The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™

LLM Traffic, Real Attribution, Real Results With Brie Anderson

• MatthewBertram.com

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Brie Anderson and Matthew Bertram explore why LLM-sourced traffic often converts better than traditional organic, how to track it cleanly in GA4, and why attribution will always be directional. We share a practical framework for aligning KPIs, separating dashboards from reports, and building a tracking plan that drives real decisions.

• LLM referrals as high-intent visits
• GA4 source/medium over fragile channel groupings
• First user vs session vs model-based views in GA4
• UA to GA4 shift, privacy and event-based data
• SEO vs CRO alignment and KPI clarity
• Tracking plans, UTM standards, and maintenance
• Search Console vs GA4 roles and gaps

Guest Contact Information: 

Website: www.beastanalyticsco.com
Instagram: www.instagram.com/brie_e_anderson
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/brieeanderson
Twitter/X: x.com/brie_e_anderson

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With over 5 million downloads, The Best SEO Podcast has been the go-to show for digital marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs wanting real-world strategies to grow online.

Now, host Matthew Bertram — creator of LLM Visibility™ and the LLM Visibility Stack™, and Lead Strategist at EWR Digital — takes the conversation beyond traditional SEO into the AI era of discoverability.

Each week, Matthew dives into the tactics, frameworks, and insights that matter most in a world where search engines, large language models, and answer engines are reshaping how people find, trust, and choose businesses. From SEO and AI-driven marketing to executive-level growth strategy, you’ll hear expert interviews, deep-dive discussions, and actionable strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve. 

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SPEAKER_00:

This is the unknown secrets of internet marketing. Your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_02:

Howdy, welcome back to a fun-filled episode of The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, Matt Bertram. Today I have another great special guest for you, something that uh I know that I'm not as strong in. And I am so glad that I met uh Brie Anderson from Beast Analytics uh at SEO Week. And she just blew me away with her presentation. And uh I was looking for a really good analytics person for a bunch of different projects. Uh, we've started to work at EWR with a number of different enterprise clients, and they're asking for all kinds of data and inputs and tracking. And uh Breeze my uh phone a friend uh when I need something. And so I wanted to bring her on and share uh the knowledge with you that she has because she's really built out a niche for herself uh in the Google Looker, uh Google Data Studio, like all the Google Suite kind of analytics and tying everything together. And so uh Bree, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01:

Thanks for having me. I'm stoked, and also that intro is killer. That's pretty sick.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, thank you. Thank you. Um, I uh I believe it in my heart, and so uh I'm I'm super glad you're here. And we get to talk analytics, and you are the expert. So uh, you know, I can talk broad range, what's going on in SEO. We're seeing a lot of new things happen with LLMs. We just recently uh went through all our clients' data and uh set up in uh GA4 where we can start to see the different sources and what's going on. And really, Google's not given us a lot, but it's given us a little bit more. It was kind of like trying to dig around in the log files before and just figure out where the calls were coming. Um, I've even seen Brian, I know LLMs are new, and so we don't have to spend so much time on it, but I'm seeing crazy tools that people are building, um, where it's it's doing the searches, okay. Like you you give it your searches and then it searches whatever LLM you want and it runs it once a day, and then it it gives you an average over the number of days of where you're ranking in LLMs. Um that sounds like a lot of work.

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, I guess you have to do it somehow, but that's crazy.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I mean, everybody's trying to figure it out. I mean, what when you look at LLMs, right? And we could we we can work backwards because I think people are are are still a little bit behind the curve when it comes to LLMs, but it is only well, eight percent of the market and growing fast, right? But but it's the new frontier and it's it's where the new real estate is where you can kind of land grab what's going on and position your entity and tracking's a big issue, even attribution. Ran Fishkin was like, go back to running a billboard and then doing uplift uh in different cities, and that like so attribution is is crazy difficult. The new world of marketing is no one has it all figured out yet. Um, I mean, what what's topical for you? I mean, what are you seeing in in the market?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so I'm actually I've I've actually been really surprised. Um, so so like personally, right? Like I'm I'm one person um that that uses LLMs, right? So I I use um cursor, I use Claude, I use Chat GPT, and I use um I I have like a a tool that I use called Magai or Magi, I guess is what it's called. Um I've always called it Magai. And then I talked to him and he was like, it's Magi. And I was like, Oh, my bad, my bad, dude. Um, but it it that one like it ports in all of the different um LLMs and you can kind of choose which one for different things. But anywho, um, and so all I know is my user behavior in in LLMs, right? And so um it was really interesting for me when I started having clients where we were seeing a lot of LLM traffic to kind of have to put myself in the shoes of like, okay, well, I can't imagine using an LLM to make this sort of decision, but obviously, like people are talking to these uh like entities, right? To to answer these sorts of questions. So um, for instance, um uh, you know, a job board where it's like, I can't imagine going and being like, can you find me jobs? Like, I don't feel like that's a thing, but I guess, I guess it is anyway. So that that was kind of my first, like my initial thought process when I started seeing LLM traffic come in. Um, and then things that you're making like big decisions on, right? Like these are not cheap products that we're talking about anymore. And now we're getting into like very expensive products and seeing tons of LLM traffic coming into those things, and I'm just like, wow, that's it, it's surprising to me. So um, and I like to kind of lead off with that because um, you know, I I know well, some people are very like interacting with LLMs all the time and and and whatever. So um I think I'm still like learning.

