There is a reason why some of the top YouTube videos are people failing. When we think of learning, it’s often finding out what to do. Trial and error tells us what not to do.

Do we ever think of searching for what not to do as a way of learning? In this case, I found a great podcast telling us what analytics reports to ignore.

The Premise of The Digital Marketing Podcast

As you often do when finding podcasts about digital marketing, you stumble upon an agency promoting their brand through content marketing. A podcast is a great way to get people interested in a topic, prove you are the expert, and then have them race to sign-up for your email newsletter. Some freelancers or digital marketing companies might avoid promoting other agencies. You may be aware (article where I list local competition), I am not.

The Digital Marketing Podcast is done by Target Internet – a company that helps organizations and individuals improve their digital marketing capability. They do this by delivering the very best face to face training, elearning and consultancy. Those few sentences (besides me changing the way they spell organisations) is directly from their website.

Why Did I Pick a Podcast about Ignoring Google Analytics Reports?

When you look over your website analytics, it’s easy to take one metric and get dwell on its success or failure. When you start out, a lot of the resources (blogs/documents) you find explain these metrics. These documents can explain what bounce rate is. They fail to report that all pages are not created equal. That same metric can be a failure on one page and a success on another.

Some metrics are graded differently based on context, others can and should be ignored based on the possibility of error in reporting. The gentlemen cover some of these issues in their podcast.

They discuss how certain reports involving these terms should be ignored:

• Bounce Rates (as discussed in the last few paragraphs)
• Time Spent on Page and how the tracking underestimates the actual value
• User Flow and the mess of this diagram
• Search Console and all of its missing keywords
• Goals and why they aren’t always accurate

Their discussion is super helpful in understanding why spending a lot of time on these metrics and reports would cause unnecessary pulling-of-the-hair.

The Podcast: 5 Google Analytics Reports You Should Probably Ignore

This quick listen will give you some valuable information on Google Analytics reporting and some reports to ignore. Enjoy.