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The Importance of Marketing Report Featuring Dana DiTomaso
7 Plays3 days ago
AI search is changing SEO reporting as we know it. In this episode, Dana DiTomaso, founder of KP Playbook and 25-year SEO veteran, joins Dane to unpack how analytics must evolve in 2025 and beyond. From understanding what really matters in GA4 to measuring traffic from AI Overviews and featured snippets, Dana breaks down the future of SEO reporting with clarity and a dose of humor.
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Transcript
Introduction to SEO Reporting
00:00:00
Speaker
We're back! As always, I'm excited you've chosen to join me for another episode of More Than You Can Chew, and I hope that you brought your analytics appetite because we're going to dive into a really important topic today, and I don't think anyone could conceive of a better guest to talk about SEO reporting than my guest, Dana DiTomaso.
Current Trends and Advice in SEO
00:00:19
Speaker
She is the founder and lead instructor at KP Playbook,
00:00:27
Speaker
Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Yeah, and it's almost yelling at football player time again. It's almost that time. So yeah let's get excited. So as someone in SEO, I'm truly humbled that you've come to be on a guest here.
00:00:40
Speaker
And so, you know, if you didn't know, Dana, search has been in sort of flux, right? But seriously, you know, there's a lot of noise out there. Good advice, probably more bad advice. Yeah, i think I think the bad advice comes from people don't know and they're just trying to grab onto something. It's like, let's try this, let's try this. But like, no one really knows at this point, I think, all the answers. So just...
00:01:01
Speaker
You're okay. We're okay. We're okay, right? There's no need for panic, right? Yeah. You know the nuance of what we're doing need to change. And, you know, some of the tactics and strategies people are adding into their work or changing in their work.
00:01:13
Speaker
Some of them maybe should have done quite some time ago, but right, where we're we're
Challenges of Zero-Click Searches and AI Impact
00:01:17
Speaker
evolving. And that's why we're having these conversations to make sure we we grow together. And one of the biggest sticking points for a lot of us, including me,
00:01:25
Speaker
is where this is all heading with performance, right? You know, deprecation of traffic via zero-click search through AI overviews, AI mode, other LLMs. We used to talk about, you know, not focusing on non-branded traffic, and we talked about more traffic.
00:01:38
Speaker
So let's take off a bite more than we can chew in this episode. And Dana, if you would, you know, I know you've been talking about this a lot. And so please, like, break down how ah SEOs need to change up reporting in the face of search transition to AI search results.
Effectiveness Metrics vs. Traffic-Based Reporting
00:01:53
Speaker
Yeah, you know, it's funny. ah Last year at MozCon, I talked about how reporting was getting inaccurate. And that talk was called It's Not Right, But It's Okay, Future of Analytics. and And I feel like it might have been a little ah predicting the future in a way, because part of it was that...
00:02:08
Speaker
We definitely need to change up the way that we report because for a long time, and I speak, like I used to to be an SEO, I worked in the field for 25 years, traffic equaled results, right? For a very long time. You got more SEO traffic, therefore you got more results and therefore you got paid.
00:02:22
Speaker
And i think now because SEOs have relied on this for so long, it is really difficult to upend traffic 20 plus years of this is how we do results. And instead focusing on things like impressions. And so one of the things that I talked about at MozCon last year was the idea of introducing what I call an effectiveness metric, which is where you take all of your impressions from all of your different channels, Google search, Google ads, everywhere else, number of people in your email list, those are the people who are aware of you in some way.
00:02:51
Speaker
And then you divide it by the number of ultimately, you know, what it makes you money in store transactions, online transactions, whatever, you know, you decide is like our main metric. And that could just be key events in GA4. It doesn't matter, but we're not looking at attribution. We're just looking at the inputs of impressions and the output of money.
00:03:09
Speaker
And then we're looking at a percentage of those two. And then over time, did the percentage go up or did it stay flat?
Attribution Challenges and Solutions
00:03:15
Speaker
If it went up, that means we're being more effective. If it stayed flat, we're being just as effective.
00:03:19
Speaker
If it went down, then something that you did is less effective. Because part of what's broken in analytics is attribution. People have ad blockers, people do all sorts of crazy stuff before they convert.