SPEAKER_02:

I'm still where where I'm learning. Well, yeah, no, I think we're all learning, right? It's like brand new for everybody. Like, uh here's the starting gun, go, yeah, figure it out. I I I I think, and this is my assumption, right? And we're just talking about our own personal assumptions here. Um, I can pull in some data that I that I've seen, like LinkedIn's been blowing up with all kinds of new data, but but what I'm seeing is there's a correlation potentially between you know how you skip the ads, or 80% of people skip the ads and they went to organic, and they're like, if Google says it's that high in organic, I must trust it, right? If if LLM and and we keep promoting or they keep promoting that it's smarter than any human being and every vertical, right? If it recommends something to me, you have to think about it. Like, so even on the job side, I'd be like, What's the best job for me based on the history that you know me, right? And then go scrape all the job boards and find ones that are best fit and you upload your resume. Like, I I can see people doing that if they're um a heavy user of LLMs, and I see as more LLMs are being used, people are going to be like ideate between this product and this process, give me comparisons, all the kind of transactional stuff. And then if it says this is who you need to go with, I have found personally we've landed multiple clients that said the first thing they say when we get on the phone is the only reason I'm talking to you is you came up at the top of perplexity. Like that's what I've heard, and yeah, that's like literally, and so the authoritativeness of showing up in the LLMs, um, you know, I I think the the data I'm seeing is five to six times more uh intent, like they've done uh enough research.

SPEAKER_01:

So yeah, so so that that goes in line though with what I'm seeing. So the the next part of that is I was surprised to see it, but I was more surprised when I saw just how qualified and quality that traffic is. Yes, so you know, it's really easy. Hold on, let me go back. That's not true, that's not true. I scratched that. It used to be very easy to rank something on Google, right? There, there was a time and place. Now it's a lot harder, it's a lot more nuanced, right? Alas. But you get someone that knows the game, you do all the work, you show up in Google, right? And I think some of it has turned into people don't trust Google as much. Probably rightfully so. Um, and so what we see, you if you get a lot of traffic, even let's say you are in the AI overview or you were in a featured snippet, it was very common to see an influx of data or uh or of traffic from Google and to see that traffic kind of hang out, but not really, and then dip the traffic that I'm seeing coming to LLMs, these are people ready to make a decision.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So these are people that are coming to your site, they uh spend time on the site, visit a couple pages, and then might even in that first session convert whatever that looks like for you. Fill out a form, um, start a free trial, uh, you know, inquire about something, whatever that is. It and it's been really high, and not even, you know, because I I look at data and I work with data. At first it was like, okay, well, we saw we saw 80 sessions this month. We generally like from LLMs, right? We generally get 50,000 sessions a month. So like we can't make right, but like as that number increases, I'm not really seeing a big difference in those like intent-based metrics. Like, I'm not seeing a huge shift. So, like, as it's gone up to okay, now we're seeing 100, now we're seeing 150, now we're seeing 200, now we're seeing 250. Like, it still is very clear that the people coming from these places, these LLMs, are like quality, it is quality traffic. Whereas if people come from a featured snippet, which is let's be honest, very rare, anyways, because they're getting all the information they need. Um, but if they do come from a featured snippet or they're coming from an AI overview, it's like, oh, they're just like checking for the next sentence, right? They might spend a couple of seconds, but they're just looking at this page and then they're dipping out. Yeah, so I at least that's been my experience. That's what I've seen. So um I think then to get into if that's what we're seeing, how how are we seeing it, right? What does that look like in in GA4? So I I all of my clients I work in GA4, so all my clients are on GA4. Um, I've seen a lot of people like really try and push the like create custom channels so that you can find your LLM traffic, um, which is fine. I really don't like channel groupings just as a practitioner in general, because what I found is they have to stay updated and nobody updates their analytics. So right now it's like, okay, well, if people come from Claude or Chat GPT or Perplexity or Gemini, um then we want it in this channel grouping. But then all of a sudden you start, you know, showing up in this other um, what's that? There's some sort of it's like a I don't know. There are all these little like grok or something else, like just something else that people that that you just weren't thinking of at the time, or like all of a sudden it pops off in your specific niche, right? Like, and then all of a sudden you're missing that. And it could be the most impactful, most intent-driven. Uh, but because you're looking at the channel groupings, and it's like only this stuff says chat or um LLM traffic that we've disregarded everything else. Um, so I try and get all of my clients to work in specifically in using source medium. Okay. Um, but I realize that that's not always the case. So I've done I've had all clients request all sorts of things. I I have clients where we intercept the traffic in tag manager and will change the medium actually to be organic because it's SEO um driven initiative, right? So instead of it saying chat GPT slash referral, it says um chat GPT slash organic, right? And that takes some fudging and it's not perfect, but it gets the job done um and it catches most traffic. But even that, it's like it's something that has to be maintained. Um, and unfortunately, we're just not at a place where it's going to be easy to maintain because things are changing so quickly, new things are popping up all the time. Um, so again, I I like to use the source medium whenever possible. Also look at page refer. Um, and you kind of just have to actually do a full like deep dive when you're looking at source mediums because like chat GPT tried to implement UTMs and then they only added a medium. They didn't add a source, they only added a medium, and it's not set up correctly, so it doesn't make any sense.

SPEAKER_02:

