Marking marketing metrics meaningful

Mordy Oberstein:

It is the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha. Mahalo for joining us on the SERP's Up podcast. We're pushing out some groovy new insights around what's happening in SEO. I'm your host, Mordy Oberstein, and I'm joined by she who is not blind. She can see, can see clearly now that the rain has come. She's our own head communications here, Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you for that lovely introduction. I cannot see as well as I used to be able to see. I have to wear glasses now, but I always forget that I need to wear glasses and then I try to look at things and I can't read them. And why are restaurants so dark? That's my question. Why are they so dark?

Mordy Oberstein:

They are dark.

Crystal Carter:

How am I supposed to read the menu? I don't understand.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's so annoying. I got to say something. Restaurants are annoying place to eat a meal. Okay? There's, one, other people around you which is...

Crystal Carter:

Boo.

Mordy Oberstein:

... not what you want. Yeah. Boo. Then secondly, while you're eating, people come around and ask you questions. Oh.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

No. Okay?

Crystal Carter:

It's like it's a quiz.

Mordy Oberstein:

How are things? If I had a problem, you would know.

Crystal Carter:

What kind of bread would you like? I'm like bread. And then they named 17 bread. They're pumpernickel, rye, sourdough, white bread, brown bread, granary bread, seeded bread, loaf bread. I'm like, I don't know. I didn't know this was a bread...

Mordy Oberstein:

I want good bread.

Crystal Carter:

... bread test. It was a bread test? I didn't know.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay. And then there's music. Why do they play music? Now you can't even see the person. Now you can't talk to the person you actually want to talk to because they're playing stupid annoying. It's never good music. It's always annoying.

Crystal Carter:

I don't like it when you go to a restaurant and there's a million screens. I do not eat my dinner in front of a TV. And then I go to these restaurants and there's 17 TVs playing like 17 different baseball, basketball, football, hockey.

Mordy Oberstein:

Were you in a sports bar?

Crystal Carter:

There's loads of places where they're just always on even when you're not in a sports bar.

Mordy Oberstein:

I was in New York a while ago and went out to eat with my dad and it was on a football Sunday and there was the football game on. It was a regular restaurant. I mean, I was kind of happy to see the football game, but it was weird. Why is that even here?

Crystal Carter:

It's distracting. It's distracting. Anyway.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. So now that we told you we hate restaurants, SERP's Up podcast is brought to you by Peter Lugers. No. It's brought to you by Wix Studio where you can use Wix Studio to get a recording of how users are interacting with your website for free. There is a paid plan as well, and natively is built right in three clicks. It's awesome. I love using it literally. We'll get into more on using data like that later, soon. This as today, are marketers flying blind? What are the metrics that still matter with changes to GA4 and reduced visibility in channels like ChatGPT.

Are marketers flying blind? Data throttling in GA4 and GSC? What data matters and what data does it in a sea of analytics to help us sail your ship through the numbers analytics Maven teacher and consultant, Dana DiTomaso sat down with Crystal for a clear conversation about data. And of course we have who you should be following on social media for more SEO awesomeness. So grab your binoculars, telescope, and magnifying glass or just get some LASIK as episode 121 helps you give yourself sight, the gift of sight of data analytics.

Crystal Carter:

So yeah, I had a fantastic conversation with Dana DiTomaso. I've heard her speak at MozCon and other events on multiple occasions and she's one of my favorite analytics marketers because she is so astute and so clear with she's, you know, how she communicates what she's saying.

Mordy Oberstein:

And funny. She's funny.

Crystal Carter:

She's funny. She's super awesome. And the other thing is that one of the things that really stuck with me, I think it was MozCon this year, she was talking about this topic and she'll get into it into the discussion, but she says that we need to stop being so beholden to the actual numbers. We need to be so beholden between whether or not it's 373 clicks or 375 clicks because really those two clicks isn't going to make that much of a difference and she'll get into this, but essentially the trends are...

Mordy Oberstein:

Trends.

Crystal Carter:

... very important.

Mordy Oberstein:

Trends. So many times said this, by the way, I said this on Traffic Think Tank the other day because of all the rank volatility and Google's going to run out consistent updates all the time now, stop looking at actual numbers and look at like create a range for yourself of where you think this site normally ranges and just look at that.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that's the thing. I think that people need to be more intelligent about what actually matters. And I think that people need to be more intelligent about having a good understanding of their data and what normal is and what different is and figuring out what that means for them.

Mordy Oberstein:

You have me at people should be more intelligent.

