779 | Closing Content Gaps and Tracking AI Traffic w/ Dana DiTomaso

Speaker A: Dana Di Tomazo's back and we're getting into the nitty gritty of content strategy, Personas, content gaps and making your marketing count. Today on the Edge,

Speaker B: your weekly digital marketing trends with industry trend setting guests. Uh, powered by your digital marketing pioneers site strategics.

Speaker A: This week's featured guest is Dana DiTomazzo, press president at Kick Point. Now here's your host, Aaron Sparks. Welcome back to the Edge. If you hadn't caught our previous episode. For the first, our first episode in 2026, we talked to Dana Di Tomazo. She's the president of Kick Point and she helps clients grow their business by making digital and traditional marketing play well together. She teaches people and teams how to set goals, track results, and to see how their marketing strategies are actually working out. She's a popular speaker at conferences on reporting, analytics, SEO and brand building. She's spoken at Mozcon, SMX, Marketing analytics and just recently Tech SEO Connect last month and had a great presentation using GA4 to surface technical SEO issues in real time. It was a great presentation. It was right after lunch there and they were a bit spicy and uh, there was a little bit of a discussion about Regex. But go check out the previous episode because we covered that in totality. But Dana, welcome back to the show.

Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me. Again, more than welcome.

Speaker A: More than welcome. Thanks for joining us. And for all the listeners, go check out the previous episode. Uh, we really did dig into a good deal of model maturity for Google Analytics. Understanding what you have to do to be able to really understand how to track your behavior of your users on your site. We're dealing with. We have to focus more on the site than ever before because traffic is dropping from a lot of different sources. LLMs and AIO are answering a lot more that our sites used to answer as a destination source. But was that traffic even really valuable? I always hearken back to what time is it in Australia, right? Well guess what? Google's answering that you don't need a destination to actually do that. So there's a lot of top of funnel non converting traffic that Google is actually answering for users. So it really wasn't most valuable traffic for our sites anyway. So maybe this is a good scenario that we're actually meeting uh, the users where they really need to meet our websites, our services, our products. However, do we know that we actually have the content that we need to meet those users? So Dana, I'm going to tee that up to you because we're talking about content strategy we're talking about, um, buyer Persona and funnels. So. So, uh, give me a lay of the land here. Where should we go in looking at our own content now?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think, and I mean we talked about this in the last segment too. Making sure that you are serving people at the correct point in the funnel with where they are in that particular funnel, but then also taking a look and seeing like, is this page actually performing at the rate you expect it to, or is this page losing people? And so one of the things that I really try to hammer home with people is the idea of directional reporting. So when you're looking at a page and you're saying, you know, this page had X number of views and it had X number of conversions, typically people would report that as a number. But the thing is that that number doesn't necessarily give you the context of what's behind it. So instead what I recommend is presenting, is presenting it as a percentage of the whole. So this page had 20% of the views of this particular, for this particular audience, this page had 40%, this page had 10%. And then did this page, if it had 20% of the views, did it result in 20% of the conversions? Did this page 40% of the views result in 40% of the conversions? 10% of the views, 10% of the conversions? And if it didn't, then you know where to start. And I actually recently just published a post on my website analytics playbook on uh, using engagement rate as well, which is another great metric to look at to see, you know, is this particular source of traffic or this landing page or whatever it might be punching above or below its weight? As in, does the engagement rate match what you would expect it to be? Is it above or below, you know, your site wide total? And is it actually engaging people? Engagement rate is such a, it is a low bar. A session in GA4 becomes engaged if somebody views two pages, has your tab as their active tab for at least 10 seconds or converts, that's it. So I feel like that's, you know, your table stakes of having someone actually be engaged in what's going on with your website. And if you can't meet that threshold with basic content that you have, no matter where it is in the funnel position, then that's a content mismatch for sure. No question.

