Digital Marketing Victories

When Marketing Data (GA4) Isn't Perfect: Strategies for Analytical Thinking

• Dana DiTomaso | Founder and Lead Instructor at KP Playbook and President and Partner at Kick Point • Season 3 • Episode 1

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Welcome to Season Three of Digital Marketing Victories Podcast. In this first episode, we’re joined by Dana DiTomaso, Founder & Lead Instructor at KP Playbook and President & Partner at Kick Point, where she helps people and teams do better marketing.

This episode is for you if you’re curious about the following:

  1. You want to develop your analytic thinking. 
  2. You want to be comfortable analyzing data and using it to persuade others.
  3. You need tips around selecting and presenting data when you're persuading others to change their behavior.
  4. You want to use data to guide a ruthless prioritization process to streamline your marketing requests.

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Katherine Watier Ong:

Welcome to the Digital Marketing Victories podcast, a monthly show where we celebrate and learn from the changemakers in digital marketing. Great digital marketers understand that people are the most challenging part of doing their jobs, and this show focuses on the people part of digital marketing wins what tactics or skills the guests use to align people with their marketing strategy. I'm your host, catherine Watsier Ong, the owner of WO Strategies LLC. We focus on increasing organic discovery for enterprise-sized, science-focused clients. Thank you for joining me. Let's get into it and celebrate our victories.

Katherine Watier Ong:

Today we're joined by Dana DiTomaso. She's the Founder and Lead Instructor at KP Playbook, President and Partner at Kick Point, where she helps people and teams do better marketing. Alongside the team at Kick Point, she teaches people and teams how to set goals and track results so that they understand what strategies and tactics bring real value. In addition to speaking at conferences about reporting and analytics, SEO and brand building, she's a weekly columnist on CBC Edmonton AM and she teaches analytics at the University of Alberta and for everyone listening, this episode is going to be perfect for you If you're curious about how to develop your analytic thinking, become comfortable analyzing data and using it to persuade others.

Katherine Watier Ong:

If you need some tips around selecting and presenting data when you're persuading others to change their behavior, using data to guide a ruthless prioritization process to streamline your marketing requests. I know that's a challenge with technical SEO figuring out what to prioritize and how to persuade others when the data is missing or unreliable. Particularly Dana's been talking a lot about that this year and that's why I brought her on the show, but I know that some people also. I've had challenges in the past about building an analytics culture. If you happen to be an organization, that's kind of new to SEO, and then how to deal with pushback from stakeholders or clients if they maybe disagree with your data analysis. Cool. So, Dana, welcome to the show. Can you just tell folks a little bit more about you? I think most people listening know who you are, but give us a little bit of your background, how you got into the analytics piece.

Dana DiTomaso:

Yeah for sure. So my original, my origin story is I went to school for geography, which I use every day in my current career. But what happened was is when I graduated at the late 90s, I ended up working in software and then from there I started tinkering with websites. I started freelancing in 2000. So I've been doing this a real long time now and my first website client said to me hey, how do I get in Google? And I said I don't know, I'll get back to you. And that's when I discovered Rand Fishkin's blog before SEO Moz, like back in the early, early days.

Dana DiTomaso:

Oh yeah, and like Jill Whalen, for example, is now retired from the field. She gave me a ticket to SES Toronto 2004. That was my first search conference.

Katherine Watier Ong:

So yeah.

Dana DiTomaso:

I'm doing this a real long time. And then I mean, I did SEO for a long time, love SEO, still do it a little bit, but what started happening around I would say like 2017 ish is we started to get more into Google Tag Manager. Version two of Google Tag Manager came out. Like okay, I got to learn this thing. Clients are asking about data. We have analytics, but like it probably could be better, and so that ended up completely occupying my brain. And when the GA4 launch came out, it's just I ended up diving so deeply into it that that is now my my main area of expertise.

Katherine Watier Ong:

We are so glad you did. Somebody had to get over.

Dana DiTomaso:

I was talking to my wife and I was like what a weird thing to be suddenly be an expert in like, like. Who saw this coming? And she's like yeah, you, you know you get super into stuff. I'm like, yeah, but GA4, was that really like a good choice?

Katherine Watier Ong:

So there's like two of you that folks follow that and it really know how it works. The rest of us, no matter how many trainings I go through, we're still like, where do I go for this?

Dana DiTomaso:

At least that's my story. Well, and every time I go on vacation, something changes. This is the joke is like every time I go on vacation, there's a major feature announcement. So my next vacation will be the first week of April. We'll find out.

Katherine Watier Ong:

We'll find out. Everybody put that on your calendar. There's gonna be some major change, Exactly. So let's start off by thinking about analytical thinking. So what if a digital marketer is kind of new to having an analytical thinking kind of process? What strategies do you recommend that they take, or tips for them to get those skills?

Dana DiTomaso:

I mean I. It's funny because people are like oh, I don't really like math, you don't have to like math I. I mean, the reason why I have a geography degree is because I failed calculus so many times. I decided a science degree was not, so I left biology and went to geography. I didn't need calculus to graduate from that. And yeah, I mean, we took one stats class that was called stats for geographers and it was just like real basic statistics, but I don't necessarily use that.

Dana DiTomaso:

I think the biggest thing when you're thinking about it from an analytical perspective is what is realistically something we can measure, but then also understanding the limitations of that measurement. And so you know you mentioned I've been speaking a lot about analytics, data isn't perfect, et cetera. There's a blog post which we can link to in the show notes about you know, your marketing data isn't right. Can it be fixed? Spoiler alert. No, it can't be fixed, and that's okay. So I think it's important just to understand the limitations of the product, more so than you know. Oh, I need to figure out the cosine or whatever of this thing, and I don't don't worry about that Like right now, if you're just getting into it. Just learn how the data gets in and how you get the data out, and what are the limitations of that process.

Katherine Watier Ong:

Yeah, I actually what I saw, or read and listened to your whiteboard friday article um, and, mind you, I also saw the presentation you had at moscon. But between the two, honestly, I felt better about my own skill set because I'm also not really big on the math piece, but I feel like I can talk about trending stuff I can talk about how to make this.

