Amidst all the changes, stay focused on your numbers

Kyle says: “SEO is changing, and you need to know your numbers more than ever.”

How is it changing, and how do you go about knowing your numbers?

“SEO is changing in a variety of different ways, but most importantly, we've got the rise of AI and large language models, and the traffic that's coming from that. Consent is much more pertinent than it used to be (quite rightly so), and we also have Apple’s much more stringent tracking preventions.

That all means that you need to understand your numbers: where your traffic is coming from, and what that means in terms of actions and insights. You need to know that to a greater degree than ever before, and you need to take your reporting away from talking about sessions and users and start talking about the things that matter: leads, e-commerce numbers, and all the things that a typical boss would be concerned about.

All these different changes mean that you need to be a lot more focussed on the numbers that are occurring and how you can use those numbers to drive actions and make a difference for your clients and your business.”

What does understanding your numbers mean in practice?

“Google Analytics is still the predominant analytical tool that exists, although there are others out there.

However, it's also about understanding qualitative numbers. That sounds like an oxymoron, but qualitative data will give you an idea of the general feel for what's happening within an organisation, and what the most important numbers are to an owner, your client, or the business overall.

It is the raw quantitative stuff, but it's also understanding which numbers are the most important.”

Should SEOs help decide what the right number is, based on the analytics, or should that be led by the stakeholder themselves?

“It's a conversation between the two, but it absolutely should be led by the stakeholder themselves.

When I worked in-house, every day, almost without fail, my boss would come in and ask, ‘How many leads did we get overnight?’ Understanding what's really driving them forward, and driving the organisation forward, is key. You can take that information and turn that into something that you can quantify within GA4.

GA4 has key events, which are a new way of talking about conversions or goals. You want to align the organisational objectives with the figures or numbers that you're seeing in GA4. That way, when you're reporting back, you're talking to them in a way that they understand, and it isn't just vanity metrics or gobbledygook.”

What kind of metric would you get from a business?

“The easiest example to understand is, if you're an e-commerce business, the number of purchases. They're looking for an increase in the number of people buying their product.

In GA4, you can align that with a key event called ‘Purchase’ and, from an SEO perspective, you can say that organic search has driven X number of purchases with a total revenue of Y, which is Z amount higher than it was in the previous year.

If you're a non-ecommerce business, it's things like understanding marketing-qualified leads or sales-qualified leads. It's easy to say that you had 10 leads coming in overnight, but you can take that a step further and say, of those 10 leads, 2 of them converted into actual clients.

If you pull that offline data into GA4, you would be able to say, ‘We're getting lots of leads from social media, but they're not converting as well.’ Therefore, you potentially need to focus on paid search, which doesn't bring in as many leads, but brings in more converted leads.

It’s about taking that metric that the organisation is really focussed on – How many leads came in? How many of those converted to an actual client? – and applying those to the data that you're getting in GA4.”

How do you go about applying that to the data in GA4, and how do you measure the user journey that ends up impacting the ultimate goal?

“There are some preset events in GA4, and you can use those against the information that you're seeing. If you wanted to configure something very specific, you could use a tool like Google Tag Manager or work with a developer to send that information into GA4 and then mark it as a key event – which is Google's way of talking about conversions and leads these days.

Then you can see that information within a standard report or an Exploration, or you can use a tool like Looker Studio to really visualise what channels are bringing in users and what those users are doing on the site.

In order to understand the user journey, you can build out a funnel in GA4 that shows you the journey you expect users to take, and it will show you where users are dropping off. Then, when you're talking to a business owner or talking to a wider organisation, you can say, ‘We're getting enough users in, but I don't think we're converting them very well.’

That’s a different conversation and a different set of actions compared to, ‘We convert users really well when they come onto the site, but we're not getting enough people into the site.’”

How do you identify the user journey?

“Again, it's always in conversation with the client about their understanding of what a user should be doing. You can take that away and set that up in Google Analytics.

If we're talking from a SaaS perspective, maybe you want them to go to X page and then go on to Y page. You would set those up in a funnel report in GA4, where step one would be landing on X page and step two would be landing on Y page. That builds out the funnel, and you can see where users are dropping off.

What I find really interesting – talking to organisations about this: talking to the head of Sales and the Head of Marketing – is that, very often, what they perceive to be the customer journey is very different from what the actual customer or user journey on their site is.

You can use what's called a Path Exploration report in GA4 to demonstrate the actual journey. You can create a Path Exploration where they start on the homepage and see where users actually go. That's really interesting. If you use it in conjunction with the funnel report that you built, you can say, ‘You want users to go here, but they actually go to this particular page, or they do this particular action.’

Again, there are lots of different actions you can derive from that, to help improve the numbers that you're seeing.”

You also talk about leveraging audiences from GA4, so what are audiences in GA4, and how do you leverage that data?

“Audiences are exactly what they sound like: they’re specific segments of users on the site.

One way I've utilised that is being able to demonstrate return on value for the content that you're building from an informational perspective (so, blog content). I've worked with lots of SEOs in the past, where we built audiences that initially land on a piece of informational blog content from organic search. Then, over a certain time period, they purchase a product or fill out a form.

You can use audiences to demonstrate return on the work that you're doing, but also, working with the wider marketing team, you can use them to help generate remarketing or retargeting audiences. I often work with hospitality clients, and a good example of this is when users go to book a hotel but then don't end up booking. That’s a perfect retargeting audience.

It's a great way to analyse a specific segment of users on the site and use that to help give you greater insights into what people are doing.”

You also talk about structuring key events that align with business needs, so what might those key events be?

“Somebody making a purchase, filling out a form (particularly Contact Us forms), or booking an appointment would all be examples of key events.

Another way to explain this is by talking about what a key event isn't. A key event will automatically fill another metric called key event rate – or what we would know in the olden days as conversion rate. If you've marked things like when somebody goes onto the website for the first time, views any page, or clicks on any button as a key event, you're telling your client, the wider organisation, or your boss that you've potentially got a conversion rate of 80% and above. That's not what it's intended for.

In conversation with the team or the client, you want to find out what the end goal or final point of the user journey is. That's your key event. You can still build the events that go in front of that, but less is more.

Purchases, form fills, appointment bookings, downloading a really specific guide, and those kinds of things – not when somebody comes onto the site for the first time.”

If an SEO needs to educate others about GA4, what are the key aspects that need to be articulated and understood by less techie marketing departments?

“What needs to be articulated is what GA4 can provide that can help drive the organisation's goals and objectives forward.

It's less about saying, ‘We can see how many sessions there are,’ and ‘We can see how many users come to the site.’ It's more about understanding which channel is driving the most return on spend or the most conversions, and then taking those insights and being able to say, ‘Come the new budgetary year, let's focus less on social media and allocate a greater amount of focus on informational content, because we know that that's actually driving the vast majority of our conversions.’

Loads of organisations are talking about AI at the moment, and building an AI channel group is another great way of cutting through the hyperbole that's happening at the moment around ChatGPT and AI. Analytics can give you real data to say, ‘It's driving a little bit of traffic, but our focus should still be on these particular areas.’”

Kyle, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Create an AI channel group within GA4 to help cut through all of that AI jargon and really understand what AI tools are driving to your site.”

Kyle Rushton McGregor is an Analytics Specialist at KRM Digital Marketing Ltd. Find out more over at KRMDigital.uk.