Speaker A: You know, um, as we talked about earlier in our previous episode, having a full fledged map of understanding, ah, each page and what does this page mean to the entire funnel process and how it meets each Persona. There's some Gaps there. When it comes down to a mature model, not only from analytics, but just a mature model of are we answering all the needs for our prospective clients? So how do you, even before engagement metrics apply? Because there also are a lot deeper metrics that you can actually trigger and understand more on that page. How do you guide companies that work with you to be able to have that full stare yourself in the mirror, not trying to call your baby ugly, but at the same time, if you've got so many different areas that you haven't fleshed out on your website, how do you actually start guiding clients to, uh, understand some of their anemic value of their site as it stands right now?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that first step of categorizing where things, who they're speaking to and what funnel position that would represent. Um, so one of the questions that we ask clients, and we always start with every client with a discovery process where we look at everything, see where stuff is at, and then ask them a whole bunch of questions. And one of the questions is, tell us about your sales process from start to finish. And you know, people go on the website, they look at these pages, hopefully they convert. Then the sales team takes over, and then we'll ask about, you know, what kinds of questions does your sales team typically answer? And some of those things are like, well, we could probably address this in the content, for example, if they want to. Some clients get real, you know, iffy about that. Oh, I don't want to talk about this because competitors, blah, blah, blah, that's fine. But, uh, really thinking about, like, what are the things that people are coming to sales for that can help you get better fit leads for your sales department. Because I find that the, the typical, you know, conflict between marketing and sales is that marketing is like, look at all these leads. And sales is like, well, these leads were crap. And so, you know, they always want more leads and they want better leads. And I think that if you can provide better quality leads, that also really helps sales, you know, appreciate the work that you're doing as marketers.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: So, uh, thinking about it from that perspective, like, what is sales feels like they're constantly answering that marketing might be able to take and put that in that funnel process instead and then help people guide there. And so this is where, like, looking at stuff like what questions are people asking when they fill out your forms? It can be something as basic as that. It can be looking at, you know, transcripts of sales calls and pulling that information out. All of this is stuff that's accessible to you. None of it is a mystery unless you've just started your business. And something else that I do quite a lot of too when we're working with clients is saying, you know, this page is a good top of funnel page. I'm going to go into Google Search Console and I'm going to look at the queries for this particular page that had impressions but no clicks. So as in they were probably pretty far down in the, you know, in the lower positions. And then I'm going to feed that. Usually I'll take those queries and feed it into an LLM I use. Claude chatgpt would work too. It doesn't really matter which one you use. And then say like, here's the, here's the page that these queries are for. Tell me, you know, categorize these queries. What other content should I be creating based on these queries to better address this particular Persona or for this company's concerns, for example. And then that really helps you figure out like what is. Because you'll always rank for some stuff that's like tangentially related to what that particular post is about, but not necessarily full on. But then you can go through these queries and say, oh wow, you know what? This page is ranking for this, even though this isn't necessarily something that we talk about. And I'll take an example from my Analytics Playbook website. One of the queries that often comes up is people searching for GA4 agency. As in they want an agency that's going to set up GA4 for them. It isn't something that we, because I sell a course called analytics for Agencies, so of course we rank for it. But someone looking for GA4 agency isn't going to buy the course. They want to work with an agency. So that tells us, okay, so this page is tangentially related for this. They don't really click through, but it has a decent amount of impressions. So that means that we need to create a page talking about how we are an agency that sets up GA4 for people. Right? And so that's a really simple example of what you can find if you just look in your GSC and look at those lower down queries that have no clicks but are showing up. And then because it's a lot of keywords, usually just like get an LLM to take a look at it and give you some data on that that you can then use to figure out what other content you need to create next.

Speaker A: When it comes down to products and services you're spot on. I appreciate that perspective because that gives you immediate tactical utilization there. But when it comes down to understanding your product and services, what you tied into originally talking, uh, to the sales and what do they hear and not just digitally when it comes from a form fill, because people are probably going to not be asking all the right questions, questions whenever they're submitting a form. However, that sales process certainly does shore up things. But customer service calls as well. Talking to customer service that are fielding problems. It's uh, immensely valuable to be able to flesh out information on the site as well as, um, feeds into social media and the like. Uh, so you can garner so much just by listening to uh, who's talking to you. Right. But when it comes down to um, defining Personas, and I don't want to really make a large swath of information about this, but I mean, really getting to the meat of the matter, if a company hasn't defined their consumer Personas yet, what guidance would you give them, uh, on um, how to start that process?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean don't think of a Persona as like, oh, I'm making this person and this is their name and they go to yoga classes. Like unless you're a yoga studio, you know, like that, that part I don't. If you're just getting started, that, that part that doesn't matter. You really only get into that when you're talking about big sophisticated like uh, like a Procter and Gamble type company who's doing all this different, average. If you're Coca Cola, you're going to have those kinds of Personas. Right. Instead, think about who are the basic. And especially I'll start with B2B. For B2B. Think about job titles, right? So one of the tools that we use pretty extensively is Sparktoro. And one thing I really like Sparktoro about for their audience research is popping in a job title and then seeing what kinds of things that people who have that job title engage with. That is a really useful thing to do. Search for that job title on LinkedIn, what are the common things that people say and engage with, et cetera, because that can give you a basis for that Persona. But also, you know, again, talk to the sales team, talk to the inside sales, the customer service teams. Here is somebody, you know, here's their job title. Tell us about, you know, what you know about these kinds of people because they will also know, you know, oh, the coo, you know, that's Bob. And this is, you know, or you know, that's that's Darlene and this is what she does. And I think that from there you can build the kinds of things that they're, they're thinking about and these are their concerns. And this is why they would go with you and this is why they would not go with you. For example. And there's actually a great book which is on my bookshelf back here. I'm just going to move my head a little bit. So these two books.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Right here. Obviously. Awesome. And this one here. Sales Pitch by April Dunford if you have not read Sales Pitch by April Dunford, I strongly recommend it. It's one of the best books I read last year. And one of the things April talks about was a real wake up call for me is the idea that when you're selling and in marketing you're selling, you're not selling necessarily against your competitors, you're also selling against. What if we did nothing? So you know, it's like, well, I don't know if we need to hire this agency because we could just keep doing what we're doing or maybe we don't need this expensive tool, we're just going to keep using Excel. Or you know, maybe we can live with our kind of, you know, leaky bathroom for a while and not hire this renovation company. Or I can deal with this mouse problem myself or I don't need a new T shirt. Right. Like, like the different it's you versus inertia a lot of the time. And so thinking about not only how can you compel people to understand that you are the best solution, but that you are the best solution versus doing nothing. And I think that's also a really important tactic to think about in your content. Why would that Persona choose to do nothing versus going with you? Uh, what can you do to help deal with those objections of budget of you know what, I think we can just go ahead with what we're doing. How can you make it more compelling to not choose nothing essentially?

