Is Anything Real?

[00:08.1]
Welcome back to "Is Anything Real?", the show where we torch illusions and drag bad metrics out into the sunlight. Here's today's hot take: If your conversions are just page views, you're not reporting performance. You're committing fraud with better fonts.

[00:24.3]
Joining me is Dana DiTomaso, president of Kick Point, who's been calling out fake conversions and BS data setups for 25 years. She trains agencies, builds analytics systems, and has seen every flavor of conversion theater in the industry. Dana, welcome to the show.

[00:41.7]
Thank you so much for having me. You got it. All right, you've said most paid teams don't even know what a real conversion is. What's the dumbest setup you've seen? Don't come after me, paid teams. You don't have to worry about NDAs here, or anything violating those, so.

[01:00.6]
Yeah, yeah. No, I think the most, I would say egregious, one that I've seen was actually one that I was given. It was a remarketing tag, or it was a tag from, I think, it was DV360. And it was what would be the remarketing tag, except they had attached not just the page view to it.

[01:21.6]
They're like, add it to every page of the site. It was a page view, and it was add to cart, and it was checkout, and it was create account or something like that. And I wrote them back, and I was like, are you sure? Like, oh, yeah, just add this to every page. I'm like, but then every page would be add to cart. They're like, oh, it'll figure it out.

[01:37.6]
That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

[01:44.8]
If I wasn't there, the client just would have added the code, right? They'd be like, look how amazing our site is. But the thing is that I find is... That's when they would go, look, look, it's a billion dollars in revenue that just came in magically. And they're like, but yet I don't have a billion dollars.

[02:00.6]
What is going on here? I think that's the thing that kills me. And so another one is like, a client will say, our agency said that we had X number of leads. And I go and look. And we don't. What's going on here? And then I find out that the agency has set up views of the contact page as the conversion.

[02:16.1]
And that's what they're reporting on, when it's actually like the form fill. And I also find too, that a lot of paid agencies don't realize you can track if people actually filled out the form or not. You don't have to rely on a thank-you page. And so again, it's like, well, I don't know how to do that. So I'm just going to record a thank you page.

[02:31.6]
And like, if you have to, if you have no alternatives, thank you page is fine. I would prefer that than the actual view of the page before people fill it out. But, we can do these sophisticated setups now and just do that instead of just blanket recording this stuff because it's, it's never going to work out well for you in the end.

[02:48.8]
I love how you're breaking it down here. You know, clicks don't equal conversions. Nope. Contact page views don't equal leads. Why do you think agencies keep getting away with not approaching it in that mindset, or keep getting away with it? I think it's just like the turnstile of agencies, right, where clients will go through an agency after a couple of years, and then they're like, oh, that's weird.

[03:12.0]
And then they set things up with a new agency who messes up things in a new and novel way. And then after a couple years, they're like, oh, this isn't working out so well, and they go to another agency. And so, it just keeps repeating with these agencies that just do mediocre. And then eventually the client's like, all agencies suck. Which is not true.

[03:28.0]
But, the barrier to entry in digital marketing is a laptop, right? And an Internet connection. So it's not hard to go and say, hey, I'm an expert now. And the barometer for expertise is someone just saying, oh, I'm an expert. And I think the actual experts are people who are like, oh, I don't know, I'll get back to you.

[03:47.9]
Because they're comfortable enough to say they don't know everything. And so a client is like, well, I'm just going to go with the person who says that they know what they're doing as opposed to the one who wants to check back on things. And so you end up, because you're being honest, you end up not necessarily closing that deal. And instead, they go with the flashy company with the bad conversions.

[04:04.1]
But it looks good on the surface. And they're probably worried about billable hours below it all also, right? And hitting that P&L that they need to hit. But say, like a great real life example, I've seen this before. Say a client sees 100 leads in Google Ads, but there are zero showing up in GA4.

[04:22.1]
Where's that breakdown? What's actually happening there? Yeah, I find that it's either, they haven't set up things the same, so often in Google Tag Manager, for example, and paid people, if you don't know Google Tag Manager, definitely a skill you should learn. But what I find is sometimes I'll go into a client's GTM and they'll have a trigger, which is the thing that the tag listens to.