Um, so then you'll have some things that are like chat gpt.com or openai.com, or you know, there's just so you kind of it still requires a lot of manual work, I think, to to the the issue I was finding around the around that was we were just trying to uh add like a a server line and or add it in robots.txt file just to like to let them come through, and then it's like a rotating IP, and so then you got to set up the llm.txt file, and you got to think about like, okay, you know, I need to add all like so. We've added like you know 26 of them right now, right? Because you just you don't know and you don't want to block it, and you can't just kind of white label it um uh on the server side, so there's just all this new stuff that that you have to think about, and it's it's funny that this is so hot because it is the future, but it's still such a fraction of what's going on, and so you got to have this barbell strategy of like, okay, I need to be paying attention and I need to be doing this stuff, but like I need to really get a handle on this is what I'm finding with big clients, right? They're running a bunch of different stuff and they don't have attribution. Well, attribution's difficult, so I'd love for you to talk more about how you think about attribution, but they'll be like, Oh, and and I've seen agencies right run paid traffic to the name so that they can make their numbers look better, and then there's like a whole debate around when you should do that and like the experience maybe a land page, like there's reasons to run your name or to protect your brand, but but I have seen also a lot of agency work where like okay, 70% of your budget shouldn't go to their name to get the conversions to you know make sure that the data looks good, right? And I've seen this in affiliate world big time, but but right, like, but I I how how are you looking at attribution in this world? Because now it's not just Google, it's not just you know AdWords, it's everywhere, it's fanned out. You're you're running multiple different sources, you gotta plug it all in. And I almost have to like test it right now, one thing at a time, and then pull it back and minimum two weeks wait and like see what happens. But to turn stuff off or to say this channel's not working, many times we've like, okay, we're running like streaming radio ads, and we're like, uh, this data is not looking good. I don't know. And then we turn it off, and then like three weeks later a month, like I don't know if it was seasonal or something. I was like, okay, where did the traffic go? Right. So it's like, yeah, okay, let's turn that back on. And and I can't really see if that's making an impact, but maybe based on the 7 Eleven Four, like, you know, they're they're getting it on multiple channels, then okay, uh, that is working, and I just didn't know it. Like, it's hard to measure attribution. Like, people are like first click, last kick. I mean, it's all blended in my eyes, and and maybe you can re-educate me on a different way of looking at it. Um, because I don't know the answer.

SPEAKER_01:

I think you know, we tend to forget because of the nature of the industry um right now, and I think I truly believe that that we're gonna see this shift a little bit because of the nature of the industry right now, where it's like I run meta ads and you do technical SEO and she does blog content, and they do this that we forget marketing 101. Okay, let's go all the way back to marketing 101, whether you took that in high school or college, wherever, and the first thing they teach you is the marketing mix because one touch point one way is not going to work, it's not, it all has to work together, and everything that we're doing is a piece of a puzzle. If you take one piece of the puzzle away, the puzzle doesn't work, right? So the reality of it is we never had perfect data, and we will never have perfect data, and there's no telling truly, even if you ask a customer what did this, right? Like, why are you here? They might say, Oh, well, perplexity said that you were the one to go with. Sick. So we know that that was probably the last touch point, but did they listen to the podcast? Did they visit the website before? Did they maybe see somebody like look at LinkedIn and saw that you guys were connected in a couple places, right? There are so many touch points, so many different ways. Some of them become subconscious, a lot of them become subconscious. You don't think about it, but there have been all of these um like votes of confidence along the way that the second they see it, they're like, okay, cool. And even if perplexity was, let's just say, or an LLM, whatever, let's just say that was the last touch point. What were all the questions it asked before? What you know, like had were you brought up once? Were you brought up 10 times? Did they have a whole conversation about something specifically? And in it gave you all these votes on. By the way, we think it's this one because according to their LinkedIn, they have a case study with a client very similar to you, according to their website. This, according to the New York Times, they're on this list. Like those are still all votes of confidence. And if you get rid of your LinkedIn and now it doesn't have that vote of confidence, yeah, you know. So the reality of it is we're never going to know. Everything we're doing, I mean, Dana Di Tommaso is doing a great job of this reminding everyone every bit of data we have is directional data, right? I always like to say I'm like, I teach this thing called like the beast cycle, which is benchmark, explore, analyze, strategize, test, track, and then you do it again. Compare all of the results to the benchmark, and then you're doing it again. That's just the scientific method, baby. We learned that in like third grade, where you have a hypothesis based on one variable, everything else should be as controlled as it can be, and then we see if there's an impact, and we have to be able to replicate that, whether that means now we're going to strip it and see if we have the same result, or we're going to repeat it again and see if we have the same results, right? So, what you're doing is exactly right. That's science. That's exactly how you're supposed to do it. Now we it's strange, especially when we're working in. I mean, the folks in ads are the worst about this. Love you guys, but they're the the worst about this, where they're like, it's been a day and we haven't seen this, so obviously we have to change the CTA. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. It was served to 2,000, like two, it was served 2,000 times. That's not enough. Like, that's just simply not enough. Um, and and they like they're making changes very quickly, and there are times where that makes sense, but um uh you know what we have to we want to control so much, and we want it to be super straightforward and we want to understand, but we can't, we won't. It's not, it's not possible. The best that we can do is to say, okay, based on the data that we were given in GA4, let's say, I can see that a lot of people, and because this is also only people coming to our website, right? So we don't this doesn't account for how many times they saw the ad before they they came to our website, if they saw us at a conference before, if they said, right? All we have is when they came to when they decided to come to our website for the first time, it was from a Facebook ad. Okay, on average, this is what we're seeing. People come from Facebook ads, and then um they come back from an email because they signed up for our email, and then they'll do a Google search and then they convert. Okay, what part of this is the most impactful? Google does give us so a lot of people like stay away from the advertising section in GA4 because they think ads, oh, I don't run ads, I do SEO. Advertise the advertising section is one of the most overlooked sections in GA4. It has all of your attribution data, so it has the attribution paths, right? And Google uses a uh cross-channel data-driven last non-direct click attribution model, which is a mouthful and kind of ambiguous. But what it does, what you can see the thought process that Google makes when you go into the attribution paths report, and it what it does is it assigns a percentage of the key event to each of the touch points. So if you look at the most common path and it's Facebook email search, it will say like Facebook gets 10%, email gets 50%, and search gets 40%. And that's based off of the interactions that were taken within the sessions.

SPEAKER_02:

How would you say that relates to like share a voice, right? I mean, I I guess share a voice is on a per channel basis, but I guess you're you're thinking about attribution attribution weights for your conversion funnel of of where where where the bigger uh uh wider part of the funnel is, right? I guess more people are coming through them. So can you see like fall-off points and then maybe look at if you were using the funnel analogy, figure out where the leak is and try to open that up more so more people come through because maybe there's a fall-up period, or how are you looking at it?

