Hey Reader!
Google Marketing Live happened two weeks ago, and as expected, there were a lot of announcements and of course I'll be covering some of them on Analytics Playbook over the next few weeks. As I was watching and reading about the changes, it made me think of the broader pattern of what happens when a platform catches up to something you've been working around.
I usually end up doing this myself since I am far too stubborn to accept “that isn’t possible” as a solution. Sometimes it's a custom report, a layer of processing in a spreadsheet, a multi-step zap in Zapier, a note in a doc that says "this number looks weird because...". And that works just fine! But then the platform ships the thing or fixes the thing that the workaround was fixing. And there's this moment of ok cool, I guess we can stop worrying about that now!
But can we? At this point, the more useful questions are: does this new feature actually close the gap, or just partially? Does your workaround interact with the new implementation? Could keeping it now create double-counting or conflict? Was your workaround quietly doing something else you hadn't fully documented?
The broader idea is that any analytics practice is always includes building compensations for gaps. Platforms are incomplete tools, they can’t solve for every use case. What changes is which gaps they've patched and which new ones they've introduced. So when a platform announces a fix, the first question response shouldn’t be "great, we can stop worrying." It's "how does this change what we already built?"
As you go through the GML announcements and see the changes come in yourself, this is your nudge to document anything that might be affected before you change anything.
Exits and Entrances: The GA4 Metrics You Didn't Know You Were Missing
By popular request (seriously, I get asked this all the time) I wrote up how to find entrance and exit metrics in GA4. I promise I write the intro before I write this part and don’t plan a theme, but yet again this article does touch on the intro regarding platform limitations. Unfortunately exit and entrance data only live in Explorations, and GA4 doesn't calculate exit rate for you, you have to export the data and do the math yourself. My guide walks through how to set that up, what the numbers actually mean, why exits aren't inherently bad, and how to interpret what you're seeing.
How to Find Exit Pages in GA4→
Articles Worth Your Time
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How to Stay Relevant as Product, Growth, and Marketing Blur
Krista Seiden (ex-Google Analytics PM for GA4, now Principal Product Evangelist at Amplitude) and Adam Fishman (Interim VP Product at Mozilla) are running a free 45-minute session at the end of June on what's actually happening to the roles of analytics and growth practitioners as AI collapses the walls between product, marketing, and growth functions. I’m definitely going to attend because I really like the framing. It isn’t about tools, it’s about who owns what when the old categories stop making sense. If you're finding your role increasingly difficult to describe to people outside your org, or finding that your work has bled well past its original scope, this is probably right up your alley.
Register for the free webinar →
Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Now With MCP
MCP, so hot right now. You can now connect Screaming Frog to Claude and other AI assistants and run crawls, analyze results, and export data using natural language, which is a huge time saver. And why include information about a crawling tool in an analytics newsletter? Crawling data is data! Make sure to read over the update post because it has examples for common use cases like summarizing crawl issues, visualizing link equity flow, and combining data exports.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider Update — Version 24.0 →
Is Google Analytics HIPAA Compliant?
Spoiler alert: no. The long answer is still no, but I go into the reasons why and a history lesson on why some articles are trading on outdated advice. What happened in a 2025 lawsuit was a ruling that determined that an unauthenticated marketing page with no patient-identifying content isn't automatically a HIPAA issue, but that doesn't mean you’re necessarily in the clear. Some state privacy laws (Washington's My Health My Data Act, for example) can apply in ways that go further. If you work with healthcare clients or handle anything health-adjacent in the USA, I hope you find my summary helpful.
Is Google Analytics HIPAA Compliant? →
Where You Can Find Me
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BreakingSilos: Brand Visibility in the AI Era
SE Ranking and Planable are organizing this free event on June 9, all about how marketing leaders build brand visibility when AI is increasingly deciding what gets seen across SEO, social, content, and PR. My session is a mythbusting talk, which I love! SE Ranking tested 12 common AI visibility claims against their dataset, and I'm joining to talk through what the findings mean for measurement frameworks and reporting to stakeholders. The lineup also includes Rand Fishkin, Eli Schwartz, Ross Simmonds, Crystal Carter, and others. See you there?
Register for BreakingSilos 2026 →
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!