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Speaker B: Yeah, April, grab hold. That is so good. And she opened up with, um. She was renovating her bathroom. I think of this story because I'm also renovating my bath. And she had to buy a new toilet, which is why we're renovating our bathroom. The wax seal on our toilet blew out and it flooded the floor. It's like, okay, well, we might as well just do it because this house has been updated since the 90s. And, um, her renovator said to her, just go buy a toilet. Whatever you want. So she goes to the toilet store and she lives in Toronto. You can go to a giant toilet store and there's all sorts of toilets. And she's like, I need a toilet. She's like, a toilet. It's something I've used my entire life. But when I get there, I'm like, I don't know what the difference is between toilets. If I asked you, like, what are the different features of a toilet? You're like, I don't know, it flushes. Right? But there's all sorts models, they have all sorts of different features. And even though it's a product we use every day of our lives, we can't necessarily tell the competitive difference between it, right? And versus, you know, buying something like a SaaS solution, which is not something you use every day of your life. How could you possibly hope to know if the solutions on that SaaS solution are actually going to, you know, solve this problem. So I think it's such a great way to open it. And April has a really fantastic style. She does a lot with sales positioning. So it is from a sales focus perspective. But. But I think there's so many lessons for marketers in there in terms of how you're positioning yourself and what you assume that people know, um, as well and just like, where you're leaving them to fend for themselves in the sales and education process.

Speaker A: Now, we just did not correlate SaaS, ah, platforms to toilets. I just want to make sure that,

Speaker B: I mean, some of them might be. Have you used teams lately?

Speaker A: That's awesome. All right, all right.

Speaker B: I don't have to use teams at work, but my wife does. And the sound makes me crazy. And I don't even have to work with it yet.

Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. So let's talk about content gaps for a minute and tools and techniques to be able to audit content gaps. So we're talking about. I don't want to lose the inertia concept. We'll come back to that here in a second. But the focus on understanding low, uh, performing pages. But search queries can give you insight on what to capitalize on and for your existing site, but understanding content gaps as it applies to what users are looking for and even competitive analysis. What kind of tools do you recommend? What kind of methodology do you recommend to really put together the Playbook? And I'll just throw that one out there to guide us towards that content journey that we've got holes, we've got major rooms that need to be renovated or aren't even in our site yet that need to be there. What would you. How would you recommend going upon that particular journey? Pun intended?