Crystal Carter:

We'll see how it goes. But yeah, we had a super intelligent conversation with Dana and with her doing the heavy lifting on the intelligence there.

Mordy Oberstein:

So here's two really intelligent people having a really intelligent conversation about data intelligence.

Crystal Carter:

I am so pleased to be joined here today by analytics maven, Dana DiTomaso, who I've heard speak at MozCon on a couple of occasions about data and analytics and all of those fantastic things. She is the CEO of Kick Point and fount of knowledge of all things analytics. I'm so glad that she's joining us here today. Dana, welcome to the show.

Dana DiTomaso:

Thank you so much for having me.

Crystal Carter:

Such an absolute honor. And I think when we were looking at this topic, I said we have to speak to Dana because she knows all about this and basically we're kind of looking at the space that we're in terms of marketers and analytics. I feel like there's a certain amount of uncertainty that we have now. I feel like when I first started my journey as a marketer, even five years ago, I felt very certain about saying we've had this much traffic and we've had this channel brought us in this much value and all of that sort of stuff. Do you feel that certain these days in terms of the information that you're getting from the various tools out there as a marketer?

Dana DiTomaso:

No. But I also think that it hasn't been certain for longer even than five years. And I think that this is one of the big things that happened when people switched from universal analytics to GA4. A lot of people, if you were transitioning to it early, you had both running at the same time. You had UA and GA4 and you would look at the reports and they'd be different numbers and you would say, well, one of these is wrong. But the thing is they were both right. They were just measuring data in different ways and I think that this is where it sort of pulled back the curtain a little bit and said, hey, actually analytics data is only as good as your analytics measurement system, but there's also a sense of data capture in terms of what you're looking at when you look at analytics. And it doesn't matter if it's GA4 or Matomo or Fathom or any of the other millions of analytics products out there, it is only as good as what the system decides to do with the data. And what you're looking at is never the raw data.

So when I first started the field back in the dark ages in 2000, we didn't have Google Analytics. It was called Urchin Analytics and Google bought them in 2004, but I didn't have that. In 2000 we had log file analysis. And I would say that log file analysis is probably the most reliable in terms of what pages are being viewed because it is actually requests from the server. And so we would use products like web trends, if people remember those, and we'd actually look at what things were accessed, but then as soon as other analytics product, and that was when you were looking at the actual raw data. But you're not going to look at the actual raw data and add it up yourself. That's when you use a tool to do it. So you are relying on the tool a little bit to process the data. And then as we move through the analytics landscape, people have ad blockers. People have tabs. People use different devices. You may not be able to tie people across those different devices. Right?

And the classic example that I use quite often is, let's say, I am booking a pest control service for my house. I live in an area we have to spray for ants every year, whether you like it or not. And so I found this company that I want to go with, but I sent the link to my wife to do the booking 'cause she was going to be home and I was not. Well, I just texted her the link. That means the attribution path is lost. It's going to show up as direct in their system even though I found them originally from Google business profile. So that is a classic example of attribution that happens every single day. So if you look at your data and you need to point at it and say this is 100% correct, you are wrong. And it doesn't matter how good your analytics is, it doesn't matter if you're using what's called server side tracking, which gets around ad blockers 'cause there's still consent management. If someone says no to being tracked, you can't track them.

But then there's also people just using the internet the way the people who use the internet and we really can't control or manage what happens there. So I think that there's a certain amount of uncertainty that we have to get comfortable with in analytics and I think that that's really difficult for analysts because we are used to a lot of certainty. Right? But coming at this from my SEO background, I mean what's the classic SEO response? Right? It depends. And so I think that SEOs are actually a little bit more comfortable with the idea of uncertainty, but because we've always had analytics presented to us as this, this is exact and this is perfect and this is, you know, then I think getting more comfortable with that uncertainty is something that actually, as SEOs, we could bring to analytics a little bit and get them to calm down a little bit on the exact numbers 'cause they're not real. They're never going to be real. They're just pleasant fairy tales sometimes.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that we all want to be able to get our little gold star, get our dopamine hit. We see that up into the right. And so I can't begrudge people for wanting to believe it's true. I want to believe.

