Using Analytics to Measure Your Success

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Learn how to measure real business results from your website, email campaigns, and more.  In this episode, Matt & Brandon talk about using Google Analytics, campaign tracking, and email autoresponders to track measurable goals for your website.  Enable yourself to take action by analyzing actionable metrics, and segmenting your data.

Links from the show:

• Google Analytics
• Google Campaign Url Builder
• Klout
• Yahoo Analytics
• Omniture
• Campaign Monitor
• Mail Chimp
• Aweber
• WuFoo
• Survey.io
• Survey Monkey
• 4 Questions Survey

Transcript:

Welcome to Automate My Small Business where we show you how to set up and run your own automated business on the cheap. So get ready to take back your life and add a little spice. It’s time to build something automated.

MATT: Hello and welcome to episode #21 of Automate My Small Business. I’m Matt.

BRANDON: And this is Brandon.

MATT: And today we’re going to talk about tools that will help you measure your success and all your different ideas that you might have as you go throughout your business. But before we get into that, Brandon, what have you been up to? I hear you have a new baby girl.

BRANDON: That’s right. I don’t know if we got to an episode where I got the baby girl back from the hospital but you’re right. I got a new baby infant girl named Alexa Taylor Kennington and she’s great. I’ve never thought I’d be a father of two but all of a sudden I am and here I am. She’s 10 lbs 7 oz., full of joy and her big brother is kind of wondering what the hell happened but …

MATT: Well, congratulations

BRANDON: Thank you. Thank you. It’s been fun so far. So I’m kind of been out of it for a little bit but still checking along and getting back on the swing of things.

MATT: We kind of spread some episodes out there for a while so it actually happened a little while ago but it may seem like just a week or two ago from that episode.

BRANDON: Right. I guess there is that time shift that we sometimes have between recordings but you know what, I still have been keeping busy. I decided to go ahead and get signed up with Shipwire, one of the fulfillment companies that we’ve talked about in the past and the reason I signed up with them is to get into the UK market overseas as well as lower my costs by opening up a shipping warehouse in Chicago and Canada. Now that’s been kind of big change for me for Porch Potty. By lowering my shipping costs to the customer, hopefully it will increase sales. So that’s kind of the strategy there.

And then W Hotel called me up the other week and said, “We’re having our grand opening in Hollywood and we wanted to have the Porch Potty featured in one of our patio that will be showcasing as one of the residences that was designed by different designers.”

MATT: That’s cool. I love the W Hotel.

BRANDON: Yeah. W Hotel is like absolutely my favorite hotel. Every time I travel, I try to find a W Hotel. I mean it’s just such a cool place. I mean you walk in you think you’re so important just because of the décor that’s just hip and trendy and young and it’s just great.

MATT: So they finally got that thing up and I remember they’ve been trying to do the grand opening for like two months now.

BRANDON: Yeah. They put the grand opening off like three times and they keep on emailing me saying, “It’s coming soon.” So finally we had it last week. It was pretty amazing. There’s a lot of VIPs and they rolled out the red carpet and a lot of media and press was there. But it was kind of a neat opportunity for Porch Potty to be among that and I guess that really what they wanted to do is attract a pet friendly crowd for their hotel and their residences. So they have this thing called the Woof-Meow program and they’re able to offer grooming services, dog walking services, and now a Porch Potty services.

MATT: I saw that $20 room service item for my dog. I skipped it though.

BRANDON: Is that right? When you stayed at the W?

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: Nice. Nice. The last W I stayed at was Scottsdale which is a scene if you’re into that go up to the pool level and just watch the people. That’s a thing to watch for sure. So that’s kind of exciting. I’m pretty happy with the Facebook fan page in that regard because I can report on things like that and people respond very quickly to it much better than a blog would. In the past everybody says, “You should have a blog. You should have a blog.” But I tell you what, I’m really impressed with how Facebook has just totally taken over.

MATT: It’s really cool because you get the bi-directional communications, with people interacting with each other.

BRANDON: Yeah. You’re right. And people watch their Facebook page a lot more than they watch an RSS feed, I believe.

MATT: Yeah. I think Facebook became the most used site in the last month or something. It beat out Google.

BRANDON: Is that right? I believe it.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: Well, I think both of us have been Facebook users for a while and at first it seemed like kind of an okay thing to do. It seemed kind of fun but it’s really turned in to be a huge business platform as well. And now, I’m learning even more that they’ve leashed some new targeting features in their ad section. So they’re getting to get real serious about their Facebook ads which by the way I reported last time. We talked about it as a bad experience for me and I didn’t really feel like I got as good of a performance from it as I did with Google Adwords. But I’ve been talking to some people recently who have really found some great success advertising on Facebook. And it has opened my eyes a little bit more. I think I want to go back and give it another shot and give it a try because I’m realizing I kind of missed the boat in certain targeting opportunities. I mean really that’s what the whole goal is is to target.

MATT: To hyper target, right.

BRANDON: Hyper target, yeah, which is a term I talked to a lady who I recently hired for my marketing manager. She coined that term or at least it’s first I’ve heard of it but just hyper targeting is like the key to success for advertising on Facebook and now you can. I mean you can now target individuals based on who they’re friends with and if somebody says something about your product on Facebook, you want to advertise to only those who are friends of that person because they probably saw the person who write about it. Now that’s getting really impressive results, I think. I’m kind of looking forward to doing another round two on that one.

MATT: Well, you have to report back to us and see how it goes.

BRANDON: Yeah. For sure. So we’ve been getting a lot of feedback from our listeners and a lot of our feedback and questions I should say is a lot of people are diving into the Odesk. They’re excited about hiring some virtual assistants and some of them are getting mixed results. Some frustrations are how do I find high quality VAs? How can I make sure they’re going to be consistent in their performance? They’re just worried that they’re not getting the right ones and the truth is it’s like anything else. You kind of just have to do a little bit of trial and error at the beginning but as you go you get better at it.