00:03:31
Speaker
And I don't think we can rely on attribution directly anymore. And and I come from this to also having a lot of years in local SEO, where we lost the ability to tribute forever ago, right? Like, sure, we can put a call tracking number on that Google business listing, we can put UTMs in there. But you know, people are doing all sorts of crazy stuff like,
00:03:46
Speaker
You know, it's ah I had to contact a pest control company for my house. I did all the Google searching and then to book the appointment, my wife was going to be home, not me. So I sent her the link and I said, here, book an appointment that was sent via text message. That appointment booking shows up as direct, even though I did all this organic research. Right.
00:04:01
Speaker
So that's just like this is how people use the Internet. So I think really trying to get away from the idea of like if it isn't attributed, it doesn't count. And instead thinking, how does the work that I'm doing influence the bigger picture for my company or my client's company?
00:04:17
Speaker
And I think that's where introducing something like effectiveness is good because it's also just one number. It's on a graph. You don't need to worry about the individual little numbers fluctuating up and down. We're not looking at...
00:04:28
Speaker
Oh, well, traffic is up 28.62% as opposed to 28.60%. Like, it's not that that part doesn't matter. And I think that this is where when you're looking at it directionally, that's a great directional metric to start to introduce to clients.
Search Console Changes: The Great Decoupling
00:04:42
Speaker
So do have a post on my website. um It's called, you know marketing analytics is broken. Can it be fixed? No, spoiler alert, it cannot be fixed. um And so this is where, you know, really we're thinking about what are we going to report on instead? And the other thing that's going on too, on top of this is this idea of the great decoupling is what people are calling it in search console, it's turning into the alligator, right? Where you've got impressions and clicks.
00:05:03
Speaker
And so again, if your impressions are going up and your resulting conversions or whatever that final metric is, is not going up, then your marketing is less effective. And now is a really great time to take a look at that and be like, okay, so we got all these impressions, but people aren't calling us or giving us money, what are we doing
Google Analytics 4: Tracking and Audience Insights
00:05:22
Speaker
wrong? And then that gives you a starting point to dig in and and figure out where you can fix the gaps in your AI strategy.
00:05:27
Speaker
Great. I love that. Now, when we talk about you know people relying on Google Analytics, right trying to follow along with where traffic's coming from, what are some tips or insights on what we can track in GA4?
00:05:41
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you can track someone, track the heck out of them. One of the things that I see a lot of people do a really good job of is tracking, like, did people convert? Like, that's something that most people are familiar with. They know if a form was filled or ah purchase happened, we got that part.
00:05:54
Speaker
But what they don't track is how to someone didn't convert, what did we do wrong? So sometimes, for example, for some clients, I'll introduce ah an event into GA4, where it's like, could they even see the CTA button?
00:06:08
Speaker
Like, it's Sometimes it's as simple simple as that. Because especially if you look at mobile devices, if your client has a lot of mobile, and I've said this for years, like if your client has more than half mobile, you need to make sure to look at that site in a mobile device at least half the time you're working with them, right?
00:06:24
Speaker
Like stop using your giant, like I have two monitors here right now. I am not most people, right? Like most people are on a phone or they're on a tiny little laptop. And so really, it's it's a matter of putting yourself in that client's shoes. Like, could you even see the ability to convert?
00:06:39
Speaker
Because if you couldn't see it, then it's not really of realistic for us to expect that this person could convert. And then the other thing, too, that I think people really should be using our audience is in GA4. If there's something that you can tell that this person is probably not going to buy something, maybe they, you know, you're a home builder, and people don't buy a house every week.
00:06:56
Speaker
So is there a way that you can say people coming to the website who come onto the website to submit, say, a service request, like a post-build service request, I'm not going to include those people in my conversion rate calculations because they already bought a house. I don't need to worry about them.
00:07:09
Speaker
um Is there a way that you can start to build audiences based on your personas so you know this person visited this page and this page and this is this audience that I really want to get into as opposed just like a site-wide conversion rate, which frankly is kind of useless in a lot of cases because you really only want to target the people who actually have intent.
