Kane Jamison will be speaking on Analytics at the Engage Conference, which will take place March 9, 2017 in Portland. For more information, or to purchase tickets, please click here.

Kane Jamison - Engage Conference Speaker1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
I’m the founder of Content Harmony, a content marketing agency based in Seattle, WA. We primarily work with eCommerce and software companies to build content marketing programs that attract their target audience.

While most of our time is spent on content creation & promotion efforts, setting up the right tracking and framework to measure the success of content marketing efforts is one of the hardest parts of the process, which is what I’ll be talking about at Engage. Why you need to set up content groups, how to analyze conversions by content type rather than source/medium/channel, how to look at how content is affecting top-of-funnel traffic to the site – these are the types of questions that content marketers need to answer in order to properly measure their performance.

2) I’ve seen SO MANY faulty Google Analytics implementations. How can someone QC their setup for accuracy?
Oh boy. Well, I think the biggest mistake most people make is assuming that Google Analytics is plug-and-play once you install the tags. So, the first step is to assume that if you haven’t customized your installation, it’s probably only tracking half of the data you actually need to measure a marketing program, and it never tracks the most important information out of the box, which is goals & conversions. You’ve also hopefully installed the tracking code only once per page, across all URLs on the site, and not separated sections of your site into multiple properties. Then you get to the problems of tracking separate domains and subdomains on separate views or properties, and best practices are kind of complicated on that because it depends so much on the purpose of those separate domains.

In short, if none of that makes sense, get someone more experienced to do even a fast 60-minute review of your account.

3) GA Premium is VERY expensive. How can a business make that very high price tag ROI positive?
Above all else, I’ll assume everything discussed in the previous question regarding proper setup is completely behind you and was done years ago. I think the holy grail that would make GA Premium worth it is to achieve a closed loop attribution system, or something close to it. Aside from that it’s really about numbers. If you spend $150k/yr on GA Premium and it will help you increase the ROI from your $15m/yr media spend by 10% – that’s when it will actually pay for itself.

GA Premium doesn’t apply to 99% of GA users, however, and to be honest, we’ve worked with large public companies that still need to figure out the faulty implementation problems, rather than paying for a premium version of the product. So, don’t bother investing in Premium unless you’ve got an excellent in-house Analyst or a great vendor helping you.

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