Dana DiTomaso:

Oh yeah. I totally get that. Like I was working with this one client and we were switching them from UA to GA4 and it turns out that they had their UA code running four times on their blog. So every time someone viewed a page, it would record a four page visits. And then, of course, when we put on GA4, we had the setting turned on that doesn't allow that to happen. And so it was recording one page view and then they're like, oh my god, our traffic has gone down. What happened? Actually your traffic is the same. That's not the issue here. Right? And so this is why I talk about like how can you possibly report on this stuff, if you don't know for sure that's recording properly. Again, you could just have it running multiple times and be like, look, look at these numbers and no one else is going to go in there and double check. So you could be reporting on pleasant fairy tales. You don't know.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right. And I think also I think it comes down to are you reporting on stuff that actually matters in the first place? And all the analytics suites, you mentioned a few different ones. Wix Studio has built-in analytics. So there's CMS side analytics. There's going to be your third party analytics. There's going to be other stuff. And they're all measuring, they're all giving you various different metrics and some of them matter and some of them don't. And just because I know they say that if it isn't measured, it doesn't matter, but there's also just because measured doesn't necessarily mean that it matters. I mean classic examples like BMI. Right? My BMI is always off the chart, but I'm just thick. I don't know what to tell you. I did sports in high school and I could drop 10, I just, I couldn't possibly, I haven't been that weight since I was 16 and I would look ridiculous, if I was that weight.

Dana DiTomaso:

Oh no. I boxed for years. Being heavier is an advantage in boxing 'cause you can punch harder. That's why there's weight classes.

Crystal Carter:

Right. I know somebody who went to the doctor the other day and he told him his weight and the doctor was like, no way. Nuh-uh. I just saw you. And so he got on the scales like I can't believe you weigh that. It's like because it's ridiculous. It's a ridiculous made up measurement. But I think, again, if you think about BMI, which I think most people are familiar with as a general annoyance, it's kind of a guideline. I don't think necessarily that you should be beholden to it, but I guess it's kind of like if you're in the ballpark then that's sort of a guideline generally, but you shouldn't be beholden to it necessarily. You should use your common sense and understand that you did boxing, you did weightlifting, you did whatever. You're a professional athlete who is perfectly fine at this weight. And I think that with the analytics one that people used to go back and forth over was bounce rate all the time back in the day. And sometimes it matters and sometimes it doesn't. But I think also-

Dana DiTomaso:

Well, and bounce rate was never measuring what people thought it was too. And this is why I hate bounce rate so much. Anyone's ever seen me present you know that just say bounce rate and I just go on a tangent, but I mean in universal analytics, bounce rate was measuring if you viewed a page and then you didn't have a measurable event on that page, which meant that if you submitted a form and it didn't take you to a second page and you weren't recording that form submit, that person would bounce. And so unless I set up your analytics, I wouldn't trust that your bounce rate was correct. More than once I saw bounce rates close to 0% and it was because somebody decided to fake out bounce rate by having an event be recorded the moment the page was loaded. You know?

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Dana DiTomaso:

And it's like, yeah, you can totally fake out bounce rate. No problem. And in GA4, I think it is slightly more accurate. You have what's called engagement rate, but I've actually been testing whether or not you can fake that out. And you can. There's an event called user engagement that's recorded when a session becomes engaged and by default a session in GA4 becomes engaged when someone's had your tab as their active tab for at least 10 seconds, viewed a second page, or converted. If you send the user engagement event right away, you could artificially inflate your engagement rates.

So it is possible to fake that out as well. But it is actually like you have to actually know what you're doing and try to fake it out. If anyone ever goes on my Kick Point playbook website, looks at the analytics there, you'll see some weird events called pizza, for example. It's just things I'm testing, but I always try to see how you can manipulate the system so I can spot it when I'm working with other people to be like this bounce rate or engagement rate doesn't seem correct. And then in GA4 there is bounce rate, but it's the inverse of engagement rate. So just use engagement rate. Let's all let bounce rate just die out. Thank you. The end. Okay.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that this comes to, but that's a great point because people, like I said, people are measuring, have been measuring things that don't necessarily matter. And I feel like with the traffic and attribution, I've had it before where I've had clients and I'm trying to piece together their attribution, messy middle because they have like it's an event. Like I had a client and their ticket booking system was a different one from the one that was their website that was different from their things.

And then they have microsites and they have KB sites and then they have all of these different stuff and you're trying to piece it all back together. And I think it can be, like you mentioned traffic as a metric, I think that SEOs and speaking about the SEO map thing, traffic is going to become much more complex in the next few years with the advent of AI and an AI search and how people are getting to the content and how people are discovering the brand. So which metrics do you think still matter? Do you think traffic still matters? Do you think other things matter more?

