Use Data Or Be Used By Data!

The September 1 issue of Seotistics is here for you!

While everyone talks about AI, LLMs and "innovation", only a few actually focus on understanding the business.

Today, I show you the importance of giving context to metrics!

You can list down all the cool stuff you want but you need context!

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📣📣 Important Announcements 📣📣

The next newsletter will also release at 5pm CET as I am currently on holiday.

I will be back on Friday 12, for now expect "different posting times" on LinkedIn.

Will do my best to keep up with the content you love reading!

Metric Trees

Metric trees are helpful companions for visualizing how a business works.

To give you a quick overview about the topic, especially if you are new, please check this past issue.

They are rarely static in reality and you will have to change them once in a while.

For example, you may notice that you are missing an obscure influence you forgot about.

Once you have created your nice tree, it's time to ask the right questions.

It's not as hard as you see, consider this as a mental framework to exercise your brain muscles.

The DuPont Matrix

If you have a background in business administration like me, you will recognize that this concept isn't exactly new.

In 1919, this model was created to break down ROE (Return on Equity).

Documenting Your Work

From this, I recommend building a dictionary with your metrics and other information:

Here's an even better example:

Skipping this step will give you future headaches and increase complexity.

Once you are comfortable with a method, it will become much easier to work on projects...

and you will get more confident in what you do.

Evaluating Chaos

In reality, many businesses already have dashboards and cool artifacts and they are barely used or useful.

This is normal, some tasks are executed just because they must.

Better for you, this is an easy win!

Before you get into action, you should ask what's already there and if they have existing processes.

If not, forget about working, you will produce extra work and make the usual mistake of starting with a solution.

This is a common mistake when evaluating big websites:

Starting from #3 without considering the real problems and defining priorities is a common agency mistake.

The obsession with order is pointless if you don't know what to actually do.

Chaos is a great companion for unlocking new opportunities:

Marketing VS Product Analytics (& Why It Doesn't Matter)

There's a key distinction between Marketing and Product.

The first is for acquiring customers, the second is for keeping them.

You can say that it's for improving the product based on event and user data.

Seotistics is clearly oriented toward #1 but it doesn't shy away from taking some concepts from Product, if needed.

How you view things is vastly different!

The obsession with order is pointless if you don't know what to actually do.

Chaos is a great companion for unlocking new opportunities:

The majority of us work with "traditional" companies, not startups or cool tech companies.

Remember, do what works for you, never copy others because they do it!

Dashboard Trees

You can take these concepts to the next level and monitor your dashboards across an organization.

This concept was developed by my friend Ergest Xheblati in his newsletter Data Patterns:

For Web Data, you won't have too many dashboards (I hope) but you will still get the chance to use this concept!

Beyond Service

The worst disservice you can do with your job is to treat it like a service desk.

If people come to you with ad-hoc requests, it means you are doomed to fail.

That's because you are treated like a boring tech guy, one who only does the execution and isn't allowed to think.

Ideally, you should be a partner, a collaborator.

The reason why I push metric trees is that they are perfect allies to make yourself stand out.

The most common complaint is that work is detached from the business.

Imagine working on a dashboard to discover that people don't actually need it!

This is the raw reality of many companies...

If you want to learn technical skills for anaylzing websites and tested methodologies, I have something for you:

Metric Trees To Products & Context

Yes, you can use our nice findings to build dashboards!

Many of them focus on the what (e.g. total clicks, total users) and not so much on the levers.

The levers represent the reason you get to the outcome, as already discussed.

This is a nice mental shortcut to make your dashboards more useful.

For example, a nice thing to keep track of in SaaS is the number of new users.

Why? Because you should acquire new ones if you want to expand!

Avoid committing the fatal mistake of reporting on metrics without context:

Social media show many great examples of hype building that lacks important context.

How many times did you see posts bragging about crazy traffic or spectacular revenue (w/o a mention of the profit margin lol)?

And if you recall, I also provided more specific examples for Web Data, like:

Context can also be referred to as "Knowledge" if you recall the pyramid model I used some weeks ago.

It's the step before you take action!

After you have the context, you need to do something or you will have a list of interesting facts.

(And trust me, you don't want that or you lose the project).

The Theory Trap

As you have read, this is done to ask better questions and understand how the business works.

If you become too entrenched with concepts, you will forget about the real world.

Being "street smart" allows you to look at the forest and not at the trees.

The reality of many companies is:

• teams are inefficient, work is carried out out of habit
• you need a handful of metrics, not 100000

It's easy to spot on social media a lot of engagement baits like "comment X and I will send you 100 Ecommerce metrics!".

You'll end up relying on the same concepts over and over...

which is a signal you are doing great!

Challenging The Status Quo

If you have ever had experience in marketing or technology, you will notice how trends change every 3-5 years.

Big Data was in everyone's mouth... and it was a hole in the water.

A lot of data theories and concepts that were treated like dogmas are now dismantled.

Even common marketing knowledge is now deemed obsolete.

Yet, it was untouchable some years ago.

Challenge the status quo.

👥 Join Our Community

Our Discord community offers a small place where we can talk business and web data.

If you hate all the noise of social media, then this place is for you.

I will start posting more there as we have a forum channel now.

This is the best way to stay updated in real time on Seotistics:

🔎 Analytics For SEO Ebook - Course / Ebook

You will:

✅ Use GSC and GA4 Data to their fullest potential

✅ Learn Python/SQL for your needs

✅ Get a complete blueprint for auditing websites

✅ Learn how to 10x your productivity

✅ Learn BigQuery to work on large websites

I teach you what's needed to go from 0 to a professional Data Analyst.

Even if you leave SEO, the foundations are the same for other jobs!

Also in ebook:

📚 Recommended Reads - Peak Content 🗻

Read these:

• ​BigQuery For GSC + GA4 Data: Why Use It & How It Differs​
• ​📚 The (Web) Metrics Guide​​
• ​SOMA: a standard for business metrics (great read and must)
• ​Introducing Metric Trees​
• ​Designing Metrics Trees​
• ​Designing and Building Metric Trees​
• ​An Introduction to Metric Trees​
• ​How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices​
• ​Why product analytics is completely different than BI​
• ​What Makes a Good vs Bad North Star Metric (product analytics, different perspective than ours!)

As usual, my most recent LinkedIn content is here.

❗️ Feedback and Recommendations

If you have ideas/recommendations for the next issues of Seotistics, you can simply reply to this email.

Marco Giordano
​Data/Web Analyst

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Bernerstrasse Süd 169, Zurich, Switzerland
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