Garrett Sussman: Rock on. Brie is the founder of Beast Analytics, helping businesses harness the power of data to skyrocket their ROI. She’s over a decade of experience consulting for top brands and speaking at global events to empower others with digital marketing knowledge. She actually specializes in turning Google Analytics four and marketing data into actionable insights that drive results for companies everywhere, presenting your most valuable asset, why you’re not using it, and how to fix that. Please welcome Brie Anderson.

Brie Anderson: Alright. We’re getting close to the end of the day. Let’s do a big round of applause here, so mostly so we can remind all of them that there’s still something happening in here. Okay? Whoo. Let’s do it. Sorry, audio team. I just screamed in your ear. My bad. Okay. Listen. We’re gonna talk about what everybody loves to talk about, and that’s data. Data is, in fact, your most valuable asset. I mean, you can find this anywhere in the media. Data is extremely valuable. But mostly because of what we do with it, right? With data, we’re able to predict trends. We’re able to mitigate risk. We’re able to improve our products. Let’s see what else we do. We could create new revenue streams. There are tons and tons of things we can do with data. Most recently, something that’s been talked about in every talk so far, is the fact that we were able to use data to build LLMs and AI and all this cool stuff. But the reality of it is that’s only done if we actually use our data. Okay? So we have to have good data and we have to actually use it. As marketers, as SEOs, it’s not that we don’t have data. Right? You build a website, a CMS gives you a really good shot at giving you their version of analytics. We get a little bit savvier. We put Google Analytics on the site. We’re SEOs. Of course, we’re gonna have Search Console. We work in local because Greg works in local and that’s really cool. So we work in local. We set up our Google Business Profiles and we have all of the data. Right? We’re like, yep, set that up. Third party tools, SEMrush, Ahrefs. I got them. I did it. Done. Thank you. The data’s done. And then we go back when we have to, we cherry pick a couple metrics and we say we’re doing exactly what we’re supposed to do.

But we can do better than that. I know we can do better than that. It and it’s 2025 and the economy is shit. We have to do better than that. Okay? We have to actually use this data that we’re given. And I think this starts at the very beginning of the entire process. I’ve written dozens of marketing plans, I’ve read hundreds of marketing plans, and even the ones that I’ve written, they were all missing the same thing. Okay? I’m guilty as charged here. A tracking plan. How in the world are we going to prove the value of what we have done? Okay? We have to have a tracking plan. And it all starts with this very simple question. What does success look like? And I know what you’re thinking, you’re like, Brianna, I’m 17 steps ahead of you. Have you heard of a SMART goal? Yeah. Actually, I have. Most of us have.

But I’ll tell you what, when the going gets tough and a CEO is looking at their bottom line, a 10% increase in unbranded traffic over the last 90 days, they’re not really going to care because they’re mostly, again, worried about their bottom line. So of course, we need to understand what success looks like for our client, right? So whomever is hiring us, whether it’s the actual client, whether it’s an agency that you’re white labeling for, or whatever that might look like. We need to know what success looks like for their client. But we also need to consider what success looks like for their boss, whomever they’re reporting to. If they’re reporting to a manager, a CEO, if they’re a CEO and they’re reporting to stakeholders or their spouse, whoever they’re reporting to. I’ll tell you what, if you’re in a good position to make your clients look good, they’re going to keep you around longer. So we need to make sure that we’re staying a step ahead and going, what questions are you asked all the time and how can I help you gather that information so that you’re in position to answer those questions? Okay. So what does success look like for a client? What does it look like for their boss? And then also, what does it look like for you? As an SEO, what does success look like? Does it look like speeding up your pages? Does it look like ranking for x keyword or whatever that might look like? Right? Okay. So we have to have all of these things.

And then once we have all of these, which are generally like your ultimate goals, most people it’s going to be like purchases, revenue, form smiths, things of that nature. But then we have to consider also what affects whether or not the users that come to our site complete these goals. Okay? Are there other events that they are going to have to complete or like other steps they have to take before they can complete the overall event? Are there different ways they could get to the site, different things that they could interact with in order to enhance their conversion journey? Right? Like, we have filters? Do we know how people are interacting with those filters? What they’re selecting? What they’re doing? How many times are they filtering things before they find what they need? Right? These are all things we can track. Something I will I will give you to you as a question just to ponder for a while is if I could jump into analytics and I could see anything, what would I want to see? More times than not, you can actually track it. Sometimes you can’t, but most of the time you can. All right? So we need to be thinking about what affects whether or not we reach this idea of success. And then we need to think about, how am I trying to make success happen?

