What are the current tracking and attribution challenges that SEOs are facing and how should you deal with these challenges?
Joining host David Bain at the slightly earlier 4pm UK time of Wednesday the 4th of October was Irina Serdyukovskaya, Navah Hopkins, and Brie Anderson.
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David Bain
Tracking and attribution challenges for SEO. What are the current tracking and attribution challenges that SEOs are facing, and how should you deal with these challenges? I’m your host David Bain and that’s what we’re covering today on the Majestic SEO Podcast and livestream with our wonderful panel. So without any further ado, let’s ask them to introduce themselves starting off with Navah.
Navah Hopkins
Hello, everybody, David, thank you so much for having me. I am honored to be on this powerhouse panel full of folks I love and adore and I learned from all the time. Just in case you don’t know me I’m Navah Hopkins I’m over at Optmyzr and I am about all things data and attribution and empathy. So I’m excited for a really good discussion.
David Bain
Thank you Navah, and also on today is Brie.
Brie E Anderson
Well, I wish I had as good of a voice for radio as David does. You sound so awesome. I’m Brie E Anderson, I work on GT4. I’ve worked on GT4 since the day it came out on accident. That’s a whole other story, but I am the owner of Beast Analytics. We’re a Digital Marketing Analytics Consultancy that helps people track, understand and use their data for a better return on investment. And I’m excited to be here and chat about GA4 attribution, Tag Manager, all the fun stuff.
David Bain
Get yourself a cool funky microphone, Brie that’ll do it for you. But thanks so much for you for joining us, too. And finally, also joining us today is Irina.
Irina Serdyukovskaya
Hi, everyone. Thank you, David for invitation. So I’m Irina. And I have a surname which is hard to pronounce. So if you would like to try you can try this just for fun. So first so I was doing SEO in house agency side, building my own products. And then when GA4 was introduced, I was a little bit digging into this. And in the end, now I’m analytical consultant with a good background in SEO. And I run my own consultancy, I would say also about GA4, GTM and Technical SEO because it’s kind of connected.
David Bain
Thanks so much for joining us. Well, we’ve got three great panelists, as you can see. So let’s find out more about tracking, about measuring, about data, what we can get, and what we can’t get any more, shall we start off with the full customer journey. So is it possible to get good detail on the full customer journey? Brie you’re nodding away there so I’m gonna pick on you first, what are your thoughts on that?
Brie E Anderson
I think the more touchpoints we have with customers, it can be a little bit more difficult to understand the full user journey, right? Like using something like Google Analytics 4 we can see when people are coming to our website, all those touch points, but what if somebody just sees all of our content on Twitter and is interacting with it. And let’s say they do that 5,6,7,8,9,10 times, and then they come to our website? You’re only seeing one website, touch. So I find myself more these days trying to convince people almost to use their website as like a central hub, so that we can start getting a better understanding of the user journey, because once they’re on our website, we do get a better understanding of how people interact with our business as it pertains to our website. We can see how many times they’ve come to the site, what pages they’re looking at how long they spend on certain pages, and things of that nature. But I will say the more touchpoints we’re able to have with customers is obviously better, but I think it’s getting harder to really understand how much time they’re spending with our brand. Whether they’re binging our YouTube videos, or watching us on TikTok or stalking our Twitter, but that’s a personal anecdote. I’m interested to hear what everybody else has to say.
Navah Hopkins
You know, it’s funny when you mentioned getting folks to engage with your brand, I’m reminded of a client who would survey their clients and we would actually check against what the client said, how they found the brand versus what actually came through. And of course, it was a lawyer and the lawyers are saying TV and they’re saying billboard, but the lion’s share was actually coming through the Google My Business, or now their Google Business Profile, and are coming through other social channels. So I do think it’s important to have those customer interviews, and ask your customers. But it’s important not just from the attribution, where they come from, but where the perceived they come from. And the more you understand what is actually sticking with your customer, the more you’ll know where to maybe lean a little bit heavier. I do want to give one little technical shout out on customer journey, and we can go in depth into this as we like, but I did actually find it very interesting with the iOS 17 update of gclid and fclid, and this is my paid hat coming out a little bit, where click IDs got depreciated. The things that got to stay were email newsletters, SMS, persona matching, TikTok, so that closed system, that kind of holy wall of content where users are sharing the information. So yes, it’s tougher to have the customer journey, but it’s not impossible. And if you’re really good about really organizing how you want your data to come through and applying both the automation and that human acumen, it’s definitely still possible.