I recently had a little shake out with a few of my VAs. I had to do some shuffling around. Some of them chose to go and do other things. My marketing manager, the one I talked about who worked in Switzerland, he decided he needed to go and help his brother with the business startup that he needed to do. So I lost him along with a writer that I also lost. So there is a little bit of a turn over there but it’s like anything else. I went back. I got on Odesk. I got another marketing manager and I am excited to see what she can do. I think I’ve really found somebody really strong in internet marketing and having to be able to take over that whole area is going to be exciting for me.

MATT: I think it’s kind of an opportunity because as people leave and traditionally is you might not get that turn over so you have the same ideas and the same people working on the business for a long time. Yes, it’s a challenge for people leaving but you also get this influx of new ideas and fresh thoughts that can really be an opportunity for you.

BRANDON: Yeah. Absolutely and you’re getting the practice learning how to communicate with different people and sometimes you get complacent when maybe you hired somebody that is mediocre but you just don’t know they’re mediocre until you tried somebody new and you’re like, “Oh my gosh. I didn’t realize I didn’t have to do all that work.” You got used to it.

MATT: I like it when it turns out that way. I don’t like it when it turns out like, wow, that person was really good. I hope I could get them back.

BRANDON: Exactly. Right. I know you got lucky on your first few VAs. I think your first one, if I remember right…

MATT: My first one was the most insane one I’ve ever had but …

BRANDON: Amazing, right. Like you could never replace her and I think she ended up having to do something else, right.

MATT: Yeah. She left for medical reasons.

BRANDON: That’s right. Things happen but that’s life, right. I mean you can’t get around that. This isn’t like the magic bullet. Although I really feel like it is a big trade secret for sure because not a lot of businesses use it and they really ought to. I really feel like I have an upper edge on my competition because of that alone, that one item alone. So I’m still definitely a big fan of Odesk and using virtual employment and all that.

The other big item I have to report is I’m rolling out retail sales. I’m rolling out Porch Potty product in retail stores and I have to say it’s definitely a whole new ball game when you have to do that because I got real spoiled with having credit cards being taken before I ship and I didn’t have to deal with invoicing and purchase orders and all that. When you deal with retail stores, each one of them has their own purchasing procedure and they need to be able to fax it to you in their letter head and …

MATT: That sounds like a lot of work. How are you automating it?

BRANDON: A lot of work. So I went to work at trying to completely automate the system and first of all I started using Freshbooks which I think we’ve talked about in the past in our finance episode. Freshbooks, if you haven’t heard of it is a fantastic way of automating your invoicing out to others and specifically what happens is an invoice goes to their email in box and they can literally just click a link out of the email to pay it with a credit card even with a check if you have it set up right.

And you’d really don’t even need to go to the mailbox, your snail mailbox to pick up checks if they’re all done electronically. They could pay with Paypal as well if they wanted to but it definitely takes away all the paper work so if you’re a high level or high volume invoicing type of business, you really need to get onto Freshbooks. There’s probably about ten—I actually have seen a list of 20 alternatives to Freshbooks.

And I did do my research and found that there are cheaper versions out there with fewer functions, some that are pretty comparable to Freshbooks but just aren’t used as often. I ended up going with Freshbooks because it kind of seemed to be the gorilla in the market, kind of definitely the lion share of the market. The prices are still pretty reasonable.

MATT: I set up an account before. It’s pretty easy to use and get set up and I was pretty impressed with it.

BRANDON: What was the one item that it didn’t do that you needed it to do?

MATT: I wanted to bill multiple people out of one account and they couldn’t do that.

BRANDON: That’s right. Yeah. So it does have some limitations but that was a very, very rare situation, right. You’re dealing with like ….

MATT: Yeah. I think it can handle most pretty simple billing.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: This is more of a medical billing application so it got kind of complex.

BRANDON: And just finally, the other things I’ve been doing is trying to get the retail stores to purchase products through the website. And I have set up kind of a wholesale page for that purpose. We’ll see how well that goes because you’re asking your customers to kind of do something that they’re not used to doing. So in the name of trying to keep everything automated, sometimes you have to turn away customers just to not have the complexity doubled or quadrupled on you because it may be worth it. It’s a 80/20 rule that you hear so often. That’s been what I’ve been up to. What have you been doing?

MATT: It sounds like you’ve got nothing done since your new girl has arrived.

BRANDON: Yeah, really right.

MATT: Wow. I think it was the longest that you even had. I did my quarterly review of all my sites and went through some of the analytics and the profit through all the books and everything trying to figure out which of the different businesses are doing well, what’s going on and where I want to focus over the next couple of months. And so that kind of gave me the idea that hey, we should something on measuring and looking at analytics and all these different information that I pulled up and I was looking up. So we’ll get into that a little bit more.

But I’ve really been on autopilot for the last month or so. I haven’t really been doing that much in the businesses. I’ve been doing a lot of personal stuff and it’s been nice just letting things run and not really worrying too much. Checking in once a day, sending a couple of emails but really just watching the money come in. So that’s been good.

BRANDON: That is good.

MATT: The one thing I did do is I added Rich snippets functionality to one of my sites which I haven’t really heard about that much before. Maybe we’ve talked about one episode a long time ago. But it allows you to put kind of some extra data into the Google search results and I did it for a review site so I could have five stars or four stars and some extra information that maybe makes my listing in the search results page stand out a little bit more. And I’ve been watching the analytics and I’ve been getting a few more click throughs off of Google so I’m really excited about that.

BRANDON: Yeah. I think you pointed out to me one time that anyway that you can get some sort of differentiator next to your link on the Google search results is a good thing.

MATT: Yeah. Anything that draws you out of your listing is just awesome.

BRANDON: We’ve talked about some of these ways in the past. I think some are one ways to get on Google’s check out. If you are a Google check out site and I think you have to have a certain amount of money go through it before they will show the badge. Is that how you … ?

MATT: You’re getting a couple of conversions.

BRANDON: A couple of conversions, that’s right. Then Google check out badge will show up next to your, I think it’s your ad only not your organic results. So if you’re…

MATT: I can’t remember. It looks like a little flying shopping cart.

BRANDON: Right. And if your ad runs, it’ll show the Google’s check out shopping cart next to it which like you said captures your eye a little bit better.