So we are SEOs, right? We have a lot of different tactics that we tend to deploy in order to try and reach success. And right now, it looks like even more because our scope just tends to I was talking to someone, I can’t remember who it was. It’s like, our scope just tends to get bigger and bigger over time. It’s like, oh, well, we wrote blogs. Can you show how many people visit a blog and then become a user, right? Or they convert. Or maybe we manage all the Google Business Profile listings. Can you show which ones of those are sending people to your website and which ones have the most active users, which ones have the users that convert the most, right? You have to have a good UTM plan for that. Same thing if you’re using YouTube, which you absolutely should be using YouTube as an SEO strategy. Just my two cents there. Can you see which videos, specific videos, are sending people to your website and then they’re ultimately converting? Sometimes this looks like having to create custom audiences, like I already mentioned, UTM plans. We have to have a way to splice and dice our data so we can show exactly the impact that we’ve made. Okay? And then you have to take all of this big list of things where you’re like, success looks like this, these are all the things they can do on the website that they can interact with, that we have the ability to change. I’m going to put that caveat out there. I understand that there’s a lot of red tape a lot of the time. And there are only so many things that we actually have the ability to change. So keep that in mind. But make your list. What things are being done on the website? What’s going to affect whether or not people are doing those things, what questions are we going to get asked over and over again, and ask yourself, am I tracking that? And then, ask yourself if you’re tracking that correctly. How many of you have tested all of your events in the last 90 days? Jori, that’s why you’re my kind of people.

Okay? We need to go I cannot tell you how many times I’ve jumped into an analytics account and gone, uh-oh, you’re double firing this. Uh-oh, that’s actually not firing at all. Or, this is doing something completely different than what you just explained to me. Okay? We have to be auditing our setups over and over again because things on the website change. Right? Only every once in a while. So make sure you’re tracking it correctly. Okay. So step one, gather the data that you actually need and make sure you’re doing it correctly. Okay? Create a tracking plan and test it. All right. So now, we’ve got a tracking plan, we’ve got everything going into analytics, and we have this table of data. Hell yeah, everybody loves a table of data. Okay. Well, not everybody. Most people don’t like tables of data. That’s totally fine. But that’s generally how data is presented. Once it’s collected, it’s put into a beautiful table, right, especially today’s analytics tools.

Our job now, in order if we want people to actually use data, including ourselves, let’s be fair, we have to make it accessible. And when I say we have to make our data accessible, I mean two things. One, it needs to be easy to find and get to, or else you’re not going to go to it, let’s be honest. And two, it needs to be easy to understand. We need it to be set up in a way that we can quickly make assumptions about what’s going on. Okay? So step one is to make it accessible. Now, heads up, all of my clients use GA4 because in my mind, it’s the most accessible at the very low price point of free. Okay? So everyone can use it. So we use Google Analytics 4. You don’t have to tell me how you feel about Google Analytics 4. I’ve been talking about it for four years. I know exactly how you feel about Google Analytics 4. But the reality of it is, actually, it is highly customizable, which means we can make the information that we need pretty accessible. See, if you jump into Google Analytics four and you go to the report section, which is where most everyone’s going to hang out, you’re going to see something called the library. And the library is actually what makes up the navigation. Okay? So it’s a library of all the reports and then you can put the reports in these places and then it shows up in your navigation. Right? So if you go into the library at the top, there’s something called collections. And if you look really hard at the collections, you’re going to be like, Brianna, that looks really familiar. That’s because the collections are actually what make up the navigation. Okay? So you can go into a collection, you can rename the collection, you can add reports to the collection, you can get rid of reports in the collection. Okay? So this is where you change all your navigation stuff. In the library, you can also customize reports. Or if there’s a report already built in GA four and you’re like, that’s pretty damn close, but not quite what I need, you can go into that report. In the top right corner, there’s a little pencil icon. If you click on the pencil, it opens up the report editor, which allows you to choose which dimensions are available and select a default dimension. You can select which metrics are available, change the order of them, change how it’s sorted. You can even choose your visuals. I say that, but really they only give you three different options. You get a bar chart, a line chart, or a scatter plot.You can show both of them, none of them. It’s really up to you. 

Okay. So all of that’s nice. But where the real power comes in is the fact that you can actually save filters reports when you customize them. And when you do this, you get access. You can filter by most dimensions. Yes, now you can actually even filter by event name. Thank God, took them long enough. So you can filter by most dimensions. You can have up to five different conditions that have to be met. And you can use includes, excludes, regex, and then all of the negatives of those and so on. Okay? So again, make your data accessible. I have a client. They just went through a website redesign, and their client is always asking them about the product page. What’s happening on our product pages now? How is it impacting the user journey? Well, easy enough. We created a report. I filtered it to only show their product pages. And now we have all of their product pages and all of the events that are happening on their product pages. And super easy. They just jump into GA4, click on Reports, click on this report. Boom. They can now answer the question very, very quickly. Making their lives a little bit easier.

