About This Episode
Welcome to Season Three of Digital Marketing Victories Podcast. In this first episode, we’re joined by Dana DiTomaso, Founder & Lead Instructor at KP Playbook and President & Partner at Kick Point, where she helps people and teams do better marketing.
Alongside the team at Kick Point, Dana teaches people and teams how to set goals and track results so that they understand what strategies and tactics bring real value. In addition to speaking at conferences about reporting and analytics, SEO, and brand building, Dana is the weekly technology columnist on CBC Edmonton AM, and she teaches analytics at the University of Alberta.
Today, Dana takes us on a journey through the evolving landscape of digital marketing data. With her characteristic blend of technical expertise and practical wisdom, Dana challenges the notion of being “data-driven” in favor of becoming “data-informed” – a crucial distinction in today’s privacy-focused digital environment.
This episode is for you if you’re curious about the following:
- You want to develop your analytic thinking.
- You want to be comfortable analyzing data and using it to persuade others.
- You need tips around selecting and presenting data when you’re persuading others to change their behavior.
- You want to use data to guide a ruthless prioritization process to streamline your marketing requests.
Connect With Dana
- Visit Dana’s website
- Learn about Kick Point
- Connect on LinkedIn, Bluesky and Mastodon
- Kick Point Playbook’s YouTube channel
- Find Dana’s decks on SpeakerDeck
Resources
Disclaimer: Some of these are affiliate links. You get 20% off when you purchase a course through my links below at no extra cost to you.
- Practical GA4 (Course)
- Analytics for Agencies (Course)
- KP Playbook Newsletter
- If you are outside of North America or Europe, check out their Parity Pricing program, which levels the prices of their courses to local purchasing power. This program is offered to people in 142 eligible countries.
- SEO for Brand Visibility & Recognition: Why it’s Key & How to Succeed At It (Webinar)
- Obviously Awesome by April Dunford (Book)
- Sales Pitch by April Dunford (Book)
- Dana’s Whiteboard Friday about Directional Data
- Her YouTube playlist with all sorts of communicating about data tips.
Check out all of the resources mentioned in our other episodes.
Other episodes you’ll enjoy:
- S1E19: How to Communicate Negative News and Become a Better Listener to be a More Effective Marketer with Dana Theus
- S1E07: Using Data to Persuade, Train and Pivot your Marketing Team and Strategy with Janet Driscoll Miller
- S1E09: The Soft Skills Necessary for SEO Success with Tom Critchlow
- S2E03: Navigating SEO and Product Management with Adam Gent
- S2E01: Can you be more persuasive as an SEO Product Manager? Interview with Gus Pelogia
Loved this episode?
Leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Tweet and tag us @dmvictories!
Episode Transcript
➡️ [Download episode transcript]
[00:00:00]Katherine Watier Ong: Welcome to the Digital Marketing Victories podcast, a monthly show where we celebrate and learn from the change makers in digital marketing. Great digital marketers understand that people are the most challenging part of doing their jobs. And this show focuses on the people part of digital marketing wins. What tactics or skills the guest used to align people with their marketing strategy. I’m your host Katherine Watier Ong the owner of WO Strategies, LLC, we focus on increasing organic discovery for enterprise sized science focused clients. Thank you for joining me. Let’s get into it and celebrate our victories.
Today we’re joined by Dana DiTomaso. She’s the Founder and Lead Instructor at KP Playbook, President and Partner at Kick Point, where she helps people and teams do better marketing.
Alongside the team at Kick Point, she teaches people and teams how to set goals and track results so that they understand what strategies and tactics bring real value. In addition to speaking at conferences about reporting, analytics, SEO, and brand building, she’s a weekly columnist on CBC admin AM, and she teaches analytics at the University of Alabama.
And for everyone listening, this episode is going to be perfect for you. If you’re curious about how to develop your analytic thinking. You become comfortable analyzing data and using it to persuade others if you need some tips around selecting and presenting data when you’re persuading others to change their behavior, using data to guide a ruthless prioritization process to streamline your marketing requests.
I know that’s a challenge with technical SEO, figuring out what to prioritize and how to persuade others when the data is missing or unreliable particularly Dana’s been talking a lot about that this year, and that’s why I brought her on the show. But I know that some people also, I’ve had challenges in the past about building an analytics culture if you happen to be an organization that’s kind of new to SEO, and then how to deal with pushback from stakeholders or clients if they maybe disagree with your data analysis.
Cool. So Dana, welcome to the show. Can you just tell folks a little bit more about you? I think most people listening know who you are, but give us a little bit of your background, how you got into the analytics piece.
[00:02:04] Dana DiTomaso: Yeah, for sure. So my original, my origin story is, I went to school for geography, which I use every day in my current career.
But what happened was, when I graduated in the late nineties, I ended up working in software. And then from there I started tinkering with websites. I started freelancing in 2000. So I’ve been doing this for a really long time now. And my first website client said to me, Hey, how do I get into Google? And I said, I don’t know, I’ll get back to you.
And that’s when I discovered Rand Fishkin’s blog before SEO Moz, like. Back in the early early days. Yeah. Oh yeah. And like Jill Whalen, for example, is now retired from the field. She gave me a ticket to SES Toronto 2004. That was my first search conference.
So yeah, I’ve been doing this a really long time.
And then, I mean, I did SEO for a long time. Love SEO still. Do a little bit. But what started happening around, I would say like 2017 ish is when we started to get more into Google Tag Manager version two. Google Tag Manager came out like, okay, I got to learn this thing. Clients are asking about data. We have analytics, but like, it probably could be better.
And that ended up occupying my brain completely. And when the GA4 launch came out, it’s just I ended up diving so deeply into it that that is now my main area of expertise.
[00:03:17] Katherine Watier Ong: We are so glad you did. Somebody had to get over me, and..
[00:03:22] Dana DiTomaso: I was like, what a weird thing to suddenly be an expert in — like, who saw this coming?
And she’s like, yeah, you, you know, you get super into stuff. I’m like, yeah, but GA4, was that really like a good choice?
[00:03:35] Katherine Watier Ong: I mean, there’s two of you that folks follow, and they really know how it works. The rest of us. No matter how many training sessions I go through, we’re still like, where do I go for this?
At least that’s my story.
[00:03:43] Dana DiTomaso: Well, and every time I go on vacation, something changes. This is the joke is like every time I go on vacation, there’s a major feature announcement. So my next vacation will be the first week of April. We’ll find out.
[00:03:53] Katherine Watier Ong: We’ll find out pretty close. Everybody put that on your calendar.
There’s going to be some major change. So let’s start off by thinking about analytical thinking. So what if a digital marketer is kind of. New to having an analytical thinking kind of process, what strategies do you recommend that they take or tips for them to get the skills?
