Stop Losing Leads: Fix Your Website with Better Analytics

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_02] Hey, we all know how important our websites are. It's where everything in digital marketing starts and comes together. But are we really paying attention to what matters most? In this episode, we'll dig deep into what your website analytics might be hiding from you, how to find out where your site is literally leaking leads, and how small changes can lead to big wins. My guest, Philippa Games, brings her deep expertise to show you how to finally make your website work smarter for you.

[00:00:30] [SPEAKER_02] So make sure you stay tuned to the very end of this next episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach Podcast.

[00:01:00] [SPEAKER_01] For expert advice, good thing you've got Neal on your side. Because Neal Schaffer is your Digital Marketing Coach. Helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your Digital Marketing Coach and this is Neal Schaffer.

[00:01:25] [SPEAKER_02] Hey everybody, this is your Digital Marketing Coach Neal Schaffer and welcome to my podcast. And this is episode number 419 with a special guest. So interestingly enough, over the last week I have had fractional CMO clients and prospects bring up the same issue of their website. One is a startup, so they're launching a new website. Another is looking for a digital marketing overhaul. And if you're

[00:01:54] [SPEAKER_02] going to overhaul your digital marketing, when I do my audits, it really starts with the website. Obviously we go through the entire SES framework, but for those that have read digital threads, and you know my six containers of digital marketing, that very top, that very first one is the website. You got to get that right. After all, it really is your digital storefront on digital main street. So are you tracking the right things to make sure it's actually working for your business? Many are not.

[00:02:22] [SPEAKER_02] So in this episode, I talk with analytics expert, Philippa Games, about what most marketers are missing when it comes to website data. Whether it's unclear calls to action, poor form conversion, or people dropping off your videos early, your analytics hold the key to fixing these leaks. Now, website analytics aren't just for tech folks. They're essential for growing your brand, increasing conversions, and turning more visitors into real customers.

[00:02:50] [SPEAKER_02] And what I love about what Philippa brings in this interview is she really helps break it all down so that any business owner can start making smart, informed changes today. Without any further ado, here's my interview with Philippa Games.

[00:03:05] [SPEAKER_01] You're listening to your digital marketing coach. This is Neil Schaefer.

[00:03:13] [SPEAKER_02] Hey, everybody. This is Neil Schaefer. Welcome to another live stream edition of the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. Well, as you know, in this podcast, we talk a lot about a lot of different things in digital marketing. But at the end of the day, everything comes down to your website, right? And there's a lot of different analytics that we look at when we look at SEO and email marketing and social media marketing. But really, the most important analytics, if you think about it, are those that cover our digital storefront, our website.

[00:03:42] [SPEAKER_02] What is it that we are missing in our website analytics? What is leaking from our website? What is preventing customers from wanting to do business with us? These are the topics that we are going to discuss today with my invited expert, Philippa Games. So I'm going to let her introduce herself, but I'm really excited to get in this topic. And, you know, I want you to really think hard. We often, as marketers, you know, we chase those shiny objects, those, you know, TikTok or other exciting tools or AI, for instance,

[00:04:12] [SPEAKER_02] which, don't get me wrong, is extremely impactful and valuable. But every now and then, we need to come back and look at our website and look at our analytics. And I'm hoping today's interview will give you a fresh perspective on how to do that better. So, Philippa, welcome to the podcast.

[00:04:26] [SPEAKER_00] Hey, Neil. I'm very honored to be with you.

[00:04:28] [SPEAKER_02] Oh, the honor is all mine. Philippa, I always like to allow my guests to introduce themselves. And really, how did you get started in doing what you did? We didn't come out of primary school saying, I want to do website analytics. So I'm sure somewhere along the line, you found an interest in this. And I'd love for you to share your story.

[00:04:47] [SPEAKER_00] Yes, unfortunately, it wasn't invented when I was at primary school. But I have been very interested in analytics ever since analytics became available, which a lot of people don't know was actually before Google Analytics. And actually, I live in Santa Cruz, California. And a friend of mine here had an analytics program called ClickTracks, which was absolutely brilliant. And it had this amazing interface. And it was really intuitive. And it was very, very easy to use. And I absolutely loved it.

[00:05:17] [SPEAKER_00] And it was aimed at smaller businesses. And then Google Analytics came along, and that was free. And of course, my friend had to charge for his program because he had to eat. And so that was the end of it, obviously, because you can't compete with free. And you can't compete with Google. But what I love about, the thing I love about being an analyst is that it's a combination of being really geeky. You know, like, you've got to understand the data. You've got to make sure the data is accurate and all of that stuff.