Katherine Watier Ong:

I can definitely talk about limitations. I've got this blog post on my website about the limitations of google search console because it feels like every week there's like a new insight. Somebody has this like oh, you can't track that or that's buried under here.

Katherine Watier Ong:

Right and I never remember all of them because there's so many like caveats with Google search console, so I just keep updating the blog post for my own reference, but I feel like I can talk people through that. Similarly, once I saw your presentation I was like, oh, I can totally talk people through how we shouldn't obsess because we've lost so much tracking. This is sort of the trend that's happening. You know, I was right there with you.

Dana DiTomaso:

Good good.

Katherine Watier Ong:

Yeah, so do you recommend that data marketers, or marketers in general, balance datadriven as well as creative ideas and qualitative? Do you encourage them to think about all three?

Dana DiTomaso:

Yeah, I do, and I actually don't like the phrase data-driven. I know a lot of people use that. It's more we're starting to use the phrase data-informed, as in, you're not solely going to make decisions based on the data, but you should look at it and help it inform, have it inform what you're going to do. You know, right, and because there's lots of stuff again, if we're accepting that we can't measure everything, then there's going to be some stuff that we can't measure, and as a marketer, you're not, you know, a robot taking an input and putting out output. That's what the AI tools are for. Instead, you're applying your marketing brain and saying, okay, so I know this, this, this, this is true, and I'm seeing this trend. Now, what do we do?

Katherine Watier Ong:

And I think that's really the critical part that a marketer brings and that's what makes you better than, say, an AI bot when it comes to marketing Right, and I mean I remember the days because I've been in the business about as long as you have been like doing it for 20 years and I remember when we had keywords, for instance. So there was this moment where we were really detail oriented or trying to be with the data. But on the flip side, I spent five years working at a PR firm and I will reassure all of you that they kind of measure very little, yes, and they definitely get paid. Oh, yeah, for sure they get paid well.

Dana DiTomaso:

Yeah, and same thing with, like PPC people. Like, talk to a PPC person sometime, if you don't know any, and talk to them about results reporting, because it's so interesting when I see results from PPC people and I'm not saying this to shade PPC people you're great, love talking to you. But sometimes those reports are based on entirely impressions, not even clicks, not even you know conversions, God forbid and so I think just impressions, especially for things like connected TV, like that's all we're seeing in those reports. Right, Nothing about follow through, but that's okay too, because brand building is also an important marketing strategy, and I literally just hosted a podcast with Leda Solis where we talked about the importance of brand building when it comes to SEO. So there's that part of it, so don't be so obsessed with like that, that end part of it. And I think that that's where SEOs really can fault themselves, because they're like well, I couldn't track it, so it doesn't count. It's like if you go for a walk and you're not wearing your Apple watch, you didn't close the rings, Did it actually count? Yeah, you still went for a walk.

Dana DiTomaso:

You know, some people are going to have ad blockers. Some people, especially when it comes to local SEO, for example, is really where I started. Like, started, Like I don't really care how they get in touch with my client, I just want them to do it. If they look up the client on Maps and then drive to the store, am I going to know? No, but it happened. Cool, Like no one's going to walk in the store and be like I'm here today because I happen to see you come up on Maps, Like it's not going to happen. So there has to be that part of it too where you know things are growing and you know the work you're doing is important and it's helping, but there isn't necessarily that direct benefit.

Dana DiTomaso:

And so that's why in that talk at MozCon, I talked a lot about that effectiveness metric where you take all the impressions of all the metrics connected TV billboards, search console, ads, all of it, add it all up, divide it by the number of transactions or conversions or whatever. That bottom line metric is that you can track. Look at that percentage If you do new things. Did it go up or did it go down? So, thinking about you know, for example, technical SEO, if you make the site faster, did it make the conversion rate go up or did people just have a better time on the site and then they're more likely to get in touch with that particular client.

Dana DiTomaso:

Right, you wouldn't necessarily be able to measure the conversion rate improvements. Maybe you can, maybe you can't, but if it's, for example, people walking into a store, then maybe you won't know, but you'll know that generally, you know the number of transactions for that client has gone up, as you did this TechnoGlassio work. Therefore, your work is probably having an impact Like well, probably isn't good enough. Well, guess what? It's 2025 and probably has to be good enough sometimes.

Katherine Watier Ong:

So sorry Once you watch her presentation. If you are a marketer, I now hear you in my head every time I strip a UTM. I know which I do all the time.

Dana DiTomaso:

Everybody does it all the time. I do it. Sometimes it's yeah, and actually that presentation I recorded. It's on YouTube now, so if you go to the Kickpoint Playbook YouTube channel you can watch. It's a presentation I gave to members of my analytics for agencies and practical GA4 courses before MozCon and then we just released it. So it is on YouTube now so you can check it out.

Katherine Watier Ong:

Great, yeah, definitely check it out. Okay, so we've talked a lot about misleading data. Now, if you're going to select data to present to somebody, what's the key factors you think about? If you're going to be putting together a persuasive presentation to pivot somebody else's actions or for them to come on board with your marketing campaign.

Dana DiTomaso:

I want to know what they care about and what are the terms that they use, because there's really nothing worse than someone feeling like they're being talked over, especially if they're already suspicious of you. So sometimes, for example, I'll come in to do, say, a training or an audit, and the person who set up GA4 originally is like, oh, this consultant is going to come in and they're just going to tell everybody how bad I am. And I'm like, hey, this is not my goal here. I want to make you look good. So really establishing that rapport is really important. But then also, you know, what does your boss say? Do they say I want the phone to ring? Okay, great, then that's what we're going to talk about. I'm not going to say phone call conversions from you know, organic search. I'm going to talk about number of people who Googled you and then called you Right. So really making sure that you're reframing your language and even if it's not terms you necessarily always use, don't force them to come to you. You should go to them. And this is especially important. Agency side In-house, you're kind of like a little agency sometimes, because it's not like everybody at that workplace does what you do. You're like your own little agency inside the larger organization. So really thinking about changing your language to meet them where they are, so they don't feel like they're being talked down to and you really want to try to break down that wall for sure. So it's not us versus them, or like my data is better than your data, it's all right. You know, this is interesting. Let's take a look at this. How about we take a look at this too, and then we're going to come together and make some decisions, and I think it's more going for that sort of consensus situation is really critical. So you know and again, really dial it back on what you present.