[00:04:14] Dana DiTomaso: I mean, I, it’s funny because people are like, oh, I don’t really like math.
You don’t have to like math. I mean, the reason I have a Geography degree is because I failed calculus so many times, I decided a science degree was not, so I left biology and went to geography. I didn’t need calculus to graduate from that. And, yeah, I mean, we took one stats class that was called stats for geographers, and it was just like real basic statistics, but I don’t necessarily use that.
I think the biggest thing when you’re thinking about it from an analytical perspective is what is realistically something we can measure, but then also understanding the limitations of that measurement. And so, you know, you mentioned, I’ve been speaking a lot about. Analytics data is perfect, et cetera.
There’s a blog post which we can link to in the show notes about, you know, your marketing data isn’t right. Can it be fixed? Spoiler alert. No, it can’t be fixed and that’s okay. So I think it’s important just to understand the limitations of the product more so than, you know, Oh, I need to figure out the cosine or whatever of this thing.
I don’t, don’t worry about that. Like right now, if you’re just getting into it, just learn how the data gets in and how you get the data out and what are the limitations of that process.
[00:05:19] Katherine Watier Ong: I actually, what I saw or read and listened to your Whiteboard Friday article, and mind you, I also saw the presentation you had at MozCon, but between the two, I Honestly, I felt better about my own skill set because I’m also not really big on the math piece, but I feel like I can talk about trending stuff.
I can talk about how to make this. I can definitely talk about limitations. I’ve got this blog post on my website about the limitations of Google search console because it feels like every week there’s like a new insight somebody has that’s like, Oh, you can’t track that. Or that’s buried under here.
[00:05:50] Katherine Watier Ong: Right. And I never remember all of them because there’s so many like, yep. caveats with Google Search Console. So I just keep updating the blog posts for my own reference. But I feel like I can talk people through that. Similarly, once I saw your presentation, I was like, Oh, I can totally talk people through how we shouldn’t obsess because we’ve lost so much tracking.
This is sort of the trend that’s happening. You know, I was right there with you.
[00:06:13] Dana DiTomaso: Good, good.
[00:06:16] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah. So do you recommend that data marketers or marketers in general balance data driven? And creative ideas and qualitative. Do you encourage them to think about all three?
[00:06:29] Dana DiTomaso: Yeah, I do. And I actually don’t like the phrase data driven.
I know a lot of people use that, it’s more, we’re starting to use the phrase data informed. As in, you’re not solely going to make decisions based on the data, but you should look at it and help it inform. Have it inform what you’re going to do, you know, and not because there’s lots of stuff again If we’re accepting that we can’t measure everything then there’s going to be some stuff that we can’t measure and as a marketer you’re not you know a robot taking an input and putting out output.
That’s what the AI tools are for instead you are applying your marketing brain and saying okay, so I know this this this this is true and I’m seeing this trend now, what do we do? And I think that’s really the critical part that a marketer brings, and that’s what makes you better than, say, an AI bot when it comes to marketing.
[00:07:12] Katherine Watier Ong: Right, and I mean, I remember the days, because I’ve been in the business about as long as you have been, like, doing it for 20 years. And I remember when we had keywords, for instance. So there was this moment where we were really detail oriented, or trying to be, with the data. But, on the flip side, I spent five years working at a PR firm, and I will reassure all of you, that they may, they kind of measure very little and they definitely get paid.
[00:07:35] Dana DiTomaso: Oh, sure. And same thing with like, like PPC people, like talk to a PPC person sometime if you don’t know any and talk to them about results reporting, because it’s so interesting when I see results from PPC people, and I’m not saying this to shade PPC people, you’re great, love talking to you, but sometimes those reports are based on entirely impressions, not even clicks.
Not even, you know, conversions, God forbid. And so I think impressions, especially for things like connected TV. Like that’s all we’re seeing in those reports. Right. No, nothing about follow through, but that’s okay too, because brand building is also an important marketing strategy. And I literally just hosted a podcast with Aleyda Solis where we talked about the importance of brand building when it comes to SEO.
So, there’s that part of it. So don’t be so obsessed with it, that’s the end part of it. And I think that’s where SEOs really can fault themselves because they’re like, well, I couldn’t track it. So it doesn’t count. It’s like if you go for a walk and you’re not wearing your Apple watch, you didn’t close the rings.
Did it actually, you still went for a walk, you know? Some people are gonna have ad blockers. Some people, especially when it comes to Local SEO, for example, is really really where I started. Like, I don’t really care how they get in touch with my client. I just want them to do it. If they look up the client on maps and then drive to the store, am I going to know?
No, but it happened. Cool. Like, no one’s going to walk in the store and be like, I’m here today because I happened to see you come up on maps. Like it’s not going to happen. So there has to be that part of it too, where, you know, things are growing and you know, the work you’re doing is important and it’s helping, but there isn’t necessarily that direct benefit. And so that’s why in that, that talk at MozCon, I talked a lot about that effectiveness metric where you take all the impressions of all the metrics, connected TV, billboards, search console ads, all of it, add it all up, divide it by the number of transactions or conversions or whatever that bottom line metric is that you can track.
Look at that percentage. If you do new things, does it go up or does it go down? So thinking about, you know, for example, technical SEO, if you make the site faster, did it make the conversion rate go up, or did people just have a better time on the site, and then they’re more likely to get in touch with that particular client, right?
You wouldn’t necessarily be able to measure the conversion rate improvements. Maybe you can, maybe you can’t, but if it’s, for example, people walking into a store, then maybe you won’t know, but you’ll know that generally, you know, the number of transactions for that client has gone up as you did. This has to be an SEO work, therefore, your work is probably having an impact like, well, probably isn’t good enough.
Well, guess what? It’s 2025 and probably has to be good enough sometimes, so sorry.
[00:10:02] Katherine Watier Ong: Once you watch your presentation if you are a marketer, I now hear you in my head every time I strip a UTM.
[00:10:09] Dana DiTomaso: I know. How dare you people.
[00:10:10] Katherine Watier Ong: Which I do all the time.
[00:10:11] Dana DiTomaso: Everybody does it all the time. I do it sometimes. It’s, it’s, yeah. And actually that presentation I recorded, it’s on YouTube now.
[00:10:17] Katherine Watier Ong: Oh, great.
[00:10:18] Dana DiTomaso: So if you go to the Kick Point Playbook YouTube channel you can watch. It’s a presentation I gave to members of my Analytics for Agencies and Practical GA4 courses before MozCon. And then we just released it, so it is on YouTube now, so you can check it out. Great. Yeah, definitely check it out.