00:07:27
Speaker
Maybe the percentage of people who have intent will go up and down over time. But that's of things look at is like, how many people on our website actually show purchase intent? And then out of those people who show purchase intent, how many of them actually became leads or customers or what have you?
00:07:42
Speaker
um And I think that that's also a different way of looking at the analytics. Just track the heck out of what you can track. Yeah. Are there certain you know people I've talked to prospects and they're worried about like bounce rate and things like that. Are there certain things like right? Not one size fits all right. I mean, are there certain things that you feel people still sort of apply a false positive or false negative towards it? A little more nuance. Yeah.
00:08:05
Speaker
Yeah, I feel that this is my heart every time someone says bounce rate. So I've got like this little like um dumpster fire around my shelf. But this is bounce rate right here. So the thing is, with bounce rate in universal analytics, it measures something completely different than bounce rate in GA4.
00:08:19
Speaker
They should not even be named the same thing. They are not even measuring the same thing. What it is measuring, and bounce rate in GA4, is the inverse of engagement rate. Engagement rate is already on most reports. Don't bother with bounce rate. Just look at engagement rate.
00:08:31
Speaker
A session on your website becomes engaged when one of these things happens. Someone spends at least 10 seconds. That's the default. You can up it to 60. With your tab as their active tab in their browser. So this helps with all those tab hoarders, people who have like 40 tabs open for years and months, right?
00:08:46
Speaker
um And then, or they visit two pages or they convert. That is how a session becomes engaged. So one of the easiest things you can do, especially with paid is grab a report, change the, like look at the traffic acquisition report, for example, use that first dropdown to change the dimension to be say session campaign.
00:09:05
Speaker
And then look at the engagement rates by campaign. Is there a campaign where the engagement rate is significantly lower than the site average Or overall, is there a channel that's significantly lower than the site average?
00:09:16
Speaker
So for example, if you're running a display campaign and your engagement rate for your website is 70% overall, but this particular display campaign, the engagement rate is 30%, that's a crappy campaign. You are wasting money on bringing people to that site because there's something wrong and they're not engaging. Maybe it's a bad landing page or maybe it's just bot traffic. You don't know.
00:09:34
Speaker
So that is where engagement rate can be a really good metric. But that is what it is measuring. It is not measuring, you know, so if I spent, if I read an entire page, say in universal analytics with bounce rate, if you spent 10 minutes on a page reading the whole page, maybe you got in touch, but you didn't go to a second page, um that would count as a bounce.
00:09:53
Speaker
It didn't matter. In GA4, if I spent 10 minutes reading a page, that would be an engaged session. So again, like this is where really thinking about the differences between the two tools. It's so much easier if you don't think of GA4 as an upgrade from Universal Analytics. It is a brand new product.
00:10:08
Speaker
Google should never have used the migrate language for it. I think it was deeply confusing for a lot of people. It's a brand new bag. And so just if you forget everything you ever learned about Universal Analytics, you're going have such a better time in GA4.
Branded Traffic and AI Visibility
00:10:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:19
Speaker
And I kind took you, thank you for that. I kind took you off a tangent off of AI search, but you know, last lastly, sort of just want to sort of pick your brain on, on a, on a, in the same vein of, of AI search. So we talked about the great decoupling or the things people should be watching for, for like, does it make sense with AI search to look for more, branded traffic in GSC? Does it make it more sense for more direct traffic to be tracked in GA4? What are some of the primary things that you would suggest looking for in addition to increase in impressions, commensurate, like not one-to-one increase in conversions, but you see that? What are some other indicators that you would see as as indicative of at least some ah progress in visibility with ai search? Yeah.
00:11:01
Speaker
Absolutely. So some AI overview searches, as well as people also ask and featured snippets, when they come to your website, you've probably seen this, you have this like, tilde text equals colon thing that shows up in your yeah URL.
00:11:14
Speaker
I have a recipe on my website for Google Tag Manager that will capture that information because it's not captured by default in GA4, you need to do additional work to get that. And then you can see that someone came to your website via what I call a snippet.
00:11:25
Speaker
um And then that is really interesting because then you can track the landing pages that have those snippets and then compare that with your landing pages in Google Search Console and then see, okay, so this particular landing page when it comes up has a really high impression rate, for example. So I think that this landing page, here's the queries for it.
