Hey Reader! I've been thinking a lot about a situation that’s been coming up lately in conversations with clients and leads, and that’s diagnosis before investigation. Here's what I mean. At some point you'll have a situation where someone on your team (or a client, or a stakeholder) sees a number that looks wrong and immediately wants to fix it. Traffic's down? Let's redesign the homepage. Conversions dropped? Must be the new checkout flow. Engagement rate tanked? Time to rewrite all the...
14 days ago • 4 min read
Hey Reader! How do you listen for listenable events on a website you can't see, even with a VPN? That's the challenge I was working through last month, and I came up with a solution that might help some of you facing the same issue. First, I created a trigger in Google Tag Manager that listens for any event at all. It's a custom event trigger with an event name of .* (and make sure to turn on regex matching). Then, for your tag, it will look like this: This way you can see all the possible...
28 days ago • 3 min read
Hey Reader! This is the last edition of The Huddle until January, so I wanted to take a moment to look back at what resonated most with you this year. First, thank you. When I started this newsletter, I had a modest list of subscribers that grew slowly. But something happened this year and now the list is four times the size that it was in January. I'm genuinely grateful that you've chosen to spend a few minutes with me every couple of weeks. It means a lot to know that what I'm sharing is...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Hey Reader! December is here, and I know the temptation is to coast toward the holidays. But hear me out: this is actually a great time to do a little housekeeping that will make January feel a lot less chaotic. I'm not talking about massive projects. I'm talking about the small things that always get pushed to "someday". Documenting that one process that only lives in your head, updating your measurement plan to reflect recent changes, or finally setting up that automation you've been...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Hey Reader! Either Kit (formerly ConvertKit, an email marketing platform) had something happen at their end or Google's scanning has gone rogue, but I got a notification last week that one of my GTM tags was automatically disabled for "malicious code." Regardless of the reason, this reminded me of how important it is to create a system for getting critical analytics alerts to someone who can actually deal with them, even when you're unavailable or it’s a holiday. There are few “marketing...
3 months ago • 4 min read
Hey Reader! I'm seeing a pattern in consent management configuration audits that's becoming a concern. People check the Consent Settings in the GA4 admin, see that signals are being received, and assume everything's configured correctly. Unfortunately, receiving signals doesn't mean your configuration is actually working correctly. This matters because you could be violating GDPR right now without realizing it. Let me walk you through an example. Sites set their default to opt-out for people...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Hey Reader! I've had a post rolling around in my head for a while, and instead of waiting until I have time to write the full thing, I wanted to share this idea with you now. Here’s the core idea: GA4 is really built with ecommerce in mind, which kind of sucks for the rest of us who don't have ecommerce websites. But that shouldn't stop us from using some of GA4's most useful features. What if you recorded form fills (or really any non-purchase conversion) as a purchase? I know it sounds...
4 months ago • 3 min read
Hey Reader! It seems a bit too early to be thinking about the end of the year, but here we are in Q4, which means year-end wrap-ups are coming whether we're ready or not. Now is the time to start planning what information you want to include in your year-end summary! It doesn’t matter if your summary is just for yourself, or something to share with your company or clients, it’s still a great exercise to put one together. Think about: What were the highlights? What were the lowlights? What...
4 months ago • 3 min read
Hey Reader! There was a huge shake-up in the SEO world recently that revealed something pretty alarming about our analytics data. Google made changes to how ranking tools can scrape search results, which caused a massive drop in impressions in Google Search Console across the board. Brodie Clark has a great breakdown of the technical details, and it reminded me of something I posted on LinkedIn earlier this year about how you could clearly see spikes in impressions in GSC for low-volume terms...
5 months ago • 3 min read