So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live
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In this week’s episode of So What? Pivoting Your Agency & Clients to Google Analytics 4. We answer your questions about pivoting your agency to GA4. Catch the replay here:
In this episode you’ll learn:
- How to talk to clients about the Google Analytics 4 deadline
- How to address gaps in your team’s knowledge about Google Analytics 4 and get up to speed quickly
- Plus answers to your questions! Got a question about your agency & GA4? Submit it to us in our Free Slack Group Analytics for Marketers! Not a member? Join today at trustinsights.ai/analyticsformarketers
Upcoming Episodes:
- Exploratory Data Analysis – 4/28
- Customizing GA4 – 5/5
Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/resources/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/
AI-Generated Transcript:
Katie Robbert 0:00
Hi. Well, hello, everyone, Happy Thursday. Welcome to so what the marketing analytics and insights live show I’m Katie joined by Chris and John. This week we are answering your questions about pivoting your agency and clients to Google Analytics 4. You know, we want to talk through what the deadline means, you know, we’ve been talking about Google Analytics 4, you know, week after week, because it’s actually really important. So we want to just dig into some specific questions. One of the questions I have for both of you is, I know, I’ve started to see and I think, John, you pointed this out, too, is I’ve started to see wizards and you know, transition tools and things that are meant to make transitioning from Google Analytics 3 to Google Analytics 4. Easy. I think there’s even you know, some sort of, you know, a wizard tool in Google Analytics. Is it really that easy? Are these tools going to make more of a mess of things? Or are these tools really going to help people?
Christopher Penn 1:27
It depends. The, the answer to that depends on the complexity of the install. So like marketing over coffee, for example, there’s one goal, right? Because this contact form, so using conversion. Stupid, that’s it exactly. The conversion to a GA for account is pretty simple. Even the official conversion tool from Google, I have issues with because it goes against their best practices, the best practices that you do your configuration and Tag Manager, use GA for analysis, and you do your reporting and data studio. And what’s inside a GA for for some organizations is a scaled down version of Tag Manager, for people who just want to force GA for to do everything. It’s not a best practice. It’s it’s more I think it’s more difficult to use. And it causes I think, more governance issues. But if you want a one button solution, if your goals are simple enough, it will attempt to migrate them, it will. And there’s a bunch of warnings on it like this is going to try to migrate everything in this view. So if there’s stuff that’s turned off, there’s stuff that you don’t want to bring over this stuff that doesn’t work, it’s going to try and bring those things over to and this obviously the possibility of duplicate goals, goals that don’t work directly and stuff. I would be very, very hesitant to use that for anything except the simplest of implementations. You know, like my martial arts teacher school, is two goals. Call us an email us, right. That’s it for marketing over coffee, we have one goal, which is contact us and honestly, we don’t even want people to do that sometimes.
Katie Robbert 3:02
really fell in it.
John Wall 3:03
Yeah, well, the good news too, is like if it gets screwed up along the way, you’ve got Google’s Colin lines and customer support that’s world famous that I’m sure will walk you through and fix any problems that you’ll have. So that’s, that’s the biggest red flag to me is like, yeah, it’s great if it works, but if it goes wrong, you’re totally on your own.
Katie Robbert 3:24
So I think the consensus is Be wary of tools and wizards and widgets that tell you that transitioning from Universal Analytics to GA four is a simple click of a button.
Christopher Penn 3:39
Yep, it is it is. Moving is simple, but not easy. is the easiest is the best way to put it right? It is straightforward to move from one to the other. As long as you follow all the best practices, doesn’t mean it’s easy. If you’ve got a huge Tag Manager instance. And you’ve got, you know, all 20 Gold slots filled and Google Analytics, and you’ve got different kinds of goals. The other hesitation I have with that is so with, that’s a platform answer, right? You push this button, run the software and your problems are solved. You still haven’t fixed any of the people or process problems, right. So you still have not addressed any of your governance issues. You still have not taken the opportunity to reboot your analytics, and especially for agencies. You haven’t fixed the people problem and the people problems the biggest problem of all, you know, Katie, when you and I worked in an agency, we designed an entire multicourse training program for employees around analytics and we it was like a two month course that employees could take and even after employees went through it. They were better off certainly than they were before. But it was they still had to lean more heavily on our team for for the complex questions. None of This stuff addresses the fact that using Google Analytics 4 is a people problem, teaching people how to use it, teaching people how to change their work habits. And getting people skilled up. I mean, that’s that, to me, that for agencies seems like the biggest stumbling block. What do you think?