Dana DiTomaso:

I think traffic is a good temperature check on what's going on. You know? And I think certainly myself and Will Reynolds for example from Seer have spoken about this quite a bit where Will's, I just saw a great presentation by him where he was talking about how he has less traffic on his site, but that traffic is more engaged, is more likely to get in touch with him. And I actually just published a blog post as well. If you do want to see how much AI traffic, AI tool traffic is coming to your website, I have a walkthrough on my website and we can include the link, the show notes of how to set up an AI tools channel in GA4 or really any tool, but it's a piece of what's called RegEx that you can set up and it'll pull out all that. AI tools traffic can put it into own channel for you. And that's really interesting to see as well.

But I think it's where, I mean, generally in the industry, I think people have to realize that Google is not necessarily going to be the only player out there for a long time. And if you've been in this for a long time, as I have, Google wasn't always the big player. There's this like cool...

Crystal Carter:

Netscape.

Dana DiTomaso:

There's this like AltaVista. Yahoo was a thing. You know? Like it was being actually had a decent market rate for a little while there. So it's not impossible for us to move past Google. And I think search GPT for example, is definitely an existential threat to Google and they're taking it very seriously, as you can see. But I think that there are lots of different ways that people engage with this. If you're aiming for a younger audience, TikTok search, YouTube, by the way, second largest search engine and you report on YouTube search, probably not. Right? So I think that there's lots of opportunities for search that aren't necessarily what people immediately think of when it comes to search. And so when you think about things like traffic, this is where are you bringing together all of your actual traffic sources? And one of the things that I've really been reporting on is what I call efficiency rate. So are part of the effectiveness rate. It used to be called efficiency, I felt effectiveness was a better number.

And so effectiveness looks at your impressions across all channels, all of your search console impressions, all of your ads impressions, like social impressions, number of people in your email list, all that stuff, add it all together, divide it by the number of transactions or conversions or whatever your final piece is. And this isn't just recorded in something like GA4, like how many people bought your stuff in store online, just the raw number of transactions. Look at that percentage. Is it going up or down over time? If it's going up, then that means you're more effective with your work, your marketing work that you're doing.

If it's going down, then you're less effective. And then that means that maybe you've got some diminishing returns or maybe this big radio campaign you decide to spend some money on wasn't actually that effective or you introduced a bunch of broad match keywords into your Google Ads account you probably shouldn't have or there's lots of different things why but you'll know by looking at those overall trends. And the example that I give is for example, if people live in North America, Old Navy, very big, you know, fast fa, is there Old Navy in the UK? I'm not entirely sure, but.

Crystal Carter:

They don't have it in the UK.

Dana DiTomaso:

I think it's just North America.

Crystal Carter:

They should.

Dana DiTomaso:

Yeah. It's just the idea.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah.

Dana DiTomaso:

Yeah. And they send out approximately 80 million emails a day individually to one person. If you ever get an email list, you're just going to get a thousand emails. Right? No one is going to go into the store and hold up their phone and say, I'm here today 'cause I got an email. Right? But that's probably what encouraged people to come in. And they may not even use the coupons in the email. They might just come in and purchase and, yeah, if they actually enter their email address at the register, which you can see that they're desperately trying to tie everything together, but maybe I bought something and I didn't enter my email at the register, does that mean that that sale should not be attributed to email?

No. It should. But if that's your strict rules, then no, it's not going to. And this is where I think something like effectiveness kind of sidesteps that because it's like, hey, we sent out this big email blast and sales in store went up. Great. You know?

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Dana DiTomaso:

We sent out this other big email blast and stores and sale went down. Oh. I guess that one wasn't as effective.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Dana DiTomaso:

And so it's a way to sort sidestep attribution and really focus on what matters, which is how much are we putting out into the world and then how much are we getting in as a result of that?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. And I think that that is something that's really useful, particularly for teams that are working across multiple channels. If you're sponsoring the local little league team, if you're doing some PR where they've been featured in the newspaper or even featured in different activities, and then you're also doing websites that to support that, not everything's going to be attributed. Every mention that you get for your brand isn't necessarily going to be attributed. Every link might not, you might see every single link necessarily. But yeah, it will add value to your brand and it will be able to …

Dana DiTomaso:

Especially if you're in a high profile field working with say a criminal defense lawyer, you know, if they had a really high profile case and they got somebody off because of a technicality, for example, people are going to call that lawyer. Are they going to say, hey, I called you because I Googled best criminal defense lawyer in thing? Like no, because of that case. Right? So how do you attribute that? Well, it's still marketing 'cause you were still good at your job.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dana DiTomaso:

And so I think that that's where those kinds of things kind of get lost under the radar per se, but it's all attributions, all ways that people have heard about you. So why wouldn't we consider, for example, like the number of views of a news article about your business in addition to everything else that happens?