[00:10:32] Katherine Watier Ong: Okay, so we’ve talked a lot about, you know, misleading data. Now, if you’re going to select data to present to somebody, what’s the key factors you think about if you’re going to be putting together a persuasive presentation to pivot somebody else’s actions, or for them to come on board with your marketing campaign?
[00:10:48] Dana DiTomaso: I want to know what they care about and what are the terms that they use, because there’s really nothing worse than someone feeling like they’re being talked over, especially if they’re already suspicious of you, you know? So sometimes, for example, I’ll come in to do, say, a training or an audit, and the person who set up GA for me is like, Oh, this consultant is going to come in and they’re just going to tell everybody how bad I am.
And I’m like, Hey, this is not my goal here. I want to make you look good. So really establishing that rapport is really important. But then also, you know, what does your boss say? Do they say, I want the phone to ring? Okay, great. Then that’s what we’re going to talk about. I’m not going to say phone call conversions from, you know, organic search.
I’m going to talk about how many people Googled you and then called you. Right. So really making sure that you’re reframing your language and even if it’s not terms you necessarily always use, don’t force them to come to you. You should go to them. And this is an especially important agency side in house.
You’re kind of like a little agency sometimes because it’s not like everybody at that workplace does what you do. You’re like your own little agency inside the larger organization. So really think about changing your language to meet them where they are. So they don’t feel like they’re being talked down to. And you really want to try to break that wall for sure. So it’s not us versus them. We’re like, my data is better than your data. It’s all right. You know, this is interesting. Let’s take a look at this. How about we take a look at this too. And then we’re going to come together and make some decisions.
And I think it’s more going for that sort of consensus situation is really critical. So, you know, and again, really dial it back on what you present. Nobody likes a table except for you. And this is something I hammer home with marketers all the time, especially SEOs. We love Excel. We love Google sheets.
We use them all the time. Normal humans don’t like tables. Normal human beings don’t use Excel unless they’re like economists, and that’s not usually who we’re presenting to. Not talking to the accountants. We aren’t accountants. So stop showing tables, show graphs, show things that people can look at and understand immediately.
What it is that they’re looking at without having to really think about it a lot because you don’t want the friction to be the chart you present. You want the friction to be spent in changing their thinking about data and how much is coming in and what they can measure what they can’t measure. So, I think it’s just a matter of really thinking about how you can make this as accessible as possible?
You know, have someone in your life who you can. Go over the stuff with who doesn’t actually really know what’s going on, but knows enough, you know, like sometimes I’ll show things to my wife and I’m like, do you know what’s going on? She works at a museum. Like she’s, she probably knows more about GA4 just existing in this house.
[00:13:16] Katherine Watier Ong: That’s my husband.
He’s a musician, but I’m like, could you read this for me? Same thing. Yeah.
[00:13:21] Dana DiTomaso: Right. But I’ll show her parts and be like, does this make sense? You know, and then she’s like, Oh, I don’t understand this part. Okay, great. That’s really helpful. Right. So show it to someone who is not a marketer. And get their feedback and, and also be open to feedback too, you know, none of this is perfect.
[00:13:27] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what about if you are present, so you talked about streamlining it. Oh, I know what my additional thought was. So, do you have any tips that aren’t Tufti? Because I’m going to bring up Edward Tufti, which I covered in graduate school. Because of the story about the challenger explosion being driven by a bad graph.
It’s burned into my memory, but I don’t know if there’s an easy way for anybody to pick that up with an online article at the moment, other than buying his book and digging through the book. Do you have something similar where people have some awareness of how important it is to make sure that the graph is sort of accurate so that people don’t misinterpret the data when it’s in a graph?
[00:14:15] Dana DiTomaso: Yeah, so often, there’s some examples in the blog post about the marketing data being correct or incorrect. And can we fix it? No, so it’s, I think one of the things that I’ve been doing a lot of is instead of showing for example you’ve got like landing pages and sessions and conversion rate slash key event rates No one says key events, but let’s pretend that Google actually is making this happen.
It’s like fetch, it’s not going to happen, Google. So, you know, instead of showing landing pages and then a number of sessions and a number of key events or whatever it might be, show them as percentages of the total, you know, 49 percent of the visits came to this landing page and 23 percent of the conversions from this landing page.
Okay. Well those numbers. Don’t appear to line up what’s going on. Why isn’t this page doing as good of a job as it could be, right? That’s an immediate way to show if a page is, say, hitting above or below its weight in terms of conversions and are the right pages bringing people through in terms of conversions as well.
And so that’s something where if you just show the percentage of the total and, and don’t include the decimal points, you know, I do this in Looker Studio. I have a video on that blog post on exactly how to do this, but by default in Looker Studio, they’ll say 49.26. I do not care. 49.50 that’s just show the numbers don’t show the decimals like the less numbers you can show the better. But again, it’s really easy to look at the colored bars and see if the colored bars match, right?
And so anyone can grasp that chart even if you don’t read at all. You can still see the colored bars there’s some charts I present that don’t have any numbers on them at all and they’re just Layered pie charts, a doughnut wrapped around a pie chart. I also have an example of that on the website, too. So you can have a report that can show that your mobile website sucks without ever actually having to present a single number at all.
And there’s ways to do this and it’s just so visual and so easy for anyone to understand. And I think that that’s truly like one of the strongest reports you could present to people.
[00:16:03] Katherine Watier Ong: Oh, and it definitely sounds like a skill people have to work on. Not only absorb the information, but then, you know, make sure that’s what they’re trying to understand.
[00:16:11] Dana DiTomaso: And I think there’s a bit of insecurity too, like, especially if you’re just getting started and you’re like, Oh, this person is, you know, agency side, you’re like, This person is paying me all this money, I have to present this giant report, like, We’re not being paid by the pound. You know what, and, and there is certainly some confidence that has to go behind showing a client who’s paying you a lot of money a one or two page report with the results.
Right. But really thinking about it, like, nobody is excited about a 50 page report review. You know, no one wants that. This, so if they want more details, you can dig into it, bring the supplemental pieces. But reality is like, you’re just showing these top level metrics and then you can dig in if you need to.
So really err on the side of not making, picking the metrics that are going to be the most impactful for that situation and have supporting data, of course, but don’t try to show everything because nobody, nobody cares. I just want to know, am I making money? Am I making money by hiring you? Am I making money by continuing to pay your salary?
That’s the real question.
[00:17:07] Katherine Watier Ong: Oh, I mean also it’s attention span. I mean, I always do training on online writing of course, as most SEO do, and, you know, we’ve lost attention in the attention span over the years. You know, we’ve got less attention than a goldfish, and I think it also parlays over to other parts of our life.
It’s not just interacting online. I just think most of us don’t have a lot of attention span. Unfortunately, the internet’s changed our brains a bit, I think.
[00:17:31] Dana DiTomaso: Oh yeah.
