How to get your relationship with Google back on track
A tool for making the most of Google Analytics, and how to recover from a SEO nightmare.
News Consumer Insights is back
In the Google Analytics 3 days, which finally ended before the summer, Google had a pretty useful tool called News Consumer Insights. Essentially, you connected it to your Google Analytics account, and it created an editorially-relevant dashboard for you to understand the relationship between your content and your audience.
It wasn't updated for GA4 by the time of the GA3 switch off, despite the fact that the new version of Google Analytics was even more e-commerce focused than the old version. It's really hard to get what publishers need out of the current version, frankly.
Well, happily, last month the Google News Initiative finally released a GA4 compatible version of News Consumer Insights:
Cutting through the hype, it does look useful, and it is free, so if you're using Google Analytics, get it hooked up and see what it does for you. I've connected a couple of our students sites, in preparation for the new academic year, and I'll report back once I've had a chance for a more detailed explore.
I'm bloody glad to see it back, though, even if there are some better (if more complex) tools out there…
Recovering from a Google algorithm spanking
Talking of Google, some publishers are seeing some real volatility in their search traffic. I'm not particularly sympathetic to some of the complaints. There's a whole genre of “Google is punishing small sites like me, it's not fair” articles out there. And pretty much every time I've looked at those sites, they're making some extremely obvious SEO mistakes - or they've got no funnel in place to develop search visitors into loyal ones. Bit late by the time you're complaining to a sympathetic journalist about the traffic downturn…
However, some sites do get unfairly hit, and this is a useful guide to how to go about recovering from that:
WTF is SEO?
What work chat tool do you use?
I'm running a quick poll on LinkedIn about work chat tools like Slack, Teams and even Discord. I'd be really interested to hear what you use professionally:
Yes, there is an audience-related reason for this. And I'll talk more about that when the poll is done…
Courses🤷🏼
Quick, self-serving plug: the next run of my popular and very reasonably priced newsletters course kicks off on Monday. Still space left, if you fancy joining us:
(I'm feel really awkward plugging my own courses, which is why I'm in journalism not marketing, but they're a big part of how I earn my living so… 🤷🏼)
Events
Now, back to more comfortable territory — plugging other people's worthwhile things!
Marcella from journalism.co.uk is organising a live webinar next week on the audience user needs model, which is a really useful framework for starting an audience engagement journey. I can'y make it as I'll be at NEXT Conference in Hamburg, but it looks well worth tuning in for:
Marcela Kunova
And in October, the European Journalism Centre are doing a News Impact Summit on fighting climate misinformation. I desperately want to be there — but I have some tricky childcare logistics to negotiate before I can sign up. If you're more flexible - you should get yourself booked in:
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Anyone know of any big stories happening today? Paid Members Public
There's got to be something. Maybe an election somewhere?