[00:05:47] [SPEAKER_00] And then being really creative. Because, you know, the point of a really good analyst, especially today, because we've got AI, you know, AI can crunch numbers and make graphs and pie charts a whole lot better than I can. But it's that piece where we go, so what? So what are we going to do with this information? You know, what are we going to change? What are we going to try? What are we going to test, right? And then you get creative. I'm not sure that AI can do that yet for a specific business in that specific business circumstances. So as I say, the thing I love about analytics, and sorry to make this a long answer,

[00:06:17] [SPEAKER_00] is just that combination of being able to be a geek and be creative at the same time.

[00:06:22] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, I find that there's a huge amount of creativity and marketing in general that people do not talk about. And not just those creatives that you, you know, the visuals that you create, but also, obviously, how you analyze your data and the directions you take based on your, it's going to be different for every company, just based on a lot of different factors. So your friend's company, is that what got you into the space then? Is that a safe thing to say that from that company, you got really interested in web analytics?

[00:06:49] [SPEAKER_00] Well, I mean, I was interested. And then, you know, I realized that he was making this program and I was quite involved with the program. Gotcha. I mean, I didn't work for him. You know, I used it because I loved it. But, you know, it really showed at that point the power of what it could do, because, as I said, the interface was really clear and intuitive, which, frankly, we can't say for a lot of analytics interfaces today.

[00:07:11] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah.

[00:07:12] [SPEAKER_00] Things have got so complicated, you know.

[00:07:14] [SPEAKER_02] And as we know, the best technology doesn't always win.

[00:07:17] [SPEAKER_00] Right.

[00:07:18] [SPEAKER_02] There's still people talking about Betamax versus VHS, but, you know, I'm aging myself there. Okay. So within Analyze, I'm assuming then, Fidipa, you work with a lot of small businesses on their web analytics. And I'm assuming, and, you know, for the listener here, I'm assuming that right now, the work is primarily being done in Google Analytics. Is that a safe assumption to say?

[00:07:39] [SPEAKER_00] For me, yes. I do know that, for example, I hear, I know in Europe, because people are still concerned about Google's privacy practices. I mean, because, you know, Google Analytics 4, which is the latest version, was developed to enhance the privacy of the whole thing. I know that there are certain industries like healthcare, where people are still quite concerned that Google has all this data, even though clearly the analytics data is supposed to be totally anonymous. I have to say that

[00:08:08] [SPEAKER_00] personally identifiable data does creep in. I've seen it in analytics, you know, where, for example, a developer says, wouldn't it be cool to have a welcome page that says, you know, hi, Neil, welcome to our service. And that name is built into the URL, which obviously then appears in the analytics. So, you know, there are things that can creep in that people like me have to audit and say, hey, you can't do this.

[00:08:33] [SPEAKER_02] Gotcha.

[00:08:33] [SPEAKER_00] Or we have to somehow, we have to mask this or whatever it is. So, yeah.

[00:08:37] [SPEAKER_02] Gotcha. So I want to ask you, so I'm assuming that when you work with small business owners on their web analytics, that thinking of a Google Analytics-centric view, that there are a laundry list of metrics and, I mean, Google is guilty of this as well, just, you know, hundreds of different metrics that you could track. But obviously, you would say it's about tracking the right metrics and really prioritizing those metrics. And I think a lot of marketers or small business owners would prefer to have a dashboard of like 10 or 20 different things. But I'm curious,

[00:09:07] [SPEAKER_02] you say, you know, less is more and really it's about the prioritization. So tell us a little bit more about that and how we can better understand the value behind that.

[00:09:15] [SPEAKER_00] So, you know, really, I honestly think there's no point measuring anything just for the sake of it, right? So the point of measuring is to say, what are we going to do with the information that we get when we do this, when we measure this? And so laundry list of metrics are really not helpful because what are you going to do with them, right? What are you going to be able to interpret that's meaningful that you can test and try to optimize if you're measuring so many things at once that it's going to be quite difficult

[00:09:44] [SPEAKER_00] to identify what change made any sort of difference? So, you know, years ago I worked, I taught alongside Avinash Kaushik that people might know was an absolute analytics guru who years ago he wrote a book called Web Analytics 2.0 that was like a Bible. And Avinash had this model that basically narrowed everything down to say nine essential metrics that you should measure. And those, you can choose whatever nine you want,

[00:10:13] [SPEAKER_00] but it's what am I focusing on today? Because I need to know this information because I know that it's going to help me and I know what I'm going to do with it. And making sure that those metrics were across the board of the different stages of our interaction with our customer or what we call the customer journey. So some metrics about what we call acquisition, you know, which is how you get people to the website in the first place. Obviously what people are focused on, which is metrics about conversions, like how many of those people

[00:10:42] [SPEAKER_00] are doing what we want them to do. But also the bit in the middle that lots and lots of people really don't focus on, which is what we call behavior. Universal analytics used to be built on this framework, but behavior is what do people do on our website once they're at the site? So we've got them, but they haven't yet bought anything because that's really crucial. And it's what happens most of the time because very few people buy something immediately, depending on obviously the nature of your site.