Speaker B: Yeah, and I think, um, I think one of the things. And yeah, I mean, I called the site Analytics Playbook for a reason, because people love Playbooks. But I think one of the ways to start is to think about, again, going back to that audience research, going back to the sales calls and the customer service calls and everything else. But also, you know, when you do that audience research. And again, I recommend SparkToro, because one of the things I like about it is, say, here's the podcast that this particular audience listens for. So, you know, for example, for me, for the courses, one of my top job titles is Online marketing manager. What types of podcasts does an online marketing manager listen to? Oh, they listen to Edge of the Web. Great. Which is actually, you guys do come up in that list, just FYI. And so then, uh, what I would grab is like the last. I would grab the transcripts of the last 10 shows, and then again, I would run that through an LLM and I would say, give me the common themes that are addressed. Or if, um, for example, Search with Candor did a wrap up of like, their top 10 most downloaded podcasts of the year. Great. I'm going to grab the transcripts for those 10 and then I'm going to run it through an LLM and say, tell me the common themes that seem to be resonating, you know, in these particular podcasts. And out of that you can start to get a sense of what topics are big and what topics are resonating. And then you can also do things like scraping YouTube comments, for example. Yeah, yeah, yeah, YouTube comments. Looking at LinkedIn comments. There's lots of tools out there that can help you do that, which are. Some are shady, some, um, are less shady. But then from a local search perspective as well, scraping your competitors reviews. And Celeste Gonzalez of Rickety Roo just had a great post on how to do this. She has a tool, I think, built in Colab, maybe that will go out and grab reviews and then you can scrape them and look at like, what you do versus what your competitor doesn't do. And that's again, a great competitor analysis. This is what LLMs were made for, right, because they're great at pattern matching. So you can load up all these reviews and say, here's my competitor, here's me. Identify the gaps where I do great and they do badly, and where they do badly and. Or where, you know, they do great and we do badly. And then from there you can identify the areas where maybe you need to have better content or maybe, you know, people talk about the service that you totally offer, but people don't mention it in your reviews, but they mention it in your competitor reviews. Does that mean you need more views? No, you probably need to sell more of that. Okay, so what is missing from your content as a result? And, and that can really help you sort of take off the blinders by not focusing on just your own content. Because a lot of people think about a content gap analysis and they're like, well, I'm gonna look at my site and I'm gonna look at my competitor site. But your competitors also might suck. Like, you might. Don't assume that your competitors know what they're doing. Right, because we've seen it. They do not know. I just did, um, a consent review for a client and I was looking at their consent setup, which was incorrect, which is, I would say, about half the time. That's what I'm dealing with now is fixing up bad consent configurations. And so, um, we looked at one of their competitors, also bad consent. And so the client's like, oh, wow, can you go check the site and the site and the site Listed off like six of their competitors and all of them had their consent set up badly. And I said, well, does that make you feel better? Because they don't know what they're doing either. So don't assume that your competitor knows. So instead of focusing on your competitors when it comes to a gap analysis, focus on the people who are going to be purchasing your products or services. Right. Look at the user generated content. There's so much of it now. Grab transcripts, grab comments, grab reviews, toss it all in LLM and tell it to look for patterns. And one of the if you don't know Brittany Muller, she has a fantastic AI course for marketers. Liz on our team took it last at the end of last year. So good. But she also has this great online forum too and one of the things that she helps people work through is building these kinds of pattern matching systems. Um, and she also told me about a great prompt where you just ask the AI to help you make a better prompt to get better data out of this. So start with that process. Be like, what should I be asking you about this data set so you can give me more useful information that will help me do X. And like tell it what the point of this is. Don't just tell it to look for gaps, but say I need to figure out these gaps because I feel like my website doesn't have great content for lower funnel for wedding planners and that's what I'm looking for. So tell me what you see.

Speaker A: That is awesome. I love the user generated content concept because we are in our echo chambers all the time and there's so much

Speaker B: of it out there. Like it's. Why would you not use this?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So it does get into a bit more of a tool discussion and technology. But I do want to jump into AIO and AI mode because that's also a learning tool as well to be able to understand what Google's actually presenting to its user base because it's kind of doing the same thing in a different manner. It's predictive analysis on what that user's looking for. And we've also heard tech SEO as well as a number of different conferences, the fan out the synthetic queries that Google's actually doing. So in a manner, there's a parallel there because it's trying to understand what are the next predictive points of need for that consumer. Right? Mhm. So we can learn from that. There are not many tools right now that are doing trend analysis in aio. It's still too fresh and too Young. Everything's moving on the board, right?

Speaker B: And even things like, like tracking. So people are really obsessed right now with tools that can track AI queries. And like, are you showing up? AI queries are so personal and so unique that I just don't feel like that's gonna ever give you what you want. One tool we do use for this is called Gumshoe. It's inexpensive, it does Persona based tracking. So I do like it from that perspective. And it's inexpensive because you really just pay when you use it, which is what I prefer as opposed to a monthly cost for not every. I don't need to pay a huge amount each month for something I'm not using all the time because what I want to do is just run specific queries across different AI platforms that I don't necessarily pay for and see what comes up. And you know, again, like what you get in that moment, it's, it's not like rankings. You're not looking at 10 blue links and it's, you know, the time of day, the, you know, when was the database last refreshed? What, you know, sort of weird stuff is happening in the Internet right now. Is it just going to Google and looking at this information and I, uh, tell clients, especially who have local businesses, when you ask, you know, chatgpt, I'm looking for a therapist who deals with anxiety in Huntington Beach. They're probably just going to Google at that point. ChatGPT is just Google in a trench coat and it's just going out and getting whatever happens to be in the map pack and then presenting it back to you. And that's just what it's doing. And that's okay. It just means that it's still just SEO and you don't need to do anything special to rank for that. If you have different kinds of searches. Like I am looking for a tool that can help me with this. That's not usually necessarily what uh, what it's going to come up with. And I always think about the example. I think I mentioned this in the last segment as well where I was searching for command hooks to go on vinyl siding and AI mode came back and said, actually you don't need command hooks. There's a hook that's made for it. So it can also suggest a product that you didn't even know about or if you say, hey, is there a product that does this, you know, or what is it called when. So I was looking for um, everything right now is home renovation based in my life. But I needed to Fix a leak in our shower. I needed a new shower sweep. I didn't know what it was called. I googled what is the plastic thing called that goes underneath a shower door? It's like, that's called a shower sweep. Okay, great. So again, you know, thinking about how do I try to optimize for that? Do I try to answer that query or do I just go for shower sweep or do I, you know, like that? That's the kinds of questions you need to ask yourself. Because do people even know what your product is called? You know, and people are like, oh, we're inventing a new, a new word for it. Or don't just solve the problem, Solve the problem.

