Hey Reader!
One of my least favourite things to do is open Google Tag Manager to take care of a quick change and seeing the Urgent red bar at the top.
It sounds concerning! Your measurement is likely being impacted, Google says. But is it?
Here's what those three items were on the container I was looking at last week:
Additional domains detected for configuration — Sometimes you can fix this by managing the monitored domains, but for some reason that isn’t fixing the issue for this client, and of course there isn’t a way to dismiss it.
Your website’s security settings are blocking measurement — This is actually useful! Looks like their developers need to add something to their Content Security Policy. Thanks Google!
Some of your pages are not tagged — Not only is this incorrect, it’s usually a false positive and/or is asking me to add tagging to pages that will never be tagged, like PDFs and XML sitemap files. You can tell Google to ignore what it found, but it’ll find more later, I guarantee it.
And sure, we have some banner blindness on these issues now but of course let’s consider who else is looking at this. Clients have GTM access, as they should. At some point they'll click around, land on Container quality, see Urgent in red, and get worried that their agency broke something. Or they’ll follow Google’s “helpful” prompts and try to fix something that isn’t actually broken.
These kinds of false flags mean that you need to tell your client, your boss, whoever might be in GTM about the issues with these warnings before they stumble across it on their own and assume the worst.
Have you had that conversation with your clients yet? If not, this might be the week to have it!
The Analytics Maturity Framework
I published this just over a year ago and it's come up in conversation at least a few times a month since, so if you missed it the first time: the Analytics Maturity Framework. Five levels, from Chaos up to Embedded, plus a four-question quiz to work out where your organization actually sits and what to do next.
Find your level →
Articles Worth Your Time
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Watermarking 101
Not really analytics related, but I was curious about how AI watermarking actually works and I suspect some of you are too. Britney Muller built an interactive version you can type into and watch it go. The “watermark” are the word choices themselves, so copy-pasting doesn't remove it.
Go try it out!
2026 Google Ranking Factors Expert Survey
Yes, I was one of the people surveyed but that isn’t why I’m including this. Sure, the SEO results are interesting on their own, but what I actually got out of it was a list of what I should be putting on dashboards built for SEO professionals, or for clients who want that level of detail.
Read the results
Stape Relay
Stape’s free virtual conference is on November 10th. It’s going to be pretty technical and of course heavy on the server-side, with smart folks like Simo Ahava and Juliana Jackson speaking. I recommend checking it out!
Grab a spot
Where You Can Find Me
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Looker Studio Workshop at SMX Munich
October 7–8, 2026 | Virtual | Free to attend live
Just a reminder that this is coming up soon and it’s free! My talk will be on “Turning Analytics Into Your Technical SEO Auditor”
That's it for this edition of The Huddle. As always, if you have questions or want to share what you're working on, just hit reply!