The Project

The blogging project that I introduced in my last post allows the students to create a blog of their choice and then promote it and track it over various forms of social media. It is important to link the blog to Google Analytics for tracking purposes.  This post will explain how to structure the project and some technical details for tracking in other forms of social media.

Linking the Blog to GA

As mentioned before, it is important to link the blog to Google Analytics so students can see where there traffic is coming from, the time people spend on the blog and the blog rate.  The new GA4 does not seem to be fully integrated with most blogging platforms and does not include the same metrics as GA4 (a topic for another blog post).  GA will not be updated but is not going away, so can still be used for the blog project. During the last post, it looked like the analytics would be in GA4, but I have done some more digging and am happy to report that prior instructions for this project that I have posted using Blogger as an example will work.

Fortunately, when creating the blog, it is possible select the option to create a both UA (Universal Analytics) and a GA4 property. Be sure to create both or these instructions will not work.  Connect GA to the blog and by navigating to the Tracking  ID (also known informally as a UA Code) information in the GA property and copying that into Blogger or WordPress. The WordPress example showing where to find the Tracking ID is below.   Follow the instructions for copying and pasting the UA code into Blogger by reading Dr. Zahay’s updated blog post from  2018 in the references section below. Follow these instructions if you are using WordPress (Zahay, 2018).

UA code in GA 4

In WordPress, the place to copy the UA code is in settings.

Linking GA to WordPress via Tracking Code in Settings.

I demonstrated the Google Analytics on my own blog and also showed how to create a shortened URL on bit.ly and track blog activity that way. There are other ways to create a short URL for tracking purposes and you can discuss that in class.

Google Analytics for This Blog

By analyzing the data from GA I can see that most of my traffic is coming from social media.  The blog has not been around enough to be served up in search.  So I can focus on more keyword rich posts that can be found in direct search easily so I can be found in search. I can post at the time of day my readers are available to read the post. This is the type of analysis the students are doing in a spreadsheet format.

Students select two social media networks and GA to report upon in each week after blogging.  This idea was inspired by a similar social media project that was created by Dr. Leila Samii at the University of Southern New Hampshire.  Students choose at lease five metrics they wish to track on GA and on two social media networks and also create weekly goals for their blog.  They submit the results and a brief analysis for several different types of blog posts, i.e., original content, pictures or videos, long form, sharing content created by an influencer, etc.

Other Analytics

For this blog, I was able to post the information in our own Facebook Digital Marketing Academics Group and therefore had access to Facebook Insights.  There was good engagement on the post and a lot of enthusiasm for a blog on teaching Social Media Analytics, so I knew I was on the right track for the blog.  Over two-thirds of active group members saw the blog post and ten percent of those clicked on the link. Encourage the students to start their own group or a related company page on their blog topic to gain access to Facebook Insights.

Facebook Insights on Blog Post Activity

These  are the metrics in Twitter for the first blog post.

Twitter Analytics Promoting Blog

As you can see, I get more engagement on Facebook since I am active on that platform and involved in sharing tips on teaching digital marketing in various groups there.  There was a fair amount of engagement but a smaller percentage of clicks. My LinkedIn posting also got good results as I am active there and have a lot of contacts.

So this is the type of analyses that students can do each week as they post their new blog topics.  This project is an excellent way to learn social media analytics in a short time frame and does not require students to use an account from another company. Next time I will talk more about the analytics spreadsheet. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.  Happy Blogging!

References

Zahay, D. (2018, September 8). Secrets to Teaching Google Analytics the Easy Way. Retrieved from https://zahayteachesdigital.blogspot.com/2018/09/secrets-to-teaching-google-analytics.html