Crystal Carter:

Right. So this sounds wonderful. It sounds tricky to set up though, Dana.

Dana DiTomaso:

It is a little tricky, I have to say. And so there's a really simple, I have again another post on my site where I go through the process. If you just want to start with just the basics, the easiest thing to do is in Looker Studio you can attach Google Search Console, Google Ads, just add those two together, attach GA4 divided by the number of key events that are entered in your GA4. That's a really simple blend to accomplish in Looker Studio. And I go through it in the blog post. And that's a really good way to dip your toe in. But it doesn't have to be fancy. You could just have a spreadsheet with some numbers popped on it that you do some math on. Right? Like this is of true back of the envelope, are things trending in the right direction kind of question. Because one thing I really want to encourage us in the marketing spaces is stop being data accountants.

We have sort of taken on this role of trying to be the most precise people in the room when it comes to data, and I don't think that ever should have been put on us. Right? You have accountants in the business. They serve a very useful role. As marketers, we should not be providing that accounting role and really trying to step away from that idea of precision and instead focusing on, say, trends or instead of presenting and say this landing page at 820 visits, say this landing page was 60% of your overall views of landing pages. This landing page, however, only converted people at a 30% rate. Really, if it's 60% of the views, we should see 60% of the conversions. So what can we do with this landing page to improve it or do we just know it's never going to be a great converting tool 'cause it pushes people off somewhere else, for example. You know? And I think that that's where really looking at those percentages instead of absolutes, I think, is really where the future of analysis in marketing and reporting is going.

Crystal Carter:

And I think also thinking of the percentages in terms of output, you know, like I know great SEOs who sometimes say to people, maybe you don't need SEO right now. Maybe what you actually need is ads for instance right now. Maybe that's what you need or maybe what you need is social right now because that's where your audience is. So I think that-

Dana DiTomaso:

Or maybe your website does not convert well and you should really work on that before we spend one more dollar getting more people to your website?

Crystal Carter:

We get them to there and then they just fall off a cliff.

Dana DiTomaso:

Right.

Crystal Carter:

That's not good at all.

Dana DiTomaso:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

So I think that that's important to know. So in terms of percentage of input compared to percentage of output compared to percentage of growth, I think that the trends are good, and also I think the trends are something that can help you benchmark yourself against almost anyone. So if you are seeing a 10% increase in your business, that's good, whether you're big or small, whatever kind of business you are, and that's useful to think about as well. So if you're seeing that your conversion rate and there are loads of people who have benchmarks for conversion rates across different sectors and stuff, if you're seeing that your conversion rate is on target, then you can plan how you scale what you do and all of that sort of stuff.

Dana DiTomaso:

I think there's also some value in considering when you're looking at your conversion rate, are you including people who already bought from you and can't buy again?

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Dana DiTomaso:

You know? Like this is where setting up audiences in whatever, if different analytics tools do help you with this like GA4, for example, set up an audience of people who have not bought from you already, who didn't click the login button on your website. Those people, if they've logged in, they already bought from you. They're not going to buy again. You know? And the example I tell people about is we're working with a convention center, there's two audiences for the convention center. There's people who want to book events and there's people going to events. People going to events want to know how much parking is and the best way to get there and what transit routes go there.

Very important information. Are the escalators broken? This was a huge thing at the convention center we were working with the escalators had this whole string of being broken. Right? So the other part of it, you have people who want to book events and when we're talking to the sales team, they do not really care about the people coming to events. That's customer experience. They care about the people who want to book events. So instead of reporting on a site-wide engagement rate, which is driven entirely by whether or not Disney on Ice happens to be there that night because more people are visiting the site, it drives down the conversion rate. Instead, we're only reporting on the people who actually visited a book page and then looking at those conversion rates. And it makes such a difference in the reporting to say, here's my really targeted audience.

