The Seotistics newsletter is written by Marco Giordano, a Data/Web Analyst with the goal of combining business and web data. Tired of the usual boring Analytics content without any business impact? Seotistics teaches you how to use Analytics, web data and even content in your workflow while helping you with Strategy.
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Lessons From A Week Of Analytics
Published about 7 hours agoΒ β’Β 5 min read
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Use Data Or Be Used By Data!
The June 8 issue of Seotistics is here for you!
After one of my best weeks in terms of Web Analytics events, I am here to share what we learned.
From Wednesday to Saturday I attended 4 different events in Copenhagen organited by the Brand Leadership Community.
Naturally I must inform my readers about what I learned and what's going on in Web Analytics!
Please move this email to your Primary inbox or reply to it. This is to prevent Seotistics goes into spam by accident. Gmail users can read this tutorial to do it.
This will be for Analysts or everyone wanting to explore Web Data in general, not only SEO.
The course is split in 4 amazing modules:
β GA4, GSC and other data sources: how to use them
β LLM Workflows, BigQuery, SQL & Python
β Dataform & Pipelines
β Real Use Cases at work
Starting from tomorrow, I will share a course update per day.
Plus, there will be waves of updates soon after the launch date since the content I will add will be a LOT.
P.S. Next week's newsletter is postponed to Tuesday as there is the course launch!
What Did I Present
I did 3 talks (one on Wednesday, 2 for MeasureCamp!):
Breaking the Measurement
Modern Web Analytics Toolkit
GA4 + GSC + BWT = Business Win
P.S. Stay tuned on LinkedIn, I will publish the slides for the second one π
My long-time readers are familiar with some of these.
As you can notice from job postings, Web Analytics is becoming more and more specialized.
Forget about doing only tagging and calling it a day, especially if you are an agency!
This means you can't just survive with GTM or GA4, especially in "competitive" countries.
As of now, most of the stuff I predicted actually happened, for example, Web Analytics getting closer to traditional Data Analytics.
P.S. I seriously recommend you come next year because the level is quite high, the place lovely and I met so many amazing people!
I am not gonna mention BigQuery/Dataform again because it's been almost a year now π€£
Business Focus
As Seotistics has always been preaching, business is the key for Web Analytics.
Agencies rush to implement the latest GTM news but in the end... this is homework and doesn't translate to any business impact.
If you have been wondering about it, it's time to review all of my past content on the topic.
This is what I also presented... your stakeholders have no clue about most of your work.
If running out of time, ask yourself: what are we trying to decide on or achieve here?
Say your goal is getting more leads, then overfocusing on traffic won't work, for example.
My friend Steen Rasmussen covers a lot of this business content on LinkedIn + his newsletter + events.
And in general, we noticed an increase in business-related talks, which is a GOOD signal.
Will this trend also be present across other countries/regions, though? π
LLMs/AI (What Else?)
The biggest focus was AI naturally, including my talk on how to use the new stack of tools (check my past issue).
In particular, I liked how Piotr Gruszecki covered semantic models.
A semantic model is a layer where meaning is defined, so that there is no ambiguity when talking about metrics and/or definitions.
So from data to business logic, that's it.
This is quite important for LLM work as you need to define what is what.
As for one of my presentations, Antigravity + Claude project where we have .md files for context. But this one you can further extend to the next level!
There was a lot of talk around MCPs simply because people love using them and they are low effort.
As you know, I do NOT recommend using them due to their waste of context.
For serious projects, MCPs are all but reliable and a big waste of time.
This is why I always recommend people to adopt more stable solutions like APIs or well, BigQuery exports.
If you are in this picture... well it's time to upskill!
So far the future of Analytics (for me) lies in orchestrating different systems and reporting properly.
This is still rare across companies because there is an excessive focus on setups and answering the wrong questions.
Tagging (As Always) & Data Quality
It's not my topic as you should know by now but it's more clear that server-side implementations are superior.
If you do Paid, this is not optional in my very humble opinion.
For sure, not every business needs it or can afford to pay for it.
But again, I would really consider it for medium-size companies.
Not the solution to all your problems but... it does work for improving data quality.
Collecting the right data is also important. How often do I have to tell people GA4 is not the only data source?
You need to use more data sources, not just fixing your tagging!
During a session at MeasureCamp, Derek Ooi brought up the topic of how to close the data gap.
So, how can we make our data more accurate?
I don't think we can because web data will always be directional at best.
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This doesn't mean you must ignore proper UTM tagging or avoid spamming redirects...
but keep in mind that web data needs to be consistent when making comparisons, not in general.
The Seotistics Advice
Well the advice is always the same... learn the modern stack AND focus from the start on achieving the right objectives.
It's so common to work with web data and target completely wrong metrics.
For a DTC Ecommerce, traffic is nice to have but ultimately not why you do marketing.
Can you even imagine working on a project to just realize your efforts were in vain?
This is normal if you don't have clear ideas about what you need.
You can't compete with an outdated stack (loss of efficiency). β You can't win without a direction or understanding of the scenario (ineffectiveness).
You can have the best tools in the world and close all tasks before competitors...
and still lose at the end lol
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Or you can be quite effective in achieving what you want but it takes too much time and resources.
You need a mix between efficiency and effectiveness in Analytics.
Modern tools AND a solid understanding of what the business is trying to accomplish.
Not just "we need more money by Q3" but something like "to increase net profit we need to invest here and there and also do this soon".
Until next time!
π₯ 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:
The Seotistics newsletter is written by Marco Giordano, a Data/Web Analyst with the goal of combining business and web data. Tired of the usual boring Analytics content without any business impact? Seotistics teaches you how to use Analytics, web data and even content in your workflow while helping you with Strategy.
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