SPEAKER_01:

So, I mean, I I just use that for, I mean, because you also have to think like, I'm not doing this for I should be, I'm not doing this for my business, I'm doing this for my clients. So, generally, a lot of the people that hire me are like, we do SEO and we need to prove this, or we're doing this. So, what I'm doing is I'm going in and saying, Okay, well, I can see that, you know, in, and this is one of the things that's really frustrating about GA4, too, that that more people aren't educated on, but really need to be educated on, is that there's three different um ways to pull attribution in GA4. So you have like your first session source or first user session source, which is essentially your first touch, right? The first time they came to your site. So if you look at that report, right, and Facebook was attributed 10%, and um email was attributed 40%, and Google or email was attributed 50%, and Google was attributed 40%. If you look at first user source medium, it will attribute that entire conversion to Facebook because it was the first touch. If you look at session source medium, it will attribute the entire conversion to uh organic search because that was the last touch. If you look at um, you know, just the regular source medium and the key events report, it will say 0.1 to Facebook, 0.5 to email, and 0.4 to search. But what happens is people have their favorite reports, they're always going to go to the traffic report, right? Because it's the closest to what we had in universal analytics, and they'll go, email hasn't done anything. Facebook hasn't done anything. And you're like, Well, hold on, hold on, wait a minute. If you get rid of the email portion and you get rid of or you get rid of the Facebook portion, they never end up on our site in the first place. They haven't seen us like prove our expertise via email. So if they just see us on on Google one time and they come to the site, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay, so what I want to zoom back out and talk about um the differences between well, I was one of the people that painfully like kept the old Google Analytics until the last minute. Um, for whatever reason, on the AdWord side, they had like a I forget what it was, but there was something I could do in the new platform that I couldn't do in the old platform, so it was like a a a carrot that I was like, okay, I gotta figure this out. But analytics had no carrots, so like I waited till the last minute, I went through the training, but I'm not an expert on GA4 like I should be. Um, what are the differences between the two? And then what is the like bare minimum setup that everybody should have? Like we were talking kind of uh before we got started. You uh uh power my analytics, uh we were talking about supermetrics. Like maybe let's back it up. What what was the transition? What happened? And then what's like the best setup for most clients today to give everybody like a starting table to a starting frame of reference to kind of set the table?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so the the change from UA to GA4 was quite convoluted, um, but it was required almost by law, basically, because the data that had been collected using universal analytics was not legal in a sense. Like it was it was kind of it was well, it it was deemed like it would it we can no longer hold this this data.

SPEAKER_02:

Um is that where the complaint came around? Because it's like I can't see anything. That's what a lot of people said is like, or could they not find it or was moved to a different place?

SPEAKER_01:

But um like with GA4, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Like people were that that I would talk to were like they they I guess they didn't know where the data was, but it was like a lot less data was was being shown.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I actually wrote a blog pit uh blog post on this. As of today, there are only three things missing from universal analytics and GA4 that G or that GA4 doesn't have, so it's just a matter of knowing where to look, knowing what it's called, because they did like change the names of a lot of things, um, and some things are hidden a little bit, um, which is not good for most people because no, I mean, the sad truth of it is is that analytics is a necessary evil for most folks, that it's not their forte, it's not really something they want to do, it's something that they use to prove value. Sometimes they're using it to drive strategy. People think that they're using it a lot more to drive strategy than they actually are. Most of the time, they're just using it to confirm some sort of idea that they already have. Um, and so that's that portion, right? It's not really missing data at first when it was released in 2024 or in 2020, it was bad. It didn't have like landing page, it didn't have, I mean, it didn't have a lot of really necessary things, but as of like a year and a half ago, it was really it's they've added it back in, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and I've I've seen like more data in there, um, and it still changes a little bit.

SPEAKER_01:

So so the privacy thing was more so like they were collecting and keeping IP addresses, right? Like you can't do that, like, and there was a way to access it if you knew PvV networks, yeah. So, so um, so so and like where the data was stored, like what once GDPR came out in full effect, it's like all of this was stored in the US and it needed to not be stored here and and whatever. So, and and what happened was because of the fundamental changes that had to be made, the data structure had to change completely as well. And so what we saw was we went from like a this session based um tool to an event based tool. Um, and that completely changed the data structure. So they also weren't able to like patch up or like clean the data and do that. It just wasn't possible. So that's kind of where they had the like, okay, now Have to start anew, sorry. Um, because that was the only way to do it.

SPEAKER_02:

So event-based, I want you to mention that too. Like typically, when I think of events for like a standard setup, and I'm talking maybe like a medium-sized or smaller client, it's just uh form fills, phone calls, and maybe downloadables is pretty much the standard. What are uh you know, when people start setting additional events uh that convert to goals, for me it gets confusing on like, is this campaign working or not? Uh because people set it set it up differently. And I'm it if I'm trying to measure like bottom of the funnel, like, is this working or not? Because I feel like a lot of SEOs, like you can like I have a client, I have a client right now, they're ranked one, two, maybe three for almost every keyword term that they came to us with, and they're not getting conversions. Okay, so like our SEO team's like, woo, like we're doing awesome. Clients like great, however, yeah, um, this is not going well, and we need to we need to work on CRO and we need to do, you know, so there's a differentiator, like you've been sharing of what people are looking at and what's important, and I and and you're in this data all the time. So, so yeah, I would love to hear what what is that basic setup look like from events, from you know, however you're seeking it up.

SPEAKER_01:

You hit on something very important, glossed over it. Uh, and this is one of the biggest issues that people have, especially when it comes to the reporting and and and client communications and and client satisfaction, is you have to be in alignment of what the actual goal is, you and the client. If they came to you and they said, We want to rank for X, Y, and Z, the SEO team has every right to celebrate because you're ranking for them. You are dominating those searches, perfect. But it sounds like there wasn't the the mandatory question of why. Why are we trying to rank for this? Is it a share of voice thing? Is it a branding thing? Is it because if it's those, y'all knocked it out of the park? Great job. But if the client was thinking, well, if we rank for those, then we'll get leads like this.