MATT: Yeah. So doing universal search, you’re getting more and more content onto that page. It’s not just results with blue links. They’re getting video and all these little review ratings and authors. All these sort of stuff is getting pulled in to the search results page and just give you more and more opportunity to distinguish yourself from your competitors.

BRANDON: There is one other way you can do that. MacAfee tried selling me on the idea that anybody who had McAfee installed on their computer, anytime they search on Google, McAfee would I guess somehow take over the results page and show your site as a trusted site when your site showed up. And so they wanted me to pay for that. I ended up doing it as a free trial and I dropped out of it but there are those other ways to get those badges next to your name.

MATT: And it leads in pretty well to what we’re going to talk about today which is measuring the different things that you’re doing with your site or anything else in your business with analytics and business intelligence and making really good decisions on what you want to do. I know when you looked to that, I remember we reviewed the analytics and found out that you weren’t getting that much more click through, right.

BRANDON: That’s right. Yeah. In fact, they even gave me the analytic tool to do that so they lost the sale with an on tool but you’re right.

MATT: They just wanted maybe people to have it installed in there, I guess.

BRANDON: That’s right.

MATT: But you want to be able to make quantitative decision on that sort of stuff because had they been able to show you that yeah, it costs $700 or whatever it was, but you made $2000 more that month because of that badge well then that’d be a good decision. And the only way you’d know that is by looking at the data. There’s no way that you could kind of ball break that or guess that.

BRANDON: Right. When we’re finished with this and we may have to stretch this into two episodes but when we’re finished with this, you’re going to realize this is a big game changer because it kind of goes against all the assumptions of typical, traditional marketing or even product pricing or advertising because typically your assumption in a traditional business is, “Oh, we’ll try this and we’ll see if sales go up or we’ll try that and hopefully we’ll get more calls.” And the problem with that is that you have a lot of cyclical ups and downs with your business as it is already so I have to just give this one example. If I put something on my site that maybe I change a graphic or something or I changed the whole header or the content, Mondays are good for me, right. Normally, Mondays are a good for business, so are Tuesdays.

But let’s say I put this change in place on a Saturday and business wasn’t as good that following Monday. Well, I’ve had a lot of Mondays that weren’t so good. So does that mean it’s just was another bad Monday or does that mean what I did actually changed the sales? You don’t know. The stuff that we’re going to be talking about today is going to totally eliminate all the guess work and make it so you don’t have to guess what is best in terms of getting customers or getting sales. That’s definitely the top reason why you want to start implementing some of these analytics.

MATT: Yeah. I mean I think it’s a good way that you can really remove the noise from all the results that you’re getting, right. You can really see cold hard facts of what the data is showing you and you can make decisions based on that. And you can even use some tools to try things out. Maybe change one page and compare it to the original page using AB testing or multi variant testing which we’re going to go to in a little bit. And say incrementally improve or radically improve your site design or your landing page or just the copy on your website and get all your customers to transparently show you what is the best thing, right.

BRANDON: Right. It’s kind of like evolution, right.

MATT: It’s very much like evolution.

BRANDON: If you look back the billions of years of evolution and it takes that long to have a mutation, make a new breed or species that causes the species to succeed and the success of the fittest or the failure of the weak. And this is basically what we’re doing in hyper time. You’re basically looking at what works best, modifying your site, analyzing it and changing it based on the results and if you continue to do this, you’re going to get some really, really good results in the end because it’s all going to start compounding on itself. You’re basically taking your customers’ actions and it will give you insight into what they want or what they need. It’s really useful stuff. So let’s get into it.

MATT: In this episode we’re going to talk about analytics and survey tools and how to use your mailing list software, your autoresponder with all the analytics around that, hit mapping, customer feedback application, and multi-variant and AB testing. And there’s a ton of tools and it’s really overwhelming so I think before we even get into talking about individual tools, we should talk about strategy to how you manage your analytics.

BRANDON: First thing right off the bat, set some goals. You’re going to want to basically customize these goals based on your business. Not every business is the same.

MATT: Yeah. I mean I think a lot of people just load up the analytic tools and says, “Hey, you had 500 visitors.” And you go, “Okay.” What does that mean, right?

BRANDON: Great. Now, what, right?

MATT: Yeah. So I mean setting goals and figuring out what your site is designed to do is going to help you figure out if whatever you add to your campaign or your SEO efforts, whatever you’re doing to drive traffic to your site is worth it. So what’s good for my review site is not going to be the same things that you’re going to look at on ecommerce site or any other sort of site, right.

BRANDON: Right. Conversion with a newsletter or magazine site might be a newsletter sign up but a conversion at a ecommerce site might be a shopping cart click purchase. So every business is different and that’s going to make a difference in how you set up your analytics using in this case, Google analytics.

MATT: Yeah. So it’s really important to measure what matters to your business and when you’re looking at all the different metrics you can look at, I mean it’s so easy to get overwhelmed. There’s so much information to these tools. You want to find metrics that are easy to understand, that are relevant to your business and are actionable. If you do all these analysis and you don’t make a decision at the end to do something differently, well, you’ve wasted your time, right. If you can’t have an actionable result out of all those information, then you might as well not do it.

BRANDON: Exactly. I mean if there’s anything you get from this, make sure that you are looking at things that matter and not just things that are cool to look at. Don’t look at measuring how many page you get on a particular landing page if that landing page doesn’t really mean anything to you or you’re just trying to find out what information for no reason. So there’s a lot of that information right sitting in front of you so it’s easy to get distracted.

MATT: Yeah. So once you have your goals and you figured out that for my site, conversions are really important or newsletter sign ups or affiliate clicks or whatever it is, when you’re going to go through and analyze that data, one of the most important things to do is to segment your visitors. Segment them by if they’re new versus returning visitors. Segment them by what campaign they came in, what source they came in. Segment them by whatever is important to your business so that you can make decisions about prioritizing certain traffic over others and increasing your investment in one place or decreasing it on another. If you don’t segment, I mean looking at the overall aggregate data doesn’t tell you anything. If your sales went up this month, then you can’t say that’s because our response from our new PPC campaign is what drove those sales up versus our SEO. Well then what good is that if you don’t where it came from then you can’t make any good decisions?