Katie Robbert 5:19
I would agree with that. We know that so far, Google has not released any good documentation on how to use Google Analytics 4. But we also know that it’s very different from Universal Analytics. So these agencies, these companies are relying on their teams to get skilled up on their own. And, you know, I know the basics of Tag Manager, I can kind of figure my way around. But to set up more complex goals to set up a whole, you know, marketing funnels worth of goals to, you know, make sure that I’m you know, we were talking with a client earlier about setting up tags that, make sure you’re not showing ads to people who are actually customers versus not customers. That’s the kind of thing that I would be nervous about trying to set up if I didn’t really understand it. But those are the expectations of a lot of companies have, don’t show ads to current customers, just make that happen. Go ahead, make that happen. And the way to do that is through, you know, proper tagging on Tag Manager and setting up the correct goals. And that to me, you’re absolutely right, is it scary, because if you don’t have people who understand how to do those things correctly, it could go very wrong.
Christopher Penn 6:49
The other thing, I think, is important, too. And you know, what some of the questions have been like, Well, how do we how do we get started with this, really, is understanding what you as the agency need the data for, like what decisions you use to inform that. So again, we were going through a call with a client earlier today. And their focus was solely around ads, like we are running ads, and we need to see our ad performance like, okay, that makes it pretty straightforward to understand, like, what’s in GA for those impacted by the ads you’re running? And where do you need to go to get that information? And that, to me is, I think an even bigger stumbling block than duplicate the configuration of migration is the moment you have your account coordinator or your account manager sign into a client’s GA for do they know what to do to get the information they need for their reporting? Right? You know, for example, content doesn’t exist in GA for that, that menu item for G three is gone, you now have to go to page and screen and className. Right? In the acquisition. And there’s there’s engagement menu for that. So do you do they know how to do that? Do they know how to use the Explore hub to assemble the right pieces of data they need? Or I think the better idea is for a lot of agencies, are your people skilled up enough on Data Studio, that they can sign it to GA for and assemble the reports they need? Because a lot of the time for agencies, you’re not creating custom ad hoc analyses all the time, you are literally just handing a template every single month. Here’s this month’s numbers. And it’s a lot easier if you get people skilled up on Data Studio, and just have them generate the dashboard. Here’s your client numbers for this month. Yeah.
John Wall 8:36
From the agency said, then that’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about it. But it seems like it would make sense to have one person that’s a subject matter expert on Data Studio, like that would be great if you then had the Data Studio person, verifying that all the GA for people spread over all the accounts are actually setting things up, right, because you should hopefully be able to copy and paste the reports.
Christopher Penn 8:58
It’s absolutely true. Because and this is, you know, I suppose just as a state of commentary on the industry, agencies don’t do a lot of analysis, right? They do a lot of reporting. They do a lot of copy, paste, screenshot, PowerPoint, etc. You know, here’s the live dashboard. Nobody ever sits down. Well, not nobody, very few people sit down, say, why did this happen? And when you listen to, you know, calls with from agency team members with their clients, a lot of times the client will ask why this happened and like we’ll find out and then you know, that’s, that’s, so they’re not doing ad hoc analysis live. So, to that point, getting somebody really proficient a Data Studio would definitely be a huge boon for any agency to feel said, yeah, we can crank out client dashboards. We can build dashboards that are intended for a limited ad hoc analysis. And then it reduces the reporting burden on the team because it’s like yeah, here’s the you can either look at the dashboard client anytime you want, or we will Just take a screenshot every month and copy and paste into a PowerPoint for you either way, the client gets what they want. But they agencies tend not to do analysis.
