In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Dana discusses the importance of directional reporting in GA4 and provides practical tips for how to present traffic data
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Howdy Moz fans, my name is Dana DiTomaso. I’m the founder and lead instructor of the Kick Point Playbook, which is an online learning platform for all things digital marketing, and I particularly focus on analytics.
Now, I’ve been an SEO for
a long time, I started in this field overseas data more than 20 years ago, so I know all about talking to clients about results. And if you’re struggling with these kinds of conversations, because maybe you watched my last Whiteboard Friday on here where I told you all your analytics data was wrong, and that was sad, and you were probably sad about it. But you’re probably still reporting in exactly the same way to your clients, your boss, your team.Focus on directionality
And I am here today to show you some different ways you can report on the data you have so that you’re not focusing so much on whether or not the numbers were accurate, but instead, you’re focusing on what the numbers are telling you. So that way, you don’t end up in those conversations that you’ve had, I’m sure at some point with your boss, your clients where you say, “And we had 18 form fills.” And they say, “Well, I see 28 form fills in my CRM. Why are you lying to me?” And you’re like, “Well, ad blockers, cookies, et cetera.” And they’re like, “No, I don’t believe you, get outta here.” That’s a really hard conversation to have, and you can avoid that by not over-focusing on specific numbers but instead focusing on directionality, which we’re gonna be talking about today in this Whiteboard Friday.
So, what I’ve got on the whiteboard
behind me in my left-hand writing — apologies in advance — are three questions you probably already ask yourself all the time when it comes to your reporting. These are questions that people want to know often, and we already report on them, but we could probably be reporting on them better.
Which landing page is better?
So, first question we’re gonna look at, which planning for marketing success landing page is better? You’ve got a website, people land on it. Do they do the thing you wanted them to do when they start on a page that you want them to start on? Yes, no, right?
The way we deliver this data
now is we have the page, and then we have the number of sessions, 400 sessions, 10,000 sessions, for example, and then we’ll have the number of key events. Now I’m saying “Key events” because I do GA4 training, I have to change my lingo at asb directory some point, but you can still call it conversions. You don’t have to do what Google tells you to do and call everything key events; keep calling it conversions. So we have 38 key events, we have 62 key events. Instead, what I want you to do is change this to be from numbers to instead make it a percentage of a total.