Dana DiTomaso:

Nobody likes a table, except for you, and this is something I hammer home with marketers all the time, especially SEOs. We love Excel, we love Google Sheets. We use them all the time. Normal human beings don't like tables. Normal human beings don't use Excel unless they're like economists, and that's not usually who we're presenting to. We're not talking to the accountants. We aren't accountants.

Dana DiTomaso:

So stop showing tables. Show graphs, show things that people can look at and understand immediately what it is that they're looking at, without having to really think about it a lot, because you don't want the friction to be the chart you present. You want the friction to be spent in changing their thinking about data and how much is coming in and what they can measure and what they can't measure. So I think it's just a matter of really thinking about how can you make this as accessible as possible. You know, have someone in your life who you can go over the stuff with, who doesn't actually really know what's going on, but knows enough. You know, like sometimes I'll show things to my wife and I'm like do you know what's going on? She works in a museum, like she's. She probably knows more about GA4 just existing in this house than most people say work in museums.

Katherine Watier Ong:

That's my husband. He's a musician, but I'm like, could you read this for me? Same thing, yeah.

Dana DiTomaso:

Right, but I'll show her charts and be like does this make sense, you know? And then she's like, oh, I don't get this part. Ok, great, that's really helpful, right? So show it to somebody else who isn't a marketer and get their feedback, and also be open to feedback too. You know none of us is perfect.

Katherine Watier Ong:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what about if you are present? So you talked about like streamlining it. Oh, I know what my additional thought was. So do you have any tips? That isn't Tufty Cause. I'm going to bring up Edward Tufty, which I covered in graduate school because of the story about the challenger explosion being driven by a bad graph is burned into my memory, but I don't know if there's an easy way for anybody to pick that up with, like an online article at the moment, other than buying his book and digging through the book. Do you have something similar where people have some awareness of how important it is to make sure that the graph is sort of accurate so that people don't misinterpret the data when it's in a graph?

Dana DiTomaso:

Yeah, so often. There's some examples in the blog post about the marketing data being correct or incorrect, and can we fix it? No, so it's. I think one of the things that I've been doing a lot of is, instead of showing, for example, you've got like landing pages and sessions and conversion rates, slash key event rates. No one says key events, but let's pretend that Google actually is making this happen. It's like fetch, it's not going to happen, google.

Dana DiTomaso:

So you know, instead of showing landing pages and then a number of sessions and a number of key events or whatever it might be, show them as percentages of the total. You know, 49% of the visits came to this landing page and 23% of the conversions from this landing page. Okay, well, those numbers don't appear to line up what's going on. Why isn't this page doing as good of a job as it could? Be right? That's an immediate way to show if a page is, say, hitting above or below its weight in terms of conversions and are the right pages bringing people through in terms of conversions as well? And so that's something where, if you just show the percentage of the total and don't include the decimal points, you know I do this in Looker Studio. I have a video on that blog post on exactly how to do this. But by default Looker Studio they'll say 49.26.

Dana DiTomaso:

I do not care, 49.50. That's just show the numbers. Don't show the decimals. Like, the less numbers you can show the better. But again, it's really easy to look at the colored bars and see do the colored bars match right? And so anyone can grasp that chart. Even if you don't read at all, you can still see the colored bars. There's some charts I present that don't have any numbers on them at all and they're just layered pie charts a donut wrapped around a pie chart. I also have an example of that on the website too, so you can have a report that can show that your mobile website sucks without ever actually having to present a single number at all. And there's ways to do this and it's just so visual and so easy for anyone to understand and I think that that's truly like one of the strongest reports you could present to people.

Katherine Watier Ong:

Oh, and it definitely sounds like a skill people have to work on Not only absorb the information, but then, you know, make sure that's what they're cranking out.

Dana DiTomaso:

And I think there's a bit of insecurity too, like especially if you're just getting started and you're like, oh, this person is, you know, agency side, you know what and and and there is certainly some confidence that has to go behind showing a client who's paying you a lot of money a one or two page report with the results Right, but really thinking about it like nobody is excited about a 50 page report review. You know no one wants this. So if they want more details, you can dig into it, bring the supplemental pieces, but reality is like you're just showing these top level metrics and then you can dig in if you need to. So really err on the side of like not making, picking the metrics that are going to be the most impactful for that situation and have supporting data, of course, but don't try to show everything because nobody, nobody cares. They just want to know am I making money? Am I making money by hiring you? Am I making money by continuing to pay your salary? That's the real question.

Katherine Watier Ong:

Oh, I mean also it's attention span. I mean I always I do a training on online writing, of course, as most SEOs do, and you know we've lost attention, attention span over the years. You know we've got less attention than a goldfish. And I think it also parlays over to other parts of our life. It's not just interacting online. I just think that most of us don't have a lot of attention span, unfortunately. The internet's changed our brains a bit, I think.

Dana DiTomaso:

Oh yeah, for sure. And I think it's just like presenting reports is never a thrill ride, like, try to make it as interesting as possible, but also accept the reality that, like this, is not exactly an exciting part of your day.

Katherine Watier Ong:

Right, and exactly an exciting part of your day Right, and not an exciting part of their day. So that's the reason not to do. You know, a bounce of reporting One of the first jobs I had after university.

Dana DiTomaso:

So when I worked in software was I was doing a training for CRM software and this is this will date me how old I am it was for Lotus Notes CRM software.