00:11:43
Speaker
Which of these do I think is bringing up an AI overview? And then that can help you start to look at it. And what I say to people all the time is like, yeah, you can use rank tracking tools, but just do the search. Just do a search for something and then see what the results look like. Search incognito, of course, and see what it looks like. Do you have to do more video? do you have to do more images? Like what does Google want from you?
00:12:02
Speaker
Or are you just coming up multiple times in these AI searches? It almost feels like we're going back to like the olden days of marketing where they'd say, you need to see the brand 17 times before someone's going to convert with you. Well, guess what? We're in the point where they have to see you come up in an AI overview 17 times where they're like, oh, I guess this company knows what i'm what they're talking about. I'm going to get in touch with them.
00:12:20
Speaker
So branding becomes even more important than it used to be. you know And that final conversion might be via a branded search. So you know they'll search for all these different articles. They're like, oh, you know what? Dana really knows what she's doing when it comes to analytics. I'm just going to search for her name.
00:12:34
Speaker
We get a lot of weird spellings with my name. And so Google Search Console, because people can't spell the last name. Google figures it out anyway. And then they come to the website and they might convert because of that. Whatever. i don't care. As long as I got there eventually, I don't really, you know, it's important to know the kinds of different ways that people search before they got to that point.
00:12:50
Speaker
But I think we need to get less obsessed with like, oh, this person converted be of brand, therefore it's not valuable. Brand is even more valuable than it used to be.
Concluding Thoughts on AI and Analytics
00:12:59
Speaker
Absolutely. You know, looking at that percentage of branded versus non-branded, I still look at it. But what I want to see is that percentage of branded going up over time.
00:13:06
Speaker
Okay, great. Well, thank you for that perspective as well. We have a couple of bites we took off more than we could chew around AI search reporting and and then and sort of what to monitor and ah you know different ah aspects that, of course, you know as I tell everyone, i don't look at anything in a silo, right? We want to get the whole picture to really tell the true data story what's happening. So, ah Dana, thanks so much for those insights around
Dana's Favorite Restaurants
00:13:29
Speaker
this topic.
00:13:30
Speaker
and Before I let you go, i have probably the most difficult question anyone's going to ask you on any podcast ever. And that is, as I know you're well-traveled, Dana, whether it's in your hometown or somewhere you've been, what is a place you would go look, if you're in this town, this restaurant is somewhere you just got to check out.
00:13:51
Speaker
Well, I actually have two places. I hope that's okay. So my new adopted hometown is Victoria, British Columbia. It's where I live now. And there is a ah local taco chain called Taco Fino, which is named after Tofino, which is a surfing town here on Vancouver Island.
00:14:05
Speaker
And they make the best fish tacos. You got to check them out. And then, i mean... good fish tacos for Canada. i just came back from Texas. Canada, Mexican food is a little step down from like what you get in like Texas. But anyway, the other place is my hometown, my actual where I was born, Hamilton, Ontario, which is a very heavy Italian population.
00:14:22
Speaker
And there's this whole mall restaurant in a basement by the hospital in Hamilton. It's called Bronzy's Place. And there's some Italian Nona in the back making pasta on Fridays. They have this fantastic squid shrimp dish, which is just like what my family eats at Christmas. I love it so much.
00:14:39
Speaker
um And they give you this like really mediocre salad of like a piece of tomato and two, you know, little bits of lettuce. And if you don't eat it, they give you a shit. And the tables are held together with duct tape. but there's always three old Italian guys of the bar watching soccer drinking Peroni. And it is my absolute favorite out comfort food. You know, it's just delightful. so If you're ever in Hamilton, Ontario, check out Bronzy's Place. It's going to look like it's not much, but it's it's pretty good.
00:15:05
Speaker
That description makes you want to go there just for Bronzy's Place. That's awesome. Great, too. Great recommendations. Thank you for those insights. And as always, ah again, Dana, thank you so much for carving out time for More Than You Can Chew.
00:15:16
Speaker
Of course. Thank you so much for having me. All right, everyone. and I'll see you on the next podcast of More Than You Can Chew.