[00:17:32 Katherine Watier Ong: For sure.
[00:17:33] Dana DiTomaso: And I think it’s just like, presenting reports is never a thrill ride. Like, try to make it as interesting as possible, but also accept the reality that, like, this is not exactly an exciting part of your day.
[00:17:40] Katherine Watier Ong: Right, and not an exciting part of their day. So that’s the reason not to do, you know, the pounds of reporting.
[00:17:46] Dana DiTomaso: One of the first jobs I had after university, so when I worked in software, I was doing training for CRM software. And this is, this will date me how old I am, it was for Lotus Notes CRM software.
[00:17:55] Katherine Watier Ong: Oh, yeah.
[00:17:56] Dana DiTomaso: Oh, yeah. So I flew all over the states doing training to salespeople who didn’t want to be there because they’re salespeople and they, you know, are movement oriented, action oriented, making phone calls kind of people. I was wasting a whole day of their time when they couldn’t be making commissions.
And, they didn’t have any input in the software a lot of the time. They were just like, handed this and said, here, you have to use it. One time I showed up at a training, I think it was in San Antonio, and the sales team had just decided to go golfing. And so the client’s like, yeah, none of them are here.
I guess we’re going to have to, I don’t know, you want to go to the Alamo? Like. Yeah. Okay, cool. Sure. That was what we ended up doing. So I think it’s a matter of really accepting that your audience may not want to be there and just trying to make it as entertaining as possible. Like not, you know, show and dance, but that’s part of what goes into my speaking now is that experience, that early experience, trying to get bored salespeople excited about CRM software.
[00:18:44] Katherine Watier Ong: Yep. Yep. I had a similar experience. I turned my, my first trainees were grandmothers when I was training folks of SEO. So, yeah, kind of similar. So I do have one episode of the show where we talk about delivering negative news, but I am kind of curious whether you have your own opinions about how you go about structuring.
But your communication style, what you actually present, and it’s negative stuff that you need to convey.
[00:19:21] Dana DiTomaso: Yeah, I usually try to just not beat around the bush, like just get into it immediately. So I can think of probably the worst piece of negative news recently that comes to mind that I had to deliver was one client we were helping with the GA4 transition.
This is pre sunset of UA, and we put the GA4 Code on the site and suddenly they’re like what something’s wrong. Our traffic has been cut in and like we got 25 percent of our traffic in GA4 and 100 percent of it in UA. I’m like, oh, I’ve done something horribly wrong. What’s going on? And I go and look and it turns out they had their UA code four times on the site.
So it was recording four page visits for every single visit because UA would allow that duplication and then GA4 there’s a setting which some people have. Turned off if you have a really old GA4, but usually it’s turned on that stops duplicate traffic from being recorded. And so I did a crawl of the site with Screening Frog and I pulled all the pages and some pages had it on there six times, some pages had it on there two times.
It was just completely inconsistent. But some of it is that like their traffic reports they have been providing for years were basically fairy tales. And so I mean I was able to talk to clients and be like, hey look, I know you’ve been presenting this to your boss every month, but somehow we’re gonna have to come up with a way to figure out how to be like, Oh, this is wrong.
And so I think trying to get them on your side immediately and be like, it’s not me data versus you data. It’s, it’s, you know, this horrible thing has happened and now we’re going to fix it together, you know? And, and just really trying to be like, look, this is what happened. We don’t know how it happened.
It turns out the developers were just like adding the code in random places for no good reason. So we got everything in tag manager, which settled sort of the problem. And you know, it’s better in GA for now, but it’s still like. It’s like a horrible thing to have to realize that things have been wrong for years.
And so like that’s the kind of thing that people think, Oh God, I’m going to get fired. And it’s like, that’s where you have to really figure out, don’t lie about it. Be honest, be upfront and just be like, look, this is what happened. And if you screwed up. Then, you know, say I screwed up. This is what I did.
Explain how you’re going to fix it and then explain how you’re not going to let that happen again. Right? So that’s, that’s the other part of it too, you know, and, and sometimes certainly, you know, I’ve screwed up in my career and we’ve lost a client because of it. Happens to everybody. And I think it’s just like accepting, it’s part of accepting that you’re human.
You know, and we all do stupid things at least once. Like I’m sure everyone has sent an email accidentally to the wrong person at some point in their careers. And this is before Gmail had the, no, I want that back button. Right. Yeah. Right? Like, everybody has screwed up at some point. And just remember that some scripts are more public than others, and really it’s just an opportunity to learn from stuff.
No one, no one hits it 100 percent of the time, and that’s, that’s okay.
[00:21:50] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, I actually had a client, it was relatively short term, because I was just helping with a migration, and then it sort of petered out, they didn’t want additional help, but, and maybe I doomed myself, but I did get into the analytics, and they were a publisher, and I discovered that they were perpetually refreshing their homepage and selling advertising.
[00:22:11] Dana DiTomaso: Wow!
[00:22:12] Katherine Watier Ong: And when I pointed it out to them, they knew what they were doing and they did not want any advice from me.
[00:22:17] Dana DiTomaso: Okay. Yeah. And at that point, you’re like, you know what? I’ve done my due diligence. I’m just going to walk away now. Yep. Yep. I remember one, one client too, they had a, they had a refresh on their homepage and their bounce rate.
This is UA land was like 0. 06%. And I was like, Hey, when we do these changes for your analytics, this is going to impact your bounce rate. They’re like, but our bounce rate is so good. I’m like, but it’s a lie. It’s not, it’s not a real metric, you know, and their web developer knew what was going on and fought me so hard.
I’m making those changes. I don’t know if they, we ended up just stopping working with them. Cause it was just like, I can’t help you if you’re not going to let me help you.
[00:22:52 Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah.
[00:22:53] Dana DiTomaso: Help me help you.
[00:22:54] Katherine Watier Ong: I know. I mean, I was the point person for analytics for at least a year at Ketchum before I started hiring my team.
And, somebody came up to me with this website well before I even started. They’re like, can you tell us how much traffic it’s got? And I’m like, and it was built by Ketchum. And I was like, well, it has no analytics on it. They’re like, well, you can’t tell us anything. Yeah, I can’t tell you anything else.
[00:23:15] Dana DiTomaso: It’s just all fairy tales at this point.
[00:23:17] Katherine Watier Ong: It’s totally fairy tales. So, let’s pivot a bit to like the technical SEO side. What if you’ve got all these data points, and you have to sort through the actions and start prioritizing them based on what could be taken and ultimately, what are your takeaways there?
What tips do you have for people there?
[00:23:24] Dana DiTomaso: Yeah, usually I start by thinking about, you know, effort and impact. And so as a real broad triage, it’s just like one through three for effort, one through three for impact. Start there, and then go back and be like, okay, these things are really critical. Is it actually going to happen?