David Bain
Navah, you said where they perceived their customers coming from as well. So are you talking about not knowing where the customer is coming from, but making a best guess?
Navah Hopkins
Yeah, well, there’s also a really funny thing about marketers, we all have egos larger than our budgets, like we’re going to think that we know best. And so there’s a certain kind of double edged sword to asking customers what’s happening. Because if they have that confirmation bias happen, and they perceive that, say, TV is where we heard from, or radio was where we heard from, or print or whatever is where we heard from, but in fact, it was a lot of digital, or they see a Paid Ad. And they say, Well, I saw your ad on Google. But in fact, what they actually engaged with was the Google Profile Listing or the thing that actually got them to convert, and that built that trust they came back was a really amazing bit of content that came organically. So it’s understanding the distinction between what does the user register and what touch point did they register? And what kind of content was it that they like, really remembered you by? Versus what was the thing that got them to act? Because those will be different things?
Brie E Anderson
Yeah, it was just gonna say it’s almost like IRL first touch versus last touch that we’re talking about. If we look at a data driven attribution, it would be like, well, they kind of saw a billboard and then they were scrolling and they saw us on Facebook, they didn’t really interact, but they saw us, and then they saw the newspaper listing or whatever. And then they came to Google looking for a lawyer. They’re like, Oh, I remember that. And so they clicked on the business profile. All of those are still touchpoints. But it’s more like, what was put into their memory versus what was something that they just kind of saw in passing? And where did they ultimately take that action? So I think Navah kind of touched on a good point with ego and confirmation bias and things of that nature. We can say, Oh, well, all these people came from organic search, but we can’t say that without looking at the bigger scope and reality. Everything we do is just a piece of a puzzle. It’s just like, how important was that piece? How big of a piece was that? Yeah, it’s a really good point.
Navah Hopkins
Yeah, I was actually about to ask Irina what you thought about this, specifically from the standpoint of knowing how much you dig into the human error component of all the various tools at our disposal?
Irina Serdyukovskaya
I would say that first I think that the customer journey becomes important for clients when there is usually the decrease of the enquiries. So what you have both already shared there, saying that maybe the TV ads are working because you’re doing them for five years, or maybe SEO is working because you’re doing it for 10 years, but you don’t actually dig into the data before you see something decreasing, especially if you’re not a huge business, and I think you just stick with the same agency or with the same freelancer, or the same in house team. I think this is also important to keep in mind that sometimes there isn’t a huge issue that happened with some of the channels. It’s more that you need to consistently analyze and try to collect these pieces being shared. So to actually analyze this picture you need to have more data. I had a client who were like, yeah, we invested into SEO for three years and we were growing a lot with the first year and the second year, but the third year we’re not growing, so I think it’s not worth the investment. But we we’re like, yeah, but there’s huge decrease on the market, and actually you’re still growing a little bit, maybe 5%. So comparing to the market, it’s actually growing. It’s not only about their customer journey, but also what is happening in the market, so you can actually build this puzzle, a little bit better together.
Navah Hopkins
So I want to make one more point about this, Irina, I love that you’re bringing up the market, because I think not often enough do we benchmark what we’re doing against each other, like there are tools out there that will help you with benchmarking, I’m not going to list any for promotional purposes, unless we get asked and then I’ll happily dive into it. But regardless of where you are, absolutely benchmark. And if you are seeing that you’re going down, and your competitors are going down, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the channel is bad, it just means that there are things that are impacting the market. If you see that you’re going up and the competitors are going down, then we throw a party. But if it’s the reverse, and you’re going down and the competitors are going up, that might be a time to actually reevaluate, not the channel, but how do you engage with that channel. Are the tactics that you were using, from five years ago still viable? I know, just looking at conversion tracking from the paid side, I see a lot of people make the same mistake of thinking about tracking and they’ll bid on or they’ll have a conversion thinking that it’s the unique click versus all conversions, and they’ll set themselves up to have so many extra conversions, and they don’t understand what happened. Meanwhile, this was a setting that was depreciated, or when Google helpfully helped migrate over a whole bunch of conversion events from GA4 the people were like, oh my god, I’m now double counting conversions or my conversion values are all out of whack. Sometimes it’s truly just a technical glitch, sometimes it’s a change in the market. But you want to constantly think about not just the strategies that you’re employing, but the tools that you’re leveraging.