BRANDON: Right. So we’ll get into more details about segmenting a little bit later. Just know that it is a way of grouping your visitors or grouping your customers into tangible groups that you can then perform more analysis on and look more specifically at what they’re doing versus another group. So just keep that in mind that that is the end goal is to segment them apart from each other so that they have meaningful results. And then next would be to actually get some survey questions out there because you’re going to learn that although there’s a whole lot of information here with what is an analytics, there is still numbers that don’t tell the whole story. So you’re going to want to survey the customers and get some ideas, maybe complaints directly from the customers that will fill out the total picture.

MATT: Yeah. The surveys are really going to tell you the why, right, so analytics may tell you, “Hey’, you had X number of visitors that came today. They clicked on Y number of pages and you have G number of conversions.” But some of those visitors didn’t come to buy. Maybe they came just to research your product today. So unless you ask them why did you come today, nothing in analytics is going to tell you what the purpose of their visit was or anything like that so surveys are going to give you the why and non-quantitative information you just couldn’t get any other way. It’s like people might say when you ask them why you didn’t you purchase today? “Well, because I didn’t feel like your site was trustworthy.” That’s not something you would figure out by looking at a number and anything else.

BRANDON: Right. So in conclusion, the strategy here is to set goals, segment your customers, your visitors, survey those to fill in some of the gaps that you’re not getting from the data and then finally, take action. Put this into good use. If you find out that there is a discrepancy or there’s a shift or a lopsided data that’s showing that you’re getting better performance on one side than the other, change it. Make the change and then start your analytics over again and you’re going to continue to tune and get it more optimized as you go. There are a lot of analytics tools out there. By far, the majority of us out on the internet use Google analytics.

MATT: I think it’s the best free tool out there. There’s a lot of it you can pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for analytics tools, if you’re a big corporation but Google analytics and if you’re a yahoo customer, Yahoo analytics are both pretty good free tools.

BRANDON: Yeah. I’ve used Yahoo analytics before and I like it. I mean it definitely has all the good information but I think if you’re going to be hiring a VA to help you with this, most of them use Google analytics. So you might as well get used to and familiar with Google analytics just so that you can kind of talk the same language.

MATT: And if you’re not a Yahoo customer, I don’t think you can use Yahoo analytics so Google you can use regardless of who you are. You just go and you sign up with your Google account and then it’s free, right.

BRANDON: I thought you could use Yahoo analytics if you weren’t on you Yahoo but …

MATT: Maybe I’m wrong I think I looked and I couldn’t figure how to sign up. But one thing you can also do is you can run multiple analytics suites because really when you install these things, it’s just a Java script file that you link into your website. You can link in multiple sites. I have sites where I run different analytic suites because maybe there’s a gap in some of the information that one provides like—there’s not really a lot of demographic information you can get out of Google analytics so running something like Quantcast will give you some of the demographic information you might not get in other places.

I’ve tried out a new tool called Kismetrics and some stuff like that that’s really customized. While I always have Google analytics running in the background, it’s kind of my go to for everything, I do use some specialized tools sometimes to get a little bit more information.

BRANDON: Yeah. In general, here’s how it works: You sign up for Google analytics. Put your website that you’re trying to analyze into Google analytics. It will spit back some code that you need to copy and paste into your website. This can get a little hairy for those who aren’t really familiar with HTML or any web design but poke around it a little bit. Maybe look at some of the help files if you’re using ecommerce platform. I had to check out the help files or the manual or knowledge base on Volusion because when I was running my Volusion site, they actually have a specific area on the Volusion system that you need to post or paste the script to. I don’t know why but it felt like I was kind of the only one that didn’t know how to get the Google analytics started in five minutes but it turns out there’s a lot of people that had a little problem with it especial in certain content management systems.

MATT: I think a lot of the content management systems are getting about it especially ones with plugins like if you’re on WordPress, there’s a great plugin called Google Analyticator that will set up all these for you. You just have to provide the little account key and then after that it’s all set up and it puts it on all the pages and it has all the options you can change after that. And a lot of the shopping carts or other specialize places, you just cut and paste that Java script you get from Google but every once in a while it’s a little hard to find. You got to search in the docs.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: And I haven’t seen too many that don’t support anymore. It’s pretty common that everyone wants some form of analytics.

BRANDON: Yeah. I mean everybody is doing this so it’s definitely number one request feature. So talk a little bit about the basic metrics that you can get out of analytics.

MATT: So when you first set it up, probably there first thing you’re going to look at and you’re going to be addicted to is watching your visitors because when you’ve come from the world of the blind, just seeing how many people coming to your site is really interesting. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really tell you very much about anything. So some of the other things you’re going to see that are literally more actionable are things like bounce rate and what bounce rate means is people that come to your site and just leave right off the start. They don’t click on anything else. I mean they don’t click to any other page of your site. They just leave and you’d be surprised what a high percentage of people that is. I mean I think industry average is going to be 40 to 55 percent. You can look in Google on some of the benchmarking stuff and see for your type of site, what is the average bounce rate across all the entry apparently where you’re at with that. But there’s an analytics guy named Avinash Kaushik who says bounce rate is I came, I saw, I puked, I left. That’s how he describes that. You’re always going to get a couple of those.

BRANDON: That’s it.

MATT: You want to minimize that, right.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: So the next thing is exit rate. And for each page you’re going to get an exit rate which is the percentage of people that leave your site from that page.

And depending on the type of site you have, that maybe a good thing. So something like a site that’s driven off affiliate revenue where the whole goal is to get them to click on a link that goes to one of your affiliate programs, well, exiting off a page is a really good thing.

BRANDON: Yeah. That’s the goal.

MATT: That’s the goal. It’s not always a bad thing and you really have to look at what your business is like to see if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Obviously if you’re an ecommerce site and you’re trying to get people to go through your shopping cart, people exiting out of your shopping cart is a bad thing.