You know who’s responsible for this? Does that mean it’s actually going to happen? And I think I think a big mistake that people make again is just thinking you’re being paid by the pound and you present this enormous audit. And sometimes I have done that at the request of the client when they’re working with an external vendor who’s refusing to accept anything is wrong with their beautiful perfect website when things are horribly wrong with it.
[00:24:11] Katherine Watier Ong: Mm-hmm .
[00:24:12] Dana DiTomaso: I think the worst one I saw recently I posted about this in the WomenInTechSEO, was when you went to a 404 URL, it showed the homepage and it presented a 200 code. How do you do that? Like what..
[00:24:23] Katherine Watier Ong: That’s very creative.
[00:23:24] Dana DiTomaso: And the client asked me, like, how are they doing? It’s like, I don’t know anymore.
[00:24:27] Katherine Watier Ong: I don’t know. Right.
[00:24:28] Dana DiTomaso: It was a custom built CMS too on top of everything else. Like it’s 2025, there’s lots of options out there. Don’t build your own CMS anymore.
[00:24:36] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, right.
[00:27:16] Dana DiTomaso: Maybe in like 96, you could do that. But anyway, I think that that’s really important too is just to realize like what’s actually going to get implemented and also go through it with, you know, the client be like, Hey, look, these are the top 10 things that I’ve pulled out of this list.
Here’s some things that we can do. And here’s some things that I think your team should do or, or your team has to do. What’s their availability like, can we get some points or however, like find out how they work. Are they working on a point system? Are they working on time? Are they, you know, how can you get on one of their sprints or whatever it is that they’re work on and sometimes pick something first that you think is going to be a big win because that can really get them on board for future stuff.
So one client we were working with, they had, they were a home builder and they had this wild canonicalization situation where they had homes that were ready to, that were already built. Quick possession homes. And then they had homes where it was like, here’s such a home. And so each of the quick possession homes were canonicaled to the show home, even though the pages were completely different.
And I was like, and they’re like, yeah, I don’t know why these pages just aren’t, you know, being picked out. And the show home pages were actually feeling the impact of that. And they weren’t really coming up in search results. And it’s like, well, let’s fix all these canonicals. They were so skeptical. I’m like, let’s just try it.
And if it doesn’t work, we can switch it back. Like, let’s just see what happens. ’cause the internet, it’s all about experimentation, right?
[00:25:54] Katherine Watier Ong: Right.
[00:25:56] Dana DiTomaso: Little jazz hands there. and I have never seen, I think they got 70% of organic traffic back in two weeks.
[00:26:00] Katherine Watier Ong: Wow.
[00:26:02] Dana DiTomaso: And I’d never seen that happen before. I was like, I did not see this coming.
And I told them too, I was like, I was expecting maybe like 10%, 20% maybe if I had a good day. 70%. And then after that, every single recommendation we made was implemented immediately. Right. And so like, I can’t guarantee you’re gonna get that kind of halo, but go through it. Be like, what is the easiest thing that we think can be implemented without a ton of effort, even if it isn’t necessarily the thing that is the most on fire, what feels quickest to be able to see some impact as soon as possible, because that can really help you get buy in.
And, and yeah, of course you want to start with the things that are absolutely the most on fire, but is there something that’s super fast? So maybe it’s like the robots file is restricting image. The image folder and you know that like every time you Google search a really important phrase for this particular website, like an image search is shown.
Maybe you just need to allow the images to be indexed. Maybe that’s all you have to do at that point, right? Just do that and see what happens, right? So maybe that’s one of the quick wins. I think the thing that I get most frustrated, especially with the WordPress websites, and we, we develop WordPress websites, we run into WordPress devs all the time, and like, there’s a real difference between a WordPress developer and someone who has a theme and clicks buttons in the theme.
[00:27:10] Katherine Watier Ong: Yes.
[00:27:10] Dana DiTomaso: You know, and its people are like, Oh, well, I’m using oxygen to build my websites like, Oh, great. That’s really excited to take a look at this thing.
I think that’s where you shouldn’t call yourself a WordPress developer. I’m sorry. I hate being a gatekeeper. But like please, it’s not WordPress development. You’re basically building a theme on top of the platform at that point. And you’re going to have technical SEO issues as a result. So if you’re okay with that, like, except there’s going to be technical SEO issues, and maybe you’re going to have to spend more on paid as a result.
You’re going to have to invest more in content as a result or whatever it might be, maybe do more connected TV ads or whatever it’s going to be, but you’re going to have to invest more elsewhere because you have these technical limitations.
[00:27:53] Katherine Watier Ong: Right, totally, so I’m so kind of curious because it’s been floating around over the last month about whether or not you’ve pivoted the conversation when you get a little stuck persuading somebody and talked about what would happen if you took no action.
[00:28:06] Dana DiTomaso: Yeah.
[00:28:07] Katherine Watier Ong: And I forget who shared this on my research pilot about what the impact would be if you did no SEO for three years.
[00:28:13] Dana DiTomaso: Yeah, yeah, and I think actually there’s some people are about to find out Like economy wise one of the first things to go when the economy is potentially in a downturn Or there’s uncertainty in the market is people ditch spending on marketing, right?
[00:28:26] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah.
[00:28:27] Dana DiTomaso: And you know we’ve had situations where you always end up with a great case study where like a client’s credit card gets compromised and then their Google ads get shut off and you’re like, great, I guess for the next two weeks, we’re going to find out what happens. I have no Google ads, you know, and it’s like, yeah, that’s a great case study, unfortunately.
Same thing with SEO. I think that there are some, one of the things that I usually say is like, if you don’t do any SEO, your competitors are going to keep doing SEO. So when you do finally turn it back, it’s not, it’s not ads. You can’t just turn it back on again. It’s not a tab. So you’re going to have to catch up with not only where the competitors were, but then also, you know, where you’re going with that as well. So, so your competitor starts here and you decide, you know, I’m just going to sit here for the start line. I’m not actually going to do anything, but the competitors are running ahead and you’re like, okay, well, great.
Now I have one year to catch up with their three years of effort. It’s not physically possible. And I think that that’s where, and you’re going to lose all that institutional knowledge of, well, like if you get rid of your SEO team internally, you’re going to lose all that institutional knowledge of, well, of what SEO is doing.
And right now, SEO is in one of those periods where it’s going through a massive amount of change. Like I think about the Florida update and how that changed SEO. And for people who are too young to know what I’m talking about, Google it but that was the first major shakeup in terms of SEO. And that felt like a huge SEO difference. And I feel like this AI stuff and everything else we’re going through, quality content and overviews and everything else is another massive shakeup in SEO. So if you have that knowledge, you have to start over again. Like that’s, that’s rough. So maybe pull back and don’t do as much if you, you know, but you got to keep an eye on your competitors and if they’re doubling down.