SPEAKER_02:

Exactly. Yep.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, if that was the case, it would have been a different conversation. Because if we rank for those, we'll get leads like this, is not guaranteed.

SPEAKER_02:

I I think I think a lot of clients, and on this specific client, which I won't give their name, but but essentially they made that connection. If you rank us for these terms, we will get these leads. So do this. And that that was kind of the conversation we had recently of we accomplished that goal. Now we understand there's a deeper goal here of what we're trying to do. Um, and we also understand your business over the last six months. So, like, okay, now we can have these deeper conversations. I feel like almost all clients, um, unless it's like a PR campaign, right? Or it's like we want to make sure we show up for this category, like you said. Um they assume ranking is equivalent to leads. And now I'm seeing with LMs and well with AI overviews really, right? Like half the traffic's gone doesn't doesn't mean that anymore. Like the whole definition of what SEO is is completely changing, right?

SPEAKER_01:

But that but that's also, I mean, to an extent, like that's that's our responsibility as practitioners to to challenge them and say, okay, like we we can do this. Um, I just but just so you know, um, ranking for those keywords, this means that our KPIs for success, how you are going to measure me for success, how your boss is gonna determine if you have been successful in choosing uh uh an agency is rankings for this word, this word, this word, and this word. Okay. And if that's the case, today we are right here in these keywords. We're gonna check back in a month and see if there's movement in three months and see if there's movement and six months and see if there's movement. And if we've all agreed on those KPIs, sweet. If we've not, if they go, well, actually, my boss is going to ask me how many leads we brought in, then we go, okay. So this changes the conversation a little bit. We can still focus on those keywords, but we need to focus on how do we convert people from those keywords. And that's a different, that's a different service. A CRO is different from SEO. Yeah, they work together, sure, but the scope definitely changes. I think there is some like, like you were saying, like, oh, well, now we're seeing with AI overviews and stuff like that, traffic's going away. Like, again, there is sort of a like, okay, now we have to have an educational moment. By the way, just so you know, what we're seeing as an industry is this. Um, so we might see less traffic, but the goal is still to get more leads. Yes. Okay, so we have to align on the KPIs. We have to have the conversation up front of what are the KPIs? How are you judging me? How are you being judged? And what are the business goals ultimately? And do we have the ability to track all those KPIs? Is everything set up in a way that we're going to be able to report on this effectively and make decisions effectively as well?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. No, I I think that that is something that a lot of SEOs need to have those harder conversations earlier. Um, and uh I try to educate our team over the years, we've learned like these are not the same things, and also I feel like it goes back to when you say SEO or historically, right? Everything's kind of in in flux right now. But historically, when you said SEO, it was like saying IT 20 years ago. Like, if someone worked in IT, you thought that they could do everything IT. Yeah, it didn't matter what it was, like like the education on all these different verticals and all these different services and digital marketing as a whole and how all these things work together. And and now you as you as you grow an organization, whether it be a company or agency, people specialize, and there's all these different silos, and now you gotta have you know, multi, you know, there's people that could could are in multiple verticals, but you have multiple different departments working together all with this common goal, but sometimes they have different goals, and you know, when you get it involved, right? Um, or security involved with with content or SEO, it gets a little messy on um what you can and can't do. Um, a lot of enterprise clients, sometimes IT, if they're not on board, they will lock down and won't approve certain things, or you know, whoever's approving content won't approve content to get it. There's a lot of things when you get into the enterprise realm of of what you have to deal with, but I think to your point, it it today more than ever, it comes down to education of like what is the goal of what are we trying to do? And and Brie, I don't know how you you deal with this. I guess you get pulled in to help justify certain things and and look at certain things, but I have conversations with um you know in inbound people that want to like I have a big client right now, and I I was trying to explain we need to do strategy, okay. We need to do strategy before we start running, you know, fifty thousand dollars, paid ads, and do SEO and all that. Like, he wants to get started now. And I was like, it's like building a house. Like, we need to be an architect, like, I need plans. I can't just go and we figure it out. Like, I don't think that that's the right choice. And he's like, But I know what I want, and I was like, Okay, if you tell me what you want, I can quote it. Well, I want SEO, eight ads. It's like, well, you know, and so yeah, I think that there's there's that education moment that creates friction, and then having those hard conversations with clients to say, what is your end goal? And like, how do we map this out? And if you use like disc profile or something, you have a D, they just want the answer, like they want the answer right now. Let's go, let's do it. And sometimes you have you know, you have to work through that, and I think that that's yeah, super difficult. But analytics, going back to it, analytics helps inform. I'm like, this is what I think. Let's see what the data tells us. The like, not everybody's gonna search or think the way I think, and I do have some past experience, but if we can look at data and like what would you say statistically significant is like I use like the like to for small business, I'm like a hundred impressions is like enough, you know, bigger client, like start adding some zeros. Like it, I think it's a percentage of their overall traffic to figure, yeah, figure it out is kind of like you know, 10 of your like you know, or five percent of your you know, overall traffic is is like a good data set to like start making some decisions based off of, but like I mean, analytics and strategy are the two most I feel like glossed over uh areas, and and so you know, um I'm they absolutely are, and that's that I mean that was the introduction of my uh my my um talk at SEO week was like data's super valuable, yeah, it is if you use it, and how many people are actually using it to make decisions?

