Our lunch break during day two of BrightonSEO saw us visit a local eatery, Ala’s Café. A stunning experience from start to finish, we indulged in homemade sandwiches and casual conversation with the friendly owner before returning to the Brighton Centre later that afternoon.
I took my seat amongst the crowd that had formed in Syndicate 3 & 4, ready for a session on GA4 and Google Tag Manager.
GA4 and GTM
Leigh Buttrey took to the stage first, speaking on the subject of how to use GA4 to track and optimise SEO (search engine optimisation) performance.
The talk covered how to set up events within Google Analytics 4, tips on how we can utilise this data to track user engagement and subsequently use this data to help with SEO.
Leigh shared how events can be filtered for different industries to ensure that we’re taking full advantage of the information available. For example, the owner of an E-Commerce website can filter events on GA4 by Organic Search to see exactly how many events were recorded from this traffic source.
Gareth Beck was next up, presenting a talk titled “Five Things You Should Optimise in Your Google Tag Manager Containers”.
Gareth reminded us that Universal Analytics has been deprecated, and as such, we can remove UA tags on GTM to make the container as small as possible. The number of tags in a container can affect the speed of a page, so in doing so, you’re aiding the performance of your site.
He went on to discuss how running old tags adds more weight to a site and makes things harder to manage. If you’re sharing your Google Tag Manager account, you want to make it easy for everyone to understand so as to not overwhelm, only tracking what is essential.
The final talk of the session was presented by Mike Fong, who discussed how to validate and audit your Google tech stack in 2024.
The talk focused on how to conduct an audit to identify common issues that online marketers may stumble across when using a technology stack, such as Google’s Consent Mode.
Mike shared a handy tip to avoid targeted ads appearing when embedding on your site, which involves selecting ‘enable privacy enhanced mode’ on your data settings. I’ll definitely be trying that one!
Log Files and Search Console
Keeping on the topic of Google tools, I headed off to Skyline, the room with the far-reaching sea views, for a techy session on Log Files and Search Console.
Beth Woodcock of Custard Online Marketing kicked off the session with a presentation titled “In Defence of Log Files”. I’ll admit, my knowledge of log files was slim before this talk, but Beth discussed what they are, why they’re important and busted some myths that have given log files a negative reputation in the industry.
The key takeaways from this talk were that you don’t need a data server to download log files, it can all be done from the comfort of your laptop, and that you can use tools to gain access to your client’s log files, directly from their server.
Wojciech Urban was next to the stage, discussing Google’s Looker Studio and Search Console, and how these are the only SEO tools you need.
The talk focused on how you can utilise these tools to find new content ideas. Google Search Console provides insights on the terms that your website is ranking for, and by applying a simple Regex to filter the data, you’re presented with a whole host of ideas that people are actively searching for.
Wojciech shared that you can obtain this information through a report in Google Looker Studio and schedule a delivery of new data to be forwarded to your email each day, week, month or year, so you’re in constant receipt of new content ideas, all based on what you’re already ranking for.
The final session was presented by Paulo Andraus, and was focused on how to export server log data into BigQuery, and how to use this information to identify metrics from Google Search Console.
Paulo explained that Google Analytics only shows what the Javascript file sent to Google and then to you, and is therefore filtered and sampled. Log files give us a more accurate view.
By exporting this information into BigQuery, we can use a pivot table to analyse the data. This can give us a better view of what’s happening on the site, and help us identify issues such as important pages not being crawled.
At the end of the session, everyone made their way to the main auditorium, where Rory Sutherland, the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, gave the final keynote speech on why things that work at one scale fail at another.
If his talk taught me anything, it’s that I need to invest in a Quooker boiling water tap!
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