And honestly, I think that if I was advising a company on this and they’re like, I don’t know what we’re going to do. You know, maybe now’s the time to invest because if your competitors are going to stop investing, this is your chance.
[00:30:15] Katherine Watier Ong: And normally I do not share stuff by Neil Patel particularly, but he also did some research about what happens when you stop doing social media.
Which I thought was very interesting because it’s just new research that I have seen. Same thing. You stop doing it. You’re going to see a decrease in traffic and engagement and brand awareness and all the rest.
[00:30:32] Dana DiTomaso: Unless it’s a social channel you weren’t seeing anything from. So for example, like I’ve stopped posting on like, you know, Twitter/X and, you know, but picked up on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
And I think too, for companies like you don’t have to be everywhere. That’s okay. Now just make sure to say like we’re over here now. And so that people don’t come to you looking for customer service support or something.
[00:30:51 Katherine Watier Ong: Right. Yeah, and then when I started to catch them, they had a set of social accounts that they gave to every single client and I was like, why?
They’re very different brands and their audience is not particularly on all of these platforms and we should never launch with four all at once a lot, you know, yeah A ton of budget, you know, crank it back to ones where you can actually be successful.
[00:31:11] Dana DiTomaso: You just toss the intern on that, right? They can just crank out social media content, no problem.
Yeah, yeah.
[00:31:16] Katherine Watier Ong: Or that. If you do have lower level people, I’m going to plug this actually, I actually have a guide on my website about how to codify your brand voice and actually train all of your lower level employees to make sure they’re consistently answering in your brand voice and staying within guidelines because I actually had to do that once so if if that’s you, feel free to grab the guide.
It’s free. So how do you here? We get to the part where I was talking about in relation to the most recent speaking engagements you’ve had. But what do you do when the stuff is missing? And how do you coach people to make confident decisions when the data does not provide a clear answer or it’s missing?
[00:31:50] Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. Yeah. I’m working on a post right now about the analytics hierarchy. Yeah. And like, you know, some people like level zero if we have no analytics. Because that still happens. People don’t have analytics or they don’t know where it is. Maybe I hear..
[00:32:04 Katherine Watier Ong: Or they lost the login.
[00:32:05] Dana DiTomaso: Well, the agency is like, Oh, you’re not working anymore.
We’re taking our analytics with us. Like first off agency people don’t do that. It’s not a good way to keep clients. It’s never worked. It’s not going to work, just going to piss people off. And then a five is like, you, you know, basically are like that, that meme of, you know, the galaxy brain analytics, right? Like nobody’s ever there.
So really thinking about where you’re at on that. Stages and then what’s the appropriate decision for this? So if you are literally like you’re working with a client or somewhere and they have no analytics at all, then get some first step just write it to the site and then you might have to make some judgment calls based on what third party tools are telling you in terms of volume or audience size, or looking at your competitors and seeing what they’re doing.
You know, like, I think at that point, you’re really just going off of what competitors are doing. And if you do use tools, like some rush or similar web, that give you estimates of traffic, your own site in, in addition to those competitors and. If your own site, once you do have some data is somewhat close to what it says in there.
Great. Maybe your competitors are also somewhat close to what their reality is. But if you go into a similar web and they’re like, you have 1 million visitors a month when you know you have like 20,000, then it’s probably off by that degree as well, and especially for people in smaller industries, those tools aren’t going to do anything for you.
If you are a small, you know, several location business in one geography, those kinds of competitive research tools, unfortunately, aren’t really going to help. So you do have to have some data to go off of, for sure.
[00:33:33] Katherine Watier Ong: So, since this podcast is all about soft skills, what are the soft skills that you think analytic people need, particularly when you’re receiving pushback or resistance?
[00:33:43] Dana DiTomaso: You definitely have to be very pleasant.
I think it’s pleasant, and get a good poker face. For sure. I say this as someone who doesn’t always necessarily have a great poker face.
But I don’t, my father in law was in the Navy. He’s very good at poker. And since I live out here now and he plays against me, I finally beat him once. Like, Oh, I know, right? Like it’s not gonna happen again, but once I did, I finally got good at poker face, but I think for sure, like being able to take in information and just being comfortable being like, I don’t know, I’ll get back to you.
Like that is a really important skill as well to just be honest and unfortunately sometimes some people are gonna lie and you just have to not necessarily poop on them too much about it because nobody likes someone who’s there just smack talking a competitor either. So I think it’s that that balance of like being honest being Pleasant and cheerful, charming, maybe, you know, and also, but also not like in a slimy snake oil salesman kind of way, because what you’re presenting from an analytics perspective is not exactly exciting to people, or they already might be coming into it with a backup because they feel like they’re going to get talked over if that’s been their previous experience with an analytics person.
So being able to ensure that you’re watching what people are. How people are responding to you, that body language, if it’s on zoom, like, are they engaging with the camera? Are they looking down or off to the side? Are they, you know, fiddling with stuff? Are they actually paying attention? Or there’s some people who just like to draw or write while they talk to you.
And that’s something that you’ll learn about them over time. But really watching people’s body language and seeing how they’re responding to you is really critical. And when I’ve been doing training, I definitely like looking around. Seeing how people are responding and then really thinking about, you know, this person seems like they’re disengaging a little bit, but I don’t want to call them out in front of everyone else.
Cause that’s embarrassing. But like, take a break, go over and be like, Hey, you know, how are you enjoying it? Don’t be like, Hey, I noticed you weren’t paying attention. Are you hating this thing? Maybe they had an emergency come up or something and be like, Hey, how’s it going? Is there anything else I can cover?
And sometimes people are comfortable telling you in a one on one situation when they’re not comfortable telling you in front of a crowd.
So if you’re really trying to get people to like you, it’s almost as important as presenting good data.
[00:36:01] Katherine Watier Ong: No, it’s huge. It’s huge on the sales end. I mean, I actually had a job in sales once in my life and it floored me how many people I was able to sell the product to. Frankly, It was an online internet product, and sometimes I presented it without internet.
I still sold it. I’m like, oh sure, and we’d talk about it. And in one instance, it was because all the friends bought it. Like, I would strategically go into a state and like, sell to all the other like organizations and then circle back to the one that was 80 and had no internet. Hey, your friends have bought it, and she will buy it.
It was all about befriending their friends and being liked. It’s amazing how much sales is part of that.
[00:36:43] Dana DiTomaso: I also think there’s two great books by April Dunford that I recommend people read and they’re actually on the shelf behind me right now. So the first one is Obviously Awesome. And that talks about brand positioning for products, but it also can, I really took it as like brand positioning for yourself and how you’re talking to people.