Katie Robbert 10:12
I agree that having a Data Studio person would be helpful, but it doesn’t, it doesn’t take away the need for that person to understand the data, and how its collected in Google Analytics like that you. It’s like, I can be a really good Excel person. But if I don’t understand the data that I’m putting together, maybe I’m just putting together, you know, charts and graphs that look really cool. But I don’t necessarily understand the data behind it. And I think you know, what we, what we talked about last week was the different definitions of the metrics between the two systems. So it doesn’t remove the need for people to understand how that piece works, just because they’re really good. Like, Chris, you’re really fast and putting together Data, Data Studio dashboards. But if you didn’t understand the underlying data, that would be completely irrelevant.
Christopher Penn 11:08
And that’s where, yes, a lot of the configuration work, it’s going to be important to make sure your conversions are set up properly, and so on and so forth. So there definitely is that level of skill needed. Also, understanding the limitations of the new system, like, if you don’t do the BigQuery integration, you will be constrained to a maximum of 14 months of data to be able to do breakdowns, right, you can get aggregated data, as far back as going for 14 months will be essentially the limit of how deep you can dig. It’s basically enough to do year over year for a one year period of time. Obviously, if you are a company that needs to do multi year, year over year stuff, which a lot of companies are you going to need to do the BigQuery integration? And that’s again, one of those things that from a configuration perspective, I know, one of the folks was asking, what is some of the key things that people would don’t know, that’s one of them, like, you’ve got to get that implementation in place. And that is something that I would be very hesitant to ask an agency to do that on my behalf. Right? Because you’re now into, like big it, you’re talking about cloud computing environments and stuff like that. And so agencies will need to have somebody on team, not who specializes in that. But who knows the right questions to ask and can liaison with a client’s IT team and not just the marketing team?
Katie Robbert 12:31
Yeah, I think that that’s definitely something that’s going to be overlooked a lot, because one of the questions that we’re getting asked a lot is, you know, when I move to Google Analytics, 4, and I lose access to Universal Analytics, how much historical data should I be keeping? How you know, Google right now is saying you can access that data for six months. But after that, unless you’ve exported it, it’s gone. You can’t get to it. So that’s one of the common questions is how much historical data should I be keeping? And what the heck do I do with it?
Christopher Penn 13:08
It depends what you’re going to use it for. And that’s really where the user stories and the inventory come in handy. When you if you know what data you need from the past, you know how to query it. And then yeah, you got to go extract it. So for Trust Insights for myself remarketing over coffee, one of the things I’m looking at is writing a piece of software that will extract essentially, our minute, day, hour minute second level data, source, medium user session, source media campaign user session, page, you so the major dimensions to go back and be able to do traffic analysis. Because I have 15 years of data to extract it’s going to take a little while to do this. But that’s the information that I would want. It has to be page level. So even if a relatively small site like mine, this is probably gonna be a 30 day project, to extract 15 years of data at that level of granularity, and store it. My plan is to store it inside of either a Big Query database or just a standard SQL table. Because I can always go back and query it that way pretty easily. For other companies, I it’s going to depend on what their environments support and and also, are you actually going to use that data I got to be the other thing is, are you going to be like hoarding it like this is creative data just sits in the closet, nobody ever looks at?
Katie Robbert 14:38
Well, that goes, you know, way, way back to earlier episodes of this show of dark data. And so why are you collecting it if you have no plan to look at it? And so John, I’m gonna pick on you for a second because it’s fun, but it’s also easy. You know, so but that’s a really good example of so you know, you’ve mentioned that the marketing over coffee website, relative li small site, mostly just to house the podcast, which is really the asset? You know, I would imagine that you don’t necessarily need, you know, 10 years of historical data for marketing over coffee from the website itself from the podcast. Yes. But from the website? Probably not. But as Chris is describing, it sounds like, the longer history you have, the longer the project could be, that it could be just a waste of time, like, what are your thoughts on that?
