Popups, cross domain tracking, and managing emailed reports from Google Analytics (11/11/2020)

Another week of Office Hours that covers a wide range of topics. I bet you’ve had these questions before, too.

The first topic we covered was about popups on a website. You know the kind: where something shows over the screen, inviting you to signup for their email list. These are called interstitial. While these are very effective, Google doesn’t like them. During the recording I couldn’t find this article, that explains their resistance to interstitials. With Google’s resistance, that means you have to consider other things (besides SEO) when adding these to your website.

The next topic we covered is a common one, when people attempt to measure their goals in Google Analytics. Some systems that take goals occur on third-party (other) websites. It can be a real challenge to measure goals, like this, in Google Analytics. In the Office Hours we discussed several options to track these kinds of things as goals.

On a side topic, we talked a lot about Google Tag Manager, this week. I recommend using this great service to serve all your tracking codes (including Google Analytics) and other things on your site (such as code for popup forms). Typically this isn’t any harder than setting up Google Analytics on a website, so don’t be intimidated.

The third topic we covered can be tricky. While I recommend setting up regular (weekly) reports emailed to you from Google Analytics, it can be tricky to manage them. What do you do if you need to make a change in that emailed report? How can you update the report? We worked on this problem, too.

Do you have an SEO question you’ve always wanted to ask? Join the Colony and you can participate in the next Office Hours.