So again, if there's a way for you to say, these are the people who actually showed intent to go ahead and contact me, then that's what I'm interested in. You know, on Kick Point playbook. For example, we sell courses. If you already bought a course, you're not going to buy it again. Maybe you might buy for more members on your team, but for the most part, you bought the course, you're good. So why would we, in our conversion rates, look at absolutely everybody? Why would we not just look at the people who haven't bought a course yet? You know? And I'm sure that there's lots of ways you can think about how can I exclude people? And if there's nothing on your website that you can use to exclude people already bought from you, think about adding something.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Yeah. I think that that's super, super useful. And I think that we have a whole course, we have the Wix Studio SEO course, and we have a whole section on reporting, because it's super important that you pay attention to the things that matter and segment your audiences. Segmentation is so important. I think that particularly when you're thinking about the messy middle for all of this stuff, because the middle is so much messier I think now in the last little while. I mean I find myself using multiple, multiple tools to find information these days. Some which result in a click. Some which do not result in a click. And so if you're able to segment your audiences so that you're very direct and very bottom up so that they are getting only what they need, then that will make a really, really big difference. I have a question just to get back a little bit in the weeds.

What about users? How tricky is it to … these days with users? We talked about trends in terms of traffic and things like that, but I know for a fact I am one of these people that if I go into a store and I want to know what's going on with that product, I will go on their website and look at what they have on their website. I'll look at the reviews on the website. I'll check out other things that they have that I maybe can't find in the shop, but should be on the shelf. Then you also have people who are, like you said, you're sending it to your wife. You're sending it to the person, all these different people. So how tricky is it to keep track of users, especially as people are opting out of things, ad blockers …

Dana DiTomaso:

Oh. Yeah. I mean consent alone for sure. And this is a concern obviously, I would say. American businesses are starting to pick up on this, for sure, but European businesses are obviously far ahead and I think that European listeners, I would say, yeah, you haven't had analytics for a long time and you're kind looking at North America like what's your problem, man? We haven't been able to track things for years. You know? And I think that the consent management for sure, it's going to remove people. It'll have these conversations and they'll say, well, they said no to being tracked, but we want to track them anyway.

You can't. Yes, there is modeling in GA4 where if enough people say no and enough people say yes, it will sort of fill in the blanks on what it thinks maybe happened. But I'm not necessarily a big fan of model data. I'd rather go with what's actually observed. And I think too that there's just accepting that you don't have that certain percentage of your data, and ideally your consent tool should show you how many people have said no. I use Cookiebot quite a lot for consent. I really like their tool.

Crystal Carter:

That's in Wix Studio.

Dana DiTomaso:

And they'll show me what percentage of people have said no. Yes. I really like Cookiebot. I think that they have the best set of metrics out there, and I think that they tell you what percentage of people said no, and you can be like, here's our report. 60% of people said no. So this is only 40% of our data, but we're going to make decisions in the 40% we're actually able to measure. Right? That's an important point to make when you're presenting a report to say, senior leadership, 'cause they're not going to know the intricacies of consent management and they don't care and they don't need to care.

But then yes, also ad blockers, Chrome is making a change right now that should make ad blockers less effective, but it's an arms race and the ad blockers are going to win. So I think this is just temporary. And then, yeah, there's different devices, and this is the thing with GA4 when it says user, a user is a device, unless you have a log in on your site and you are reporting user IDs from that log in to GA4, and this is true of really any analytic system. Matomo, doesn't matter what you're using, you have to report those user IDs and it has to be something non-identifiable. You can't just say their email address in order for it to understand a user across devices. Otherwise the cookie is set at the device level. And if a cookie set it all, maybe they said no, but that's just how it is and it's how it's been for years. So when you're looking at users, you're really it just say devices, honestly.

Crystal Carter:

Right. Right. I think that's totally valid. 'Cause I'm absolutely somebody who is on my phone looking at a website on my phone and on my Chrome profile and sometimes on my other Chrome profile as well.

Dana DiTomaso:

Yeah. Oh. Marketers are the worst. I have eight different Chrome profiles for all the different accounts I have to log into. Right? I am the problem here. I understand that. Or you're talking about being in a store. More than once, I've been in Home Depot, where do I find this? Load up the website, tells you where to go. Great. Going to aisle nine, bin 18, perfect. You know?

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Dana DiTomaso:

But I didn't buy online. The Home Depot people are probably like. Why? Well, because standing in your store, I just need to know what it is.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Right.

Dana DiTomaso:

You know?

Crystal Carter:

Exactly. Exactly.

Dana DiTomaso:

So I hope Home Depot marketing people, if you're listening, I hope you have a system to filter that out, but like that's a great example of intent. You know?

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Dana DiTomaso:

I was never going to buy online. I'm buying in store. How do you deal with that?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Exactly. And I think that maybe we do need to relax, maybe we do need to just chill out a little bit and just.