[04:42.6]
So the tag is the code going off to GA4 or Google Ads, and it is attached to a trigger, which would be the form being submitted. And sometimes I'll see that they'll have a trigger for Google Ads, and they'll have a trigger for GA4. And they're two different triggers. Even though it should be exactly the same trigger, you can use the same trigger more than once.

[04:59.7]
You don't have to keep making new triggers. And so because of that, you're not measuring the same thing. And maybe the GA4 one broke because you had it. You know, I saw one where it was attached to the button and the button was named Submit. And so if they ever changed the name of the button from Submit to something else, it would break.

[05:15.3]
And then the Google Ads trigger was set up completely differently. So the Google Ads trigger kept working \ when they renamed the button, but the GA4 one broke. So it's set up in a different way. So stuff like that, where you have really fragile triggers and unique triggers for each destination, can cause these kinds of problems.

[05:31.8]
I much prefer having a single trigger that isn't very fragile at all, is based on something you know is going to work even if the button's renamed, and you use that same one for GA4, Google Ads, Reddit, LinkedIn, et cetera, just use the same trigger for all that stuff. So really, we're not talking about a math error.

[05:47.9]
It's a truth problem that it's based in. I mean, there are situations for sure where the number of conversions you see in GA4 is going to be different than Google Ads. Like that's just the Internet. That's how that works, you know, and same thing like clicks and sessions is a really common one. Someone clicks on an ad twice, within like 10 minutes of each other, you have two clicks in Google Ads, but you have one session in GA4 because their session was still active, for example.

[06:10.4]
Like those kinds of things are pretty common. I have a blog post on my website that goes through all the common reasons why your data in Google Ads is not going to match your data in GA4. But it should be relatively close. It shouldn't be like completely off from each other. It'll never match up. Don't try to make it match. You'll go crazy.

[06:25.5]
If it does match, it's completely a coincidence. Go buy a lottery ticket. It doesn't mean anything. It's your lucky day then if that happens. Exactly, like the stars align for you, congratulations, this will never happen again. Yeah. So I know you've also said that honesty in reporting really requires psychological safety.

[06:44.5]
How would you define, what does that mean inside a marketing team? Yeah, I think it means that it's okay to report on bad results. Not everything we do is going to be perfect. Not all the campaigns we create are going to be massive gems, right? There's just sometimes it's just like the wrong targeting or you just didn't get the pulse of the audience.

[07:02.1]
Right? Or the keyword research wasn't necessarily on point or, you know, a million things could have happened. Like there was a major, you know, news story that day, or there was a natural disaster in the, you know, like there was an ice storm in the area where you're promoting, for example. And so that doesn't necessarily mean that like your campaign was bad.

[07:19.9]
Sometimes maybe you just set it up badly, and that's, you know, sh*t happens. We've all been doing this a long time. You're not always perfect, that's okay. But I think that that's where the psychological safety comes in, that we all know that we all mess up at some point. And being able to say to your boss or your client, hey, look, this didn't go as planned.

[07:36.3]
This is what we're going to do. Or this didn't go as planned. I genuinely have no idea why, we're going to dig in and find out. And so being able to feel confident that you can say that without immediately getting fired, I think is a big part of psychological safety, you know, and I think it extends within the agency, but also with the client, as well.

[07:55.5]
And I think that as an agency owner, it's also, you know, up to us as agency owners to say, look, don't work with clients who are going to completely lose their minds if things aren't always going 300% growth with a 20% budget increase, right? Like do not work with those people.

[08:11.8]
And I know it's hard to get rid of clients, especially, you know, economics aren't necessarily the best right now. I've owned my agency for a long time. Like I've worked for myself for like 25 years. So, it's hard to be like in 2008, oh, you know, never mind this giant economic crisis.

[08:28.1]
Let's not work with jerks. But at the same time, like, don't reward bad people with good work. And so if a client routinely abuses your staff and you don't do anything about it, like you're going to be losing good staff as a result of that. Or you can offset that client or jettison that client. Like, there's good clients out there, you just need to find them.