Speaker A: I mean, people are trying to hammer a nail in. So they're looking for the concept of the hammer, right? You got to solve the problem, but also reach them. And paying attention to what these platforms are now sharing and helping consumer audiences with is enormously more valuable than trying to rank track something. And I think that's the pivotal moment right here. Learn what your consumers are looking for. And I'm not trying to be as basic as that. Stop paying attention to the volatility in the SERP environment because it's just going to get more and more volatile. I mean, the last three years it's just been a nightmare trying to get a beat on things. But if you're actually solving questions and anticipating, and that's that synthetic fan out opportunity there of anticipating before there's even volume of a search, that's where you can really start feeding the AI mode, feeding the aio, but also making sure that you are as valuable to the consumer when they do finally get to your site because they've seen your brand in so many different places as an answer in these places. So that's our new paradigm. It's been a sizable paradigm shift for SEO for a number of years, but we've got to just jettison rank tracking and getting into a place where we're understanding more and more about our audience. Now I'm going to pivot around here with the time I've got left here because we still got to talk about AIO and the value of LLM traffic. All the chatbot traffic that's coming through the market share really doesn't justify a huge optimization technique. And on top of it, by the way, it's all SEO anyway. So however you lay it out, geo, aeo, uh, eieio, whatever the bloody thing is, it's still SEO. So we do need to answer the call that C Levels. And our marketing managers are actually giving us of. How are we tracking it? Do we know our market share? And over at Tech SEO Connect, you gave me an example of one of your clients that's a medical client that had about 10% of their traffic coming from that. But that was exceptional. I mean, we're still not even seeing the needle move beyond 1 to 2%, right?

Speaker B: Yep, yep, absolutely. And I think. I think the clients that do see a lot of it are either in a realm where there's a lot of AI queries or like. Like therapy, for example, seems to be particularly rich for LLM queries, which I'm not necessarily thrilled about that, but that. That's. It is what it is. So people feel more comfortable apparently asking chatgpt about mental health and asking Google. Um, that is what it is anyway. So, yeah, I think that that's where there are certain verticals that do well in terms of getting lots of traffic without having to do a lot of work, and there's some that don't do as well. And again, I think that this is where tracking it is just the first step. Right. Because what you don't want to have happen is have your C level come to you and say, hey, how much traffic are we getting from AI tools? And you're like, I don't know. Oh, you just put it in. And. And there's a way. So I have a post which we'll include in the show Notes, where you can add a channel in GA4 and you can also take this regex and apply it to any other tracking tool at all. Fathom, Matomo, doesn't matter. And create a channel for AI tools. So people coming to your website from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, et cetera. It takes five minutes to do, I promise. You can even use it in Looker Studio and then you've got that report ready to go and you can even proactively share it and say, hey, look, here's the amount of traffic coming to the website. Oh, you want to put 60% of our budget towards something that's bringing you 2% of traffic. Cool. You know, but at the same time as well, the other half of it is also seeing what the value of that traffic is versus what you're spending money on now.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And I think about this in terms, for example, another client I was just talking to yesterday, their AI traffic is now more than their search traffic. It's still not a high percentage. I think it's five versus four. They don't spend a ton of money on search. But, you know, you know what, their AI optimization SEO budget is, is tiny, and their ads budget is big. And so I'm like, well, why are you spending more money on this channel that actually isn't converting? Super great. You need to work on your ads versus this other channel, which is already bringing in a bunch of traffic to you. So one of the calculations that I go through with clients and marketers like this is really important. We have done a very bad job of connecting our results to actual cash. So we'll talk about things like page views and sessions, but then we won't talk about money or, you know, cost per acquisition or average order value. And those are words that the PPC people use, and that's why the PPC people get all the money. So I want you to start using those words, please and thank you.

Speaker A: So take a break real quick and just let. Hold on a second. Before anything else, I just want to make sure everybody who's listening to this right now, go check out Dana's presentation with SE ranking about turning AI snippets into sales. This is exactly what she was talking about on that, and it was an invaluable piece of information. Okay.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Light it up. Let's go.