Dana DiTomaso:

Yeah. Well, I don't think it's necessarily, we need to chill out a little bit. I think leadership needs to chill out a little bit. And I think this is where, as marketers, it really comes onto us to do that education piece. And there's always going to be people that you work for who are never going to accept that analytics is fuzzy and blah, blah, blah. They want exact numbers, and you may not be able to change your mind. That's okay. You might want to look for another job, but there are some people who will realize that as you explain to them, this is why things are fuzzy. And so again, but those of my website where I talk about reporting on trends on absolutes. I also talk about how to talk to senior leadership about this. But part of it is really a process. If you've been reporting in exact numbers for years, whether or not those numbers are accurate, that's not where you want to lead with it and say, hey, remember those reports they gave you? They were all lies. Don't start there. It's not a good way to keep your job.

Instead, I would say start changing the metrics over slowly. Start removing decimal places. If you're reporting on year over year traffic, does 12.62 versus 12% actually matter? No. Of course not.

Crystal Carter:

That's a 0.6% increase. Dana...

Dana DiTomaso:

Oh. Pardon me. It's-

Crystal Carter:

... that's a 0.6%.

Dana DiTomaso:

Yeah. Which if you round it up is 1%, so hey.

Crystal Carter:

Basically.

Dana DiTomaso:

But I mean that is just a rounding error. Right? Just round that number. Instead of 12.62 is 13%. Leave it at that. No one is going to get upset about it. Right? But those are the little changes you can start now. Start including a report that just has, you know, and I have some screenshot examples of this in my website. There's some charts we present that have just bars of percentage amounts of the total as opposed to individual accounts. It's a much easier way to present data or comparing to pie charts.

You know, one of my favorite chart types is where I put a pie chart in the middle and then I put a donut around it, and then you compare the composition of the colors and the outer, for example, donut would be sessions by channel. The inner pie would be conversions by channel. Do the slices relatively match up? Yes. No. You know? And there's no numbers on it. We're just looking at whether or not the colors match. And so doing something like that is a really easy way to be able to visually communicate something without making it sound like you're talking over someone's head because nobody likes that. And then also really start to make those slow changes to explain things aren't as accurate as they used to be so this is what we're going to report on instead.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. I think so. And I think also if we think about conversions as the metric, which it generally ultimately comes down to conversions. Whatever the business is, if it's an attorney, if it's fast fashion, if it's a dog groomer, it will come down eventually to conversions. And I think that where you can say 50% of the conversions came from online, 50% of the conversions came from in-store, or whatever it may be, then I think that that's probably going to be something, a good trend line to follow. Would you agree?

Dana DiTomaso:

Yep. I would agree for sure. And I think, again, include some caveats with that trend line, but again, also make sure that what you're tracking as a conversion is actually meaningful. You know, for example, if you're using call tracking and you are say a dog groomer to pick on that example, returning phone calls is probably fine 'cause that's going to become a customer as well. If you're a home builder, returning calls, how many times do people order a custom home? You know? Probably not that often. So first time calls may be the way to go. Right? But again, it's not just like you don't want to include telemarketers in that number. You have to actually dial it down and say, here's the number of people who called us who were actually legitimate leads. Right?

And so it's where using tools like call tracking, et cetera, are only as good as making sure that the person at the other end, whether it's you working in house and talking to your sales team, or if your agency side and talking to the client, get them to mark off things as good or bad. And I think that's where, you know, yeah, we can see the number of form fills. Were they good form fills? And I think a lot of marketers sort of leave it at the form fill happened and they don't follow through. And what separates an okay marketer from a good marketer is knowing whether or not that follow through happened. Were those leads good? Not just the volume.

Crystal Carter:

I learned that the hard way. I've told the story a few times. But I remember taking on an account and we got a bunch of signups on the form, more than they'd ever had, and they were like, we didn't notice that. And I was like, what do you mean? And they were like, oh, we didn't notice that. Did you notice that? It's like, oh, I don't know who actually answers those forms. Who actually gets those emails?

Dana DiTomaso:

Oh. No.

Crystal Carter:

Like, oh, I think Susan does. Oh. Susan was on vacation and literally my heart sank.

Dana DiTomaso:

Oh my God. I would, yeah.

Crystal Carter:

And I learned that the hard way. And this was a few years back. But it was definitely a teachable moment. And then from then on, whenever we started doing anything, I was like, okay, where does this form go? Who's answering that? If the form's not going anywhere, we should take it off. If you don't actually have a newsletter and you have a newsletter sign up, don't put one on there.

