Hey Reader, Last week I was working with a client who's doing their own content strategy. They aren’t an analyst and they really haven’t spent a lot of time digging around in data tools before, but they’re curious and comfortable using Claude. We walked through a workflow I've been refining for a while: export your top pages with top queries from Google Search Console, drop the CSV into Claude, ask it what's worth prioritizing. The whole thing took about twenty minutes. By the end they had a...
15 days ago • 3 min read
Hey Reader! I read a post recently from Sanity called "Content is Data" and it's been rattling around in my head ever since. The argument: content locked inside a traditional CMS, where it is tied to its presentation, copy-pasted between surfaces, and impossible to query, is a bottleneck to everything you want to do next. Your content isn't really content. It's HTML with some text trapped inside. That got me thinking about how if content is data, how would that interact with marketing data?...
29 days ago • 4 min read
Hey Reader! I want to talk about something I've been deliberately not writing about for a while and that’s server-side tracking. The honest reason I've held off is that for a lot of the people reading this, it hasn't been a practical option. The setup is technical, the cost is real, and most clients, when you describe what's involved, look at you like you've suggested they renovate the kitchen during a dinner party. There's no good way to time that conversation. But at the same time what’s...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Hey Reader! Here is a mantra that I want you to carry with you in your professional career: we are not data accountants. Somewhere along the way, marketers got sold the idea that good analytics means precise analytics. That if the numbers don't add up perfectly, something is broken. That your job is to account for every single session, every click, every conversion, and if you can't, you've failed. The problem with that whole idea is that the data was never complete. It just used to be less...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Hey Reader! I've been seriously irked lately. Client sites are getting hammered with spam and bot traffic, primarily from China and Singapore, and I've been running experiments to see what I can filter out in Google Tag Manager before it ever pollutes our client’s production GA4. Here's where I'm at so far: GeoIP — block based on country. Only worked a little, since the IPs that spammers use typically aren't in geoIP databases. Browser version — most spammers are using an older version of...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Hey Reader! I’ve been working on an audit of a client’s dataLayer implementation for a custom-built eCommerce website. There’s a lot going on, but one of the major issues is that their developers got bad dataLayer advice in the past and now we’re working on cleaning it all up. But what's been on my mind more than the technical issues is the documentation itself. When you're working with people who only encounter analytics occasionally, your audit document has to do two jobs at once. It needs...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Hey Reader! Way back in 1996 I had to take one statistics class as a part of my geography degree. I never thought that I'd be using it again, 30 years later, but here we are! A client wanted to know if we can predict how many appointments they'll book based on their website traffic. The answer is yes, and yes it did involve stats, but it really wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. I started with two columns of data: website sessions per week and booked appointments per week. I then...
3 months ago • 4 min read
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...
4 months 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...
4 months ago • 3 min read