BRANDON: Right. So that will lead us into like a conversion rate metric. Like we said if you’re a shopping cart, a conversion would be a purchase or if you’re a magazine, maybe a newsletter sign up will be a conversion. But you’re basically measuring your conversions and that would be calculated in the Google analytics as well. Now, it is important that in order to capture conversions, you need a little bit of extra snippet of script to place in the conversion page which would be, say, your thank you page or thanks for signing up or thanks for purchasing so that Google analytics knows that a conversion occurred. So that’s important to make sure that you have from day one. In fact, one tip I would say is as soon as you even have a website, try to get all these stuff in place immediately because the more information you have the better. But more importantly, once you get time on your site and there’s people on your site, you’re losing everyday that you don’t have this in place, you’re losing valuable data so it’s best to get these all set up as soon as you can.

MATT: I think one of the really interesting things around conversion is that you can associate value with conversions. And so you can see for this conversion, I made $300 or $12 or whatever it is and then you can really associate value to the whole pipeline that got them there whether that’s the PPC Adwords campaign that you ran or the newsletter that you sent out or whatever. You can say, “Hey, this newsletter that I sent out earned me $3000.”

BRANDON: Have you had any experience with setting up different types of conversions or is it one conversion the same across the board?

MATT: No. I usually set up different goals and those goals are manifested as conversions. So things may have different values like an affiliate click for me might be 25 cents whereas a sign up I may have to attribute or newsletter sign up I may have to attribute some a return value for.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: Maybe looking back in history, I know that my newsletter subscribers earn me $3 or $4 a month based on the newsletters that I send them in and the things they click on. So I might say a newsletter sign up is worth $10 to me or whatever value based on what I see.

BRANDON: Right. I have pretty much similar priced products that I’ve worked with in the past so I don’t really need this but it was always something I’ve wondered is if you have a very high margin or high priced product and also a low margin, low priced product, your conversion value would be of course different from each one of those. So I’m wondering if Google analytics would actually be able to pick up which product they purchased.

MATT: Yeah. I think it actually will like you could put in the actual cost of your product, the cost of goods so it will actually measure profit for you I think, if I remember it correctly.

BRANDON: Yes. I’ve seen that before, the profit segment. Yeah. You definitely can do that. So another metric you can take a look at which anything that measures the engagement of your customer: the time of their visit or how many pages they visited, or how often they visit. That’s all measuring how engaged they are and you can basically get a sense of how loyal your visitors are or how engaging your content is based on these variables. So there’s all of that in the basic metric section of Google analytics. So far we haven’t really modified or customized any of the metrics that you can use or find on Google analytics. So we’ll get into more customization later.

MATT: One thing I think is interesting with the basic metric is you can go into the visitor section of Google analytics, underneath these you see benchmarking. If you go into that, you can actually compare like those common things that we just talked. Things like the number of visits, page used, pages per visit, average on site, bounce rate, all those basic things and you can look at that compared to other sites that are about your topic and about your size and see how you’re doing because I know when I was starting I saw 60 percent bounce rate. I’m like that seems awful. Was it bad? Was it good? I have no clue. I didn’t know what it was supposed to be. And so kind of going into the metrics and seeing, “Hey, the average is 45 percent.” And I go say, I need to get that down. So 60 percent is bad but I had no clue without looking at the benchmarking. And I think that was really valuable for me when I was first starting out.

BRANDON: Yeah. You always wonder that stuff. Wow, am I doing good or is that bad? Is the number 512 a good number? What do I do with this, right? So that’s a good way to kind of see how you ranked with others in your industry. The other area that you can really focus on is if you have a step to step to step process on your website, you can use a feature called sales funnel, which basically contract what your customers are doing, if they exist at a certain point in the process which would be like kind of them leaking from your sales funnel. Maybe if you have a check out process where you have first step is to click ad to cart. Second step is fill in this basic information with your address and name. Third step is look at the shipping cost, click submit and fill in your credit card information. And then the last page of course is the thank you page. If you’re finding that most of your customers or some of your customers are getting all the way to the shipping information page and then they are leaving, maybe it tells you a little bit about check on getting lower shipping cost because it’s just not doing it for your customers. So that’s a good indication of like where along the process they may be losing interest.

MATT: Yeah. And as we get into later or in the next episode when we talk about AB testing and multi-variant testing, once you identify that, “Hey, there’s a problem on this page.” You can even do things like create alternate versions of this page and see if version B helps people get through that hurdle a little bit better.

BRANDON: Right. That’s a great tool and all this put together really becomes a way to optimize your page. You’re trying to find—your purpose is to find out what each page is doing for you along the way to reach your goals. So if your goal is to sell a widget, you need to purse that out, look at each page as what is this page doing for me and then analyze it. If you’re a non-ecommerce site, visitor loyalty, visitor recency, length of visit, depth of visit are all good metrics to use when you’re looking at each page.

MATT: Back on the purpose of each page, I think there’s a lot of pages that we just create on our sites and we never really think about why we create them. I heard a great example the other day of someone talking about like thank you for signing up for the newsletter page. And they did some testing and they kind of thought about it and they said, “Why does this page exist?” Yeah, it exist to say thank you for signing up for this newsletter but what good is this, what could we do with this page that would contribute to the overall goals of the site? And just putting a couple of extra links, “Hey, you signed up for the newsletter. Here’s the next steps. Go look at this product. Go read this article. Watch this video.” And putting that on the thank you page increase the conversion rate by like 10 percent. I thought that was really interesting use in our case study and if you just start to think about, “Hey, what does this page exist? What can it do to help the overall goals?” You start to see opportunities in your pages where they might never been before.

BRANDON: Not that I’m a big fan of advertising on your site, I think it distracts the customer in the many cases but I believe there is the right time and right place to do that and I have also heard of many people finding good results from putting not just ads but maybe links that they’ve swapped with other sites that they feel the customer would be also interested in after purchasing their product. It’s kind of like, “Hey, you’ve already purchased this,” or it’s kind of like the Amazon, “People who purchased this also purchased” or “People who read this book also read this book.” When you have a customer and they purchased your product, you might say, “Hey a lot of our customers find this other company useful.” I mean you’ve already gotten them as a customer you might as well help other companies in your industry that kind of coincide with your customer’s needs.