John Wall 15:31
Yeah, that comes back. That’s more, you know, in line with the traction analysis that we do, it’s just so that I know that, you know, the website is not in the top five marketing programs for the podcast, you know, we don’t dump enough assets and effort into the website. And the website just doesn’t generate the traffic, you know, people find the podcast and other places, and they subscribe and download from other places. So yeah, there’s, there’s really no upside to me adding to the data junk drawer and, you know, exporting a bunch of GA data. Yeah, we would just pass on that. I think one thing that’s critical with this is the, the big deal of we’ve been given this 12 month window, so you need to be turning it on now. So that a year from now you have GA for data like that, the worst case you run into is you forget to turn it on. And a year from now you’re trying to compare GA three to GA four, because you don’t have any GA for data. So yeah, as far as we’re concerned, you know, Chris has got GA four flipped on. So I’m, that’s pretty much the end of it for me. Because once GA three shuts off, there’ll be some history in GA four, if I ever do need to go back. And yeah, literally by then we’ll be a year into it, and I won’t have to worry about it.
Katie Robbert 16:40
So another question that we got was, how do we make leadership? Not only just aware, but how do we impress upon them the importance of going through these activities, prioritizing these projects. So again, Chris, you’re just describing this, you know, data extraction project, which, depending on how big the company is, could take 30 days or more, and requires a skill set to go along with it. Again, it’s not just here’s the easy button, extract all the data and boom, magic, it’s done. It does definitely does not work that way. I wish it did. But it doesn’t. You know, so how do you have that conversation with leadership to impress upon them the importance of prioritizing this work now?
Christopher Penn 17:30
Again, it goes back to user stories. If leadership never sees any of this data, then you’re gonna have a really hard time convincing them because they’re like, I don’t see what this has to do with anything. If, on the other hand, you can say, hey, you know, that quarterly bonus that you want from the board, it’s a rely on this data, this data is going away? unless we do something about it, would you continue to like to get your bonus? If the answer is no, that’s fine. But I would imagine most people would be like, I would like to continue getting my bonus. And I’d like to continue to be able to show that I should still have a job here. So yes, let’s please go ahead and do that. It is I know it sounds so cynical. But if you could figure out how to make it all about the person, there’s a better than even chance that they’re gonna sign off on it say like, yeah, your bonus is dependent on this data. You know, so that that that house in the Hamptons you’re trying to buy is directly dependent on this data? If you don’t have it, you can’t prove that you should still have a job here. You know, Mr. CFO, that’s usually pretty motivating.
Katie Robbert 18:33
I don’t see why that’s cynical, though. That’s just human nature. People need to because we’d like to think
Christopher Penn 18:39
that we are more, I guess, lofty in our goals than than that most people would like to think that about themselves. Yeah,
Katie Robbert 18:48
that’s a hard pass. That’s that’s
John Wall 18:50
not fun driven. No, it doesn’t
Katie Robbert 18:53
have to be money. The one of the core successes of change management is meeting people where they are. And so you know, sitting on top of the mountain and just to creating, we’re going to move to Google Analytics 4. Everybody, their first question is going to be why and how does this affect me? And so in order to set people up for success, you as the driving force behind this need to meet people where they are and say, Hey, Chris, this is how it’s going to affect you. Good, bad, whatever, John, this is how it’s going to affect you and give people the option to play a part to play a role to get invested in this. And that’s how you start to see success is, you know, if I come to you, Chris, and I say, Okay, we’re gonna move to Google Analytics 4, and you knew nothing about it. Your first question probably like, why? What’s in it for me? What do I what do I need to do? And those are natural questions. So yes, it’s not a cynical thing. It’s part of the Change Manager. process to help people understand how the team as a whole will be impacted, but then how the individuals will be impacted. And that’s why a lot of change management projects don’t go well, because it’s the people that are forgotten about it’s, we’re just going to do this, don’t ask me the questions like, we’re just going to do it. And you can’t get people on board, you can’t get that support.
