Data in 2025 is a Weird Thing 😵‍💫

I recorded a podcast recently, and in that conversation, I found myself rephrasing Dana DiTomaso’s idea of directional reporting and saying,

“All data is directional data; it’s meant to push you in the right direction.”

Again, this is not exactly what Dana is saying in her talks… but, like, it kinda is, right?

I had three separate conversations with three different people last week about the “accuracy” of their data.

Now, this isn’t totally abnormal. I mean, I do GA4 setups for a living. And I rant about how people tend to fuck up their fundamental settings (and in turn, their GA4 data) almost daily 😅

But it got me thinking, where is this coming from? Why are we all so concerned about our data all of a sudden?

I mean, I gotta say, I’m not the most technical person. Like, I’m not a data scientist or anything, but all of the REALLY smart (and technical) people in this industry simply ARE NOT concerned.

So why is everyone else?

Remember when marketing was just episodes of Mad Men, creating crazy good jingles/punch lines, and creating a landing page very once in a while (if you were on the up and up)?

We knew that it worked cause people would end up calling or coming to the store.

It’s older, but that Wanamaker quote was still kinda true: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

And it was just accepted. It was a truth we lived with.

We gained access to website counters (y’all remember those??? lol), log files, website analytics, and the marketing landscape was changed forever.

Technology continued to advance, and the information we were able to collect was ever-increasing and becoming more and more personalized (and weird).

Now, I will say, this wasn’t an entirely new concept; data has been sold for a long time. It was the amount of data we gained access to that became concerning.

Mix personal information about millions of people and trillions of touchpoints with systems that can handle big data, and you start to see BIG problems.

Consumers started catching on to what we were doing and grew concerned. Some might say the tipping point was Cambridge Analytica, which like… yeah. That was fucked.

But do you remember the New York Times story about the dad who learned his teenage daughter was pregnant from the Target paper ads that were mailed to them?!

We got away with this for a long time before legislation caught up.

We got used to being the ones in control.

We could know exactly where you came from on the internet, what content you interacted with on those other sites, what you did on our site, we knew your name, and we knew exactly the products you looked at and which ones you ended up buying.

Now the pendulum of control is swinging back to consumers, and marketers are freaking the hell out.

But the pendulum isn’t as far on their side, okay?!

We can still see enough to know what our next move ought to be.

The thing is, we had so much for so long… Now that a slice of our pie is gone, it seems like the end of the world.

But we did so much with so little before!

Giving people autonomy over their data is a good thing. There is no need for us to know everything about everyone. We can make decisions based on the data we have; we just have to be willing to accept where we are and map out how we will move forward.

I see companies abandoning GA4 and other website analytics tools because they “don’t match” what their CMS says.

There are so many things wrong with this.

The first, which I won’t get into here, is that every analytics solution collects data a bit differently, so.. That’s never going to work 😅

Oh, and there’s this whole thing that we customize the shit out of our CMS (looking at you, Shopify), and some of that data simply isn’t pushed to GA4.

BUT! The biggest issue with this is that they are giving up ALL data because they are “missing out” on SOME data.

You mean to tell me you don’t care which pages perform best with your different audiences? Or which products people read reviews for then buy, and which products view the product video for before they buy?

You don’t think you can make valuable decisions based on data for *most* users? Because yeah, we still get most of our data.

Even with cookie banners and such, you’re not going to lose ALL of your data. Hell, Luke Carthy got his clients down to a 2-5% in lost data.

And even then, we are seeing more modeling from analytics tools based on cookieless pings and such.

This is what I would recommend personally…

Get over it? Haha, jk, kinda.

Right now, the best thing you can do it accept where we are at. Get compliant (stop trying to get around it) and move on.

Accept that we never had perfect data to begin with, and it never will be moving forward.

The questions you should be asking yourself today are:

• Is my data clean/trustworthy?

• Do I have enough data to make a decision?

Then use you use it, damn it.

Make direction decisions. Track your changes. Compare your new data to the old data. Iterate. Do it again. And again. And again.

That’s it, that’s the game.