Dana DiTomaso:

That's my favorite is we say to people, hey, how often did you send a newsletter? They're like, oh, we don't. Why do you have this big prominent sign up pop up that comes up on every single page if you're never going to send people a newsletter? Yep. If you somehow convince people to sign up for it, how dare you let them down and then only email you with their Black Friday sale? You know, Black Friday's like the perfect day to find out what email list you've been living on for the past year that you had no idea, for example.

Crystal Carter:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Speaking of newsletters and email lists, good newsletters, where can people find you? I know that you send out lots of fantastic information, actual good information… Where can people find you online to learn more about all of this fantastic stuff?

Dana DiTomaso:

Yeah. I would say I'm most active on LinkedIn. Although I am on Blue Sky now and using that a bit more, but I would say LinkedIn is still like the place to go. And if you go to KPPlaybook.com/Newsletter, you can sign up for our newsletter, which we send out every other week, and it is, I promise, useful. And if you are listening to this podcast and you would like a discount on any of my courses, use the code WIXSTUDIO to get 20% off any of my courses.

Crystal Carter:

We love it. Thank you so, so much for joining us, and thank you so, so much for all of that fantastic insight, and we will get all of those links in the show note. So thank you so very much, Dana DiTomaso.

Dana DiTomaso:

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

Mordy Oberstein:

Make sure to follow Dana on all of her social media platforms, and she has a whole course.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Dana has so many courses and so much great content. So she's got great content on LinkedIn. She's got great content on Kick Point Playbook, so do check out all of that. If you're still confused about GA4, she's the person to help you with that.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah.

Crystal Carter:

And yeah, stop being a data accountant and get yourself together.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh. And to help you get yourself together with even more analytical nerd stuff is our follow of the week, Bri Anderson, self-described analytical nerd.

Crystal Carter:

Yeah. Bri's great as well, and she's got some fantastic stuff about GA4 and about getting to grips on that. And yeah, there's some great folks doing some great stuff with analytics. So do follow Bri. Do follow Dana. And yeah, get your data together because it's not easy out here, but you got to make it happen.

Mordy Oberstein:

So you and the captain can make it happen. By the way, that's a great cereal still.

Crystal Carter:

Cap'n Crunch?

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. Thank you for getting the reference.

Crystal Carter:

I'm a Cheerios person myself.

Mordy Oberstein:

I like Cheerios. I eat Cheerios almost every day 'cause like got enough fiber, not too much fiber. Let's not get into that. But Cap'n Crunch still holds up for me. It's like a sugar cereal. That and Frosted Flakes still hold up for me. Some other sugar cereals don't. Like ew, that's Fruit Loops-

Crystal Carter:

Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Mordy Oberstein:

Cinnamon Toast Crunch still holds up, but as you get older, some of them, the fruity ones don't for me. Like Fruity Pebbles, Fruit Loops, throw them in the trash. Cocoa Pebbles is fine.

Crystal Carter:

Man, I'm a granola and yogurt kind of person. I make my own granola. It's very good.

Mordy Oberstein:

You make your own granola?

Crystal Carter:

Yep.

Mordy Oberstein:

I never, how did I not know that about you?

Crystal Carter:

You never asked.

Mordy Oberstein:

Why would you? Can I ask? I'm supposed to ask like, hey, do you make your own granola?

Crystal Carter:

I do make my own granola.

Mordy Oberstein:

Okay. You don't, but there's nothing else about you that would indicate that.

Crystal Carter:

I do.

Mordy Oberstein:

Like you don't wear like gemstone jewelry.

Crystal Carter:

Hey, I blended my own tea yesterday with like multiple dried herbs.

Mordy Oberstein:

Yeah. I blended like tea before. I take two different tea flavors in the bag and you mix them together…

Crystal Carter:

No. I took like… I dried the herbs and then I put them in the thing, and I like did the whole-

Mordy Oberstein:

You also call them herbs?

Crystal Carter:

I live in England. My accent is confused.

Mordy Oberstein:

I thought I, I've known you for a long time at this point, and I'm finding out all these things all at once.

Crystal Carter:

I'm many layers, many layers. You thought you had all the data, but no.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's no better way to end the podcast than with that. Thank you for joining us on the SERP's Up Podcast. Look for it wherever you consume your podcasts or on the Wix Studio SEO Learning Hub at Wix.com/SEO/Learn. Don't forget to give us your review on iTunes or on Spotify. Peace, love, and SEO.