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 ranked list of posts to refresh and a clear reason behind each one.

Before this, their relationship with GSC looked a lot like what I see (and you probably see) pretty often: open it up, click around, look at some stuff, close the tab without knowing what to do next. The data itself wasn’t the problem!

What was missing was a way to ask a question of the data that didn't require knowing how to build a pivot table or remember what a click-through rate benchmark should be. The workflow didn't give them anything new, instead it gave them a way to use what they already had.

The gap between "data exists" and "data gets used" is where I keep finding myself working. And I think the interesting AI use case in analytics right now isn't the sophisticated stuff. It's collapsing that gap for people who already know their business but don't have an analyst on staff, or even someone who's comfortable navigating these tools day-to-day.

Sure building impressive things with AI tools is fun, but the most useful thing you could probably do right now is hand someone a workflow that makes their existing data feel approachable.

Dana DiTomaso Founder ​dana@kpplaybook.com​

What You Actually Need to Get Started With Server-Side Tagging

By popular demand, I wrote an introductory guide to server-side tagging, including how it actually works, not just what it is. If you've been hearing the term a lot but haven't been sure whether it applies to your setup, this is the place to start.

​Read the getting started with server-side tagging guide →​

A Looker Data Studio colour setting that will break your Sankey chart

Branislav Mateáš posted this on LinkedIn and I commented because I had quite honestly just run into the same thing. If you're using a Sankey chart and you have the "Single color" coloring option selected, the report will work fine in the editor but as soon as you try to share or export it, you get a "System Error: Cannot render data" message. The "Node order" setting has the same bug. The fix is to switch to "Dimension values" coloring, then use "Manage dimension value colours" to manually assign the same colour to each node if you want uniformity. Not a perfect workaround, but it gets the job done.

​See the LinkedIn post​

Send data from Google Tag Manager to Zapier via webhooks

Most measurement conversations are about what you're capturing. This one is about where captured data can go once you have it. The article covers how to send data out of GTM via webhooks and walks through a real use case: reconciling a Samcart Order ID with a GA4 Transaction ID by routing both through a webhook and storing them side by side. If you've ever had a situation where two platforms are each tracking something but you can't connect the records, this is how you solve it. I recently used this technique for a tricky analytics setup and it was exactly what we needed.

​Read on TrackFunnels​

What's the job of this page? A framework for tagging pages by purpose

I published this one between Huddle issues, so if you missed it: it's a framework for tagging every page on your site with a purpose and using that purpose to ask different questions of your analytics depending on what job each page is actually trying to do.

The core problem it's solving is that site-wide conversion rate averages across pages with completely different jobs, which washes out the signal you actually need. A homepage is supposed to send people somewhere. A blog post is supposed to be read. Measuring both of them against the same metric tells you almost nothing worth acting on.

​Read the full post​

Where You Can Find Me ​———•

Calgary (and area!) friends — I’ll be speaking at SocialWest on May 29th at the TELUS Convention Centre. My topic is “What Your Analytics Aren't Telling You (And What To Do About It)”. If you’d like to come, I have a discount code, just email me!

That's it for this Huddle. Have questions or have a topic for a future issue? Hit reply and let me know!

Want more? You got it!