Speaker B: Okay, so that's, that's where I'm going with this, is, is that presentation. So what you're going to do is you're going to look at your average conversion rate for the site as a whole, for organic search, for paid search, whatever it is, and then you're going to look at your average conversion rate for AI tools. It's usually higher. Then you're going to figure out what your average conversion value might be. How much more money are you getting from this channel that you haven't really been trying for? And then over the course of a year. So the example that I used, I think in that presentation, I actually used an example from Analytics Playbook. And for us, we see a, I think it was like, uh, a one and a half percentage higher conversion rate from AI tools versus just general organic search. And with that, based on our average order value, that results in an extra $84,000 of revenue from AI in a course of a year. So if we did more with AI, imagine how much more money we could make. Right. And there, right there is your exact justification that you send to leadership to say, if we invest in this, we're already seeing this value coming in, we would expect it to grow. Now don't say you're going to get AI search to you know, 30% because it's not going to happen. But you could say, like, we want to double it. That might be realistic. Or you know, this means that there are some opportunities. Or it means that our organic search results are not necessarily putting us in the light that we want to be. Because one of the advantages of AI search is that when you people use it and this place is recommended, you are pre vetted by the AI people trust whether or not they should chatgpt. Right? And, and people laugh and they're like, I can't believe they trust these programs. Like there was examples in Vancouver of people hiking up mountains in their running shoes because they didn't realize that they were covered in snow still, because Chachi Pic told them it was a nice easy hike, it's not a nice easy hike and they would need to get rescued by search and rescue. And so because ChatGPT told them to, right? Or all those stor stories about people using their GPSs on Google Maps and then ending up on some sort of random logging road or something. Right? Like there's so many stories of that because people blindly trust what the computers tell them to do. For good or for worse. This is the reality. So if your AI traffic is converting better, first off, you're being recommended by the tool and people trust that. But second of all, why are you not being recommended well by ads or by organic search? What are those results looking like that make people think, uh, I don't know, go. Right, so where's the disconnect there? And that can also tell you how to improve your other channels so that they do start to perform a little bit better too. So don't just give up on like a badly performing channel. Figure out, can I improve this? Maybe that channel is crap. Maybe display traffic will never be great for you and in that case you should probably stop it. But maybe there's something else that you could be doing.

Speaker A: Our friends at, uh, Nlynx have made a really cool tool. Why click AI W a I K A Y What AI knows about you. Are you aware of how AI is shaping your brand's online presence? With why Kai you can stay informed about what AI is saying about your brand. This powerful tool gives you insights into how your brand is perceived by key audiences and provides actionable ways to improve it. Wai helps you compare your AI presence to competitors, uncovering valuable content opportunities. Opportunities and identifying harmful link hallucinations all in one simple report. Plus there's a brand new SEO report to be able to help you fine tune your website's search engine performance. It's the easiest way to monitor and optimize your brand's digital narrative in AI. Best of all, Wai Kai provides concrete recommendations to enhance your AI visibility. If you're looking to stay ahead of the curve in AI, manage your brand's digital and image, go over to edgeofthewebradio.com um Waikai. That's W A I K A Y. That's your go to solution. And the best part, it's free. Go check this out. You're absolutely right. We have to connect to the ROI of every business that we're working for. If we're an agency or if we're internal, we have to be able to tie that in to the true revenue coming from those channels. And that's also a maturity model for any organization. But we also have to know how to track, not track position, but track inbound. And for the small amount of time that I got left with you, Dana, you've given us a roadmap. There's also, uh, a post that we're going to have in the show notes on how to track AI, uh, traffic and LLM traffic coming into Google Analytics 4. You want to give us a little bit of an insight into some of that so we can tie that into conversions.

Speaker B: Yeah. So the first one I talked about is creating a channel in GA4 based on traffic already coming to the site. This is the easy one. Takes five minutes done. Nothing special needed. You can do it all in GA4, whatever analytics tool you use. The second part is tracking people coming to your website via AI overviews or people also ask snippets or featured snippets. And that one does take a little bit more stuff because you have to track it in Google Tag Manager because if you've ever clicked on a link, it's got that like tilde and then text equals blah, blah, blah. There's some pound symbols in there, right? So that can't be picked up by analytics tools by default because they don't necessarily track anything after the pound symbol. So you do have to do a little bit more work in Tag Manager, Google Tag Manager, Matomo Tag Manager, Adobe's Tag Manager, whatever tool you want to use. It's some pretty simple JavaScript. There's a post as well that will include the show notes on how to set that up. But then you can also see people coming to your website via those kinds of highlighted snippets and you can track what text was in the snippets. Now you can't necessarily know that they searched for this and this is what they got. But at least you can see what Google wanted to highlight as the correct answer, which can also tell you an awful lot about what that person's query was originally. And there's lots of interesting stuff that comes out of that, so I would recommend setting that up as well.