David Bain
So one of the points that Brie said earlier on is that she spends a lot of her time convincing people to use their website as their hub. And I find that really intriguing, actually. So shall we move on to talking about managing across various channels? Obviously, Brie’s tried to encourage as many touch points as possible to happen on the website. But would you like to expand on that and it’ll be great to get everyone else’s perspectives on how to try and ensure that every aspect of the user journey is tracked?
Brie E Anderson
I was just trying to remind people that it’s a lot easier to figure out how different strategies are working when we ultimately still use them to send people to our website. It’s not always going to be the answer, right? But it’s just one of those things where it’s a lot easier. Honestly, the reality of it is, most of the time, if people come to our website, they’re a warm audience. They’re not like freezing cold. These are people that have taken some sort of step to come to our site, whether it’s because they have a need and they know we can fix it, or they have a need that they don’t know that we can fix or they don’t know they have a need, but they know us and they just want to see how we can work with it. There’s a lot of different ways to get there. But I think to Navah’s point, we are still able to see there are a lot of strategies out there that are still allowing us to see what channels people are coming from, which is ultimately the data that we’re trying to collect in this this idea of the user journey and all the pieces that we put together. There are plenty of ways to still do that. I think, as we’ll dive into a little bit deeper, the biggest thing is getting everybody on the same page when it comes to that because again, we’re all a piece of a large puzzle and there are generally speaking multiple people touching the traffic that comes to our site and we all kind of need to be on the same page as to how we’re going to track each of our audiences so that we can get them all in the same place.
Irina Serdyukovskaya
I would like to add a regarding keeping all the users on the website is because a website is the only channel we actually own as a marketers, because it can change. Today it’s Twitter, tomorrow it’s LinkedIn, and even now, Twitter is X now, and we don’t know what happens. So I think that this is the platform we own as business owners, as marketers, and that’s why it’s so important to try to push people to actually engage with our website, because even if they may be reading our Twitter, or maybe they’re reading our LinkedIn profile, we need encourage them to interact with our content on the website, or with our contact page and everything to see a little bit more of the brand, which they can also keep in mind. Then when they will see a Google advertisement, they will come to the same website. So they have this idea that this is the same brand, because sometimes I think on Twitter, or LinkedIn, or Instagram, maybe you don’t remember the name, you remember that somebody or some companies sharing something useful, but you don’t remember the name. Maybe you remember the brand, or the photo of the person, and that’s it. So it’s very important that you click and actually engage with the content. And it’s good for us marketers, because we can then attribute this traffic that you actually remember, okay, this is the website, I can check if I need something.