SPEAKER_01:

Most people they're not. So, but I mean, and I'm guilty of this. I've I've you know, I've written plenty of marketing plans, I've I've been in those conversations, I've done the one thing almost every single marketing plan is missing is a tracking plan. What are the KPIs? How are we going to um isolate this specific data? Can we do that? Do we need to set up new events? Do we need to set up new conversions? Do we have to have a UTM plan? Are we all using the same UTM plan? When do we use this versus this? Um, you know, like having those conversations and being very clear about what reports we're using, what dimensions, what metrics, what KPIs is a game changer. And it's required, it's it's required to have a good strategy because if you can't go back and see the effectiveness of the strategy, we're still just shooting into a bucket of fish hoping to we hit something, you know. Like, like it's um, but like I said, I mean I'm I'm guilty of it. It's but that's that's what I work with clients to do today. It's like, okay, here's what I saw this month. Um, you know, these these are places where maybe we need to address something or like this worked really well. I could we do more of it? Um, this didn't work. By the way, just just to like put this back in your brain, did you change anything recently? Have you deployed something recently? Did you make any posts? Are you planning on posting on social this month? Are you going to any conference? Like, we need to know these things because they all affect the data, and you're going to want to know the effectiveness of them. So let me just go ahead, I'll make a plan for you. Just but but it becomes what's what's hard is now it has to become a part of our process when it's never been a part of the process before. Um, and so what I'm trying to figure out is like, how is what's the best way for me to work with people to make that part of the process?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I mean, you just keyed in on something for me that I have not thought of. So this was like an aha moment for me is I have never done like, here's a form, like even it's like a Google form. Like, if you're gonna do anything and go to a conference or you're gonna change whatever plan that's static that we're starting with, share that information because the data tells the story. Um, and and a lot of times I'm looking in the data, trying to figure out what happened, and then you start asking those questions, and the story kind of comes together of the changes. Man, to ask them up front, okay, let's unify, right? Let's unify what we're doing so that it will reflect in the analytics, and let's enter in that stuff so we can see the changes. Like, I'm not as strong in the A-B testing arena as I would like to be. Like, I've not done enough of them to just be an expert in that, and you know, all of these different things, and now we have so many different moving parts because it's not just Google and AdWords and Facebook, it's everything. What is going on? You need to know that stuff to your point with a tracking plan to do that. Um, I I would I really want to go back to it too of like, what is like the most basic setup you would recommend? And then, like, maybe go into like the most baller setup that you've like set up. I would love to hear that as well.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah. Just just real quick, I would like to reiterate, I really think that's because we've become so siloed. Like, oh, you handle events, I handle this, how but it all matters, it all matters when we're all supposed to be working together, and it's really easy. The only reason I brought up events was because I literally had a client, this was years ago, where we were running ads, we were doing, I knew we were doing geofencing because I was working with the media buying team as well. Like they were still doing traditional stuff, and they did geofencing through the um newspaper here. I guess they started out. Okay, you know, they're they're doing anything to try and stay alive. So um, and I was doing their end of month reporting, and I was like, we had this massive spike on this one random day of traffic, and it was like good traffic, but I can't find like I don't see anything, like we weren't mentioned in anything. Our ads, like we didn't overspend, there's nothing, nothing. And so I went back and looked at our plans, or maybe I looked up because it was all in Wichita. So I looked up, which is where I live. I looked up like events in Wichita, uh, like at this time. I don't remember why I came to that conclusion. And what had happened was we had we were geofencing this building, which was like um uh construction workers guild or something because it was it was like uh storage units, whatever. I don't know, on-site storage. Um, we were geofencing this place, and they had had like a massive um training session there, and so all of the folks from that training were served our ads while they were sitting inside of the building, I guess. And it increased like that exact day, our geofencing data went through the roof. So um, you know, it's just little things like that. Like, yeah, I I never would have thought of it otherwise, but I've worked with a lot of people that still are are really embedded in like traditional media and stuff and in events, and it's like, how do you track that? But I think it's just lift, right? And in marking that. But to get back to what you were were uh asking about like the most basic setup, I mean, it the most basic setup should answer your your business goal questions, which is we're trying to make money. Well, how do we make money? We make money by selling these services, okay. How do we get people to buy services from our website? They fill out this form, they view these specific pages, which you don't have to set up events for. Please don't set up events for those, just use a page view event and filter it for those pages. Um, and like that, like you said, like that's really it. It's like form fills. How are they gonna contact us? Form fills, emails, phone calls. Sick. On the other side, it's like e-commerce. What are they trying to do? They're trying to get revenue. So we have to have a solid e-commerce setup that tracks purchases with the revenue, add to carts, um, maybe like uh product page views. Um, you know, that that's Google actually has a guide. Google has a guide. Um, if you just look up GA4 recommended events, they have a guide. Like all businesses should be measuring this, e-commerce should be measuring this, and um, you know, like uh lead-focused um businesses should be focused on this. I would say that's bare minimum, but um, I recently worked with a client the be the first half of this year that we were doing an analytics setup for that. Um the person that was heading it up actually came from a product background and was had moved into growth, right? So um, and they were just asking for this. I mean, honestly, some wild things that I was just like, is this necessary? Like, and I don't know if we're actually gonna be able to track that and and whatever really like made me uncomfortable and like kind of pushed me out of my my comfort zone a bit. But the more I started implementing and like seeing the data start coming through, the more I was like, that makes perfect sense. If you look at, I just talked about this in another podcast recently, but um I I took a sales class in college that I dreaded and hated, except for the fact that we we read this book called um, I think it's called The Power of Influence. And it talks about like these like seven principles of influence. And um there are things like oh, is that Robert Cialdini?