Now, obviously, the easiest way to make data accessible is to put it into Looker Studio. Totally get it. Most people are bypassing GA 4 completely at this point. Do you, boo? Okay. So we can put our data in Looker Studio. That’s great. The reason that I love Looker Studio so much is because it does make data a little bit easier to understand. Right? You are able to rename your metrics if you did not know that. That is sick because nobody cares about a key event. Right? Not sure why we went down that rabbit hole, but alas, you can rename your metrics. You can use visual cues. Green means good, red means bad, up arrow, down arrow. You can use these cutesy little icons. It’s really sick, right? But a little bit of issue with this is, again, we’re cherry picking metrics, but alas, we’ll get into that later on. But this is just giving us a snapshot. Again, we want to analyze data, hopefully, using Looker. We want to make it accessible. We want to make it so easy, a very cute toddler could do it. So this is my two year old son, Grayson. He is the cutest and the coolest, and you cannot fight me on that. And right now, at home, we are working on a fundamental pre-math skill. My wife was an early childhood education person, so yeah. We’re working on a pre math skill, which means at two years old, we’re working on this, which means I’m very confident all of you can do this. Right? So this is what the skill kind of looks like. We have red, white, red, white, red.

Uh-oh. Oh my goodness. Half my sides are missing. Where did they go? Okay. Well, whatever. So there’s supposed to be a pattern there. I don’t know what happened. I obviously didn’t do a very good job. But basically, it’s identifying patterns. Right? Okay. Most all of you can identify your pattern. That’s great. Visualizing your data allows you to identify patterns quickly. Okay. So we’re just going to spend a little more time on this. This is the other side of that. Right? So if the pre math skill is identifying patterns, this is the other half of that. Does anybody remember the Sesame Street song? One of these things just doesn’t belong here. Right? This is all about identifying the odd one out. In this case, it’s a Yellow circle. Yellow circle. Right. Perfect. You guys are very good at this. So you just told me that you can identify outliers. Right? I always say analytics comes down to two things. It comes down to trends and it comes down to outliers. So if you can identify a pattern and you can identify an outlier, you can analyze your own data. Okay? I believe that. I truly believe that. 

So this is a very extreme example. For one of my clients, we were looking at number of products purchased over time by product name, and we can see here that there are three massive spikes of purchases in this one product, and I’m like, damn, how do we have more days like that? I want more people to be buying that much product. And I could have looked at the source where they were coming from or whatever. I’ll I’ll tell you, I looked at that, there wasn’t a huge like correlation. Instead, I was like, wait, how many people purchased? And when I put these two things together, you could see there’s not a relationship at all. It actually just turns out that there was one person that needed a fuck ton of that product. I don’t know why they needed so much of it. My guess is they’re probably wholesale, like selling it themselves. But once we identify this just goes to show that once you identify the trend or you identify the outlier, that’s what you need to look into. Right? And that’s how you get to these kind of hypotheses. Oh, the reason that this happened is because of x, right? It’s a hypothesis. Correlation does not equal causation, I’m not saying that, but it’s a hypothesis that we’ll get to later on. Okay. There are lots of different ways to visualize data. I don’t have to explain them to you, But this is just another way of identifying the outliers. We can do that pretty quickly here. Right? This is something we use a lot using a pie chart to show category type. In this instance, we can see and quickly make the assumption that, oh, most people are searching our site on desktop. That’s good to know. Can use something like this. This is two visuals kind of layered over each other. I know it can probably it might be a little bit hard to see here, but right away, I can see, ah, Nashville. People love us in Tennessee. And that’s great. Right? So this is the city level, but if we zoom out a little bit more, we also have the state level, and it turns out people really love us in Iowa too. I’m pretty sure that’s Iowa. I’m a military brat, I went to a lot of schools. I’m pretty sure that’s Iowa. I don’t know. Alas, so people love us in Tennessee, and they love us in Iowa. Right? That’s sick. You might be thinking, oh, well, are some times that I need to have a table of data. I agree.