And then the second one is Sales Pitch and that’s definitely more sales oriented. Both books are super quick. I read them both. I read one flying from Vancouver to Toronto and the other from Toronto to Vancouver. So it is, it’s a quick four and a half hour read and yeah, fantastic. And April as well, she has a podcast.
She’s probably one of my top speakers to watch of all time. If you’re looking for tips on how to be a better speaker, watch some of April’s talks, she’s just at the top of her game. But I really like what she has to say about positioning and as you read it and you’re thinking about yourself and how you position yourself and how you bring your product, which is reporting or discussions or consulting or whatever it might be to clients or internally, think about how you can position those.
[00:37:41] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, that’s a great tip. So let’s talk a bit about the analytics culture. So if you’re helping, I mean, you run an agency. So in this instance, it would be helping a client brand new to SEO sort of look at the data on a regular basis and build that cadence. Particularly in my case, I’m also talking to people about the next step after that, which is maybe rework some job descriptions.
So it’s a bit tied to how things perform. So there’s a carrot and a stick because otherwise you’re never gonna. Yeah. Some people are going to instantly be interested in what you’re doing and pick it up because they just happen to be dorky and they’re excited about it. The vast majority of people need some sort of push or pull to align with this internet culture thing that was not part of the culture before.
So what kind of tips do you have about how to engineer that or help the client engineer it?
[00:38:29] Dana DiTomaso: Yeah, I, I typically like to have some sort of recurring meetings with clients and that’s just like, can be like a check in because sometimes too, you’re pretty low on the priority list from an agency perspective.
Like, you are not sadly top of mind for the client. Most of the time, unless things are going wrong. So the important thing is to keep that, keep that conversation going, even when things are going well. And so set up regular calls with them. Especially if you have to do items for them because that will remind them to do the thing before the call.
Otherwise it may never actually be done. And this is important as well for like technical SEO for really anything like you got to schedule those regular checkups or else it’ll never happen. They’ll get put off until everyone dies, heat death of the universe of technical SEO pieces are still not implemented.
So I think it’s important to have those regular calls. And then also on those calls, you know, really thinking about what I want to review with them? So sometimes I’ll start off with just like a, Hey, let’s take a look and see how things are going. And then be like, Hey, I noticed this. And then having discussions about those pieces and that can go in all sorts of really interesting directions.
Usually, um, you know, I’ll have my main screen, my zoom, and then I have my second screen. I’ll have some notes I’ve written for myself in advance. I’ll have the reports. I’ll have like some stuff ready for screen sharing, but also just thinking and also having their website open and being like, all right, let’s walk through this.
You know, let’s do this Google search and see what comes up and let’s talk about how. You know, how this, path would go for a potential user who’s thinking about this. And sometimes, you know, also show the client mobile. Don’t always show them desktop, especially if mobile is more than, like, half of their traffic, which in B2C industries it generally is.
In B2B it’s more. hit or miss for sure. You know, for sure just to have it up and mobile because sometimes the client doesn’t look at their own site on mobile ever and we all use these big beautiful desktops with these giant monitors all day and it’s not a mobile device. So, so definitely make sure to have that mobile up there and really thinking about that experience and then just note down things and be like, oh, hey, I noticed this.
I noticed that. Don’t feel like you have to stay in your lane. You know, if you notice an usability issue, even though maybe technically you’re just talking about analytics or just talking about content or whatever, note that because, you know, if you see something, say something. I think that’s really critical and also shows the client that you’ve got their back and you’re helping them in more than just this particular, you know, whatever lane that client has put you in.
[00:40:43] Katherine Watier Ong: So it sounds like you’re really trying to sort of have them watch you walk through your data analysis and being curious about what’s going on.
[00:40:51] Dana DiTomaso: Oh, yeah. And it’s like being a detective. I think that the most exciting part of this job is just being that detective and digging through stuff and being like, why is this happening?
Or why is that happening? Or look at this, you know, one of my favorite things to do with clients is actually go into Google search console and look at a page and look at the keywords for that page and then look at. Find queries that aren’t 100 percent related to that page, but it’s still coming up anyway, even if there’s no clicks, maybe there’s not even that many impressions, but being like, look at this topic group that is coming up.
Like, this is really interesting. Tell me, do you have conversations about this internally? Is this something we should talk about? And really thinking about, like, we already see this in the data. Let’s do something about it.
[00:41:32] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, I love the mobile tip. I particularly because all my clients are here in the DC area and we were sitting on top of where the internet was created.
So the speed here is not like everywhere else. And I was working with the fisheries division of NOAA and they actually had functionality. They wanted people to use fishermen on boats.
[00:41:50] Dana DiTomaso: Oh, good luck.
[00:41:52] Katherine Watier Ong: Exactly. So, one of the first things I did was, thank you GTmetrix, you can like pivot to a location, I can’t put them out into sea, but I can get sort of close in relation to ruralness, and then flip to mobile, and force them to, I always do this, I actually record the video, and I forced everybody to sit through the video.
That tells the story better than anything else because people start getting itchy because they’re like, why is it still loading?
[00:42:15] Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. What’s taking so long? Is my browser broken? Is the site broken? Like, yeah, that is what that Fisher person is thinking right now while they’re stuck out on a lake, you know,
[00:42:23] Katherine Watier Ong: Exactly, exactly. Yeah.
[00:42:25] Dana DiTomaso: 100%. Yeah. It’s a 100. That’s great. you know, thing for that too. And as someone who lives in a rural area, boy, do I get excited about, you know, like sometimes where I live is very close to the U. S. border. And so we can see, we can see America from our house. And, sometimes I’ll just be sitting in my living room.
My phone’s like, welcome to the USA. Like I did nothing. I didn’t even move. And I’m in the States. And so we have like, I always have to, we have a thing with the cell phone company where we’re in America for less than five minutes. They don’t actually charge us for it. And then we go back to Canada again, later on, like, welcome back to Canada.
Did nothing. Still watching tv, but you know, thinking about it like in that period I have bad internet pretty regularly unless i’m on wi fi And so trying to do literally anything is so frustrating. I also you know, if you have a retail location, too, one of the things that I always do and I’m sure I can’t be alone in this is sometimes this is particularly bad for Home Depot.
I’ll be standing in Home Depot and I want to, you know, look up a product and I’m in your store and I go to your website and the back of the store sucks for mobile, you know, I don’t have free internet or whatever it might be, you know, just like make that easier for people. I, I think it’d be really interesting if your retail location to try to see the number of people who are probably like accessing your website from your actual retail location, which not only tells you that, like, Maybe your signage sucks or you need kiosks or you need people actually going to make sure that people are, you know, I mean, Home Depot is generally pretty good.