Dana DiTomaso:

Oh yeah. So I flew all over the States doing training to salespeople who didn't want to be there because they're salespeople and they, you know, are movement oriented, action oriented, making phone calls kind of people. I was wasting a whole day of their time when they could have been making commissions and, uh, they didn't have any input in the software. A lot of the time they were just like handed this and said here you have to use it. One time I showed up at a training I think it was in san antonio and the sales team had just decided to go golfing, and so the the client's like yeah, none of them are. I guess we're going to have to. I don't know, you want to go to the Alamo? Like, yeah, okay, cool, sure, that was what we ended up doing. So I think it's a matter of like really accepting that your audience may not want to be there and just trying to make it as entertaining as possible, like not, you know, show and dance, but that's part of what goes into my speaking now. Is that experience?

Katherine Watier Ong:

experience, that early experience trying to get board salespeople excited about CRM software. Yep, yep.

Dana DiTomaso:

I've had similar kind of experiences.

Katherine Watier Ong:

I turned my. My first trainees were grandmothers when I was training folks about SEO, so kind of similar Um. So I do have um one episode of the show where we talk about delivering negative news. But I am kind of curious whether you have your own um opinions about how you go about structuring your communication style, what you actually present, and it's negative stuff that you need to convey.

Dana DiTomaso:

Yeah, I usually try to just not beat around the bush like, just get into it immediately. Probably the worst piece of negative news recently that comes to mind that I had to deliver was one client we're helping with the GA4 transition. This is pre sunset of UA and we put the GA4 code on the site and suddenly they're like what, something's wrong. Our traffic has been cut in in. Like we got 25% of our traffic in GA4 and 100% of it in UA. I'm like, oh, I've done something horribly wrong. What's going on?

Dana DiTomaso:

And I go and look and it turns out that they had their UA code four times on the site. So it was recording four page visits for every single visit because UA would allow that duplication. And in GA4, there's a setting which some people have turned off if you have a really old GA4, but usually it's turned on. That stops duplicate traffic from being recorded. And so I did a crawl of the site with Screaming Frog and I pulled all the pages and some pages had it on there six times. Some pages had it on there two times.

Dana DiTomaso:

It was just like completely inconsistent. But some of it is that, like their traffic reports that they've been providing for years were basically fairy tales every month. But somehow we're going to have to come up with a way to like figure out how to be like oh, this is wrong. And so I think, trying to get them on your side immediately and be like it's not me data versus you data, it's it's. You know, this horrible thing has happened and now we're going to fix it together, you know, and and just really trying to be like look, this is what happened. We don't know how it happened.

Dana DiTomaso:

It turns out the developers were just like adding the code in random places for no good reason. So we got everything in tag manager, which settled sort of the problem, and you know, it's better in GA for now, but it's still like a horrible thing to have to realize that that things have been wrong for years and so like that's the kind of thing that people think, oh God, I'm going to get fired, and it's like that's where you have to really figure out. Don't lie about it, be honest, be upfront and just be like look, this is what happened. And if you screwed up, then you know, say I screwed up. This is what I did Explain how you're going to fix it, and then explain how you're not going to let that happen again.

Dana DiTomaso:

So that's, that's the other part of it too. You know, and and sometimes certainly you know, I've screwed up in my career and we've lost a client because of it Happens to everybody and I think it's just like accepting, it's part of accepting that you're human, you know, and we all do stupid things at least once, like I'm sure everyone has sent an email accidentally to the wrong person at some point in their careers, and this is before Gmail had the no, I want that back button. Right, yeah, Right. Like everybody has screwed up at some point, and just remember that some scripts are more public than others and really it's just an opportunity to learn from stuff. No one, no one, hits it 100% of the time and that's.

Katherine Watier Ong:

that's okay. Yeah, I actually had a client, was relatively short term because I was just helping with a migration. And then it sort of petered out. They didn't want additional help, but and maybe I doomed myself, but I did get into the analytics and they were publisher and I discovered that they were perpetually refreshing their homepage and selling advertising.

Dana DiTomaso:

And when I pointed it out to them.

Katherine Watier Ong:

they knew what they were doing and they did not want any advice from me. Okay, yeah.

Dana DiTomaso:

And at that point you're like you know what I've done, my due diligence, I'm just going to walk away now. Yep, yeah, I remember one, one client to they had. They had a refresh on their homepage and their bounce rate this is UA land was like point 06% and I was like, hey, when we do these changes for your analytics, this is gonna impact your bounce rate. They're like but our bounce rate is so good. I'm like but it's a lie, it's not a real metric, you know.

Dana DiTomaso:

And their web developer knew that what was going on and fought me so hard on making those changes and I don't know if they we ended up just stopping working with them because it was just like I can't help you. If you're not going to, let me help you.

Katherine Watier Ong:

Help me, help you, I know. I mean, I was the point person for analytics for at least a year at Ketchum before I started hiring my team, and somebody came up to me with this website. That was well before I even started. They're like can you tell us how much traffic it's gotten? I'm like and it was built by Ketchum and I was like well, it has no analytics on it. They're like well, you can't tell us anything. Yeah, I can't tell you anything.

Dana DiTomaso:

It's just all fairy tales at this point. Yeah, it's totally fair.

Katherine Watier Ong:

Okay, so let's pivot a little bit to like the technical SEO side. What if you've got all these data points and you have to sort through the actions and start prioritizing them based on what could be taken and, ultimately, what are your takeaways there? What kind of tips do you have for people there?

Dana DiTomaso:

impact and so, as a real broad triage is just like, one through three for effort, one through three for impact, start there and then go back and be like, okay, these things are really critical, is it actually going to happen? Who's responsible for this? Does that mean it's actually going to happen? And, I think, a big mistake that people make again just thinking you're being paid by the pound and you present this enormous audit and sometimes I have done that at the request of the client when they're working with an external vendor who's refusing to accept anything is wrong with their beautiful, perfect website, when things are horribly wrong with it?

Dana DiTomaso:

I think the worst one I saw recently I posted about this in the Women in Tech SEO was when you went to a 404 URL, it showed the homepage and it presented a 200 code Like how do you even do that? That's very creative and the client asked me, though, like how are they doing this? Like I don't know anymore. I don't know right it was a custom built cms too, on top of everything else like it's 2025.