[00:11:11] [SPEAKER_00] But whether they like the site, whether they move around it, whether they consume your content and so on, is really important in order to identify what is it that pushes them towards those ultimate outcomes. So really thinking about what do I want to know? Like, for example, I'm spending a ton of money on social media advertising. Is it paying off? So you'd want to be specifically looking at your segmenting out. So a technique that we call segmenting where you group your visitors, right? So you just look at the people

[00:11:40] [SPEAKER_00] who come from social media ads and then you start saying, OK, what did they do? Did they convert? Did they watch our videos, etc.? You know, did they sign up for our newsletter? Whatever it is you're trying to get them to do. And if they didn't, is it worth spending this money? And once you start focusing in on those specific questions and measuring specific things that will help you to answer those questions, then you can do something. Right? So just saying, oh, we had more visitors this week than last week. So what? Right?

[00:12:08] [SPEAKER_02] Right. So a few things here just to break it down. You mentioned, you know, no more than nine things.

[00:12:13] [SPEAKER_00] Well, I don't want to set hard and fast rules, but what I'm trying to say is... It's actually a great rule

[00:12:17] [SPEAKER_02] because it says you don't need 20 or 30 things. It's like, you know... No. Yeah. And understanding that analytics is all about mapping the customer journey. So you mentioned three distinct acquisition, conversion, and then the middle, that behavior. And I'm looking at GA4 as you were speaking just because they've actually, you know, changed the user interface to give you a little bit more of that, right? Right. Of metrics for that. But it's still obviously a lot. So would you say that if the average small business owner listening, if they were to spend a little bit of time

[00:12:47] [SPEAKER_02] in Google Analytics, they would be able to figure out how to map all this or what would be your suggestion for, yes, Philip, I understand that. And now I understand, okay, going forward, like the next few weeks, I want to look at this one metric. What would you suggest to them to figure out how to do that within GA4?

[00:13:05] [SPEAKER_00] Right. Can I go back to one thing about that customer journey? I mentioned those three buckets because that's what Avinash's model had, but there's actually another bucket, which is maybe not so much marketing, but it's retention. So it's really important once we've got a customer to see, assuming it's our business model, if we can make them a loyal and ongoing customer, right? We don't want to have to work so hard to get every single customer. So there is a fourth area and some businesses that may be persuading that customer to buy more

[00:13:34] [SPEAKER_00] and also thinking about ways that you can support that customer if that's relevant online. So maybe you have, you know, how to use our equipment videos or, you know, some things that or knowledge bases or chat, right? So just thinking about ways that you support your existing customers as well. And that should be another function of your website if that's relevant for your business.

[00:13:56] [SPEAKER_02] Thank you. And I was also going to say that, you know, what you talk about is this traditional funnel and applying it to analytics and marketers often forget it doesn't stop at the conversion, right? So thank you for that.

[00:14:08] [SPEAKER_00] Anyway, so thinking about what a small business owner should do and should they go to their GA for, you know, I...

[00:14:14] [SPEAKER_02] Or do they need to go to their GA for, right?

[00:14:17] [SPEAKER_00] Well, okay. So there are people like me around and what I mean by that is, you know, when I don't do my taxes, right? I get my accountants do my taxes because I don't understand how taxes work and I don't want to. It's not what I do. So, you know, if you can find somebody who understands this stuff and can do it and you want to let them do it and you don't want to play with GA for, you know, in my book, that's fine as long as, and this is the real important piece, you know what you need

[00:14:46] [SPEAKER_00] that person to do for your business and you can explain your business to the analyst in a way that allows them to find these insights and so you become a partnership, right? But, you know, the first thing I do as a consultant is talk to the business owner and I'm like, what are you trying to do? What are the outcomes that you're looking for? Who are your target markets? And you need to be able to articulate that very well so that when the analyst comes along and says, you know, here's what I see happening, is that what you want? You can say yes or no or you can say, well,