Listen, I love a table of data. Sometimes you have a lot of metrics, you’ve to show it, alas. But you can use visuals here too. These are things that we want to draw people’s eyes to. In this instance, we are using heat mapping to show that Long Beach ranks for the most keywords, Portland had the most impressions, and West Seattle had the best click through rate. Right? And so then again, these are things that we would research. And listen, I didn’t have time to do the research for all of this data. Sometimes you just got to do it yourself. Okay. So alas. But this, what I’m trying to show you is that there are ways to easily draw your eyes in a direction that’s going to help you make an assumption. Right? Oh, that’s why. So here is the patterns. Okay. So if we have red, white, red, white, red, white, the next thing is going to be Red. Red. Perfect. Yeah. So that’s a trend. This is a pattern. Right? This is a pattern most people are going to see on their sites. So this is for SEOjobs[.]com. Shout out Nick for always letting me use his data. And you can see a very obvious trend here that most people see. For Nick, people don’t apply to jobs on Saturdays and Sundays. Makes sense. Right? And and that’s a very quick assumption that we can make. Now, on the other hand, there’s another trend here that there’s always peaks on Mondays. The mo we get the most applications on Mondays. Why is that? Well, we could make any assumption that on Mondays people get to their jobs and hate it, or Mondays people get to their jobs and realize they don’t have a job, and so then they they go and search for it alas. So I’m like, are people coming from search? Like, are they really searching that much on Mondays? So I pulled up the traffic, I did a stacked bar chart, And so the Mondays are, again, the outliers here.

And what I noticed very quickly, the search doesn’t change a ton. Right? The organic search and the direct traffic, it doesn’t change a ton. What does change is now all of a sudden, have this really big section that we don’t see on all the other days, and that’s actually from email. And it turns out Nick just writes bomb ass emails every Monday, sends them out, and people are like, I could use a new job. Right? And so then they click on the applications or click on the links in emails, and they go and they apply for these jobs. Okay? So again, the trends and the outliers, that’s really all it comes down to, I promise. You identify a trend, you identify an outlier, you look into it a little bit, and you make a hypothesis. Okay? So one, you capture all the data you need, make sure you’re capturing it correctly. Two, you make the data easy to find. And three, you make it so easy to understand, a very cute toddler could do it. And easy to understand just means that it’s easy to identify trends and identify outliers. Alright.

Let’s get back to Looker Studio. Who here loves Looker Studio? Woo. Wow. SEOs. Y’all are haters for real. Okay. Fine. I love Looker Studio. Most of us love Looker Studio because it can do really cool things. We’re like, oh, I can input this data. Oh, I can merge my Google Business Profile data with my website data or my Search Console data with my GA4 data, like Jori said, because we’re all going to start being actionable with the things we see at conferences. Right? We put it all in one place, and then we have like 17 different reports in this one report, and we build all these tools, and I’m like, this is really cool. I can show you how many times your keywords were shown in your Google Business Profile comments. Right? And oh, here’s this other thing. We’re looking at branded and unbranded traffic, and I built this filter, and so you’re definitely going to want to see that, and you’re totally going to want to see all of your Google Business Profiles and how they’re working, and oh, with those page clusters we worked on, I put that in a report too, and you see this really cool lift, and then we’re like, why aren’t they looking at that really cool lift? It’s on page seven, and it’s so sick, and and we were working on those location pages and it bumped, and the whole time, the client’s just like, yo, I care about two things. Did I make money and how much of that product did I sell? That’s it. That’s all they care about. They’re going, get to the point. You give them a 17-page report and they’re going, please just get to the point. Right? The problem is everybody should have two sets of reports. I firmly believe this. I will die on this hill. Unfortunately, we’re all sharing what should be considered internal reports. These are reports you look at. Okay? The internal reports have all of the information. It is our responsibility to analyze this information and make decisions on this information. Okay? We are service professionals being hired to do a service. Okay? Part of our service in 2025 with a shit economy is to do the analysis. Okay? And make data backed decisions. And that’s what you do with the internal reports. Okay? External reports are your like give a bow reports here. Right? 

So in journalism, they use something called an inverted pyramid where they say, get to the point right away. Give the most important information first, then show the supporting details, and everything else, that’s what you throw at the end. We should be mimicking this in our reports. Right away, show them the information that they care about, make it easy to understand, so easy that they can do it at a glance. Okay? Because this is what they’re looking for. Regardless of what you’re saying, this is what the client is looking for. And you might be looking at that and going, damn Brie, that’s rough because their revenue’s down. Listen. The foundation of a good relationship is trust. Trust comes from being transparent. They’re going to find out. They’re like moms. Clients are like moms. They’ll find out. Okay? They always find out. So give it to them straight up. In his sales book called They Ask You Answer, Marcus Sheridan talks about this tactic called disarmament where you come in and you you address the objections right away because what it does is it takes the power away from the client and actually gives it to you. I know we’re not salespeople in here, but it gives you the power. Right? And again, it builds trust. It says, hey, I know we have these flaws, but x, y, and z. And that’s what the next section should do. It should give them the supporting facts, tell them why whatever happened happened. Right? And then the last part, you can put whatever here, whatever information they ask for all the time, whatever information you think might be helpful. Okay? So, please, please, for the love of God, create two sets of reports. Okay? 

