Competitive Analysis With SEMRush and Summit Community Bank

  Summit Community Bank is a nearly $4 billion regional community bank. It provides banking, lending, and trust and wealth management services at 44 banking locations across three states. While primarily focused on maintaining its strong footprint in legacy locations, Summit Community Bank has used a successful merger and acquisition strategy to encourage steady growth over the last six years. As it continues to grow in new markets, new opportunities bring new, diverse challenges, including exploring new peers and competitors, expanding brand awareness, and capturing market share. In the digital landscape, competitive analysis is especially important when it comes to optimizing one of an organization’s most valuable online resources, its website.  Competitive analysis, as SEMrush notes, can help benchmark a business’ current SEO performance, identify areas of improvement in SEO strategy, reveal any competitor gaps or weaknesses, and discover competitors' winning strategies (Sl...
Post a Comment

Differences Between Google Analytics 4 Metrics and Universal Analytics Metrics


Since the sunset of Universal Analytics was announced, one of my main concerns as a marketer was to ensure that I was still able to provide the same or similar insights that I was currently reporting to my organization once we transitioned our online and digital properties to Google Analytics 4. However, as the decision-makers in my organization have grown comfortable with the format and metrics of Universal Analytics, my main concern with migrating over to Google Analytics 4 is trying to explain the differences in a way that makes sense and can account for the differences that they will see in the reports they receive. While much of what I believe has changed with Google Analytics has changed on a technical and more nuanced level, I want to try to make those concepts easy to understand without getting too deep or overly complex.

One of the important things to note with Google Analytics 4 versus Univeral Analytics, and is the foundation to understanding those subtle differences is how they each capture data. In Univeral Analytics, a piece of interactional data is collected as a “hit”, and those hits have several different variations depending on the nature of the interaction, such as page hits, event hits etc., in Google Analytics 4 however, Google has done away with separate hit types and now captures all data as “events”. The “events” data model is one of the fundamental changes between the analytics models (Analytics Help, [UA→GA4] universal analytics versus Google Analytics 4 data - analytics help). Google Analytics 4 events now use event parameters to help identify what kinds of actions that users took on a certain property, or give more context to that action. In UA, this must be achieved with the help of Google Tag Manager (GTM) for custom actions that aren’t set by default in UA, for example, a specific button click on a certain page or perhaps a QR code scan, etc. The event is configured in GTM and assuming that a GTM code is already installed on the website or property, after it is configured, data managers can see this information in their analytics reporting. Event reporting in GA4 is much more flexible with its event configuration, and as Root and Branch mentions in their summary of GA4, that can be a great thing if you have a plan and know what you’re doing, or it can make things more complicated if you don’t (Duncan, 2022).

Using this event formatting and changes to how data points are captured allows Google Analytics 4 to “create a single user journey” that “incorporates User ID natively across all reporting, analysis and insight” (Analytics Help, [UA→GA4] universal analytics versus Google Analytics 4 data - analytics help). As more and more organizations are looking to create omnichannel and cross-platform experiences, these fundamental changes to Google Analytics allow data managers to more accurately and cohesively analyze multi-touchpoint consumer journeys in one place. For example, many organizations have both a website and an app (on both iOS and Android platforms), using Google Analytics 4, instead of each entity being its own stream of reporting, these data streams are now viewed together across the organization, which can be more representative of the actual customer experience. However, because of this combined data, expected traffic or user count amounts when moving over to Google Analytics 4 may be skewed.

One of the first metrics that Google Analytics Help explains that has similar but different implications in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Universal Analytics (UA), are user metrics. In both UA and GA4, both total users and new users can be calculated and ascribed value. However while UA uses total users as the basis for its user reports, GA4 uses a new, “active user” metric as the basis for its user reporting. UA does not support the active user metric, which is described by GA4 as any user who has an engaged session or fulfills a certain parameter on a website or other property (Analytics Help, [ua→ga4] comparing metrics: Google analytics 4 vs universal analytics - analytics help). In this way, GA4 is segmenting users a on more granular level, and possibly, in my opinion, a more accurate level, when it comes to engagement, as active users must meet certain criteria in order to be labeled as such (Analytics Help, [UA→GA4] universal analytics versus Google Analytics 4 data - analytics help). Analytics Help also mentions that “Depending on how frequently your users return to your website, the Total Users metric in UA and the Active Users metric in GA4 may be more or less similar” (Analytics Help, [ua→ga4] comparing metrics: Google analytics 4 vs universal analytics - analytics help).

One key metric that Google describes as similar between both UA and GA4 is pageviews since “the Google tag fires on each page and generates a pageview” (Analytics Help, [ua→ga4] comparing metrics: Google analytics 4 vs universal analytics - analytics help), however while UA can distinguish between unique pageviews, GA4 does not. Analytics Help also mentions that metrics can look different in GA4 versus UA because not all filters and view filters are available, and data managers need to make sure that when comparing the same properties in each model (one in GA4 and one in UA) that the same filters should try to be applied (Analytics Help, [ua→ga4] comparing metrics: Google analytics 4 vs universal analytics - analytics help).