[00:15:16] [SPEAKER_00] what if we try this or tell me more about this particular metric, let's dive into it and see what's going on with these customers. So I know that when I give, I do professional speaking as well as consulting and if you talk about analytics, you've got to be fairly interesting, hopefully, because an awful lot of people can just glaze over really quickly and I don't blame them. It's like you said, if you log into that tool now, it can be overwhelming. I mean, there's like how many 100,

[00:15:46] [SPEAKER_00] 140, 150 default reports or something? It's crazy. So I do feel like I want to give permission to the people listening that you don't have to do the actual interface yourself if you don't want to, but you do need to know what analytics can do for your business, why it's important and have somebody, if it's not going to be you, who can use it effectively to do that. So in other words, don't ignore your analytics because if you do, I believe that you're completely shooting in the dark

[00:16:15] [SPEAKER_00] with your entire investment in your website and that's a big statement, right?

[00:16:18] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, no, without a doubt, what you don't see will hurt you. So on that note, as we were prepping for this interview, you were talking about this concept of plugging your leaks and I think in marketing we know that, hey, you know, your website is leaking. So what would be, so now that we've gone over sort of core, you know, ideas for those core analytics and tools you should use and what you can do if you don't know how to use those tools, but you still want to get this done. Going beyond that, how can our listeners

[00:16:47] [SPEAKER_02] look for places where they might be losing viable visitors or opportunities? Where would you recommend they start?

[00:16:55] [SPEAKER_00] So here's a really simple one. Calls to action. So, you know, in marketing, calls to action are the bits that say do this, that direct people to the outcomes that you want and absolutely on a website, in my experience, even though we might think our calls to action are really clear and compelling, a lot of people, if they don't see them, will decide, make their own decisions about what they want to do next and very often those decisions will not be what you would have wanted. They'll either go somewhere else or they'll leave or whatever.

[00:17:23] [SPEAKER_00] So calls to action need to be at the points on every page where somebody might be saying tell me more and a lot of people put their call to action, for example, at the bottom of the page after a long block of content and especially on mobile phones and as we're scrolling, you know, a lot of people are not going to see that. So for example, in the analytics, you can see how far down the page people scroll and if you

[00:17:54] [SPEAKER_00] customise Google Analytics, so one of the things I love about GA4 is that it's extremely customisable if you've got somebody who knows how to do it and by default, it tells you when somebody is 90% of the way down the page but 90% is almost at the bottom, right? That's not necessarily helpful because if somebody has only gone halfway down the page, they won't, you won't know that. So what I tend to do with clients is always one of the first things I do is put in some additional scroll flags which tell me when somebody's maybe,

[00:18:24] [SPEAKER_00] you know, 25, 50, 75 and then 90% down the page and now we can much more clearly tell how far down the pages people are going and that allows us to see whether or not they're even seeing the calls to action on the page because if they're not, then they've got no chance of understanding what it is you want them to do and at that point normally I'll say hey, let's move this call to action up or better even still let's duplicate it. I mean, there's no rule that says you can only have one call to action on the page.

[00:18:54] [SPEAKER_00] So as I said, sort of thinking about those emotional points where the visitor might be going tell me more and giving them something to do right then that they can act on. So one of the first things I do is just look at those calls to action and see how effective they are.

[00:19:10] [SPEAKER_02] Makes a lot of sense. Obviously, the ROI of your website for many come down to those call to action and will people actually click on that? And I love that idea of putting flags at different points that are in your Google Analytics report just to see. So I think people that are listening or watching can visualize what you just said. Obviously, it takes understanding of how to do both within Google Analytics and then within making sure that your website and tags are all set up. I'm curious, outside of the call to action, are there things

[00:19:40] [SPEAKER_02] you can do in GA4 like that with just your homepage or with a product page? And all these obviously have calls to action, but just for general pages or money pages, any other advice outside of that specific call to action and scroll that you often recommend to your clients?