Christopher Penn 20:22
I was watching the World of Warcraft, new expansion announcement yesterday. And one of the things that the the developers were asked was, you know, when we were getting player housing, and the developer said something very interesting. He said, it’s one of the features that people always want. But the development time on it is so much that we always ask players, what are you willing to give up in exchange for it? Are you willing to not have another expansion for two years to get this feature? And people just say, No, when you look at Google Analytics, 4, any major IT project, one of the things that you have to say, and be prepared to answer as an agency is to say, Okay, well, what are you prepared to give up? Because if as your agency, we’re going to spend 20 hours this month, you know, setting this thing up for you? Those 20 hours, we either can’t spend somewhere else, or you have to pay for an existing an additional 20 hours to cover that work that otherwise was not budgeted for. So I think for agencies a big part has to be what is the opportunity cost of doing this, right. And then the I think the pickle agencies will run into is with clients to say, hey, we need this data. And the client says we don’t see the value in this data. And when the agency says, well, then we can’t report on it, the client says that’s not our problem, you need to fix it at your cost. Wouldn’t you know, we’re not going to do it for you, because we have other priorities? And I think that’s a very sticky situation to navigate.
Katie Robbert 21:47
It is and I don’t have a good answer for that one. You know, it’s, you know, as Chris, as you say, it depends, it depends on your relationship with the client, it depends on the skill set of your team, it depends on where we are in the calendar, like if we’re having this conversation today, we can start taking slower steps to get there. If we’re having this conversation. A year from today, we can’t take it slow steps and the cost is going to go up because the urgency, the dedication, dedicated time the skill sets, all those other things. And so there’s gonna be a lot that goes into having those conversations is not as simple as saying, okay, Google made this announcement. So you have to pay for us to do that. It’s definitely not that simple.
Christopher Penn 22:36
And I think that’s one of the questions too, that, you know, like you said, it depends, if the client in question is a strategic client, and you’re earning, you know, 20 3040 $50,000 a month for them, you might just say, Yeah, you know, we’re gonna eat the cost on it. Because we want our reporting to continue to make us look good. So that we don’t lose our, our contract. On the other hand, if the client was paying $500 a month, they’re like, you know, what, then fine, you don’t make the transition, then you get no reporting, insert additional coins to continue. So I think there’s, from an agency strategy perspective, too, you have to prioritize which clients will be most impacted, and which clients are strategic investments that you’re willing to eat the cost on it.
Katie Robbert 23:20
I feel like it’s going to be a different podcast episode or a different live stream. But I feel like the announcement by Google is definitely going to create some inequities between the size of companies. So small businesses having the resources and the budget to make this transition to have the time when they’re not wearing all 10 hats to scale up to do this thing. So I think that is, that’s a different conversation, because we could go down a rabbit hole there. But I do think that it’s going to create a lot of challenges, the smaller the company, in order to get up to speed where everybody else is.
Christopher Penn 24:00
Exactly. And I think one of the knock on effects of that, that we have to be prepared for as an agency ourselves and dealing with clients is, with those complications, you may have folks who choose not to make the investment. And as a result, the importance of data driven marketing for those organizations will decline, because they won’t have the data. So they will say we’re just gonna go back to winging it, and hope it works out for the best. And I think that’s there’s a legitimate risk. So again, as you evaluate your client base, looking at them and saying, who assume you have the capabilities to migrate a client from from three to four, who would benefit from that migration, even if you do it at cost, even if you don’t make money on it? Because in the long term, you think that that client is a potential growth client, right? You know, they may be paying $2,000 a month now, but you see a way forward where that client could be making $20,000 You’re paying $20,000 a month in two years. If you do that work for them, if you invest in them, then you may be helping nurture that that backline along other clients, you’re looking to go, this is a dead end, right? Or we want this client to go away. Let’s just say goodbye.