MATT: I’ve even done that with my competitors before where I’ve had like a comparison page and if they decided not to use or buy my product, well, I wanted to get the 10 or 15 bucks of them buying the other product so I may try an affiliate link

BRANDON: Right. So as long as they’re buying your competitor’s product, you might as well get some affiliate commission on it, right.

MATT: Exactly.

BRANDON: Yeah. That’s true. Alright. Talk a little bit more about conversions and micro conversions and such.

MATT: Okay. So we talked about conversion. Really, this is going to be how you track whatever goal you have within your site and these are really easy to set up within the Google analytics. You just need to go down to the goal section, create some custom goals. This could be anything from your customers viewing a certain page. In ecommerce section this is going to be like they get to the after the check out page, thank you for buying, your order has been submitted and a lot of the shopping carts would populate information about the order so Google analytics can get it. But this could be any page. If you have a very special page that you want them to get to on your site, then you can just say, whoever use this page, that’s a conversion and I attribute this one to value to it. And you can create all kinds of different conversions and different goals and then you can view that underneath the goal section. And sometimes the conversions are going to be things that are steps along the way. We’ve talked about the funnels before. You might say, “Hey, if someone puts something on a cart, that’s conversion.” Well, you might say it’s a micro conversion. It’s not the ultimate conversion you want but it’s an important step on your site. It’s an important thing. The ultimate conversion is in buying.

BRANDON: So we talked a little bit about segmenting before but here’s a few examples you can sink your teeth into. For example, let’s say you had a newsletter sign up on your website and you were kind of wondering, of the people who signed up for my newsletter, how long do they typically stay on my website for? Or do they ever get to the check out page if they’ve signed u for the newsletter? So that kind of measures how well the newsletter is doing for you, right.

MATT: Or even really compare them versus of the people that signed up for the newsletter, how well did they convert versus people that haven’t signed up?

BRANDON: Right. So you can tell if the newsletter is actually doing good for you. It’s that something you’re spending your time on. It’s a lot of work to do every week or every month. Is this really paying off? And so that’s where the segmentation comes in. So what you’re going to do is you’re basically going to set up a segment in Google analytics and you’re going to give it a name and you’re going to take that group of people and put it aside and say, “Alright. Now, let’s just take a look at these people. We’ll call them newsletter sign up people.” And of those people, now you can just run all the other analytic metrics on them and find out how they act differently or how a non-newsletter sign up person would act. So that’s good information. Another way you can segment is off of which sites they come off of, maybe a group of people you want to segment or all of those that use the AOL search engine. Set those aside. Do they act differently than the people coming off of Google? That’s probably a bad example but maybe a better example is a referral site that they have come off, it may have targeted certain words before or things like that.

MATT: I really like looking at paid traffic versus SEO traffic. I’m getting all these SEO traffic. Is it converting as well as very targeted paid traffic or is it not? Should I spend more time on SEO and things like that or different landing pages that they come in. You can segment by that as well. And one of the kind of things that you didn’t realize you can segment by until last twelve months was you can actually segment by the amount of time that people spend on the site so if I want to look at people, how well the people convert who spend over two minutes versus under two minutes on those site. I could look at that and say, Well, hey, getting people over two minutes is a key goal to helping them convert. So I need to do things that keep them engage on the site and increase that time on the site.

BRANDON: Exactly. So that’s analytics in a nut shell. I think there’s a lot you can dive into and get your feet wet. You can get really overwhelmed real quickly but there’s a lot of other analytics tools out there in terms of measuring performance. If you’re a Twitter person and you like to do a lot of Twitter, you could measure how well you’re doing with sites like Klout.com, kind of gives you an ego boost as to how many followers you have, what your level of engagement is. TweetLevel is also a website that does that. It gives you kind of a popularity contest for Twitter and in some ways monetizes or at least acts to give you a monetary value of how well you’re Twitterring.

MATT: I mean I think regardless of whether you’re doing web or Twitter or any other sort of analytics and measuring stuff, you really want to focus on setting what your goals are, what you’re trying to measure the things that are really going to benefit your business and then looking at different ways to slice that data through segmentation to figure out which group of users is doing better at achieving those goals and focusing turning them to sales. So whether you’re looking at web analytics or Twitter analytics or even your email analytics which we’ll get into, I mean I think those are the key goals that you just don’t see like it’s a little bit harder to get to. When you first see analyst, you see all this and it will say to you, wow, I have analytics set up and all I look at is visitors. You got to think about the goals and think about how you want to segment, how you want to look at that data.

BRANDON: Yeah. Of course all of this is free, so you might as well do it. The only really concern you have is the time it might take to just analyze all this but if you segment your visitors correctly, and you set up certain goals in the system correctly, and you put together a campaign tracking correctly, you will reap huge rewards because you’ll be able to optimize your site for the most conversions possible. Speaking of setting up campaign tracking, one of the thing that we haven’t covered yet in Google analytics is the ability to track campaigns and now that could be tied to maybe your ad words campaigns or campaigns that you might want to set up separately.

MATT: Yes, the Adwords campaigns you get a little bit of tracking automatically. Google add that. If you’re advertising on Yahoo or Microsoft Ad center then you’ll probably want to add the Campaign tracking to those links but you can also use that outside of your PPC. You can attribute your links from email newsletter or from anywhere you post on the web for anything with the source that’s coming from the medium so the medium being is it Pay Per Click? Is it social link? Is it in an email? Is it an offline link where you print out a bunch of cards and put those out there? You can tag these links so that when people click through with these links, it will show up in different segments within Google analytics which I think is tremendously powerful. I mean we’ve done that for our email campaign so we can see the people that come to the site through email, how do they convert versus people that come naturally through organic. Even things like I wanted to see how my link building and forum posting is doing, I can have my VAs tag all those links with a forum medium and then I can see regardless of if they came from 50 different forum sites, I can say, “Hey, these are all forum post. Everyone that came from a forum post did this on the site.”