SPEAKER_02:

Is that what you're doing?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, yes, yes, right, or is it power of persuasion? I don't know, but they it's like reciprocity and you know, like those kinds of things, urgency, yep, um, belonging, like all these things. And as I was looking at the things we were tracking, I was going, Oh, oh, right. All of these things actually are tied to a business decision. Like, how many testimonials did do they view? Did they how many times did they see our CTA before they clicked on it? What kind of and I was just like, do I really need to track how many testimony? I mean, these testimonials, it's crazy. There's like dozens of them. Like, you know, which social media platform do they engage with the most? As in, are they sharing to they're clicking on our LinkedIn posts or clicking? Like it was very interesting to me because it really got into more of like the psyche behind where I'm just like, okay, we built out these features, like we built out a calculator. Did they use the calculator? Uh, we have these filtering things. What are they filtering by the most, right? Like, I'm thinking of this from like kind of like an SEO, like CRO kind of background, more so. And um, this was a lot more like product focus and like customer focused. Um, and so yeah, I mean, I I've done everything where I've worked with a client, and it's like we have like three things we need to track to that client. I think I ended up with like I built out like 60 things in Tag Manager for them. Not all of them were events, and they weren't all like because you also have to be very careful if you start putting too much data in into something, it becomes very hard to read. A lot of them were like roll-up and like helpers and and things like that. But um, it was very interesting, very eye-opening to me. Uh, and I I think about it a lot more when I do my audits and come up with tracking plans and stuff.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, one of the things that we were talking about before we got started with this interview that I feel like this is where everything's gravitating to, uh, on uh at least from my view, is we log into so many different platforms. Okay, like ever like even all the data that we have access to. If you're you know, whatever tool you want to use, SEM rush, hrefs, you know, SC Ranking, go down the list of all of them, right? Moz, whatever you got data over there, you got the website data, right? You got um if you're if you're tracking uh newsletter stuff, also you can track competitor stuff, like yeah, we built some pretty cool dashboards, like where you track competitor stuff, like so, like just think about all the different oh, your CRM data, that's pretty important, right? Like, yeah, buying it all so all this stuff is in different places, unifying all that data, uh, to to even like paid ads, right? So now it's not just Google and Facebook, right? You you need to link together if you're running, you know, on multiple platforms, linking all this data to get to say, hey, like you know, what's doing the best? Like, and then you got to pull it all into a looker or something like that. Um, I I feel like that that's starting to become almost the standard because it's not just about Google anymore. I mean, yeah, Google's moving mainly to YouTube from what I see from their presentation, and um, you know, what was the deal behind uh email ads going away? What's the backstory on that? I'm just curious.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, I have no idea. Okay, I haven't I haven't been super embedded in the ads world lately, so I okay.

SPEAKER_02:

I was just I was just curious. One of the also random questions I have for you is we had a client that was running, you know, a hundred thousand dollars plus a month traffic or something, and they were doing radio ads on top of that, like just terrestrial radio ads. Um and their website was slow, okay. And I had never seen this before, but there was such a delineation between what was happening in Search Console and what was happening in GA4 that like because I couldn't track it because the ad platform was saying this was happening, but then GA4 was saying no, that's not happening, but then and Search Console is saying, Yes, that's happening. What I figured, what I guessed, what I guess, and I you know, I I built out a little deck on this, so hopefully I was right. But essentially, I was like, the website's too slow for the pixel to fire. People are going to the you know, uh Search Console and are bouncing before the pixel can pick up any data, and so I said, We need to stop running ads and fix the website because you're you're hemorrhaging all this money. Um, uh, I had never personally seen that big of a delta before. So, you know, what is your viewpoint on just GA4 data versus search console data? And like, how is it different? How is it the same? And how do you look at both of those things?

SPEAKER_01:

Um, I think you know, you have to think of the jobs that that both of those platforms have. So, like search consoles definitely should be your source of truth for like, are people clicking on things? Has this have we been served for this keyword? Um, and such. GA4 and isn't like can't tell you a lot of those things, and and isn't going to be like you said, it's not going to be perfect. Like, just because someone clicks through our site doesn't mean that they're not immediately leaving. And if they're immediately leaving, then it could be not captured, or um, it could be captured and they are not registered as an active user, and so then it never gets reported on kind of thing, like unless you look at total users, um, which is a whole other thing. So I would say, like, yeah, I would I would trust Search Console over GA4 as far as like Google traffic goes, um, and especially like discovered data, like you don't see Google discovered data. A lot of it comes through as direct in GA4. Um, so that's not great. Um, so GA or so search console is always going to be uh better um for that. But yeah, I mean that's it's a real thing, it happens.

SPEAKER_02:

If you have a little bit more time, I would love to talk uh about Looker uh and and just kind of how that's being incorporated and how people are using that in Google Data Studio. I think that um people are pretty familiar with GA4 or at least know of it and somewhat use it, right? But now you're starting to talk about uh additional dashboards, additional layers. Um, I would love to uh understand your viewpoint on those things and kind of how you're using them.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so um I would say a lot more people shifted to Looker with the rollout of GA4 because the UI was completely new and and people didn't want to learn it, frankly. Um and it just wasn't as it just wasn't what they were used to. So a lot of people just changed over to just pulling everything in through Looker, which I think is fine. Um, I have kind of a love-hate relationship with Looker because I feel a lot of people kind of like my new soapbox that I've been screaming about lately, is a lot of people will use Looker to create automated reports, and automated reports are really just dashboards. So it's like not actually a report if you're not looking into the data, gathering insights from it, doing a deep dive. Like our responsibility as service professionals is to report on our services, what we've done, what impact we've had, um, and what we're doing next. And just sending a the same report over and over again to a client month after month is not doing that. Um, I would say most of the time.

SPEAKER_02:

It's a snapshot, right? Yeah, it's a snapshot, it's a snapshot.

SPEAKER_01:

But it's like a looker studio is like it's always up to date, so it's really just a dashboard. They could just go to it whenever they wanted. If they they wanted a snapshot, they could just go look at it.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah, that's fair.