John Wall 25:17
It’s unfortunate, too, though, that there’s really no upsell from Google. You know, I mean, this is they’re losing some technical debt. And it’s basically a transition. I mean, it would have been much better if we could at least say, Hey, here’s five things you can’t even do in the old, you know, version that you’re going to have access to if there was some kind of happy meal package that people could see on the horizon. But really, it’s been they had that? Well, what kind of I mean, you do the one big thing is gathering all hid level data, right? I mean, that’s a huge ton of data. But well, so the better question as we’d like, what are the three biggest improvements that you’d see then out of making this transition?
Christopher Penn 25:54
So the three things that you will that are definite improvements to the reasons to upgrade to GA for number one, if you if you do any kind of Google ads, the accuracy of reporting between the two systems will be finally on par. Because the ad system was all event based. And up until now, Google Analytics has been kind of all over the place. And now it to GA four is event based, so your ad accuracy gets better. Second, the machine learning built in to do things like anomaly detection and insights is I think huge for, especially with smaller businesses, where you don’t have a full time analyst on staff where the software just raises its hand says, Hey, your conversions are going down, and you’ll do something about it. I think that part is really poor and a three. This is the big one, and the the one that people love to talk about the cookie list future and all that stuff. Google is going to provide an inferred things like inferred conversion data, because you know that 30 40,000,050% of your data is going to go away. Because of things that consent forms and privacy and stuff. Google’s machine learning on the back end is going to guess essentially, based on all your usage data, how many conversions, you actually got to try and get to a realistic number in the software to deal with that cookieless future. And that’s something that no other company no other analysts company get can do. Because Google owns search, and Gmail, and YouTube and Chrome and Android, and all these things that give you them a digital footprint that nobody else has. They can infer you in your traffic and say, Yeah, we think this is actually what probably happened, even when privacy signals or you know, privacy tracking is turned all the way up. If somebody is, you know, sort of tracing around these activities, you see, there’s a black hole in the middle, but you can see the border of it, you can guess Okay, there was a conversion in there based on what Google’s data has. So those would be the big three reasons why you should be using GA four. The fourth would be the new data driven attribution model, which we talked about in last week’s episode. I think there’s a lot of value in that, as long as it’s properly explained to people. Here’s the funny part, though, that I think this reflects on Google. John, you didn’t hear about any of this, like this was in the documentation. This was in the release notes, you know, and this was actually in the presentation they gave at Google IO and their Google Marketing Platform conference last year. Nobody heard.
Katie Robbert 28:24
We have a question. From Brian, he says, I’m hoping to use this forced migration to streamline tracking across an institution, always a good idea like that. Any recommendations on setting up a master analytics account for very siloed business.
Christopher Penn 28:39
So the architecture of GA four is different from a processing perspective underneath. But here’s what’s sort of similar. So in the old version of GA, what you would do is you’d have a master property, and then you have all these different views. In the new version, what you would want to do is provision a, a, again, a master property, and then you can have more than one data stream, feeding into the property. So you can have a data stream, not just for one website, but 235 10 different websites. So for like some of our clients where we have, they have 10 different websites, each website will have its own data stream. And that can still flow into one property. And because of things like the page location variable within Google Analytics, you don’t have to say put the domain name on. It will it can do that behind the scenes. And so that would be my recommendation is having that property and then having the multiple data streams flowing into it and with with the appropriate modifications, you will still want to keep it separate from a property focusing on one specific website because, again, you’re limited to 30 conversion events. So you have your most important conversion events and your roll up. And then you can have more granular ones in the individual web property itself.
Katie Robbert 30:02
You get all that done?
John Wall 30:04
Oh, yeah. All right.
Katie Robbert 30:09
One of the questions that we get and I, I can guess the answer to this already is many of the many of our clients are looking for a base level setup or shortcuts. Do those exist?
John Wall 30:30
Yes. Oh, no. All right, moving on, is like you have to walk to China. Well, yeah, there’s no shortcuts, you’ve got to walk.