[08:45.4]
I mean, that really bleeds into why I think a lot of marketers who are listening today would probably admit they feel pressured or have felt pressured to fake it. And I don't know if that necessarily, you just said comes down to bad bosses, bad incentives, or just plain fear.

[09:02.1]
But let's sort of role-play. What do you tell a CEO who demands perfect analytics in a world of ad blockers, consent banners, capture codes, all these different things flying around? Oh yeah, I just walk them through like a realistic scenario.

[09:17.2]
So, my typical go-to is, you know, I need to book pest control for my house because I live in an area where you have to spray for ants every year. So I do the Googling to find a pest control company near me. Great. Click on their Google business profile. It's all UTM'd. Good job, you know, so you would have that attributed.

[09:33.6]
But then to book, I'm not going to be home. So I text the link to my wife who's going to be working from home that day, and be like, can you book and be here when they get there? And so she clicks the link in the text message. It's now direct, because I didn't send her the one with UTMs. I just sent her the link, right? And so the booking comes even though I found them.

[09:51.1]
Right. That hits a thread with me. I strip UTMs off of URLs, even when I click on them in emails, when I share them with other people, or I, even for myself, Dana, will strip it off and then reload the page to actually work on the conversion.

[10:08.7]
Don't tell anyone out there I do that. You are the dark funnel. Yeah. And I think that that's a really common thing that people do, right? And so I talked to the CEO and just like walk them through that scenario and be like, this is how real people use the Internet. We can't make them follow our rules because we want perfect attribution.

[10:28.3]
And then the other thing too, attribution is a journey. Right. Today is, you know, we're recording this towards the end of September and in a couple of days everyone's going to be generating those monthly reports. But what if I looked you up on Monday, and then I didn't book until Thursday, does that mean that I don't count? Because I happen to go over the completely artificial line that is a month, you know, and so that's where things like rolling 28-day dashboards might be better than reporting on an artificial monthly basis, for example.

[10:56.3]
It's really thinking about the idea of attribution as a journey, I think is a hard step for a lot of CEOs to get to. So I don't start there usually. I usually start with, here's a completely realistic scenario. How would you attribute this? You know? And part of what I always tell people too is like, I don't actually care how people got in touch with you.

[11:14.2]
I don't care if it was trackable or not. I just want more people to get in touch with you. So if we're doing our work well and more people are calling you, your phone's ringing, you're getting leads coming in, you'll see that in the reality of people getting in touch with you, it won't necessarily be reflected in totality in your reports because tracking is hard.

[11:31.9]
And yeah, we track lots of different things, but that doesn't mean that we're perfect, and we can never be perfect. So instead we're just going to see, do things kind of look like they're going up and to the right and, your end, do you see an impact, you know, with the actual, like, is your team busy?

[11:48.0]
Are you making money? Those are the important things, you know, not necessarily number of impressions you got on Search Console, which is completely out of whack right now, for example, because of the changes that Google made to impression reporting that broke a bunch of rank tracking tools. Yep. Right, right. And I mean, it's incredible the history that you have over that 25 years, and you were kind of tying into that evolved culture of lying with data and how that continues to evolve.

[12:13.6]
But I think the important thing that you just kind of touched on this, analytics is not about perfection, and it should never be about perfection. Just like anything in this world, nothing is actually ever perfect. It's about the directional truth that you can act on, and anything else just turns into theater.

[12:29.8]
Yeah. And I don't know how we became this idea of like analytics accountants. And this is something that I really want us to walk away from because at some point somebody said, oh, digital is perfect. You can track everything. That was maybe true for like a second right before tabs were introduced in browsers.

[12:46.7]
But we can't track everything. And I wish whoever said that never said that. I think I might have even said that at one point and, if so, I apologize. But the thing is, like you can't track everything. And I think it's important for people to just realize that, just sit with it, just accept it into your heart and then just move on, knowing you can't track everything.