Dana DiTomaso:

There's lots of options out there. Don't build your own cms anymore. Yeah right, maybe in like 96 you could do that, but anyway, so I think it's um, I think that that's really important to is just realize, like, what's actually going to get implemented and also go through it with you know the client be like hey look, these are the top 10 things that I've pulled out of this list. Here's some things that we can do and here's some things that I think your team should do, or or your team has to do. What's their availability? Like, can we get some points? Or, however, like, find out how they work. Are they working on a point system? Are they working on time? Are they you know how can you get on one of their sprints or whatever it is that they're working on, and sometimes pick something first that you think is going to be a big win, because that can really get them on board for future stuff.

Dana DiTomaso:

So one client we were working with they had they were a home builder and they had this wild canonicalization situation where they had homes that were already built quick possession homes and then they had homes where it was like here's the show home. And so each of the quick possession homes rel canonicaled to the show home, even though the pages were completely different. And I was like, and they're like, yeah, I don't know why, these pages just aren't, you know, being picked up and the show home pages were actually feeling the impact of that and they weren't really coming up in search results. And it's like, well, let's fix all these canonicals. They were so skeptical. I'm like let's just try it and if it doesn't work we can switch it back. You know like let's just see what happens, Because the internet it's all about experimentation, right, little jazz hands there and I have never seen that happen before.

Dana DiTomaso:

I was like I did not see this coming and I told them too. I was like I was expecting maybe like 10%, 20%, maybe if I had a good day 70%, and then after that, every single recommendation we made was implemented immediately, right? And so, like I can't guarantee you're going to get that kind of halo, but go through and be like what is the easiest thing that we think can be implemented without a ton of effort, even if it isn't necessarily the thing that is the most on fire, what feels quickest to be able to see some impact as soon as possible, because that can really help you get buy-in. And yeah, of course you want to start with the things that are absolutely the most on fire. But is there something that's super fast? So maybe it's like the robots file is restricting image, the image folder, and you know that, like every time you Google search a really important phrase for this particular website, like an image search, is shown. Maybe you just need to allow the images to be indexed. Maybe that's all you have to do at that point, right, just do that and then see what happens, right? So maybe that's one of the quick ones.

Dana DiTomaso:

I think the thing that I get most frustrated, especially with WordPress websites and we develop WordPress websites we run into WordPress devs all the time and, like there's a real difference in a WordPress developer and someone who has a theme and clicks buttons in the theme yes, you know, and it's it's. People are like, oh well, I'm using Oxygen to build my websites. Like, oh great, that's really excited to take a look at this thing. Like I think that that's where it's. Don't call yourself a WordPress developer. I'm sorry, I hate being a gatekeeper, but like, please, it's not WordPress development.

Dana DiTomaso:

You're basically building a theme on top of the platform at that point and you're going to have technical SEO issues as a result. So, if you're okay with that, like, except there's going to be technical SEO issues and maybe you're going to have to spend more on paid as a result, You're going to have to invest more in content as a result, or whatever it might be, maybe do more connected TV ads or whatever it's going to be, but you're going to have to invest more elsewhere because you have these technical limitations about whether or not you've pivoted the conversation when you get a little stuck persuading somebody and talked about what would happen if you took no action.

Katherine Watier Ong:

And I forget who shared this it might be search pilot about what the um, what the impact would be if you did no SEO for three years.

Dana DiTomaso:

Yeah, yeah, and I think actually there's some people are about to find out, because there's a lot of like economy wise. One of the first things to go when the economy is potentially in a downturn, where there's uncertainty in the market, is people ditch spending on marketing Right.

Katherine Watier Ong:

Yeah.

Dana DiTomaso:

And you know, we've had situations where you always end up with a great case study where, like, a client's credit card gets compromised and then their Google ads get shut off and you're like, great, I guess for the next two weeks we're going to find out what happens if they have no Google ads, yeah, you know, and it's like, yeah, that's a great case study, unfortunately.

Dana DiTomaso:

But yeah, same thing with SEO. I think that there is some one of the things that I usually say is like, if you don't do any SEO, your competitors are going to keep doing SEO. So when you do finally turn it back, it's not ads, you can't just turn it back on again, it's not a tap. So you're going to have to catch up with not only where the competitors were, but then also you know where you're going with that as well. So your competitor starts here and you decide you know, I'm just going to sit here at the start line, I'm not going to actually going to do anything, but the competitors are running ahead and you're like, okay, well, great, now I have one year to catch up with their three years of effort. It's not physically possible, you know, right, and I think that that's's where. And you're going to lose all that institutional knowledge of well, like, if you get rid of your SEO team internally, you're going to lose all that institutional knowledge of well, of what SEO is doing.

Dana DiTomaso:

And right now, seo is in one of those periods where it's going through a massive amount of change, like I think about the Florida update and how that changed SEO and for people who are too young to know what I'm talking about, google it.

Dana DiTomaso:

But that was the first major shakeup in terms of SEO and that felt like a huge difference for SEO and I feel like this AI stuff and everything else we're going through quality content and overviews and everything else is another massive shakeup in SEO. So if you lose that knowledge, you have to start over again, Like that's, that's rough. So maybe pull back and don't do as much if you you know, but you got to keep an eye on your competitors and if they're doubling down and honestly, I think that if I was advising a company on this and they're like I don't know what we're going to do, you know, maybe now's the time to invest, because if your competitors are going to stop investing, this is your chance but he also did some research about what happens when you stop doing social, which I thought was very interesting, cause it's just new research that I have seen.

Katherine Watier Ong:

Same thing you stop doing it, you're going to see a decrease in traffic and engagement and brand awareness and all the rest. Unfortunately, it's an all-in-one thing.

Dana DiTomaso:

Unless it's a social channel you weren't seeing anything from. So, for example, like I've stopped posting on, like you know, twitter, slash X and you know, but picked up on LinkedIn and blue sky, and I think too, for companies like you don't have to be everywhere, that's okay. Just make sure to say like we're over here now, and so that people don't come to you looking for customer service, support or something.

