Hey Reader!

We welcomed Jaime Rowe to the Kick Point team last week as our newest Digital Marketing Analyst, and her arrival reminded me of something that happens way too often in our industry. You know how it goes — someone new joins the team and suddenly you realize all those "obvious" processes and decisions that live only in your head aren't documented anywhere.

It's like that moment when you're trying to explain why you set up a particular GA4 event a certain way, or why certain URLs are excluded from reports, and you realize the new person has no context for decisions that made perfect sense six months ago.

The reality is that documenting decisions as you make them isn't just about onboarding! It's about saving your future self some frustration when you need to revisit something months later. You will thank yourself for those notes about why you implemented a workaround or what business context drove a particular tracking decision.

Speaking of documentation, this is a perfect time to ask: have you started using annotations in GA4 yet? If you're not documenting when you make changes, launch campaigns, or see unusual spikes in your data, you're missing out on context that could be crucial for future analysis. Here's my complete guide to GA4 annotations if you want to get started.

What processes have you been meaning to document? I'd love to hear what's on your list! Just hit reply and let me know.

Dana DiTomaso Founder ​dana@kpplaybook.com​

New: The Social Media Manager's Complete Guide to GA4 Custom Channel Groups and Reports Most marketers know their social media is driving valuable traffic. But how can you get the credit when GA4's default setup bunches everything together unhelpfully in a single Organic Social bucket? And then when you try to break it out, you’re dealing with multiple source entries for the same network. It doesn’t look great. I just published a complete guide that walks you through setting up custom channel groups in GA4 specifically for social media. Using this process will give you the clean, professional reports that you (and your stakeholders!) actually want to see. ​Read (or watch) my guide →​

Your Google Tag Manager Options When Consent Gets Complicated

Jos IJntema breaks down six ways to handle GTM without consent that go beyond the basic "don’t use GTM" advice, which isn’t actually helpful. This matters because consent management isn't getting simpler, and most businesses need practical approaches that work with their current setup.

What I appreciate about this piece is that it acknowledges different scenarios require different solutions. If you're dealing with privacy regulations and trying to balance compliance with actually useful data collection, these options give you a framework for making informed decisions rather than just following generic best practices.

Google Business Profile Tracking

It’s always a great time to revisit your UTM tagging! If you work with physical locations, you need to track clicks and impressions of your Google Business Profiles. Claire Carlile’s guide is a great resource and while she and I don’t necessarily use exactly the same tagging structure, honestly — I don’t care! As long as you use tagging, I would be thrilled.

The best part of adding UTM tags to your GBP URLs is that you’ll see impressions and clicks of those URLs separately from other organic search results in Google Search Console. It’s a trick that local SEOs have used for years and Erika Austin reminded me in a recent Analytics for Agencies office hours that it isn’t necessarily well known outside of that field.

The Reality Check on T-Shaped Skills

June Dershewitz published a thoughtful piece on the trouble with T-shaped expectations that hits on something I see constantly in analytics hiring. The idea that everyone should be a generalist with deep expertise in one area sounds great in theory, but it can become an excuse for unrealistic job requirements.

The reality is that analysts can’t be expert statisticians, visualization designers, stakeholder managers, and technical implementers all at once. June’s article makes a compelling case for being more intentional about what skills actually matter for specific roles rather than defaulting to "T-shaped" as a catch-all requirement.

BrightonSEO San Diego

Later this month I'm heading to BrightonSEO San Diego where I'll be giving a talk on transforming GA4 into a strategic content intelligence system and leading a workshop on reporting and Looker Studio. If you're going to be there, come say hi — I’ll have stickers! Tickets are still available if you want to join us.

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. I read every email!

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