases I will create Powerpoint documents with screenshots and step by step instructions for my clients

If a client is not familiar with their Analytics package, the phone and email route will be time consuming, require us to be available concurrently and the client will always phone back the next time the same action needs to be taken.

The step by step documented route is a better solution but can also take quite a bit of time to set up.

1 How to add someone to a Google Analytics account so they can see the analytics data

• Go to your dashboard and on the bottom right-click on "user managers" then "add users".
• Enter the users email address and choose the account type.
• Add the website you want them to have access to.
• Click "save".

2 How to block everyone in your office from counting in your own Google Analytics data

Everyone involved in building a website should be stopped from counting towards the website's user data. The people who work on a website can distort the analytics and you need to keep your data clean and reflective of your customers' use of your website.

This task is divided into two parts; firstly find your IP address and then block your IP address.

• Find your ip address whatismyipaddress.com.
• Go to your account in google analytics.
• Click on "filter managers" on the bottom right.
• Click "add a filter".
• Give the filter a descriptive name. select the "traffic from ip addresses" dropdown.
• Add the website you want to add the filter to and save your changes.
• Double check you put in the right ip address or you might actually block real customers.

Now traffic from that IP address will be filtered out of your Google Analytics data.

3 Add notations to your Google Analytics graphs

• Go to your dashboard and on the visits graph, click on the blue dot of the date you would like to annotate.
• Click the "add new annotation" box and a box will open to allow you to add a comment to that data. 
• This is good for noting any changes and big marketing events so that you can understand why spikes in traffic happen when you look back later on.

4 Tag a URL in Google Keyword Builder

Why would you want to tag a url? So you can track clicks on that url e.g. track all links in an email so that you can analyse the impact your emails have.

• Go to http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578 setup source magazine email launch, medium email, campaign logo.
• Generate a new, tagged url and use it in your email and you will be able to see the number of times that url sends visits to your website.
• The next video will show you how to go into Google Analytics and find the impact of your emails by looking at visits from this url.

5 Find the impact of an email campaign in Google Analytics

• Go to your dashboard and on the left hand navigation open traffic and then campaigns.
• You can sort by source, campaign and medium you specified earlier.

Even though I have provided simple bullet point instructions for each action, you can still see the room for error and possibilities of misinterpretation in using text to communicate.

I hope these videos inspire you to try this method of clear communication with your clients. Please share your thoughts below and let me know how this works for you.