Katherine Watier Ong:

Right yeah, and then when I started to catch them, they had a set of social accounts that they gave to every single client and I was like, um why? They're very different brands and their audience is not particularly on all of these platforms and we should never launch with four all at once a lot you know, unless you've got a ton of budget, you know, crank it back to ones where you could actually be successful.

Dana DiTomaso:

You just toss the intern on that right. They can just crank out social media content or that or that, If you do have lower level people.

Katherine Watier Ong:

I'm going to plug this. Actually, I actually have a guide on my website about how to codify your brand voice and actually train all of your lower level employees to make sure they're consistently answering in your brand voice and staying within guidelines, Cause I actually had to do that once. So, if if that's, you feel free to grab the guide it's free. So how do you here? We get to the part where I was talking about in relation to the most recent speaking engagements you've had. But so what do you do when the stuff is missing and how do you coach people to make confident decisions when the data does not provide a clear answer or it's missing?

Dana DiTomaso:

Yeah, I'm working on a post right now about the analytics hierarchy.

Katherine Watier Ong:

Yeah.

Dana DiTomaso:

And, like you know, some people like level zero is we have no analytics. Because that still happens People don't have analytics, or they don't know where it is, maybe, or they lost the login. Well, the agency is like oh, you're not working with us anymore, we're taking our analytics with us Like first off agency.

Dana DiTomaso:

People don't do that. It's not a good way to keep clients. It's never worked. It's not going to work, just going to piss people off.

Dana DiTomaso:

And then a five is like you know, basically are like that, that meme of you know the galaxy brain analytics right, like nobody's ever there.

Dana DiTomaso:

So really thinking about where you at on that stages and then what's the appropriate decision for this? So if you are literally like you're working with a client or somewhere and they have no analytics at all, then get some first step, just add it to the site and then you might have to make some judgment calls based on what third-party tools are telling you in terms of volume or audience size, or looking at your competitors and seeing what they're doing. I think at that point you really are just going off of what competitors are doing. And if you do use tools like SEMrush or similar web that give you estimates of traffic, put your own site in in addition to those competitors. And if your own site, once you do have some data, is somewhat close to what it says in there, great, maybe your competitors are also somewhat close to what their reality is. But if you go into a similar web and they're like you have 1 million visitors a month when you know you have like 20,000, then it's probably off by that degree as well.

Katherine Watier Ong:

And especially for people in smaller industries.

Dana DiTomaso:

Those tools aren't going to do anything for you. If you are a small, you know several location business in one geography. Those kinds of competitive research tools unfortunately aren't really going to help. So you do have to have like some data to go off of for sure.

Katherine Watier Ong:

Since this podcast is all about soft skills. So what are the soft skills that you think analytic people need, particularly when you're receiving pushback or resistance?

Dana DiTomaso:

Uh, you definitely have to be very pleasant, Pleasant, Okay, I think pleasant, like and get a good poker face for sure. I say this as someone who doesn't always necessarily have a great poker face, but I don't. My father-in-law used to be in the Navy. He's very good at poker and since I live out here now and he plays against me, I finally beat him once. Oh, there, know right, Like that's never gonna happen again, but once I did, I finally got good at a poker face. But I think for sure, like being able to take in information and just being comfortable being like I don't know, I'll get back to you.

Dana DiTomaso:

Like that is. That is a really important skill as well, to just be honest and unfortunately, sometimes some people are gonna lie and you just have to not necessarily poop on them too much about it, because nobody likes someone who's there just smack talking a competitor either.

Dana DiTomaso:

So I think it's that balance of like being honest, being pleasant and cheerful, charming maybe you know and also, but also not like in a slimy snake oil salesman kind of way, because what you're presenting from an analytics perspective is not exactly exciting to people or they already might be coming into it with their backup because they feel like they're going to get talked over if that's been their previous experience with an analytics person. So, being able to ensure that you're watching what people are, how people are responding to you, that body language, if it's on Zoom, like, are they engaging with the camera? Are they looking down or off to the side? Are they, you know, fiddling with stuff? Are they actually paying attention? Or there's some people who just like, have to draw or write while they talk to you, and that's something that you'll learn about them over time.

Dana DiTomaso:

But really watching people's body language and seeing how they're responding to you is really critical. And when I'm doing training, I'm definitely like looking around, seeing how people are responding and then really thinking about you know, this person seems like they're disengaging a little bit, but I don't want to call them out in front of everyone else because that's embarrassing. But, like, take a break, go over and be like, hey, you know how are you enjoying it. Don't be like, hey, I noticed you weren't paying attention. Are you hating this thing? Maybe they had an emergency come up or something and be like hey, how's it going? Is there anything else I can cover? And sometimes people are comfortable telling you in a one-on-one situation when they're not comfortable telling you in front of a crowd. So just really like trying to get honestly people to like you is almost as important as presenting good data. No, it's huge.

Katherine Watier Ong:

It's huge on the sales end. I mean, I actually had a job in sales once in my life and it would. It floored me how many people I was able to sell the product to that. Frankly, it was the online internet product and sometimes I presented it without internet. I still sold it, oh sure, and we talk about it. And in one instance it was because all the friends bought it. Like I would strategically go into a state and like sell to all the other, like organizations, and then circle back to the one that was 80 and had no internet. Hey, your friends have bought it and she would buy it. It was all about like befriending their friends and being liked. It's kind of amazing how much sales is part of that.

Dana DiTomaso:

I also think there's two great books by April Dunford that I recommend people read, and they're actually on the shelf behind me right now. So the first one is obviously awesome and that talks about brand positioning for products, but it also can. I really took it as like a brand positioning for yourself and how you're talking to people. And then the second one is sales pitch and that's definitely more sales oriented. Both books are super quick. I read them both. I read one flying from Vancouver to Toronto and the other one flying from Toronto to Vancouver. So it is, it's a quick four and a half hour read and, yeah, fantastic.

