Why PR Pros Need The New Google Analytics™ Demo Account

Recently, Google announced a seemingly minor feature: any Google user could access a new Google Analytics™ Demo Account. The new Google Analytics Demo Account contains live, real information from Google’s eCommerce merchandise store.

The marketing and PR industry responded with a collective yawn.

From our perspective as a Google Analytics™ Certified Partner, every marketing and PR professional should be jumping up and down with excitement. Why? Four reasons:

• For sales pitches
• For training videos and webinars
• For classes and instruction
• For learning a different business model

Let’s dig into each of these reasons in more detail.

Sales Pitches

If you’re a truly data-driven PR professional, you want to showcase your analytics chops in every new business/sales presentation. Most PR professionals run into a serious problem every time we go to use Google Analytics in a sales presentation:

We’re showing someone else’s data.

Perhaps it’s our agency’s data. Perhaps it’s a personal account. Perhaps it’s another client (thereby breaking NDAs).

No matter what, we’re showing data to someone else that we probably shouldn’t be, unless we’re using the Google Analytics account of the business we’re pitching. That’s a no-no on a variety of levels.

The Google Analytics Demo Account solves these problems for us. We can demonstrate with a clean, orderly account our analytics skills without compromising or sharing data we shouldn’t be.

For example, we can see in the Demo Account Google’s eCommerce data. No client or company wants their private sales data being shown publicly; the Demo Account lets us showcase our eCommerce analysis skills without breaking confidentiality agreements.

Training Videos and Tutorials

Similar to the sales problem, have you ever watched a webinar or video in which someone’s demonstrating Google Analytics? Whose account are they showing? Video is arguably worse than a live sales presentation, because a screenshot of someone else’s data is just a few taps or clicks away.

The Demo Account solves the confidentiality problem. The new Demo Account also solves another problem: have you ever done a tutorial with your own data and found something unexpected or embarrassing? The Demo Account means that you shouldn’t unearth any unwelcome surprises in your video creation. We can teach our clients or colleagues how to use different features of Google Analytics, confident that the account will behave as expected.

Classes and Instruction

One of the challenges of teaching analytics, especially to a group of people, is that companies and organizations often have radically different data. I’ve taught Google Analytics sessions at conferences and experienced the pain of every attendee having a different setup, different features, sometimes even different versions.

Larger companies and enterprises often have multiple Google Analytics accounts. Even if we’re just training internally at our companies, we may have many different accounts and features.

The Google Analytics Demo Account normalizes the classroom experience. Whether you’re at a conference or in-house training, having one source of truth and a common dataset means teaching and learning is more effective.

Learning Different Business Models

The Google Analytics Demo Account has all major features of Google Analytics enabled and populated with data, including:

• Benchmarking
• Enhanced eCommerce
• Attribution models
• Multi-Channel Funnels
• Search Console Integration
• Site Search

Many companies don’t use one or more of these features, largely because they are not always useful in every context. For PR professionals with a wide variety of clients and industries, it can be hard to learn Google Analytics with just one account, especially if your own company/agency account isn’t well-configured.

The Demo Account gives us access to most featured with real, reliable, well-configured data, helping us to learn as many aspects of Google Analytics as possible before working with clients’ live data.

Try The Demo Account Today!

Sign up for free access to the Google Analytics Demo Account and you’ll be well on your way to better sales presentations, cleaner training videos, more consistent classroom experiences, and improved knowledge of analytics in a variety of contexts.

Christopher S. Penn
Vice President, Marketing Technology

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