Navah Hopkins
I love the email at that point, because that happens to me all the time. And what’s actually really interesting is, when you look at spellings of names, then you’re in trouble if you misspell a name, or someone has a popular name. So I would argue that all three of us (sorry David), have interesting, unique, beautiful names, that it’s actually almost a guarantee that you’re not going to find that name elsewhere in the global marketplace every day, like their varying degrees in certain markets, they’ll be more popular, but that that’s a piece. So it’s something to consider. Also, when you’re thinking about your content and your branding, and how you get your customers to remember you there are pros of being in the same vein, as everyone thinks I’m used to thinking in this way as it’s a popular way of thinking. But there’s also value in being completely different. I will say there are very few people with the name Navah, and they’re even fewer that spell it my way. So typically, when someone’s looking for ‘Navah Content’, they know they’re going to find PPC stuff, they’re gonna find automation stuff, they’ll find Optmyzr, they’ll find that I judge that they’ll find that I teach, but we’ll move up. So when you’re thinking about your content, and how you have it organized, it’s just as important that you are playing into human behavior of how people like to consume it, and how people will remember going back to that perception issue. There’s one more point I want to make on sensitive websites, and then I’ll leave the floor. I don’t think enough people harness insight search, in terms of content and product the way that they should. And if there’s one nugget you take away from the insights you can get from your site. It’s leveraging your insights search. One of my favorite people on this earth JP Sherman and he made this amazing point about how one of the best things that you can share between your departments and how you get the kind of breaking up the silos is your insight search, and seeing what kind of content and how are your people behaving once they come to you? Versus what are the ways people are searching before they know who you are, and does that shift? Or is that education process that you’re doing through your content? Are they getting further down the funnel? Are they staying the same? Is there more work to be done? There’s a lot of insight you can gain from your insights or analytics.
David Bain
What are the current tracking restrictions SEO are encountering? I know that you’ve got a lot of thoughts around iOS17 Navah, so would you like to leave with that?
Navah Hopkins
So I don’t want to make this a whole iOS privacy piece, because candidly, it’d be a little bit more PPC heavy, but I just want to give a level setting just so that everyone understands what’s happened, and how it might impact you. So one of the most recent iOS updates, iOS 17, did away with click IDs for most major ad networks. So that means the Google Cloud, Facebook club, Twitter club, Microsoft, they’re no longer there. And what that means is that accounts that had set themselves up where either Universal Analytics was on was connected. I don’t think it will auto convert, but you definitely correct me. But for GA4 you had to actually have the UTM parameter, it couldn’t just move over, unlike in Universal Analytics. But now you have to have a UTM parameter in your URL slug, otherwise, you’re not going to be able to see that data. Now, why that impacts non-PPC is just because PPC is don’t have the data doesn’t mean that that traffic isn’t still coming to your site that there’s still revenue being generated. And then now there will be conversations about how much is actually attributable to x initiative versus y initiative. And I think it’s really critical that everyone gets on the same page, when it comes with how you set up your UTM structure, and that it doesn’t matter what school of thought you subscribe to just that every single part of your marketing department subscribes to it. And additionally, that you’re aware of what channels are less impacted by this. So for Klaviyo, which is SMS or mobile marketing, text message marketing, heavy email marketing, TikTok, things that are closed wall. So this does not mean that you cannot get full intel, it just means that you have to be much more collaborative. And I will definitely yield the floor to the brilliant, brilliant Irina to talk about the GA4 implications.
Irina Serdyukovskaya
Adding to the point regarding their update on iOS, it’s also the update, I think that even now the more pushy to use cookie banners and cookie policies, because I think we had already started using this a lot, but I think this is a huge push to do this even more, because we introduced GA4, we need to integrate, and then for sure, you need to be compliant with this. And we have some restrictions, because we don’t have that much data already. Because if you implement your cookie policy for European, you will see the huge drop of traffic, which is expected. But still, you would like to collect this data as much as you can. And another thing is what Brie already shared, and maybe she can interact a little bit into this, that when people implemented in the cookie banner, in most of the cases it’s not implemented the best way it can. So for example, we are excluding all the people from all over the world, not only from the Europe, for example. So we have the same cookie policy for everybody. But we can actually choose what we can do with European users and with USA users and other countries based on the installation, but regulation is different. And also how you actually implement the cookies banner, and do you check everything you can.