Speaker A: And again, everybody, uh, we'll have the, uh, show notes. We'll have that link on Dana's, uh, site. On the Playbook site. Or is that on Kickpoint? I think it's on Kickpoint.

Speaker B: That's on the Playbook website. Yeah. So anything that's like a specific analytics tutorial goes on Analytics Playbook. And then on the agency site, we have more agency type stuff. We're going to be launching a new site next week. So, uh, we're just moving everything around right now.

Speaker A: What am I not asking right now that we should pack into this episode?

Speaker B: The last thing I would advise is that those metrics, those business metrics are really important. So if you work for a company and you don't know the average lifetime value, the average order value, the average customer value, um, what are your profit margins? Like, that kind of thing. Basic business 101 stuff about the business. You got to learn these things. Like, you should know these things. And agency side people, this goes for you too. Like, you should know these things about your clients. Some of them weird about it and don't want to tell you their profit margins. That's fine, let that go. But they should be able to tell you at least their average order value or average customer value. And if they can't, here's a great opportunity for you to help them beyond the basics of just marketing and help them work through what those metrics are. And then you can show them how you're improving them over time. Because the number one way to not end up working with a client or not getting a raise or whatever it might be is to not connect your work with outcomes. Um, not proving your value. And I've been hammering on this for 12 years now. I think I first talked about this@mozcon 2014 and a talk called Prove youe Value. It's on YouTube if you want to watch it. And, uh, yeah, we're still bad at it, so let's get better at it.

Speaker A: And with. Absolutely. And that, what a great snippet right there. I mean, the sheer fact that traffic's changing going down, search is certainly changing. The fact of the matter is still there that we haven't connected the dots to those decision Makers to the financial side of every business or every client that we work with. It is imperative for marketing to be able to show their value and as new channels arise and new platforms arise, to be able to tie that in, be able to show that type of conversion, that type of lead generation, but on top of the value, what money they're making from these different platforms. Every marketer should know that if anything, you take away from this episode, that should be in your playbook this year. So with that, I'm going to ask you, Dana, what bugs you about this industry right now?

Speaker B: Where to start? I think the number one thing that bugs me, there's two. Well, there's two things that bug me. I posted a little rant right before the end of the year which ended up carrying me all the way through Christmas with my LinkedIn engagements. Like, great. So here's my number one LinkedIn tip. Post something controversial right before Christmas. You'll carry all the way through the new year with that one. I posted that.

Speaker A: Well, you can at least address that.

Speaker B: Use BigQuery. Yeah. And it's just, you don't have to learn BigQuery to be a good analyst, first off. Second thing, I hate it when SEOs post pictures or screenshots of Google Search console going up into the right and they're like, look at the SEO work we did. That tells me nothing. Traffic is not money. Like, traffic is not money. Traffic does not pay the bills. And that right there is the issue with like, again, proving your value. And they're like, oh, wow, look at the stuff that they did. Like, you could do all sorts of spammy crap and get this sort of bump, but it does not mean that that made money for that company. And that drives me right up the wall. I mean, it's been a problem for since I started in this industry, right? Like the barrier to entry for digital marketing is a laptop top. So it's not like it's very difficult to say I'm a digital marketing expert. You know, just keep that in mind. Is like, don't just look at those and just ignore it. Because the people doing the really good work, they aren't necessarily talking about the results. Like they'll have case studies and whatnot on their website, but some of these things are under NDA and they just can't talk about them. And this is why things like conferences are really important. I'm really glad that we're back to in person conferences again, because again, it isn't what it's on stage, it's when you're chatting with someone, you're like, hey, what's some interesting stuff you're working on right now? That's when you find of the really interesting stuff that people are doing and the really cool stuff that they've done.

Speaker A: Absolutely, Absolutely. Well, conversely, what excites you about the industry? Uh, I know measurements are m incredibly valuable to you and you're doing a great job in leading the way for us to understand Google Analytics 4 to a much greater degree. But what's exciting that you're seeing on the horizon?

Speaker B: I think that this is such a great shakeup for the industry of what's happening with AI right now. Like, is it going to take over the world? Uh, maybe. That's not what I'm worried about in this moment. Are we going to lose our jobs because of it? I think what's happening with AI is it's getting rid of a lot of the grunt work, the busy work that you used to have to do, which means that we actually have to, you know, think a little bit more, which is both tiring and exciting. So again, I think that this is a really. If you're just getting into SEO now, I'm so sorry, this is a really weird time for us and hopefully you'll, you know, you'll, you'll get settled in soon. But if you've been working in it for a long time, like me, like, I think that this is one of the biggest shakeups of the industry ever. Even more than like the, the Flor update forever ago, you know, and, and really thinking about how is this going to change the face of marketing for better or for worse, but it is certainly changing it. And as Ruth Buriedy said on LinkedIn in a post that I really loved, people are going to keep buying things on the Internet. That part of our jobs is never going away. I think the way in which they buy those things might change, but the fact that they are doing these things and we need to make sure that we're there when they want to do those things, that's not going to change.