[13:05.3]
So one of the reports, for example, I've been recommending for people, although that is a little bit weird right now, is I've been recommending an efficiency metric which is looking at the number of impressions of your site on Search Console, on Google Ads, billboards, you know, how many people might have heard your radio ad, et cetera, dividing it by the total number of transactions, lead fill, whatever your like key event is, to use the GA4 term, dividing it by that.

[13:29.7]
And then we're just looking at is that flat or is it going up over time? Great. If it is going down, then what we're doing isn't necessarily having the same impact. Now, when I say that's kind of broken right now is because there's this grand adjustment in Google Search Console, where Google basically broke ranking tools from being able to scrape their search results.

[13:50.7]
Right. So you suddenly might see a huge decrease in your impressions over the past couple of weeks. Like I'd say about starting in mid-September, going down still is weird now at the end of September. And in that case, you might have to adjust your client's expectations accordingly. What I find really interesting about that is just the sheer volume of impressions that were coming in from rank tracking tools.

[14:10.2]
I always knew there was some impressions in Google Search Console that were from rank tracking tools, but for myself and clients we're seeing is about half of the impressions, which is wild. I had no idea the scope of the problem. Half of those impressions were just robots.

[14:26.4]
That's wild. And then, when you think about the future of measurement, with GA4 changing, cookies collapsing, even the double-edged sword of AI writing the reports. Do you think measurement is getting clearer, or is it actually getting murkier?.

[14:44.2]
I think it's definitely getting murkier. I think we're going to just go back full circle back to spray and pray, you know, we're going to be back to the 1930s again or something, you know, and it's just we're going to go full circle on this. I think at some point, you know, ideally, and I think about Europe is where we should be looking in terms of where measurement is going.

[15:03.6]
Because a lot of the things that are happening with GDPR, other countries are going to pick up on that. And really, the ideal state in the GDPR would be opt-out by default. And then you would have to choose to opt-in. You would have to make a choice to say yes, go ahead and track me. Not, what do you want to do?

[15:19.8]
Track me, don't track me. It would be click this button if you want to be tracked. She's going to click that button. Literally no one. And I think that that's where we just kind of abused our toys and now we've ruined them. And now we might just be going back to like rank trackers, like maybe Web Trends, this is its big moment to shine.

[15:34.9]
And if people don't remember Web Trends, it was like a log file analysis tool because you can't hide from log file analysis because you do have to access the pages, but at the same time, like maybe something like log file analysis will go. Because a lot of log files capture IP address and pages viewed.

[15:51.0]
And technically, that would be personal information. So maybe we won't even be able to do that either. Wow. So this is where it's going to be like where are we going to end up with this at the end? And it might just be we're making guesses. I don't know. Isn't this all just guesses sometimes?

[16:07.2]
But, but on the side of confidence. Right. Kick Points playbook workshops are $5,000 a pop. What the clients actually learn that agencies keep screwing up through that reporting? Yeah. I find a lot of the time the setup is like, okay, what happens is there's a lot of GA4s out there that were sort of set up in a scramble towards the sunset and like, oh crap, I guess I better do this.

[16:30.4]
And then there were no extra events set up or there were things set up that weren't quite right. And so often when I'm going through and doing the training with the client, I try to do an audit ahead of time just so I can see what I'm looking at. But I also talk to the client about, you know, what are the questions that you're asking of your GA4? And then is your G4 even set up to answer those questions?

[16:47.8]
And if it isn't, then we'll walk through the process of like, here's how to set up these things to measure the answers to those questions. Like, are people getting in touch with you? And then something else I try to emphasize too, is we're pretty good at measuring, did people do the thing we want them to do? We're not great at measuring.

[17:03.5]
What stopped them from doing the thing that we want them to do? So could they even see the button to convert? Did the form not load for them? You know, those kinds of things? I think those are also important to record as well. And so we might not have that set up by the end of the workshops, but we might have them on the path of figuring out, like, what are the things I would need to measure to know that this person didn't do the thing that I wanted them to do.

[17:25.7]
You just, Dana, threw me on a flashback to my early agency days, where we used to have to look at website information about eye tracking data, right? And where people's eyeballs would go. But anyway, if you could wave a magic wand and fix one metric obsession in the industry, what would you nuke?