Brie E Anderson
So now we’re talking about all of the different restrictions we have, you know, iOS 17, but we started to see some of this with iOS 14.5. We started to see some restrictions come directly from Apple, and when you think of where the majority of our traffic is coming from for a lot of sites, it is mobile users. And then even more specifically, it is a lot of Apple users and so I’m getting rid of those. I think something interesting to talk about too is like getting rid of those specific identifiers. From Microsoft or Google, for Pinterest, etc, is that you don’t necessarily really need like the Google Cloud, for instance. Because if you connect your Google Ads account to your Google Analytics 4 account you can see all the data right there in your Google Ads report in GA4, and you can see your campaigns and the spend and the results, and all that stuff. I don’t want to say it’s going to push people to spend on Google ads more, because the tracking is easier and it’s all right there in GA4, but I think Navah, you made a really good point about using UTM. The biggest thing I talked to people about this all the time is to have a plan before you execute things. You can’t go in the middle of the campaign and be like, Oh, so now we should think about UTM’s, right? Like, we’ve already started spending, we’ve already started the strategy. So the big thing is making sure everyone’s on the same page as far as nomenclature goes. Are we going to use paid? Are we going to use CPC? Are we going to use CPM? What wording are we going to use? What do we call Facebook? Do we call it Facebook? Do we call it Meta? Do we call it Instagram? Do we call it FB? Do we call it IG? Do you know what I mean? Like making those decisions and making them known and how are we separating our words? Is it don’t use a space? That’s a bad idea. But are we using Hyphens? Whatever it may be, it’s about having those conversations and making sure everyone’s on board. And then also Irina talking about the cookie banners? Listen, I’m not a very technical person, I’ve been handed a lot of technical issues recently, because of our cookie banners. And you know, a lot of people are trying to be compliant, which is ideal, right? Like everybody should be talking to a privacy expert, everybody should be talking to a lawyer, and making sure that they’re complying with the legislation of the audiences that they serve, right. It’s not just where we live, like, I live in Kansas, I don’t have to worry about GDPR and CCPA, but that’s not true at all if I have people coming to my website, from Europe, from, you know, California from Canada, like I need to make sure that I have those things put into place. So I think we get a little panicked and we just push it out, we’re like, Okay, this is what we need to do, without considering the technical implications of you have to have it, you almost really have to have a privacy expert on your team at this point or someone, a consultant that you can reach out to and make sure that you have all of this kind of setup correctly, so that you’re still getting as much data as you possibly can, as Irina alluded to earlier. So definitely a lot to consider these days,
David Bain
You talked about having a privacy expert in your team, you talked about referring to a lawyer as well. I mean, is this all possible practical for a relatively small business to do? Is there not just somewhere online or not some plugin that small businesses can use to be relatively confident that they’re complying with the various laws out there?
Brie E Anderson
There are surely multiple companies out there that that help with these things. I’d be interested to hear Irina or Navah’s take on this. I still see people though using it in wanting to be as compliant as possible. And it’s really easy to mess up the setup, as far as I’m concerned, like I’ve seen quite a few. But I’m interested to hear if anybody’s found a good solution for this or what your thoughts are.
Navah Hopkins
So this is where I will make the exception about Optmyzr because I know optimizer were a tool and I could talk about Optmyzr functionality all day. But this is the exception where I am going to talk about tools because it genuinely is very helpful. One of them is Duda. I think it’s very important that you take a look at the Duda functionality. They’ve done a lot of work to make sure that their privacy compliance is really good, and Wix is another one. I definitely would look at Wix when they made the shift to be SEO first, they put a lot of technical chops into protecting and really shoring up their integration. So yes, it might not perfectly fit you but it definitely has a lot of great things. The last one I’ll give as a suggestion for small businesses and again this this is more around suppleness, even though both Duda and in Wix now serve significantly bigger folks is Hocoos. Hocoos is on the smaller side but they’re definitely in a growing steam. Now one of the reasons why I like them is actually you basically have a conversation with their app, and then it spits out a site for you. Now, a caveat to all of these tools. One of the reasons why they are as powerful as they are from a compliance standpoint, and being practical as a small business is that they are pre building solutions. You’re paying a subscription fee to have a standard turnkey, here’s the approach. So if you are not a standard turnkey business, this is not going to work for you. And unfortunately, the size of your business may not matter, you may need to actually invest in those resources, like we mentioned. But if you’re can get away with more standardized services, more standardize implementation. I definitely recommend that on the eCommerce side. I mean, we all know Shopify, WooCommerce, Bigcommerce. Like they all have their pros and cons there. It’s a little bit tougher, because, like, it depends on what integrations you go with. But I would take a look at those three Duda, Wix and Hocoos.