Dana DiTomaso:

And April as well. She has a podcast. She's probably one of my top speakers to watch of all time. If you're looking for tips on how to be a better speaker, watch some of April's talk. She's just at the top of her game. At the top of her game, but I really like what she has to say about positioning and as you read it and you're thinking about yourself and how you position yourself and how you bring your product which is reporting or discussions or consulting or whatever it might be to clients or internally think about how you can position those.

Katherine Watier Ong:

Yeah, that's a great tip. So let's talk a little bit about an analytics culture. So if you're helping, I mean you run an agency, so in this instance it would be helping a client brand new to SEO sort of look at the data on a regular basis and build that cadence, particularly in my case. I'm also talking to people about the next step after that, which is maybe rework some job descriptions. So it's a little bit tied to how things perform. So there's a carrot and a stick, because otherwise you're never going to. Some people are going to instantly be interested in what you're doing and pick it up because they just happen to be dorky and they're excited about it. But the vast majority of people need some sort of push or pull to align with this internet culture thing. That was not part of the culture before. So what kind of tips do you have about how to engineer that or help the client engineer it?

Dana DiTomaso:

Yeah, I typically like to have some sort of recurring meetings with clients and that's just like, can be like a check in, Because sometimes too, you're pretty low on their priority list from an agency perspective, Like you are not, sadly, top of mind for the client most of the time, unless things are going wrong. So the important thing is to keep that conversation going, even when things are going well. And so set up regular calls with them, especially if you have to do items for them, because that will remind them to do the thing before the call. Otherwise it may not ever actually get done. And this is important as well for, like, technical SEO, for really anything Like you got to schedule those regular checkups or else it'll never happen, It'll get put off until everyone dies, Heat death of the universe. Those technical SEO pieces are still not, you know, implemented. So I think it's important to have those regular calls and then also on those calls, you know, really thinking about what do I want to review with them. So sometimes I'll start off with just like, hey, let's take a look and see how things are going, and then be like, hey, I noticed this. And then having discussions about those pieces, and that can go in all sorts of really interesting directions. Usually, you know, I'll have my main screen, my zoom, and then I have my second screen. I'll have some notes I've written for myself in advance. I'll have the reports. I'll have like some stuff ready for screen sharing. But also just thinking and also having their website open and being like all right, let's walk through this, you know, let's do this Google search and see what comes up and let's talk about how this, you know, how this path would go for a potential user who's thinking about this.

Dana DiTomaso:

And sometimes, you know, also show the client mobile. Don't always show them desktop, especially if mobile is more than like half of their traffic, which in B2C industries it generally is. In B2B it's more hit or miss, for sure, you know for sure, just have it up in mobile, because sometimes the client doesn't look at their own site on mobile ever. You know for sure, just to have it up in mobile, because sometimes the client doesn't look at their own site on mobile ever and we all use these big, beautiful desktops with these giant monitors all day and it's not a mobile device. So definitely make sure to have that mobile up there and really thinking about that experience and then just note down things and be talking about analytics or just talking about content or whatever. Note that Because you know if you see something, say something. I think that's really critical and also shows the client that you've got their back and you're helping them in more than just this particular. You know whatever lane that client has put you in.

Katherine Watier Ong:

So it sounds like you're really trying to sort of have them watch you walk through your data analysis and being curious about what's going on. Oh yeah, and I tell them too it's like.

Dana DiTomaso:

It's like being a detective. I think that that's the most exciting part of this job is just being that detective and digging through stuff and being like why is this happening or why is that happened? Or look at this. You know, one of my favorite things to do with clients is actually go into Google Search Console and look at a page and look at the keywords for that page and then look at a find queries that aren't a hundred percent related to that page but it's still coming up for anyway, even if there's no clicks. Um, maybe there's not even that many impressions, but being like, look at this topic group that is coming up Like this is really interesting. Tell me, do you have conversations about this internally? Should? This is something we should be talking about and really thinking about, like we already see this in the data. Let's do something about it.

Katherine Watier Ong:

Yeah, I love the mobile tip. I particularly because all my clients are here in the DC area and we were sitting on top of where the Internet was created, so the speed here is not like everywhere else. And I was working with the fisheries division of NOAA and they actually had functionality. They wanted people to use fishermen on boats. Oh, good luck, Exactly. So one of the first things I did was thank you. Gt metrics. You can like pivot to a location. I can't put them out into sea, but I can get sort of close in relation to ruralness and then flip to mobile and force them to. I always do this.

Dana DiTomaso:

I actually record the dang video and I've forced everybody to sit through the video that tells the story better than anything else. A great you know thing for that too. And as someone who lives in a rural area, boy do I get excited about. You know. Like sometimes where I live is very close to the US border, and so we actually see, we can see America from our house.

Dana DiTomaso:

And sometimes I'll just be sitting in my living room, my phone's, like Welcome to USA, like I did nothing, I didn't even move, and now I'm in the States and so we have like a I always have to. We have a thing with the cell phone company where we're in America for less than five minutes they don't actually charge us for it. And then we go back to Canada again later on like welcome back to Canada, did nothing, still watching TV, but you know, thinking about it like in that period. I have bad internet pretty rarely, unless I'm on Wi Fi, and so trying to do literally anything is so frustrating. I also, you know, if you have a retail location too. One of the things that I always do and I'm sure I can't be alone in this is sometimes this is particularly bad for Home Depot. I'll be standing in Home Depot and I want to, you know, look up a product and I'm in your store and I go to your website and the back of the store sucks for mobile, you know and you don't have free internet or whatever it might be you know,

Dana DiTomaso:

just like make that easier for people. I think it'd be really interesting if your retail location to try to see the number of people who are probably like accessing your website from your actual retail location, which not only tells you that, like maybe your signage sucks or you need kiosks or you need people are actually going to make sure that people are. You know, I mean, home Depot is generally pretty good. If you look slightly confused, they'll come up to you and ask you if you need help with something, but, like, other stores, are not so much for that, and I think that that's where it's, you know, important to look at that data too.