BRANDON: Yeah. So basically what you’re doing is you’re putting together a quick custom URL that you’re going to be posting on a specific area whether it be an email you sent out or whether it be a group of forums like Matt was saying or maybe it’s a special website that you’re hoping to get a lot of publicity from or press release that you’re putting out there that you’re hoping to get a lot of traffic from and you’re going to want to capture that information and capture how many people are coming and what they’re doing. So there’s a URL creator tool that Google analytics has if you go into the help section and search for it, you’ll find it and they can basically make it easy for you to create the long URL that you’ll end up using. And it will basically give the information or pass the parameters of what that URL is trying to say and where you’ve placed it. It will pass that information into Google analytics when somebody clicks on it. So it’s very similar to how affiliates use their affiliate trackable link when trying to get credit or get commission for their work selling or getting traffic to another person’s site. It’s the same kind of deal. You’re basically tracking who’s clicking, when/where they came from. There’s basically five different dimensions: Where it’s coming from, which is the source. What type of medium is it? Is it organic or is it paid, is the typical medium. Which campaign is it? You can give it a name. What’s the content is the fourth dimension which is as we talked about our AB testing. You might have a certain version of the content. There’s version A and then you might have version B as another version of the content. So you might want to put that in there, inside the link so that you can track which one you’re using.

MATT: If you’re doing price testing, that’s a great place to put that.

BRANDON: Even better. Right. And then the last dimension is the terms, the actual keywords you’re using. This is typically used with your Adwords campaign so that’s kind of exclusive for that. But there’s a lot of information you can get out of that. Anytime you come up with a new campaign idea or new advertising idea or a new marketing concept or maybe somebody says, “Hey, I’ll put your website on my thank you page,” or something like we’ve talked about earlier, give them a trackable link. I mean you can always see where the traffic is coming from using the sites visited section of Google analytics. So there is that back up but you get a lot more information if you give them a specialized URL that can track that.

MATT: I think it’s really good summary. Good point. So one of the next things that we have after we have all these quantitative data of the analytic stuff is a survey tool and survey tool is going to let us ask the why. Why did you come to the site? Why did you leave the site? All the stuff that you can’t really track just by looking at web pages people had been in. There is a ton of survey products out there that do this stuff. And I like just from a conceptual idea, this one product called 4Q. It’s by Avinash Kaushik which we talked about earlier. He’s a Google analytic specialist out there and he created this questionnaire site called 4Q which asks four questions. And he thinks these are the most key questions at figuring out if your site is effective. And these questions are basically are: Rate your experience from 1 to 10. Then he asks, what was your goal? So you can have a multiple choice of was your goal is to purchase something, was your goal to research or compare products or anything that makes sense out of your site you get to customize that. And the next one was did you complete your task? And I think this one is the one that is most critical. So if they came here to research and they successfully researched, that’s a good thing. That’s conversion for you basically, right. Maybe you shouldn’t be tracking if the people that came to visit actually bought. You want to know if hey, did they get the research information they needed on this visit and maybe later on they’re going to come back and purchase. If they came to buy and they said no, they didn’t buy, well then, that’s something you need to work on, you need to fix. And then the last question is provide feedback. And I’ve gotten all kinds of great responses inside of my feedback. Basically an open ended question just, what do you think? How can I improve the site? And I’ve gotten so many suggestions of how to fix things and why people aren’t clicking on certain links on my site that I never would have gotten through any analytics. I mean it has really helped me to make all my sites better.

BRANDON: Yeah. I’ve never really been a big fan of surveys because I don’t know why. I’m just not that type that likes to fill out all surveys so I’m …

MATT: I have filling them out too. I was surprised how many people filled them out.

BRANDON: Exactly. That’s what I was about to say was I would always click them off or exist out of them but I am real surprised to see how effective they are. They just are downright effective. I don’t know who takes the time to fill these things out. I mean I don’t have the time or if I did, I didn’t want to use it filling out surveys but for whatever reason there are a lot of people that will actually sit down and take the time and give you real honest feedback and you know what, it’s so valuable. It’s worth putting on your site. So against surveys as you might be as I am, this stuff really does work and there are people that are happy to give their feedback. In fact, there’s some people who are searching for ways to give you feedback. I can’t tell you how many calls I get from, not me personally, but my customer service group that gets calls from people that are just dying to give their ideas as to how to make our product better. In fact, when I was first getting started and I was taking all the customer calls, I had a few people one in particular I can remember, a guy out of Canada, who would call me daily with new ideas about how to make the product better. Of course it was good. I wanted feedbacks so that’s all good. It’s just that this guy was so passionate about how he thinks that it could be so much better if you did it this way and then eventually of course there’s the questions, do I get royalty if you change the product to be like I’m asking? I mean that’s just kind of a funny scenario but the point is that there are people that are just dying to give feedback. Look at all the comments that you see on blogs, whether you don’t do that or a lot, that doesn’t matter. It’s that there are a lot of people that do it. There are people that are wanting to give comments and give feedback and be a part of something bigger and so take advantage of that wave of energy and ride it.

MATT: I talked about the 4Q survey tool which I think is really good but definitely some stuff to be desired like I would love it if it would automatically segment that traffic based on people’s responses to the survey and Google analytics. So I could see of the people that said that rated as a 9, what did they do versus rated their experience as a 1. So 4Q doesn’t do that. I’d love to hear if anyone has found a survey tool that will let you add segmenting to Google analytics because that will be awesome. But there’s some other tools out there like Wufoo, Survey.io, Survey Monkey. There’s just tons of survey stuff out there. Those are kind of some of the leaders. But really you’re putting the survey out there to figure out the why. Why did they do something? Why did they leave the site? Why did they buy? What are they here to do? I mean I’ve had sites where my old point was to get them to buy something and I saw on the survey question they were here trying to do research or trying to compare products or something that it wasn’t what my goal was. So I wasn’t getting as commercialized of an intent as I wanted it to be. So that was a good indicator for me.

BRANDON: Yeah. So I think surveys are powerful and if you have any where you can use them, they’re good to have. Another area that you can measure and get good analytics from is your newsletter or your emails that you send out. Split testing software out there that can make your newsletters a lot more optimized as you go because you can basically send out two different types of newsletters and find out which ones perform better, which ones have better click-throughs and randomly send them out without really any other variables.