David Bain
Brilliant, thank you. I’m talking about standard turnkey approaches. Can we use a standard turnkey attribution model? Or do we have to be a bit more bespoke with that?
Navah Hopkins
One thing paid related, and then I’ll yield the floor, is one of the biggest downfalls I see people make when it comes to attribution and when it comes to tracking is that they will opt into data driven attribution before they actually have conversion thresholds. So there’s a really unfortunate mechanic that happened with advertising networks that they did away with the minimums that are needed to opt into smart bidding to opt into data driven attribution used to me to have I think it was 600 conversions in a 30 day period in order to use data driven attribution. And then they threw that away, that should give you an idea of the old conversion thresholds that are needed. And if you’re not doing 15 conversions in a three day period, odds are, you’re gonna hit thresholding issues. So I strongly recommend being suspect of data until you can hit those minimum thresholds. And using your own internal attribution and your own internal CRM integrations before you dig in.
David Bain
It’s great to have those figures in mind, thanks for sharing that it’s very much the same for testing and for split testing, and making sure that you’ve got enough data in there to actually be able to make a decision. Brie, in relation to attributional, what’s your thoughts?
Brie E Anderson
I think we’ll always have to kind of bear in mind that none of our data is perfect, right? Like, what were given with Google Analytics, it’s not a perfect solution. So I think it is important to look at the different attribution models that were given. GA4 has a section that completely goes over all of this that a lot of people tend to overlook. So in that primary navigation, you see your home, reports explore in the advertising, a lot of organic people look over the advertising section, because they’re like, Oh, I’m not spending money. But really, it kind of got misnamed. Somehow, that’s where all of your attribution data lives. So that’s where you can compare attribution models. That’s where you can look at conversion paths and flows. So I think that when it comes to two different attribution models, it’s always best to kind of look at how they compare with each other when you can, and obviously, you know, this is talking on the GA4 side, so I’m glad Navah jumped in about paid. I haven’t been in Google Ads in a minute, I think that it’s always good to have the different standpoints. And I’m interested to hear from Irina what your thoughts on attribution are, specifically attribution models as GA4 has kind of changed the way that some of those work.
Irina Serdyukovskaya
Thank you, I really support your idea that we shouldn’t look only into GA4 for example, because this is on the one tool. And if we couldn’t say this is the all the data we have. So if you, for example, have HubSpot, or anything else, this is good thing that you can compare this and also have heard a lot from clients like, oh, this data doesn’t match. It means something is going wrong. So it’s usually it’s not 100% a sign that’s something is not wrong, it’s good that you have two different tools, you can compare the data, you can have your back end, like form submissions or ecommerce data. And you can then compare what is going on. So you can make this bigger puzzle and to see what is happening with the data. So when we think about GA4, we should not think, as this is one tool we are using. And we also need to think about what other tools we can add, for example, Microsoft Clarity can give us much more data about the content consumption and everything. So it’s some kind of, especially for small businesses, I think for sure they are struggling with having different tools, and some of them paid, or I need to pay for another consultant to do this. But on the other side, if you’re thinking about long term, this is the investment you’re doing. So it’s not something like you would like to do one time. And that’s it. So you are doing this for years, and you need this data. And you need to understand better what is going on.
David Bain
Let’s just move on slightly and talk about making sense from the data and actually using the data to tell a story and talking to other people within the organization to actually try and assist with setting the strategy from the data. So what kind of process do you go through? Do you use a third party tool to analyze data from multiple sources? And how do you talk to people internally within organizations about that, and assist them in terms of strategy moving forward from that?
Irina Serdyukovskaya
I would say that the first step is actually to be sure that you’re collecting the data and the data which you are collecting is right, because as we already mentioned, you can have some kind of conversions, which will set it up by somebody else, nobody knows, maybe it was after immigration from Universal Analytics. So this is the first step to understand if you have the clear data and the data you would like to have, and then build out of these because most of the clients, I think they come to us and they like, oh, we would like to implement GA4 and we’d like to implement new conversions, we would like to run PPC or SEO. But actually, we must have a step back. And then you talk with them. And you know that a lot of things if they were doing this is not something you can use actually, to build your strategy, you need for us to understand what actually happening and to build this groundwork for yourself then to actually have the strategy applied. So very often you need even some time to collect this correct data to have some data to actually use for the strategy.