SPEAKER_01:

Um, so what I'm and slash, and um, you know, we build out these reports, and then I actually just posted this on LinkedIn. We build out these reports and we look at the same metrics, the same reports every single time. And I think that that really stifles creativity, innovation, what you're able to deduce from that data, because think of like if you saw the if you see the same ad 20 times, eventually you just start ignoring it. So if I see the same report every month, month over month, I'm probably not like super stroked. Yeah, it's not super helpful. Um, and like even as a practitioner, like I I would feel this way about Google Ads sometimes where I'm like, okay, I've looked at this every day for the last, I mean, this was a long time ago, but like for the last three months, like it's not doing what I think it should be doing, but like I've I've overturned every leaf. Like I've looked at every single way I could look at this, and I'm just like, I'm out, I'm out. I don't know what what I'm supposed to be doing. But it's like if you put yourself in a situation where it's kind of the same thing people are saying about like critical thinking with LLMs, it's like if you put yourself in a situation where the data is served up to you in the way that you expect to see it every single time, you're not going to be thinking, I wonder if there were any sort of anomalies over the last three months of like of the cities that people were coming from, or like how this one single page, like you're not exploring it, right? So I do think that there is this, there should be in Looker, it's really easy to build things, which is super cool, and we get it very excited to do it. And so we build out these massive dashboards, right? So it'll be like six pages, and this page is really long, and this page gets really in depth, and you send that to a client, like on the other side of things, and they're like, I don't know what I'm looking at. What am I supposed to do here? And like, that's not their job really either. Like, that's what they hired you for. So we it is our responsibility to go, this is the data that's important, this is why this specific data is important, we're doing this next, and this is the data that supports why we are doing this next, right? And the reality of it is that data should not be the same every month. If you say next month we're focusing on our title tags and meta descriptions because our click-through rate is shit, we have to pull in our click-through rate data to support that, right? Um, and and maybe our competitors' click-through rates and like what their title tags look like and all that stuff. Like, we you can't just serve up the same data. So that's that part. And then the next part is like you have to have two sets of reports. The the reports that you're making decisions based off of, those really long, complex, like we can filter, we've got drop downs here, and we can do this and we can do that, and it gets really nitty gritty. That's for you to look at. Yeah, that's for us to look at internally. That's not for the client to try and play with.

SPEAKER_02:

So when we rolled out, this was years ago, we rolled out like agency analytics for like all our clients and i loved it and the data was great like i could tell the team what what the biggest problem was with agency analytics for us was clients kept uh asking to reset their password like that was like that was like they so so to like give them a login and a dashboard and uh all this stuff like it was so cool and then clients were like i forgot the login can you reset the password like yeah and and that and that was like the biggest holdup and then the data was overwhelming to them even though like it was helpful for for us like you said as practitioners but the client just wants to know the executive summary like what are you doing what's going on tell me what i need to do like that's it and all this data is uh a lot of times depending on the client overwhelming to him and uh yeah and uh you get you gotta you gotta uh weigh that that that that you know what's everybody's role in this right like I liked how you said define it and I I really I wrote down here exploring like you need to explore your data and you need to think critically um I I love that and and I think how you defined uh reports is is really important what is the definition of reporting and what are you going to be providing in that report and there should be some analysis associated with that not just a snapshot of of where the data is today because that's not super helpful to somebody if they're not looking at the data every day they don't know everything that's going on it's your job to communicate into that so I think that those are really really excellent points Bree um as we're like kind of wrapping up I want to give you a time to to uh have people reach out to you to find out more information but before that I wanted to ask you for the shorts out there that we're gonna start to make because we need to make it right um what is one unknown secret of internet marketing that you think is underserved today and and you want to get on the soapbox and communicate about one unknown secret oh my god uh I'll give you I'll give you a give me whatever you want just give me a few things yeah whatever okay um one unknown internet's marketing secret oh my god I would say let's I'll just I'll give you a GA4 secret how about that yeah perfect perfect um even if you work in SEO you need to work look at the advertising section of GA4 so that's one because that's where all of your attribution data lives I don't know why they named it advertising um another one is um double check all of your session source mediums to see if you have payment processors coming through as referrals because if you do that breaks your attribution um uh if you want to track it you probably can you just have to find the right person to help you track it perfect so these are one two three secrets of GA4 analytics uh and uh hopefully that was helpful um awesome well Bree uh beastanalyticsco dot com yes yes right beast analytics co we'll put that in the show notes you are active on LinkedIn what other platforms I would love for you to send me that blog uh where where you where you talked about um kind of what what's still missing the three things uh uh with the switch over that that would be interesting to share um what where are other places that people can find you I know you do a lot of talks as well um and so uh I'll just turn it over to you to share what you would like to share with the audience.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah so beastanalyticsco.com um I'm mostly active on LinkedIn right now trying to figure that out and then um I would say YouTube is probably the the other one with the like a lot more in depth um tutorials and things of that nature and I'm building out a tool right now GA4Helper.com um where it's going to do a settings check so I look at the configuration of so many GA4 accounts and there are a lot of like kind of hidden things in the settings that people just will never find or see or think of that can really impact your data and whether or not you're keeping your data of whether or not you can actually report on it and if it's just clean data in general. So I'm building that out right now and that's eventually going to have more tools and blog posts and all the fun stuff.

SPEAKER_02:

So uh yeah hope people check that out awesome well thank you so much everybody go check out Brie Anderson's stuff she's uh a big educator out there she wants people to understand the need for analytics I do too that's why I brought you on I uh am this is an area that I am not as strong in so reach out to Brie. She is she is the girl um if you're having analytic issues and um you know until the next time everybody I would ask that you like share oh fall we we used to call it shaiko it was called shaiko share like follow um uh you know it it really helps with engagement uh we are uh moving over from well we're not moving over but we're expanding to YouTube uh so we're really big on iTunes so please leave us a review on iTunes if you like uh the podcast or Spotify uh and uh until the next time uh bye bye for now

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