Google Analytics has taught us to use direct metrics

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Rightly or wrongly, performance marketers today are primarily concerned with direct metrics, which is reflected in Goals and Events in Google Analytics.

In his memoir, former tech journalist and Silicon Valley host Dan Lyons describes his ill-fated time at HubSpot. He wrote about running the company’s blog: “I had one goal: to get leads. If the analytics showed that the leads were coming from a blog post that was full of rewrites, duplicates, and translated articles, then great — I should keep publishing those articles. I realized that this was probably a legitimate business model for churning out shitty content. But it’s not like hiring a former Newsweek technology editor to write about you.”

Blogs have become the primary communication portugal consumer email list channel for many companies, so marketing and communications strategies must include branding and PR. As in Dan Lyons' example, posting bad content over and over again may indeed generate a large number of leads, but at the same time it will cause terrible damage to the company's branding and PR, and these metrics will not be reflected in Google Analytics.

Focusing only on Google Analytics metrics usually causes companies and online marketers to publish clickable content instead of informational content. Clickable content may provide the opportunity to get more traffic, but it will reflect poorly on the brand and, ultimately, may cause a loss of trust in the company.

Additionally, page views are only a useful metric for sites that choose to sell online advertising from their pages as their primary business model (such as news sites), because each page view counts as an ad view. On the other hand, companies that choose to get more customers as their goal understand that “clickable” content brings in a lot of traffic, but does not increase visitor conversion.