Brie E Anderson
That’s actually something that I’ve been really kind of pushing clients into recently is, let’s just start documenting what we’re doing in Tag Manager and GA4 and let’s have a document that talks about these are the events that we are collecting, this is why we are collecting these events, and this is how they are set up. We know that analytics properties get passed from team to team, the team are there, that’s different agencies, people in house, people on the sales side, people in marketing, it somehow gets their hands in there. And then we have this like, well, they’re using it. So I guess it’s got to stay on. And then you go and talk to them. And they’re like, I don’t even know what this is, right? So I’m having a central like document that that everybody can see and understand what’s being collected and why and how, because what also happens is, you know, sometimes we’d have to hodgepodge solutions together, right? And we’re like, well, we can grab the like idea of this specific element. And if people are interacting with this, then we know that they’re doing X, Y or Z, but then somebody goes in and changes that element. And now all of a sudden, it’s not tracking, right? So having a understanding or a document where people can go, if I change this, am I going to break something or like this broke? Why did it break and then you can go and check those specific elements. And then using that same setup across it as best as you can across your different analytics platforms, whether that’s your CRM, or you know, other analytics properties. Having that same setup is going to make it a lot easier to compare data because what you don’t want to do is compare apples and cucumbers, right? Like at that point, it’s not even apples and oranges, you’re using a different program that attributes things differently. And they’re attributing different events like now. Now we don’t even have anything that’s comparable. So making sure the data is comparable, it’s got a good foundation, as Irina was saying, and then looking for things that are statistically significant, which talks about those thresholding, making sure we have enough data, etc, etc, etc.
David Bain
Navah, do you find that you’re often comparing apples and cucumbers?
Navah Hopkins
When I want to have a nice spa day with my data, it’s great little nibble on the eyes. It’s funny as you were talking about notes and making invitations. On the paid side, there’s a built in report for change history. And you can actually have anecdotes, and it’s great. But what’s actually really fascinating is, when you think about the change history, many people are very good at actually documenting, they’re very bad at documenting the why. And what I actually find is very useful, especially if you’re the sort of organization that’s sharing your site and data between all departments, it’s not just paid in SEO siloed, you actually find a ticketing system for any change you want to make is very helpful, because it lets you have a cute like a QA system of I should be able to make this change. While that change is gonna break everything like please, please don’t. But when people go so fast, and so rapid fire, like I just have to get done, I have to get it done, I have to get done. They typically break things. So having that ticketing system actually works very well. I’ve seen it work in agencies, I’ve seen it work inhouse, it tends to work very well. And it comes from a product development standpoint of just because you’re working on marketing tasks, doesn’t mean that it’s not a product, like your marketing organization is the product that’s driving your business’s success. So you want to make sure that there is a certain bit of vetting one last note on this. When it comes to data, there is a certain amount of modeling that we are all going to have to get comfortable with. So that original question of how well can we know the customer journey, there’s a lot of technical solutions out. And there’s a lot of gut feel out. And there’s a lot of things that you can do. But at the end of the day, I think we all just need to get a little bit more comfortable with we are 75 to 80% confident that this is the data. And then there’s that other percentage where it’s like a wishy washy, and that’s where you do tests, like for example, you might remove your entire paid, offering for a quarter and see how does the quarter compare to the previous year? How does how does it compare? Year over year, quarter over quarter? And if you see that your sales dropped, then you know, okay, Pete was actually doing something even if it’s not attributable. Same thing with SEO, you can. It’s a lot more hurtful if you do to SEO because SEO takes longer to get ramped back up. Because they’re like, Alright, we’re going to downplay the amount of content we produce, or we’re going to downsize our crawl budget just to try to save a couple of nickels and dimes does it actually impact our sales? And if the answer is yes, then you can concretely know that yes, you should keep doing the thing, even if the metrics make the model.