[17:46.7]
Oh, bounce rate. Absolutely. No question. Anyone who's watched my videos knows I hate bounce rate. In UA, bounce rate was so inaccurate. So in Universal Analytics, bounce rate measured if someone loaded the page, but then didn't take an action. But if you weren't measuring an action, for example, if you had an inline form, that, when it was submitted, it didn't take you to another page, that would count as a bounce because you didn't record that event when they filled out that form.

[18:11.2]
They could have spent 20 minutes on that page. They could have read everything you had to say, but they didn't take an action that you measured, therefore, they were a bounce. Hated it. In GA4, there's still bounce rate. It measures something totally different. So in GA4, there's engagement rate, and a session becomes engaged when someone visits two pages on the site, has your tab as their active tab for at least 10 seconds.

[18:31.2]
You can up that to 60 in the settings. Or converts. That's a engaged session. Now, bounce rate is the inverse of engagement rate. Why do we need that? Because people complain and said, I missed my bounce rate, which is not even measuring the same thing. So if you're comparing UA bounce rate to GA4 bounce rate, and you're wondering why they're different.

[18:47.5]
That's why. But engagement rate is not a bad metric. I'm okay with it. But I would like to get rid of bounce rate because it is just silly and misleading. We have engagement rate. Why do you need bounce rate? Unless you're hopping on a pogo stick, right? Then bounce rate is a whole different number. And bounce rate doesn't even mean anything.

[19:02.8]
If you think about what engagement rate is measuring, like, a session could become engaged because it's 10 seconds with the tab. Is the active tab like. But maybe they left after 11 seconds. Is not that a bounce? I just. Yeah, so don't use bounce rate. Just use engagement rate. It'll make me happy. Thank you.

[19:18.6]
I love it. I mean, hot line here, right? Data doesn't lie. People do. And the cost is truly client trust. Dana, this was data on fire right now. From fake conversions to truth in reporting, you've just armed a lot of listeners with a sharper BS detector.

[19:37.9]
Where can folks find you and Kick Point online? Yeah, the best place to engage with me is on LinkedIn. That's where I post the most. And my website is currently kpplaybook.com, but we're switching to analyticsplaybook.com later this year, renaming to Analytics Playbook just to reflect, like, the focus is just on analytics.

[19:56.8]
So if you go to that domain now, it does redirect you, but the domain will be migrating later this year. Awesome. And one final question, Dana. For the agency founder listening, who's maybe realizing that their amazing conversion rate is really just hot garbage, what's the one move they should make this week?

[20:15.2]
I think that they should probably start to measure a new engagement rate or conversion rate or whatever that metric is, measure it correctly, but then slowly start to wean the client from the old bad metric to the new good metric. Because you can't just switch it. And they'll be like, well, what happened?

[20:31.4]
Be like, hey, look, we're improving our measurement. We realized we were being a little too broad before, so now we're going to be measuring this, which is more specific. So your numbers are going to be lower, but it better reflects the reality of how people are engaging with you. And that's the narrative to take as you tell them. It's just like, frame it as a positive. Don't be like, hey, I didn't know what I was doing before. Now I do.

[20:49.9]
Like, this is a little bit more precise. This gives us a little bit more information, helps us set up better remarketing audiences, et cetera. You know, whatever that client is into. That's how you're going to phrase it. But make sure to also use the words the client uses. Not every client describes stuff as a conversion. They definitely don't describe stuff as a key event.

[21:06.7]
So pick the right term that makes sense to that client. Use their own words when you're setting it up. Get in their shoes a little bit, right? Think from where they're coming from. Awesome. Well, thanks for tuning into "Is Anything Real?", the podcast where we sift signal from noise and torch the mirages.

[21:23.0]
I'm Adam W. Barney, and just one final thought. If your dashboards look too good to be true, they probably are. Demand honesty, because fake conversions aren't just bad marketing, they're bad leadership. Dana, thanks for joining. Thank you so much for having me.