Speaker A: Amen to that. We're having to do the real work now. And it's, mhm. Kind of been shaded by different tactics and different, uh, shiny objects. But we got to know our audience, we have to meet our audience, we have to persuade our audience, and we have to follow up with our audience in so many different manners that we have not really been pressured before to do. Right. The game's changing, the traffic's changing, the

Speaker B: initial gold rush of traffic is over. Right uh, when I first started my business in 2000, I joined this group called BNI was like a networking group. And my tagline was, you know, if you meet someone and they give you their business card and their business card says at Hotmail for their email address or whatever, that's a great lead for me because it means that they don't have email on their website and they might not even have a website. Right. That was 2000. Now here we are in 2026. Like, we're well past that now. Now it isn't, oh, you know, Hotmail on their business card. Now it is, they have a serious, you know, local SEO problem or they have to worry about consent or, or accessibility or, you know, like, we're so far past those initial days, but a lot of marketers still act like we're in those initial days. And I think that this is a real wake up call to adjust to the current reality. But remember, it's still just SEO. This whole AIO geo, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah is just SEO. Ah, smoke and errors.

Speaker A: It's still SEO and got to do the good work as well. So. Yep, I appreciate it. Dana. It's always a pleasure to speak with you. You're a third timer on the show. We certainly to swing you back around here this year and find out more about what you're doing. If you want to follow Dana, go over to Blue sky, you can find her at Dana Ditomazo. You can also find her on LinkedIn where she is throwing grenades. Evidently during, uh, holiday season.

Speaker B: I was just real mad one morning. I was like, I'm just going to write about this thing. And so it was, yeah, it was very much like that angry cat at the computer meme. But yeah, and I also post, uh, I have a newsletter that goes out once a week on there too. I just published about engagement rate today when we're recording this.

Speaker A: So, yeah, rock and roll. Yeah, I saw that coming through. Go over to YouTube as well at Kplaybook. Is there anything that we can promote for you today before we sign off?

Speaker B: I would say that the biggest thing is that if you are feeling confused about GA4 and you are feeling like every time you go in there, you're feeling like you don't know what you're doing. You feel like, uh, I don't understand this. My course practical GA4 is probably one of the easier courses for people to follow. I have lots of compliments for people who say that I, you know, it goes through it in a slow, easy. We're all in this together kind of way. I really try to focus on use cases for people. So if you need to do this, this is how to do it. Not here. Click this button. Click this other button. So I do recommend checking that out and with the code edge of the web, you can save 20% on your purchase.

Speaker A: Oh, sweet. Thank you so much. Didn't know that was coming. Fantastic. We'll have that. Thank you so much. We'll put that in the show notes as well. Um, good luck this year. Uh, it's going to be a bumpy ride like it has been for the last three years, four years, five years, what have you. But, um, certainly go check.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: 12 years, 15 years.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: It's been a while. But thank you so much for your time today. And uh, we're certainly going to be looking for you at, at another conference coming up in the near future. Oh, where are you going to be speaking next, by the way?

Speaker B: I am going to be at SMX Munich in March. Uh, so if you're going to be there. I love this conference, by the way. So if you're in Europe and you haven't been, you should go. It's great. Great. And then I'm doing a full day Looker Studio workshop in addition to speaking. So if you want to learn Looker Studio, now's your chance. And I'm also going to be speaking at Women in Tech SEO in Portland. That's in May, I believe. I'll be going back to Marketing Analytics Summit, which is usually in June in Phoenix. And again, I'll probably be doing a GA4 looker studio workshop there. That's not finalized yet, but that's all I have on my plate so far for in person. There's a few online stuff that I'll be talking about too.

Speaker A: Awesome. Thanks so much for your time. And uh, for everybody who's listening, go back and listen to our first episode as well. Unpacked a lot there. Have a great 2026 and we'll talk to you soon.

Speaker B: Dana, thank you. You too.

Speaker A: You're more than welcome. Don't forget to like and subscribe to Edge of the web on YouTube. And if you're feeling up today, we'd love a quick review on your desired platform on podcast listenership because that's how we get up in the Rain ranks there thanks to our sponsors as well. Make sure that you check them out from the show notes. They're trying to make sure that you have an easier digital marketing work week and reach out to them from those links that's how they know that you found them on the edge. From all of us over at Edge. Stay safe. Stay well. Have a great 2026. And don't be a piece of cyber Griffith. We'll talk to you next week. Bye.

Speaker B: Bye, Sam.