David Bain
Superb. So obviously, tracking and attribution challenges starts off with trying to make sure that you’ve got the right data that your data is as accurate as possible. So shall we finish off by asking each of you one thing that an SEO needs to do, because most people will listen to this, so what’s one thing that an SEO needs to do to try to ensure that they’re tracking their data correctly? And after you’ve answered that one, I’ll just ask you just to remind people of who you are, and where people can find you online.
Navah Hopkins
My number one thing is get a UTM parameter structure in place, if it’s not already in place, right now, you need to make sure that you are really confident and happy with how your UTM structures are in place. If you’re not happy and confident, take a month and audit every single URL and come up with a scheme that you can commit to and commit to it. If you’re interested in hearing more advice from me I’m Navah Hopkins and you can find me over at Optmyzr. We’re a software that helps manage different app platforms, but we do quite a bit of reporting for GA4 analytics. So it’s some useful integrations, there are some benchmarking, you can find me on Twitter/X, you can find me on LinkedIn, I do a lot of public speaking, and blogging, and I love helping people. So I am very appreciative of the opportunity to participate in this discussion.
David Bain
Thanks so much for coming on and much appreciated that you can hear as well, Irina, let’s move over to you.
Irina Serdyukovskaya
So my number one tip will be for SEOs when you if you start with a project or you’re already working with this one, be sure that actually the tracking you’re looking at is implemented correctly. For example, if your most important tool is GA4, be sure that actually tracking is implemented correctly. It might be that you can learn how to do this on your own, or maybe you hire the consultant, then or you have somebody internally in the team, you can talk to and be sure that you’re counting the right number of pageviews and conversions, which are important for your SEO, the cookie banner is implemented the way it should be, and that you’re not losing some data because this one is really, really crucial when you should show the results because this is where you will go. And to show okay, this is how many conversions is brought this is how many users are brought. If you will find this out, for example, in half a year, it will be much, much more tricky for you to actually show your results because maybe it was tracked incorrectly. And this doesn’t play directly into responsibility for servers. But this is what actually we need to have to show that our job is actually done on a high level. And yeah, if you’d like to learn more, you can visit my website, I have some guidance about GA4 and everything. And I also do consultancy about these. But there are also a lot of free resources. So don’t limit yourself. If you’re just starting, for example, as a freelancer and everything. Just something you need to keep in mind. And for example, when I started as a freelance, I have not thought about that. So it’s kind of important. And yeah, you can find me on IrinaKudres.com or on LinkedIn, I’m quite not so active, but I’m trying to be active. And I’m happy also to answer questions, if you would like to just DM me.
David Bain
Thank you so much Irina, Brie?
Brie E Anderson
Um, I guess my biggest piece of advice is going to be especially for SEOs that are more than likely avoiding that advertising section and GA4 to just go take a look, I think there’s a lot that can be learned there. It’s very, like I said, very poorly named. So I think, you know, looking at that, and then even going into explorer and looking at PATH explorations can be helpful to, to see how people move kind of through the website and, and things of that nature. But really the biggest thing to remember is that it’s all a piece of a bigger puzzle. We talked about attribution, you know, who gets who gets this piece of the pie. Ultimately, we should all really kind of be working together. And generally, it takes more than one strategy to get somebody to convert, especially if you have a higher ticket item. Or something where people need a little bit more trust in you. So I would say yeah, make sure you’re looking at all of the all of the different angles as far as like the different attribution models, the different places where you can collect data. And yeah, if you ever want to talk about attribution, if you ever want to talk about tracking if you have any questions about GA4, come visit me on Twitter, @brie_e_anderson. I’m not gonna call it x because I don’t like that. I hang out a lot on Twitter. You can find my stuff on YouTube. You just Google Brie Anderson, I’ve got all sorts of junk out there who knows? Maybe something can help you.
David Bain
Thank you so much for joining us wonderful panel discussion. I’ve been your host David Bain, and you’ve been listening to the Majestic SEO Podcast. If you want to join us live next time sign up at majestic.com/webinars and of course check out our other series at SEOin2023.com. Bye for now.
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