Join Fusion’s SEO team as we round up last month’s major industry updates.
Google Release New Google Analytics
Google Analytics has received a large update with the introduction of Google Analytics 4. This update looks to combat major shifts in consumer behaviour and privacy-driven changes to long time industry standards, by providing new and intelligent insights with machine learning at its core.
These updates will take changes like restrictions on cookies and identifiers, which create gaps in data in to consideration. Key new features include the following:
Smarter insights to improve your marketing decisions and get better ROI
Google’s new machine learning models can now alert users to significant trends in their data, such as products seeing a raising demand because of new customer needs.
Utilising churn probability (churn = customers lost during time period / customers at beginning of period), Google’s machine learning models will also be able to help predict the future actions of customers and allow users to efficiently invest in retaining customers and create audiences to reach higher value customers.
This will also have deeper integration with Google Ads, creating more focused insights for paid channels.
Google’s new approach also looks to create clearer insights between the web and apps, such as being able to see conversions from YouTube engaged views that occur in-app and on the web in reports.
A more complete understanding of how customers interact with your business
Google Analytics looks to provide user centric reporting, rather than segmented reporting (e.g. performance by device or channel). Rather than segmenting performance for insights, users will now be able to have a more complete view of how customers interact with their business.
For example, you can see if customers first discover your business from an ad on the web, then later install your app and make purchases there.
With simplified and re-organised reporting, Google look to provide clear insights on customers across their entire lifecycle, from acquisition, to conversion, to retention. With this complete view, users will be able to see which channels are driving new customers and understand the actions these customers take.
How to use these new features
Google Analytics 4 insights will be available to new properties by default. For existing properties, Google recommend creating a new Google Analytics 4 property to run alongside existing properties in order to start collecting data, as historical data from existing properties cannot be exported from existing properties.
Microsoft Releases Free Analytics Software
Microsoft have released their new analytics software, Microsoft Clarity. This user behaviour centric tool looks to provide insight on exactly how users interact with your site, utilising features such as:
- Session Playbacks
- Heatmaps
- User Experience Insights
This tool is free and GDPR compliant. Microsoft have also announced that the tool will be completely scalable and will work for the largest websites, while remaining free and has also been optimised to not slow down sites.
Session Playback
Session playbacks will allow users to view individual session recordings, allowing a view on how individual users interact with the site. This feature will allow users to see how customers interact with and navigate their site, this can help pinpoint any areas of frustration from a customer’s perspective, resulting in lost engagement.
Heatmaps
Heatmaps will provide a bulk view on where users have clicked, scrolled and moved around a site. This will allow users to view which parts of a page drive the most engagement, allowing them to streamline navigation and content.
This bulk view of the session playback feature will be useful to understand overall user behaviour.
User Experience Insights
The user experience focused insights Microsoft Clarity will provide, include:
- Clicks that go nowhere
- Rage clicks
- Excessive scrolling
Just like the heatmap tool, these metrics will provide valuable insights on highlighting areas of frustration that customers have displayed when navigating the site, allowing users to tackle customer experience issues on their site that would otherwise be hidden.
Microsoft Clarity will also integrate with Google Analytics. This integration will put a link to Clarity’s session playbacks within your Google Analytics dashboard.
Google Remove “Request Indexing” From Google Search Console
After the indexing issues Google started to experience last month. Google have now disabled the “request indexing” feature of the URL inspection tool, within Google Search Console.
We have disabled the "Request Indexing" feature of the URL Inspection Tool, in order to make some infrastructure changes. We expect it will return in the coming weeks. We continue to find & index content through our regular methods, as covered here: https://t.co/rMFVaLht6V
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) October 14, 2020
As stated in the above tweet, this feature is expected to return after a couple of week and standard Google indexing is not affected by the removal of this tool.
In regards to the indexing issues Google have been experiencing, they have provided an update that this issue is effectively resolved and any URLs that still experiencing issues should shortly be restored.
Final update: the canonical issue was effectively resolved last Wednesday, with about 99% of the URLs restored. We expect the remaining edge cases will be restored within a week or two.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) October 19, 2020
If you found this update useful, check out our latest blog posts for the latest news, and if you’re interested in finding out more about what we can do for your brand, get in touch with the team today.
by Zack Cornick