MATT: Yeah. I think this is a really cool feature and we use Aweber which enables this. I know Mail Chimp and I think things like campaign monitoring Constant Contact also have this. But a lot of people will use this split testing just to send out two or three different messages and they’ll send out all their messages using the split test. They’ll say, “Okay, I’m going to say 50 percent gets this letter and 50 percent gets this other letter with a different title.” And then at the end of that they go, “Wow, title B was better.” But I don’t think you get any value, like you get a little bit of value because next time you’ll know hey, I should make my title more like this other title I had, but you don’t get direct value out of it if you do it that way. A technique that I learned that I really like is that you set split test two or three different options depending on how many people you have on your list and you send maybe 10 or 15 percent out to each of those groups with the different options. So you have option A and you have option B and you send out 15 percent to each group or 10 percent to each group and you see that option B is better, well then with the remaining 70 percent of people on the list, send them option B and you automatically improved your conversion rate by whatever difference that was. If it was up 5 percent better click through rate or whatever, you get to use the better version for the majority of the people.

BRANDON: Yeah. Maybe the word option isn’t the right one. Maybe version A, version B, right.

MATT: Version A, version B.

BRANDON: You’re not necessarily giving them an option A or B, you’re showing them two different versions of the email.

MATT: Yeah. So it’s basically for 50 people they’re going to get one version of the email and 50 different people are going to get a different version and I’m going to measure those responses across those different people.

BRANDON: Yeah. I think you’re right. I think that’s a better way to go. Test it a little bit and see which ones work best and then use the better one for the rest of the people that you’re sending it to. That makes a lot more sense. Although I think you can gain some insight from doing it all at one time but maybe we can use this in our text ads because it performed better on our newsletter. Maybe there’s some cross pollination there that you can gain insight from the split testing of your newsletter and then carrying that over onto your website or onto your ads.

MATT: There’s all kinds of different ways that you can use this. I mean you can alter the title to see if a more engaging title might get more opens or a different call to action within the email might give you more clicks.

BRANDON: I think a big one is do I use graphics or do I use plain text? I mean that’s a big decision to make and sometimes plain text is sometimes better.

MATT: Yeah. That’s one option.

BRANDON: Not having all these blinking arrows and graphics filling up your newsletter, I mean, what ends up happening is you lose customers because it looks too salesy.

MATT: I just give it a bunch of red Xs and like…

BRANDON: Yeah. Mine too, right. I have to click show images every time.

MATT: But that’s another metric you even get it within Aweber and I think the other ones is you can get the number of complaints or people that unsubscribe because of a certain message. So if you have some of it that’s really out there with flashing graphics and stuff like that or over the top titles, you can see that’s one of the metrics you don’t want to probably get forward. So version A, you got three people that unsubscribed and version B you got no people unsubscribed, well, version B might be the better one to go with.

BRANDON: Right. There’s a lot of other statistics you can get from this as well, right. You can see how many people are opening the letter or the email. You can see how many people clicked on which links within the email. By the way, I think a good rule of thumb is you should really try to focus each email on a narrowly focused topic and then try to use only one or two links inside that newsletter. I’ve heard that a number of times coming from management consultants and experts that are newsletter management consultants that do this. They really find that their successes increase by doing one email per topic per link per click and then expecting the customer to only really be focused for about 10 seconds on your newsletter than to have way too much stuff that they had to digest and spend five minutes going through. So I think that’s something you can test though and you’ll get results as to who clicked on it, which ones they clicked on, how many they clicked on, how many opened it and a lot of other stuff.

MATT: I think even going beyond that you can use the Google analytics campaign tracking links that we talked about before and you can measure success by what people did when they actually clicked through, right. So you can segment these two different versions of the letter with different sources or during campaigns within your campaign tracking and maybe that’s how you make the decision of which version of the email you’re going to send out to the majority of the people.

BRANDON: Yeah. Now, you’re using multiple tools to get to the same goal and you really start getting into ninja style…

MATT: If you can look at conversions off of that not just I got more clicks with B, maybe B got more clicks but version A got a 50 percent higher conversion rate once they actually got at the site. Well, now which one do I send? I send A.

BRANDON: Yeah. So true, right. That’s really where you need to go. That brings up a real good point, I mean, there’s so much you can monitor and measure here but the real goal, you got to keep your goal in mind, because just because you can measure how many people opened up the newsletter, does that really tell you anything? I mean so it tells you need to be better at writing your newsletter better next time but it doesn’t tell you how many converted. You got to take it to the next step. Put that trackable link in there. Put that link that we talked about in the Google analytics and make that customized link so that you can track all the way through to the conversion and find out what’s really happening. So really powerful stuff there.

MATT: So make sure you go to the website and check out the Automate My Small Business Community where you can ask questions of all the other listeners and us and get some really great advice and feedback on your ideas that you’re trying to implement in your own site.

BRANDON: Yeah. And if you got a chance to slide over to iTunes and give us some feedback, give us a few stars to let other people know how well you like the podcast, it always helps and to let other people kind of understand that this is a good podcast to listen to. Hopefully you’ve gotten a lot of value out of it. So far we’ve gotten a lot of feedbacks saying that it is valuable so we’re going to keep on tracking here and bringing you more information as we come up with it and we find out more. A lot of it comes from you, the listeners. If you have new ideas or new software, new tools or tricks, send us emails or post it up on the community site to let everybody else know about it.

MATT: Yeah. And don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter if you want to get updates in your email when we post new content and advance offers that we give to the newsletters we publish first.

BRANDON: Absolutely. So thanks again for listening and we’ll see you on the other side.

You’ve been listening to Automate My Small Business. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To get a list of the links we’ve just talked about or download more episodes and How To videos, go to AutomateMySmallBusiness.com. Thanks for being with us and catch us next time on Automate My Small Business Podcast.

Podcast music features, “Nothing’s Got Me” by Big Bad Sun, distributed by Magnatune and licensed under Creative Commons. The Automate My Small Business podcast is engineered by Vincent Furlong and transcribed by Flo Umali. And licensed under Creative Commons Attribution No Derivative Works license and may be freely distributed to share with friends, co-workers and strangers.

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