Business

Life Is All About Relationships

July 24, 2019 By Bryan Coe

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is being a successful entrepreneur/business person and even for life, in general, is all about relationships.

This thought struck me again this morning when I was in the middle of a “catch up” meeting with someone I did contract work for probably 10 years ago. He was working at a large agency at the time and contracted me to do some SEO work for their Fortune 500 clients.

The way you handle yourself with every business interaction could have positive or negative effects.

Since that initial project, we’ve both been through a lot of changes, and we may have spoken less than a handful of times since then. But there we were discussing ways that we might be able to collaborate.

This is not the only time I’ve experienced this in the last few months.

A few months ago a contact of mine reached out to recommend I work with a company in South Africa where he now sits on the board.

This one was particularly cool because way back in 2004, so 15 years ago, I worked for a German company in the US. At the time there were only three people there that spoke German: The CEO, the President and, you guessed it, me.

This was a starting point for a relationship with the CEO. I worked there for only a short time, but over the years we’ve stayed in casual contact. And it was the former CEO that reached out to me with the recommendation. The company is now a client.

Neither of these “relationships” was the type where you invite them over for dinner or spend a lot of time outside of work. It was simple mutual respect and understanding of the value of each other’s business ethic.

It sticks out to me because it really drives home that you never know where a connection will come from. The way you handle yourself with every business interaction could have positive or negative effects. This carries over into the rest of your life too.

Make Yourself Proud

September 9, 2018 By Bryan Coe

I just read an email from a newsletter that I subscribe to from Rob at Owner Media Group. The title was the same as my post, “Make Yourself Proud.” Rob was writing about the advice he gave his son when he dropped him off at college. It got me thinking though.

With all the pressure to succeed, to impress others, to climb the corporate ladder, or as an entrepreneur – to win more business, we all make decisions every day that will drive our future. One comment in the email really stuck out and puts all this in perspective.

“I know that when I face my choices directly, if I can ‘make myself proud,’ the rest will fall into place.”

We all need to step back and think about this…

Are you making yourself proud?

Celebrating Our Successes – I Received an Award For My Work With Google Analytics!

August 20, 2018 By Bryan Coe

One thing I’ve learned from mentors and if you read/listen to any of the great leaders, they continue to say, “celebrate your successes.” Or as Gary Vaynerchuk says, “Be your own biggest fan.”

Anyway, all that to say…

Today I’m celebrating!

Why? Because today I received a Morado Award from AFI for an important project that has been a large part of what I’ve been working on this year. Migrating Armstrong Flooring from Adobe analytics and DTM to Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

“In recognition of outstanding guidance and technical leadership during the Google Analytics Implementation.”

When I started at Armstrong Flooring back in 2016 they were in the middle of building the commercial site which included going from a legacy implementation of Adobe Analytics to the new AA and Dynamic Tag Manager (DTM). While I had experience with AA it had been several years since I actively used it. I was one of the only people on the team that had any experience with it so we relied on a vendor to define and implement the tool. Almost from day one, I shared that I believe that Google Analytics is a better more cost effective solution. Especially based on the sophistication of the current analytics reporting.

Then in 2017, I helped convince my manager that it was a good idea to switch to Google Analytics and we were able to start the conversation with upper management. Long story short in early 2018 we had the green light to start the migration project.

We worked with a small team including Tim, a developer. Tim was a critical team member because of his development skills. He did the onsite code to make sure GTM was working and he baled me out a when I was stuck with coding in GTM itself. He and I did the brunt of the work. Although, we wouldn’t have been able to accomplish what we did if it hadn’t been for great team we worked with. We as a team managed to get the project finished early and under budget!

Now with the project complete, we are getting more data each day, and I’m working on the reporting which will include a dashboard for analysts, as well as higher level reporting for management and the executive team. It’s been very exciting to the insights that we are gaining already.

I am still planning to do a post that compares the differences between AA and GA. I might even do a whitepaper, but today I just wanted to share something good.

Thanks to Bryan S. for making sure Tim and I received some recognition of the work we put into the project.

Launch Day! Analytics Migration From Adobe to Google Analytics

May 17, 2018 By Bryan Coe

For the last few months I’ve been working on a project to migrate our analytics from Adobe Analytics and Dynamic Tag Manager (DTM) to Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager (GTM). The project encompasses 3 main sites with around a half million visits per month, plus about 9 other smaller or internal sites.

The motivation for the change was an effort to simplify our analytics as well as to replace an overly complex implementation that was in my opinion botched by the vendor we used to implement it. Plus, there’s a small cost difference since we have found that the free version of Google Analytics suits our needs currently. We also have the option to upgrade to the paid version in the future if needed.

Today will be filled with testing, but once it all settles down I’ll post a full report on how the migration went and the pros and cons of the two platforms as well why we decided Google was a better choice.

Google Search Console Finally Gets Historical Data!

February 2, 2018 By Bryan Coe

Everyone that has a Google Search Console account should have recently received a notification “Introducing the new Search Console (beta).” And if you’re an SEO or a marketing agency you probably been suffering from an onslaught of emails notifying you of this. Google REALLY wants everyone to know about the updated UI and functionality.

But with that minor annoyance aside. It’s like Christmas for SEOs! FINALLY we can now see historical data in GSC, up to 16 months. This means we will be able to finally do year over year comparisons. WOOHOO!! Older than that you won’t be able to see in the tool so you may still need to do some exporting and backups, but this is so much better than the previous 90 days.

To do this:

log into Google Search Console and go to the property you want to look at.
If you end up in the old version. Go to notifications. There you should see the notification about the new GSC and you can click on the link to the new version.
Then go to “Performance”
At the top you’ll see the standard filter for “Last 3 months”
Click the edit pencil
Then choose “Full Duration” to get the last 16 months.

Your report should then look something like the one below.