Christopher Penn 30:43
Yeah, there’s there’s no. It’s like is, is there a shortcut to learning how to use a frying pan, you know, if you’ve only ever made soup, mold, no, I mean, you have to learn what you’re doing with thing, you know, read, read the manual, it’s like any new thing is you got to read the manual. And in the beginning, and again, we will beat this to death, there is no substitute for doing those user stories and doing your inventories have figured out how you use the software today. And what you need to do tomorrow and then translating between the two. That’s part of the I think the the people in the process, part of the migration is somebody has to be able to translate to say, like, for example, source medium, and GA three, a session source medium and GA for and knowing when to use which of the variables and that only comes through training, and through through experience.
Katie Robbert 31:42
And just as a refresher, we keep mentioning user story. So a user story is a statement, it’s as a persona, I want to so that. So the persona is the audience. And so it could be, you know, as you know, as John Wall, the owner and operator of marketing over coffee, I want to the want to is the action, I want to understand the historic website traffic to my website, so that I can decide whether or not I need to do more with my website or not. And so the so that should always be some kind of a measurable outcome or an action. And so what Chris is saying is, these user stories are going to help you prioritize what you need in Google Analytics 4 versus what you had historically, in Google Analytics, 3, use this time as an opportunity to reset the strategy, the expectations, the tactics, the data that you’re collecting. And these user stories, become the foundation of your business requirements, because you can write as many as you need to. And you can, you know, have every single person in your organization who might be affected by the data change, create one of these, and that’s where in change management, you’re starting to address the individual needs, because then you understand the perspective of a Chris or Katie or John, because we’re all going to look at the same data, three different ways. Even if we are, we work together every single day, you know, we’re always aligned on decisions, we’re always going to have a different perspective on what we need from the data. So this use this simple statement, to figure out the audience, the action, and the outcome.
Christopher Penn 33:33
Exactly. The other thing that I think, you know, this is something that again, we did a lot when we ran a team at an agency, and it is one of the simplest things to do. A, as an agency, you should be running Google Analytics 4 on your agency’s website. Right. And if you’re not make that the number one thing that you do this week, number two, for all of your staff that are on staff, make sure that they anybody who’s client facing that would need to use Google Analytics has access to the agency’s GA four account, make sure they have full access so they can see everything. If you don’t trust somebody with it, then they probably shouldn’t be working at your agency because you have deeper issues than you know, if you can’t trust somebody look to that, look at your web analytics, you got an issue with that person. And then every week and your staff meetings, assign one person, a different person every week, to look at one aspect of GA four and do a five or 10 minute lunch and learn or whatever at the staff meeting. Explain, hey, here’s what we see in this report what it tells us and what if this was a client what we should do so in this case, I’m looking at the acquisition Overview report. And I see there’s two options is user acquisition and traffic acquisition. So in a 10 minute lunch, Atlanta, I’d say user acquisition is all about first touch to understand how we acquired add new users to our website. And traffic is what happened at any given time in our, our, our traffic. And we see here that email as are our highest traffic acquisition channel. And that means that if we’re doing a lot with with organic search, we’re not seeing the benefit. So our takeaway from this Lunch and Learn would be, we need to figure out what else to do with organic search to make it work for us better five to 10 minutes a week, getting every person in agency who is customer facing to do one feature in Google Analytics, and Google annex four, we’ll get everybody using it. And we’ll get everybody sharing information about different ways to use the application. And if people are just like, I don’t know what to do, let’s both you try this other part of Google called Google. Google and and see what tutorials you can find.
Katie Robbert 35:55
Well, and it’s also going to bring up questions that you may not have thought of, again, that goes back to the user stories of don’t just assume you know how other people are going to be using the system. You know, even just yesterday, Chris, we were working through some dashboards, and we were both coming up with just different kinds of questions about the exact same data, because we were just thinking about it in two different ways. And so now we have, you know, a final very important question. And John, this one is for you. What’s that? The Boston the $6 million man on your off zoom photo?