Katherine Watier Ong:

I think that depends on where you live in the US. I always get floored with how good customer service is. Definitely like more aggressive than Canadian customer service.

Dana DiTomaso:

Canadian customer service is like. I don't feel like talking to anybody unless you ask you know.

Katherine Watier Ong:

Well, DC is fully like non-trained customer service. I'm going to be aggressive. Why are you bothering me?

Dana DiTomaso:

It's like this whole other culture, and I always forget that other places are nice.

Katherine Watier Ong:

I traveled to Seattle because my family my husband's family isn't from Seattle and every single time I'm floored by how nice people are, because it's just very different here. So I'm kind of curious what do you think this is like? The 10,000 question what do you think about the future of data analytics? Like the next five, 10 years, with all this AI stuff and machine learning and the death of data?

Dana DiTomaso:

what are we doing? I think, I think that's really more so than the AI machine learning thing. I think, actually, the death of trackable data is really going to be. What does this in? But I think it's going to vary wildly based on location, you know it's uh, you know the EU is clamping down more and more. I mean, I think the EU really wants to have it, so that you have to opt in.

Katherine Watier Ong:

You know it's like everybody. How many people are going to do that too? No, they're not.

Dana DiTomaso:

They're going to click it accidentally and be like oh no, this is.

Katherine Watier Ong:

Yeah, exactly.

Dana DiTomaso:

You know the EU would really want to go to an opt-in model. The US probably, if you know, federally would probably want to have no tracking restrictions at all. You can track whatever you want open season and I think it's just like a philosophy to how that particular area has towards tracking. And so I think it's going to really depend on where you are in terms of the clients that you service what you can and can't track. But I think one of the things that people really need to be more aware of is if you're actually following the rules. Just having a consent banner on your website doesn't actually stop tracking. You have to actually attach it so that choices are made on the backend based on what people say. Yeah, I think one of the more egregious ones I saw was this very large housewares brand that you would absolutely recognize, as in every store in North America probably, and in Europe, and they, when you went on their website and you said no, don't track me, it sent off a conversion event to Facebook Like cool, yep, that's a big fine, yeah, it was a very large and I was, and I had my VPN set to Copenhagen, so that was what it was

Dana DiTomaso:

doing for a European visitor. So it was like you are screwed. And they're like, yeah, our Google ads got shut off because they said we weren't we weren't, uh, respecting consent choices. Like no, you definitely are not. Uh, and yeah, it's just like just having the banner does nothing. So I think it is important to educate yourself on like is this actually being tracked properly? But then also explaining to leadership like this is why this is going down. There's so many threads I see all the time on, like all the different slacks I belong to in the Google, on Reddit, the GA4 forums on Reddit and the Google forums for GA4. And they're like we put in consent management. Now we see 50% of our traffic. What have we done wrong? Like that's literally what consent management is. That's what's supposed to happen.

Katherine Watier Ong:

You've got to write yes, good job, you did it correctly.

Dana DiTomaso:

And I think that that's where it's just like this huge uh education gap, which you know like I'm trying to fill, but I'm just one person. It needs to be out there in the world too. That, like this, is what's going to happen. So, depending upon where you are, you're either going to have lots of data, you're going to have very little data at all, and based on that, you're going to have to make some choices. And sitting around saying oh I wish I could track everyone is not actually going to solve the problem. You just have to think of other ways that you can get the data that you need without actually violating things that cost your company a lot of money, right, right?

Katherine Watier Ong:

So this has been amazing. Tons of helpful tips, I think, and there's going to be a ton of stuff on the landing page, so feel free to check all of that out. But what kind of other if you had any other resources or wins that you want to share with listeners?

Dana DiTomaso:

Yeah, I would say my two courses are particularly something that I talk a lot about. So my first course is called analytics for agencies, and it is analytics for agencies, although we have some in house people in there too. It is exactly what we do at kickpoint when I am setting up analytics for our clients. It is all of my plans, it is my templates, is my Google tag manager containers, it is my looker studio templates, my documents, the sales process, everything else. There's something like seven and a half hours of videos. Uh, so, yeah, there's available. And then there's also a practical GA for which is practical application of GA for start to finish. Um, so it doesn't just walk you through, and I think one of the things that I, as a former trainer and I think generally, like, I think that courses don't do well as they're like click on this, you know, click save to save. Well, yeah, we all, we all know that the button's called save. We can figure that out.

Dana DiTomaso:

That's not the point of this course. The point is, when would I need to do this? What are the common use cases that you see for GA4. So I have lots of how-tos based on questions that we've been asked from clients and then also people in the course. There's a community that comes along with it, and people in Analytics for Agencies have a bi-weekly office hours. They can attend on Zoom with me as well, and the questions that people ask end up becoming part of the course as well, and I'm updating it as often as I can, because GA4 changes approximately every 10 minutes, right? So definitely check those out. And if buying a course not in your budget right now, I have the Playbook Huddle, which is at kpplaybookcom slash newsletter. That's a biweekly newsletter and we have exclusive tips that are just in the newsletter and nowhere else, right?

Katherine Watier Ong:

Yeah, this has been awesome. So how can people learn more about you?

Dana DiTomaso:

I would say LinkedIn is probably the place that I'm the most active and if you Google Dana D Tomaso and really any variation of how you think my last name should be spelled, I should come up. So it's a. When I check Google search console, I'm like wow, that's a way to spell my last name. So yeah, there you go.

Katherine Watier Ong:

So this has been fabulous. Thanks again for coming on the show. Definitely check out the resources and watch some of her other whiteboard Fridays. They're really enlightening. Yeah, thanks again. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks so much for listening. To find out more about the podcast and what we're up to, go to digitalmarketingvictoriescom and, if you like what you heard, subscribe to us on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Rate us, comment and share the podcast, please. I'm always looking for new ideas, topics and guests. Email us at digitalmarketingvictories at gmailcom or DM us on Twitter at DM victories. Thanks for listening.

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