The Ad Was Never the Problem. Your Analytics Were.

Welcome to another episode of the Marketing MadMen. Nick Constantino here with my boy, Chris Williams of Elite Web Pros. Chris, how you doing, buddy?

Doing excellent. How about yourself?

It's been about three years since our first conversation like this. A lot of the things you told me along the way, I've seen play out, how important Google My Business is, how strength in one place can cover up gaps somewhere else. I want to go in order and talk about how this all comes together, starting with Google Analytics, not just how many people clicked, but page views, sessions, time on site, bounce.

It's funny we're talking about this now, because in our first conversation three years ago I said I believed Google was looking at your website data to determine what people do when they land on your site, to decide whether it keeps sending you traffic. That's now confirmed. Google wants people spending as much time with them as possible, so if Google sends someone bad information, that person spends less time with Google, and Google's job is to answer the question well. But you have to play by their rules to do it. There's no other way.

So as a business owner, your job is to make sure that when someone lands on your site for a keyword, the page actually answers the intent behind that search, so they call, or click through, or find the next piece of information.

Right, and what's also come out, which no one talks about, is that Google is looking at link authority based on whether people actually click the link. Even a link from someone else's site is worth less if nobody clicks it. Every time you log in with Google, it's tracking you. Cookies don't matter anymore, that's why they're phasing them out, it's already far more intrusive than that.

You can build a good business by shadily operating inside Google's rules for a while, but it'll be short-term, because Google's always going to be a step ahead. So basically you're opening the hood and telling Google, this is the experience I'm giving your searchers, send me more traffic.

That's confirmed now. So that was phase one three years ago. Phase two is Google Tag Manager. If you're not going to take Google's default word for what counts as a phone call, you need someone who knows how to tag the actual action. Agencies will sometimes rack up key events that don't mean anything and show you how good they've done, a page view isn't a key event. There are a lot of people who just want to look at diamond rings and aren't going to buy.

So what counts as a win for you?

Form fills and chats. Because I'm not going to fake to Google, Pinterest or Meta that anything else matters when I'm spending money against it. I love getting email signups, but I'm not spending fifty-six dollars in acquisition cost to get one, and if you're not careful that's exactly what gets counted as an event.

Their whole system is set up to have you spend as much money as possible, but to their credit, Google actually publishes an enormous amount of documentation, they'll teach you how to set up a tag manager, you can even see your competitors' ads because of the transparency requirements.

Right, because if your deals close more often thanks to the spend you're putting on Facebook and Google, you're going to spend more money with them. So they want you to understand what works. It's just not easy, and most people don't want to do it. But if you have this in place, you'll spend money smarter, and you'll know which campaigns actually don't work. Tag Manager is really just embedding code across your headers, footers and pages so you can track actions, back in the day it was UTM codes and long-tail tracking scripts. Now it consolidates all of it.

How important is it for a business owner to know enough to be dangerous about Tag Manager, even if someone else is setting it up?

Super important, because even when you get Google on the phone for your ad campaign, they'll assign someone to set up your tag manager, but you need to know what to tell them. If you already know you want a thank-you page to count as the real conversion event, not just a form field being touched, you stay in control of what your KPI actually is. Never let someone else be an admin you don't completely trust, and never let someone else tell you what your KPI is.

Let's bring in Search Console.

Search Console is how Google talks to you about how your website is performing, and how you communicate back to Google what's happening on your site, this page moved, this isn't mine, put this page on the first page. It's so important because it's the raw impressions and clicks coming from Google, not a modeled estimate. You might think a keyword is your best one and find out you're only capturing one percent of the actual search volume for it.

No business owner in America wants to hear they're getting one percent of the available traffic.

And Search Console will show you where you rank overall, it's your job to figure out why, whether you're optimizing for the wrong keyword length, or your home base never expanded past a certain region. I also encourage people, download your Search Console data and hand it to AI to make predictions, that's a powerful use of clean inputs. Just don't ask Gemini to optimize your Google account. That's like asking Coca-Cola if their product gives you diabetes.

Now let's talk about Google Business Profile, because that's the layer that pulls all of the previous three together.

When you set up ads with locations, are you sending people to your Business Profile? Do they click through? Do you have tags firing on it? If you see business reconciling from GMB traffic without paying for it, that's usually bottom-of-funnel traffic that was coming to you no matter what, and you don't have to pay branded keywords to defend it. If you don't look at this as a full stack, every piece you're missing is a broken connection.

Branding is key here too. If a competitor writes an article comparing themselves to you and you haven't locked down your own organic presence, that article can rank on page one just because it mentions your name, and you lose the traffic you should own.

Exactly, and locking that down lets you go on offense against competitors instead of only playing defense.

One last piece of advice. If you have an agency running your Google ads and you're not checking on them, go look at Total Campaigns, then Keywords. If the top twenty keywords you're paying for are your own brand's name, you're either being ripped off by your agency, or you haven't done enough to protect your Google Business Profile and organic presence. Either way, that only deteriorates from here.

And the reason that matters is people should be searching for what you do, not just who you are, for someone finding you cold. But there's nothing better than someone searching for you by name directly, because that's the highest intent traffic there is, they're not clicking a competitor's ad. The question becomes whether your site gives them enough once they land to point them where you want them to go.

This is where it comes full circle back to analytics. Someone lands on a paid click, finds what they want, and the next time they search that same term organically, if you've optimized the page and it's converting at a high click-through rate, it actually helps your organic ranking too, because Google can see the paid campaign and the organic result are both satisfying the same intent.

That's exactly right, and a lot of people don't buy on the first click anyway, so if you did your job on the ad, they come back through organic the second time, which reinforces the same signal. I consider a conversion a little differently than most people, a click from your site to another page inside your site is a mini-conversion. In Google's eyes, that's someone finding what they were looking for, and if they click through again and again, you've shown Google your information is viable.

So what he's describing is that marketing gets hyper-focused on the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel, and everyone forgets the middle. You can't take someone from knowing you to buying from you without driving consideration in between, and it's the most forgotten part of marketing. Chris, give me your handles.

That's Chris Williams Inc. on Instagram.