John Wall 36:34
Absolutely. I actually we can show in the background here. Yeah, there Steven Oscar, they, you normally can’t see them. They’re hiding behind me through the whole entire show. So yeah, that’s my 70s upbringing. They’re using technology to solve problems. That’s why I’m here today because it’s steep. So I have no idea why the hell that’s my photo, though. You know, that’s the other thing. That’s ridiculous. I’m supposed to be logged in on the Trust Insights account. But I think I came up in my personal browser. But I still have no idea where the hell Steve came from. So
Katie Robbert 37:05
that’s okay. My off camera photo is John Wall.
John Wall 37:11
Why is it Steve? Like? How the hell? You either Yeah, that makes no sense at all. You want? You I want me nobody wants Steve.
Katie Robbert 37:23
I think this is a good place to call it Chris.
Christopher Penn 37:26
Well, I was going to add one more thing. On a slightly more serious note. If you’re an agency manager, you need to be inventorying your team skills, asking people what do you know how to have you even use Google Analytics 4. And then Katie, what is a professional development plan look like when you’ve got your results back? And, and Timmy knows nothing about Google Analytics. And Sharon is intermediate. And Leticia is as expert and Bob’s just gonna get fired next month anyway. So don’t worry about it, Bob. What do you do? Then? Once you know what were people’s skill levels aren’t? And how do you fairly inventory their skill levels?
Katie Robbert 38:07
That’s a, you know, complicated question to end the show on. So as simple as I can, I think the first thing is, you know, everybody could use a refresher course, on Tag Manager, we know that tag manager plays an integral part in the setup of Google Analytics. So I would start there, that’s probably the most fair is, you know, is everybody up to date on their Tag Manager Certification, if not great, go ahead and start there, you know, it’s not a bad idea to get recertified in Universal Analytics, either, because a lot of a lot of how you use Universal Analytics is still relevant in GA four. And so everything you know, isn’t suddenly going away. So I would start there with the Google Analytics Academy, the Google Academy, just to make sure everyone is at least on the same page with what currently exists. And then you can go from there. And so you know, it, it’s going to come down to who has time who has aptitude, who has motivation. And so you don’t necessarily have to get everybody to the same skill level, you may decide that, you know, Sharon, who’s the expert in what currently exists, maybe she also wants to take on being the expert in the new infrastructure, you know, so you can find those moments to give people the opportunity to really, you know, stand up and stand out. But yeah, that’s, that’s a bit of a complicated question, which may be a whole different episode, but I would start with getting everyone recertified on the existing platforms.
Christopher Penn 39:46
Okay. And I would say also, again, the sooner people are using it, the better if you’re your agency, as something that again, I think is important, your agency should be the guinea pig for your staff to train on so that they’re not doing it live on a client’s production account. They can stumble across all those questions that Katie highlighted the other things people are going to want to know how to do. And honestly, agencies, us included, don’t spend enough time on their own marketing anyway. So it’s a it’s a three way win, for you to be using GA four on your agency stuff, and your team and getting people to ask questions and figure out how the thing works.
Katie Robbert 40:29
I would agree with that. And you know, don’t forget about the people, there’s going to be a lot of people who are impacted by this change. So include them, ask them questions, how to how do you use it, use it as an opportunity to start those conversations, you know, and so if even if it’s the business units, or different websites that are all siloed, the people don’t have to be siloed.
Christopher Penn 40:54
Exactly. Stay tuned in the next month or so. Trust Insights, we’re working on our own Google Analytics 4 course. We’ve got five of like 30 lessons done, recorded, so we have a ways to go. But in the next month or two, we should have some information about that. But any final parting words before we roll out this week?
John Wall 41:14
Just have Trust Insights, do it. Don’t even just call us we’ll take care of it. Prime’s go away. They go away.
Christopher Penn 41:24
Folks, thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you next week. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more. Check out the Trust Insights podcast at trust insights.ai/t AI podcast, and a weekly email newsletter at trust insights.ai/newsletter Got questions about what you saw on today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at trust insights.ai/analytics for marketers, see you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.
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