INBOX INSIGHTS, February 14, 2024: The Problem with Jargon, GA4 Diagnostics - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

INBOX INSIGHTS: The Problem with Jargon, GA4 Diagnostics (2/14) :: View in browser

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The Problem with Using Jargon – Part 1

Jargon can make people feel less intelligent. Sometimes it’s weaponized to keep people down. Many who use it struggle to communicate without it.

Being in business and tech, I run into this all the time, both on the giving and receiving end. This morning, I had an experience where someone from the financial industry mentioned a concept with which I wasn’t too familiar. When I asked him to explain in more detail he immediately turned condescending and made me regret asking.

Jargon is occupation-specific shorthand language that can be hard for someone not on the inside to understand.

Some common examples:

Circle-back – let’s come back to this topic
Level set – let’s all get on the same page with the information
Put a pin in it – now isn’t the time to discuss but it’s important to follow up on

When you get into different disciplines, the jargon becomes even more complex.

In software development, we’d use phrases like:

Swim lanes – different stages of work efforts
Scrum – a planning meeting
Sprint – a two-week development effort

In project management, the jargon includes:

Bottlenecks – people or dependencies preventing tasks from moving forward
Waterfall – a type of task completion where one task is reliant on the previous
WBP – a work back plan where you create your timeline in reverse order from the end date

The point is that we all have our versions of short-hand language. It might save you some time but it could do big damage. What happens when we’re over-reliant on jargon to communicate?

Creating Barriers to Understanding

Using jargon can create a culture and set a tone where users feel alienated. It’s hard to feel confident participating when you’re not sure what’s going on. It can start to feel like a members-only club and outsiders aren’t sure how to get invited in.

Signals Exclusion or Elitism

Jargon can unintentionally make someone seem superior. When we feel like we aren’t smart enough to hold a conversation with someone, there are lots of missed opportunities. Conversely, if we’re using jargon that only a few people understand, we’re excluding the majority of our audience.

Reducing Engagement

Are you using jargon in your content marketing? Short-hand and specialized language limit the audience’s willingness to engage. If they don’t understand what you’re talking about, they’ll skip over your content. Your competitors are happy to create content for your audience that isn’t confusing. Don’t let them steal away your people!

Negatively Affects Brand Trust

Overuse of jargon in your marketing can appear empty and soulless. There is no authority, no value provided. It’s just a bunch of meaningless words. Your audience will lose confidence in your voice and may begin to distrust your opinions.

There are a lot of ways that we can make our audience feel “less than”, even when we don’t mean to. The overuse of jargon is one of those ways and is preventable. In Part 2 I’ll give some tips if you’re the one talking in jargon and how to get out of your own way.

Are you over-reliant on jargon? Reply to this email to tell me or come join the conversation in our Free Slack Group, Analytics for Marketers.

– Katie Robbert, CEO

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Diagnostic Reports of GA4 Health, Part 2 of 4

As we covered recently on the Trust Insights livestream, Google Analytics 4 can be a bit cumbersome to use. So starting this week, I’ll be sharing a four part series on diagnostic analytics for GA4, to understand whether or not your GA4 is working correctly. It’s important to note that we won’t be examining GA4 for marketing purposes – this is bare bones, bare metal “is it working?” Stuff.

This week, let’s dig into events and conversions. I personally extract the data from GA4 via the API but you can easily build this chart in seconds in the Explorations menu. Choose event name and is conversion event from the dimensions, and event count from the metrics:

What we’re looking for here is the state of events and conversions in GA4. Recall that unlike the previous version of Google Analytics, in GA4, EVERYTHING is an event. Whether it’s a shopping cart purchase, a B2B sales demo request, or a swipe in a mobile app video game, anything and everything that a user does is an event. Some events are more valuable than others, and those are events we specify in GA4 as conversions.

What we’re looking for in this chart is very straightforward: what events and conversions are set, and how much data are we collecting for each of them?

One of the most important best practices here when setting up GA4 is a consistent naming schema for events and conversions. An awful lot of people just set up non-obvious names that then makes governance challenging later. As an example of a best practice, when I set up events that I know will be conversions, I’ll prefix them with conv_, like conv_email_subscribe. There’s no ambiguity there, so if/when the account changes hands and personnel change, it’s fast and easy for new people to get up to speed. Equally important, from a diagnostic perspective, if we’ve named an event conv_something and it’s NOT showing up as a conversion, we know something’s gone wrong.

GA4 comes with a number of events that are built in, like session_start and form_submit. Depending on your situation, you may or may not want these as conversions.

Remember that ONLY conversions show up in the attribution reporting, so if there’s an event you’d like to do attribution on, mark it as a conversion. Typically when I set up a GA4 account, I’ll create three classes of conversions: awareness, behavior, and conversion.

Awareness conversions are things like new users, where you’re attracting net new people to your property – and you might want to know what channels are doing best with that.

Behavior conversions are engagements that lead to retention of an audience and potentially buyer intent. These are conversions like newsletter subscribes, where someone is giving you an alternate sale. They’re not ready to buy yet, they’re not a marketing qualified lead yet, but they’re more interested than the casual passerby.

Conversion conversions are, of course, valuable actual conversions like shopping cart checkouts, demo requests – anything that has a clear line of site to an important business objective.

Equally important when looking at this diagnostic report is to see what’s not there. Is there an event set up, perhaps in Google Tag Manager, that isn’t showing up? If so, either something has gone wrong in configuration, or that event has no traffic to it. Neither case is optimal, and that’s an important thing to troubleshoot.

In the next piece in this series, we’ll look at pages receiving direct traffic.

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