Open a marketer’s treasure chest and you’ll see a wealth of data.
How do you choose the valuable gold from all the worthless pyrite? And how can AI help you find this gold?
Dana DiTomaso has some thoughts based on her experience as founder and lead instructor of Kick Point Playbook, which offers online marketing training. She recently shared her findings CMI’s content and marketing trends for 2025 Event.
Watch Dana’s take on how to get the most out of Google Analytics 4, AI tools, and all your other data, or read this edited transcript.
Accept that data is not perfect
Let’s talk about data. We’ve never had more of it. We have Google Analytics 4 and much other data that we can evaluate on our website. We have our CRMs. We have all this AI information being thrown at us. We have tons of data.
Unfortunately, the data has never been so accurate.
Market analysis data is incorrect. Can it be fixed? No. Why? Because people use ad blockers. There are many other reasons, and they all mean that your analyzes are really not correct.
I really want you to accept in your heart that analytics will never be perfect. Instead, work with what you have.
Please note that Google Search Console data is not 100% accurate in terms of volume or number of impressions or clicks. But directionally it is more or less useful. Don’t focus on the numbers; Check out the trends.
Evaluate whether a page is doing its job
Do you match search intent? That’s a tricky question. People will look at the search intent and think, “Well, I guess I’ve got a lot of traffic here.” I don’t want to look too far behind the scenes and decide whether the search intent isn’t very good or not, because if I could do better If the search intent matches, I may get fewer visitors to the website. That would look bad in my reports.”
However, wouldn’t you rather have 500 visitors who are more likely to convert than 10,000 visitors who won’t convert? Matching search intent is crucial. You can use GA4 and AI to better tailor search intent.
If you have worked in software development, you may be familiar with the concept of “tasks to be done.” A page has a specific task. The contact page’s job is to allow people to get in touch with you. The purpose of the privacy policy page is to ensure that you comply with your legal requirements.
Would you expect people to convert if they somehow landed on your privacy policy page? No. Some pages may be viewed by people who have already purchased your service. So do you expect them to convert again? No. So why do you include these types of pages when listing conversion rate landing pages?
So recognize the task of the landing page.
Then ask whether the (search) queries that bring visitors to a page match the purpose of that page. If not, do you need a new page or do you just need to fix the existing page?
This is where AI really shines because it can easily identify new opportunities. I really like it Claude. I’m not doing anything on a large scale yet. I have a text file of a page on our website and then I go into Google Search Console and ask it to give me all the searches that led to that page in the last 16 months. This is the maximum amount of data you can fetch natively from the Google Search Console interface.
I look at what searches appear for this page. You may have the opportunity to rank for these phrases because if your page comes up that isn’t entirely relevant to that term, Google is really trying to figure out something that should rank for it. These are likely good content opportunities because they may not be well served by existing content.
Then I ask Claude this question: “Can you identify queries that are not being answered well on this site?” And if so, what new content should I create to address those questions?”
Claude comes back with a gap analysis and identifies some really fantastic pieces that we should write about on our website. My next question to Claude is: “Now I want you to add up all the impressions and tell me which ones offer the most possibilities.”
Track the visitor journey in GA4
What does the user journey look like from this landing page? If that landing page looks good, but it might not be the place where people convert, where else can they go from there? I recommend you use Path Exploration in Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
Check out the “Session Start” of the event. What is the path of this page? Where are they going next? You can just keep clicking on these (options) until you get to where the visitors landed. You can also perform path analysis by starting at the end point.
Looking at the gap between the landing page and the high-value pages can help you identify opportunities. People started on this site; You clicked here but didn’t continue. How do you get people from A to B?
Learn how visitors interact
Do you know how users use your website?
I don’t just mean page views. I mean, look at other metrics that tell you whether users are having a good or bad time with your website. You may have used bounce rate in Google’s universal analytics. It wasn’t a good metric. GA4 has a new metric called Engagement Rate. A session becomes active when a user does at least one of these three things:
- Your website was in an active tab for at least 10 seconds
- Visited a second page of the website
- Had a key event
This is why it’s important to make sure your key events record things that relate to your goals for your website. Looking at engagement rates is a great way to really figure out if people are engaging with your content the way you want them to. User behavior also provides information about the quality of your traffic. You can identify bad traffic by looking at sources with poor engagement rates.
Engagement rates don’t tell the whole story either. We often measure content consumption to learn what content is engaging. It’s a Google Tag Manager recipe. It is also a WordPress plugin. It takes the content and measures how long it would take to read that content. If the person stayed long enough to view the content and scrolled to the end of the content, the content was consumed. There’s a starting point (knowing) what content needs to be improved to ensure people read everything on the page.
However, remember that content is not just the written word. Videos have never been more popular. You should record content consumption based on how people watch your videos. We often track that if someone watches 90% of the video, they have completed consuming the content.
Then, when you compare content consumption rates between text and video, you can see which is more compelling to that audience. Does text speak more to the audience or does video speak more? Now you know what to prioritize when creating more content.
Use AI to analyze the data for opportunities
What new content opportunities should you pursue?
Take the AI tool of your choice. Input everything you have, from content assets to keywords and audience research. Then add your performance data from GA4, Google Search Console, your CRM, etc.
With your entire website and content assets in its brain, it can make connections between performance data and the content on the page. You can then ask him questions that will help you make better content decisions, such as:
- “Here are our performance data from GA4. This is what we say in Google Search Console. What content do we already have that meets these searches?”
- “What content performs well in search compared to social networks?”
- “What content is missing from this research?”
- “What content is great at driving these high-value sales?”
The final question is where your CRM data comes into play. I’m a big proponent of linking GA4 data to your CRM data.
For example, people fill out a form and you know how they got to the form. But ultimately, do you know the real value of that sale? Depending on your specialty, it can take months or years. By linking the GA4 and CRM data together, you can say, “This advertising campaign actually generated X dollars in value.”
You can pass that information to your AI brain and say, “Tell us what content best drives those high-quality sales.” Then you can ask, “Now you know what content drives high-quality sales; What other content do you think would be of great value to our company?”
It can identify these opportunities and help you prioritize your work for 2025 where you’ll make the most money.
Get the most out of GA4
What else should you follow in GA4 in 2025?
Track image views. I record every single image that appears on our website. I can record scroll depths of 25%, 50%, 75%, etc. This gives me very detailed knowledge of where exactly people are getting off. I get a good sense of where people get bored and stop reading our blog posts. And it’s a really helpful way to optimize that content.
I also recommend using Audiences in GA4. I love using audiences for all kinds of things, like places or pages that people have engaged with. For example, I often use it to understand the target audience and exclude people who have viewed a careers site. You probably won’t buy stuff; They just want a job.
But the most important thing is to make sure you set up insights in GA4. On the GA4 home page, scroll to the bottom of this page and click “Create Custom Insights.”
This is where you set up your alerts for things like no organic traffic or no conversions to know if something is wrong. The last thing you want is for something terrible to happen and you don’t find out until you check next month’s report.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute