Updates for the week ending May 26th, 2023

A couple of you found an error on the weekly Google Analytics SEO dashboard, so I fixed it. I also added a little tutorial about Ghostery.

I love Looker Studio, but it can be a little glitchy. I guess I just ignored the glitch in the lower-right of the first page of the weekly Google Analytics SEO dashboard, but now I’ve fixed it.

The glitched-out data was a list of all the new visits your website has received from Social Media in the last week. I think this is a good thing to keep an eye on- not because social media directly affects SEO but because it might have an indirect effect. For example:

• Did someone mention you on Facebook? Perhaps they would be a good partner to work with to develop a skyscraper link building project.
• Did someone share your content on Twitter? Reach out and thank them and see if there are other link building opportunities with them- like a guest post on their blog.

Now the Looker Studio template is fixed but that won’t fix any broken reports you have already created. Rather than create a new report, you can fix the existing report by following these steps:

1. Select “Edit” at the top of the page
2. Delete the table with the error from the page
3. Right-click on the table that says “Visitors From Links” and select “Duplicate”
4. Move the duplicated table to the bottom-right of the page, replacing the old one.
5. Click on the duplicated table and make the following changes:
   1. At the bottom of the “SETUP” column (on the right) remove the existing “Filter” and choose “Social Media Traffic”. At this point the table now shows social media traffic, rather than “referral” (or traffic from links).
   2. Scroll to close to the top of the “SETUP” column and click on the tiny “ABC” to the left of the green Dimension called “Visitors From Links” (when you hover over this, it should change to a pencil).
   3. Change the name of this Dimension from “Visitors From Links” to “Social Media Visits” (or whatever makes sense to you).

As I mentioned in the introduction, I also added a brief tutorial on how to use Ghostery effectively.