Now, there is something I did miss that should go in all of those reports and it’s Will Reynolds’ favorite question question, which is, so fucking what? So what? What am I going to do with this? Right? What? All this data and information you just told me, what are we going to do with it? You have to come up with some sort of strategy. I use this very simple framework, it’s two questions. Some sort of strategy to look at all of these hypotheses and evaluate how you’re going to move forward with them. The first question is, was the return greater than the investment? Right? Investment meaning time, money, resources, so on and so forth. If the answer is no, you can’t keep doing it. Okay? We’re going to break some hearts here. We can’t keep doing it. If we’re writing shit tons of blogs and we’re not getting any revenue from those blogs, we can’t keep doing it. Now, that doesn’t mean we can’t keep writing blogs. I’m not saying that. Don’t freak out. Instead, we’re going pull a little bit of a Ross Geller, right? We’re going to pivot. We can’t keep doing it the exact same way we’ve been doing it. If we’re writing an index of all of the different jargon in different industries, and nobody’s coming to that and they’re not converting, maybe we pick a new topic. Okay? Hey, hear me out. Maybe we try something else. Or if we’re writing these really long case studies and nobody’s reading them, maybe we break them up with media. We just have to change something because what we’re doing right now, it’s not working. Okay?

The second question is, did I mean to do that? Was that on purpose? Whatever I just found, did I mean to do that? Because there are plenty of happy accidents in this world. I know that because you’re looking at one. Okay? So plenty of happy accidents. If the answer is yes, you really did mean to do that, congratulations, you found something that you could potentially scale. If the blogs are working, can we create more of those blogs? Can we boost them on social media, right, and put some ad spend behind them? If we – one time I had a client, we found out that that like 50% of all their free sign ups were coming from some influencer they had never talked to, you can bet your ass we reached out to that influencer. Right? Again, like Carrie said, we’re tapping into the people that are already taking the attention. Right? Work with them, not against them. If the answer is no, you didn’t really mean to do that, again, create a strategy for it. That’s what I was actually talking about, alas, with the with the free trials. Right? So if you find something you didn’t really mean to do, create a strategy to leverage it. Right? So next time you look at your reports, I want you to look at it and go, so fucking what? Right? And instead, every report should have a section that explains the findings so that the client doesn’t have to come up with them. You tell them, hey, I saw that email. We backed off on email last month.

I think that’s kind of what affected our revenue because that’s where return users come from, and average orders are really higher. Our product optimization is working. We’re getting a lift on organic, but we’re not seeing a lot of revenue yet. And also, was an influencers blog post that sent some traffic. Great. And then you’re going to pick one of them. Just one. Okay? Science 101. If you’re going to run a test, change one thing. Okay? Because if we change too many, we won’t know what the effect came from, right? So we’re going to pick one thing, and that’s what we’re going to test. And those are going to be our next steps. Again, this should be in your reports. You should always have your findings and your next steps. So in here, says, hey, let’s do the email thing again. That really worked. We’re just going to keep doing the same pace for organic as well. Now, what this means is you can’t schedule pre-built reports and send them to your clients because if you’re sending the same report over and over again, it’s just a dashboard. And they’re going to look at it and go, don’t care. Or they’re going to look at it and go, so fucking what? Right? We don’t want to be in that position. We want to tell them what’s happening here. Okay? Again, that’s our jobs. And then you’re going to get approval, obviously, because you’re awesome, and you’re going to run the test after you create a tracking plan and double check your setup. Okay? So you’re going to run the test. So step five is to create a system that allows people to test so that you can always be testing. In a market that’s always changing, we have to always be testing. That’s the only way we’re going to keep up.

In my consultancy, I use this, which is selfishly branded. Benchmark, collect the data, explore, collect all of the data around it. So how are we doing today? Collect all the data around it. Analyze it. Look for the trends and outliers. Pick a strategy, which is basically like what’s going to have the most impact with the smallest change. Right? And then you’re going to run the test and track it. We have to create a culture of innovation within our organizations in order to win moving forward. Okay? So we’re testing hypotheses which means they might not always be right, which means we might not always win and that is totally okay. Alright?

Alright. Please go out there and use your most valuable asset which is data. Thanks for letting me pretend I’m a rock star and have a good SEO week.