Session metrics also contain differences between what is collected in GA4 and UA, and continuing with the theme of UA to GA4 migration, there are some elements that don’t one-to-one translate, especially when it comes to custom session-scoped dimensions that a data manager may have created in UA. GA4 no longer supports custom session-scoped events, (or even the format of custom dimensions and metrics that could be created in UA for that matter), leaning on the new events and event parameter format to collect and describe that data. But luckily GA4 contains both automatically collected events and enhanced measurements, which allow some advanced event tracking without the use of GTM, which for UA data managers could be useful as they transition over, because they don’t have to rely on GTM for some standard metrics or data capturing. Root and Branch Group explains it like this, “With both automatically collected events and enhanced measurement events, the event parameters have already been decided upon by Google Analytics. The parameter data will be collected in your GA4 property and there’s nothing you need to do about it” (Duncan, 2022).

So while the interface, the format, and data managers’ understanding of how data is captured does change in GA4 on a fundamental level, the data capture does not change the user’s behavior, and we’re still able to pull similar, if not better insights from a more encompassing experience, even if it’s presented differently. And although Google has built their new platform to still be somewhat familiar to their previous iteration, understanding the new data model is the learning curve to the new system. In my opinion, as marketers and data managers evolve to lean on more customer-centric omnichannel and universal experiences, it feels natural that our analytics platforms would do the same. I also believe that as GA4 becomes the norm, more and more developers and data scientists will figure out the best practices to achieve the desired results as they have in the past. The good thing about this change is that it’s not just new for me, it’s new for everyone and we can all learn together.




References

Analytics Help. (n.d.). [ga4] analytics dimensions and metrics - analytics help. Google. Retrieved October 24, 2022, from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9143382?hl=en




Analytics Help. (n.d.). [ua→ga4] comparing metrics: Google analytics 4 vs universal analytics - analytics help. Google. Retrieved October 24, 2022, from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11986666?hl=en#zippy=%2Cin-this-article




Analytics Help. (n.d.). [UA→GA4] universal analytics versus Google Analytics 4 data - analytics help. Google. Retrieved October 24, 2022, from https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9964640?hl=en#zippy=%2Cin-this-article


Duncan, Z. (2022, October 4). Events in GA4 vs ua: Google analytics 4 event tracking. Digital Marketing and Analytics | Root and Branch. Retrieved October 24, 2022, from https://www.rootandbranchgroup.com/events-in-ga4-vs-ua/#:~:text=The%20GA4%20events%20are%20a,help%20of%20Google%20Tag%20Manager.

Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you for your comment! I will get back to you shortly!

Popular posts from this blog

Why conversation may not be king…in all cases

Hello Class, I have mentioned a couple times on the board, that I personally am losing faith in social as a conversational medium (with the exception of questions and/or complaint resolution) and tend to view social as more of an information distribution channel. This is not absolute, but I think this is especially true in local, where the need is often very momentary. I have had the opportunity now to watch social for more than a dozen years and there has been a definite shift. I think that machine learning may be accelerating this trend. Even big brands which appear to have conversational threads only do because they have hundreds of thousands or even millions of adherents and there are numerous responses to each post. However, if you read them carefully, most of the “conversations” are actually hundreds of people shouting out their own thoughts. Here is a great article by   John Boitnott   (2016) that discusses that concept of distribution vs. conversation ...
Read more

Why Think...I've got activity :)

Image
Here is an article from Mark Ritson that address something that most of us deal with every day: frenetic activity. One of the things that I had to smile about was the thought that “who needs strategy when you have a machine down the basement learning as we speak?” The article is here . Photo courtesy of: https://gratisography.com/ But many times, just taking an uninterrupted hour per week can make all the difference. As he states: “You have to close all that down and, well, think. Switch off your phone, open up your Moleskine. Take a long, deliberate breath and think.” (Ritson, 2018). The article should take less than 5 minutes of your time but may cause you to approach your week a bit differently after you have spent those 5 minutes. Reference: Ritson, M. (2018, January 9). Mark Ritson: Ignore all the waffle and set time aside for strategic thinking. Retrieved from: https://www.marketingweek.com/2018/01/09/mark-ritson-strategic-thinking/
Read more

Setting Your Social Media Strategy in 2022

Image
 Facebook (Meta??), Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Snapchat, TikTok, LinkedIN, Pinterest. So many channels, each one with their own nuances, yet so little time. In 2022, there will be an estimated 3.96 billion users on social media (Statista Research Department, 2022). This means social is a key avenue to reach your key decision-makers that can’t be ignored. So how does a company choose how to jump in and set a social media strategy? Content Curation The first question to ask yourself is-  do you have the content to sustain social? As Greenberg (2020) emphasizes “social marketing efforts need to be driven by content, not vice versa. Without content, there is not a whole lot to talk about.” So choosing the right social media strategy for your business depends on your content curation process and internal team capabilities. The amount and type of content you have may help your team choose which platforms to focus your efforts on. First, the marketing team needs to have ...
Read more