If you look slightly confused, they’ll come up to you and ask you if you need help with something, but like other stores there is not so much for that. And I think that’s where it’s, you know, important to look at that data too.
[00:43:56] Katherine Watier Ong: I think that depends on where you live in the US. I always get floored with how good customer service is.
Not here. Anyway, just a side note about DC. If you come to DC, we have horrible customer service.
[00:44:06] Dana DiTomaso: Well, I do find that American customer service is definitely more aggressive than Canadian customer service. Canadian customer service is like, hmm, I don’t feel like talking to anybody unless you ask.
You know.
[00:44:15] Katherine Watier Ong: Well, DC is full of non-trained customer service. I’m going to be aggressive. Why are you bothering me?
And I always forget that other places are nice to travel to Seattle because my family, my husband’s family, is from Seattle. And every single time I’m floored by how nice people are, because it’s just very different here. Oh, yeah. So I’m kind of curious, what do you think this is like with the 10,000 questions.
What do you think about the future of data analytics like the next 5-10 years with all this AI stuff and machine learning and the death of data? What are we doing?
[00:44:50] Dana DiTomaso: I think I think that’s really more so than the machine learning thing. I think actually the death of trackable data is really going to be what does this in, but I think it’s going to vary wildly based on location, you know, it’s, you know, the EU is clamping down more and more. I mean, I think the EU really wants to have it so that you have to opt-in, you know, it’s like everybody
[00:45:12] Katherine Watier Ong: How many people are going to do that too?
[00:45:14] Dana DiTomaso: No, they’re going to click it accidentally and be like, Oh, no, this is, you know, the EU would really want to go to an opt-in model.
The U. S. probably, if you know, early would probably want to have no tracking restrictions at all. You can track whatever you want to opt into. And I think it’s just like a philosophy to how that particular area has towards tracking. And so I think it’s going to really depend on where you are in terms of the clients that you service, what you can and can’t track.
But I think one of the things that people really need to be more aware of is if you’re actually following the rules. Just having a consent banner on your website doesn’t actually stop tracking. You have to actually attach it so that choices are made on the back end based on what people say. I think one of the more egregious ones I saw was this.
Very large housewares brand that you would absolutely recognize as in every store in North America, probably, and in Europe. And, when you went on their website and you said, no, don’t track me, it sent off a conversion event to Facebook. Like, cool. Yep. That’s a big fine. That was a very large And I was, and I had my VPN set to Copenhagen.
So that was what it was doing for European visitors. It was like, you are screwed. And they’re like, yeah, our Google Ads got shut off. Cause they said we weren’t, we weren’t, respecting consent choices. Like, no, you definitely are not. And yeah, it’s just like, just having the banner does nothing. So I think it is important to educate yourself on like, is this actually being tracked properly, but then also explaining to leadership, like, this is why this is going down.
There’s so many threads. I see all the time on like all the different slacks I belong to and the Google on Reddit, the GA4 forums, Reddit and the Google forums for GA4. And they’re like, we put in consent management. Now we see 50 percent of our traffic. What have we done wrong? Like, that’s literally what consent management is.
That’s, that’s, that’s what’s supposed to happen.
[00:47:02] Katherine Watier Ong: You’ve done it right.
[00:47:03] Dana DiTomaso: Yes.
[00:47:04] Katherine Watier Ong: Good job.
[00:47:06] Dana DiTomaso: You did it correctly. You know? Yeah. And I think that’s where it’s just like, this huge, education gap. Which, you know, like, I’m trying to fill, but I’m just one person. Yeah. It needs to be out there in the world too, that like, this is what’s going to happen.
So depending upon where you are, you’re either going to have lots of data, or you’re going to have very little data at all. And based on that, Night, you’re going to have to make some choices . And sitting around saying, Oh, I wish I could track everyone is not actually going to solve the problem. You just have to think of other ways that you can get the data that you need without actually violating things that cost your company a lot of money.
[00:47:35] Katherine Watier Ong: Right. Right.
So this has been amazing. Tons of helpful tips, I think. And there’s going to be a ton of stuff on the landing page, so feel free to check it all out. What if you had other resources or wins you wanted to share with listeners?
[00:47:51] Dana DiTomaso: Yeah, I would say my two courses are particularly something that I talk a lot about.
So my first course is called Analytics for Agencies, and it is analytics for agencies, although we have some in-house people in there, too. It is exactly what we do at Kick Point when I am setting up analytics for our clients. These are all of my plans. These are my templates. It is my Google Tag Manager container.
These are my Looker Studio templates, my documents. The sales process, everything else. There’s something like seven and a half hours of videos. So yeah, there’s available. And then there’s also a Practical GA4 course, which is a practical application of GA from start to finish. So it doesn’t just walk you through.
And I think one of the things that I, as a, as a former trainer, and I think generally, like, I think that. Courses don’t do well as they’re like, click on this, you know, click save to save. Well, yeah, we all, we all know that the button’s called save. We can figure that out. That’s not the point of this course.
The point is, when would I need to do this? What are the common use cases that you see for GA4? So I have lots of how to’s based on questions that we’ve been asked from clients. And then also people in the course, there’s a community that comes along with it. And people in Analytics for Agencies have a bi weekly office hours.
They can attend Zoom with me too. And the questions people ask eventually become part of the course too. And I’m updating it as often as I can. Cause you know, GA4 changes approximately every 10 minutes, right? So definitely check those out. And if buying a course, not in your budget right now, I have the playbook huddle, which is at kpplaybook.com/newsletter. That’s a bi weekly newsletter. And we have exclusive tips that are just in the newsletter and nowhere else.
[00:49:20] Katherine Watier Ong: Right? Yeah, this has been awesome. So how can people learn more about you?
[00:49:22] Dana DiTomaso: I would say LinkedIn is probably the place that I’m the most active, and if you Google Dana DiTomaso and really any variation of how you think my last name should be spelled, I should come up.
So, it’s when I check Google Search Console, I’m like, wow, that’s a way to spell my last name. So yeah.
[00:49:32] Katherine Watier Ong: There you go. So this has been fabulous. Thanks again for coming on the show. Definitely check out the resources and watch some of her other whiteboard Fridays. They’re really enlightening. Yeah, thanks again.
[00:49:48] Dana DiTomaso: Yeah. Thanks for having me.
[00:49:50] Katherine Watier Ong: Thanks for listening. To find out more about the podcast and what we’re up to, go to DigitalMarketingVictories.com. And if you like what you heard, subscribe to us on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.
Rate us, comment, and share the podcast, please. I’m always looking for new ideas, topics, and guests. Email us at digitalmarketingvictories@gmail.com or DM us on Twitter @dmvictories. Thanks for listening.
Leave a Reply