[00:19:56] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, a couple of things. I mean, and you know, we're talking about GA4, but a decent analytics tool is going to be able to do the same thing. So if you're not using GA4, if you're using PeeWick or something like that, you know, you can still do these things. So don't just tune out of this. A couple of things. I mean, one is video. So video now is really hot. It's great to see, you know, somebody actually talking and giving a human face to the business. And also, of course, video is really great for explaining the value of your products,

[00:20:27] [SPEAKER_00] showing how they're used, having visitor tests or customer testimonials, reviews and so on. One of the other things you can do is see how much people watch your video. And that's really important too, and especially to people who produce podcasts as well. Because if people don't watch for very long, you can tell how much of the video they consume, right? then all of that valuable content is being wasted. Same with a blog, if they don't read the blog page. And so one of the other things that you can do to customize

[00:20:56] [SPEAKER_00] is to measure that much more closely. I had a client who used to put out masses, and he still got masses and masses of video, big expert in his field. And he was absolutely shocked when I told him that within 30 seconds, he was losing 50% of his viewers. And he had a big follow-up, you know, a lot of people would start the video, but then he would start by saying, good morning, my name is, and I've been doing this for blah, blah, blah. And it was boring, especially since

[00:21:26] [SPEAKER_00] he'd heard it all before. And it was like, don't do it this way, right? And he was quite shocked, he didn't really believe me. But, you know, the wonderful thing about data is that you can show the client the data, or the business owner can see it and go, okay, so we do have a problem here.

[00:21:42] [SPEAKER_02] So was this a video on his website, or were you looking specifically at his YouTube analytics?

[00:21:47] [SPEAKER_00] I was actually doing both. Okay. Because you can embed, and again, because YouTube, again, if we're talking about GA4, because YouTube is owned by Google, it will automatically measure YouTube views that are embedded in your website. But if you have other forms of video, again, it might take a bit of customization. And, you know, if you're the business owner, you can hire somebody to set up your customized analytics. You don't have to hire them forever. But, you know, it's worth understanding that it has these capabilities. So if you have Vimeo or

[00:22:17] [SPEAKER_00] Wistia or whatever, you can do this.

[00:22:20] [SPEAKER_02] Right. So that makes sense. Similar to how much of the web, how much of the web page are they scrolling through, how much of the video they're watching. Any other things that, you know, I'm sure you have a whole laundry list.

[00:22:31] [SPEAKER_00] Let me just do a couple more basic ones.

[00:22:34] [SPEAKER_02] That'd be awesome. Thank you.

[00:22:35] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, forms. So where you have a lead form, you know, these are classic because your email list, as I'm sure you talk about a lot on your podcast, is really, really valuable because people who said they want to hear from you. But if you have a lead form, one of the other big questions is how many people fill in that form? How many people start to fill in the form and then don't complete it potentially because you're asking too many questions or you're asking the question I don't want to answer it's annoying me.

[00:23:04] [SPEAKER_00] I mean, I know that there are some wonderful sites that put out white papers and they ask me like, what's your annual income? And I don't see exactly why they need to, I'm sure they would like to know that. I don't particularly wish to tell them. Sometimes I put in that I make over 200 million a year or something, which I don't. But, you know, forms, again, you can customize it. It doesn't always work out of the box, but you can customize it to see how many people started to fill in a form as

[00:23:34] [SPEAKER_00] opposed to how many people successfully submitted a form. Because if there's a discrepancy there, then obviously potentially there's something up with your forms that's putting people off, giving you that valuable lead or whatever it is that your form does. And of course, again, we can extend that out to e-commerce. So obviously, if you've got a shopping cart, there's a whole lot of diagnostics you can do about how many people put items in your cart, how many people start the checkout process,

[00:24:03] [SPEAKER_00] where all of that might go wrong, where they're dropping out if they don't go through to check-up, because we still have pretty high abandonment rates on shopping carts. So there's all sorts of things that you can do to figure out, and all of these things you couldn't possibly know without analytics. You would have no idea how many people are abandoning your cart, how many people aren't filling in forms, how many people aren't watching whole videos, and so on.

[00:24:29] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, I can see how you can pull all these things out, because basically there's, I think for the average entrepreneur, small business owner that are listening, there's just so much hidden data that they just don't even know exists, don't even know they can get access to. So I think you've given our listeners a lot of things to think about. One other thing, as we were prepping for the interview, you were talking about site search, your own site search, and so I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that as well.

[00:24:55] [SPEAKER_00] So I love site search, it's an absolute goldmine, and if you have any level of content on your site, or of course obviously if you're selling actual products, so people have to be able to find stuff, and you can get analytics on what they type into your site search engine, so this is on your website, right, it's not the Google search, it's actually the site search on your site, and what people there is fantastic market research, because it tells you things like, one, how do they describe your

[00:25:25] [SPEAKER_00] products and services, what words are they using, and in, especially in industries where there's a ton of geek speak, which is a lot of industries, right, do they understand and use the same technical terms that you do, because if they don't, and especially if they don't even understand your technical terms, you've got to be writing copy and using keywords that use the words that they would use, so that you can get them and engage them, and then you can teach them

[00:25:54] [SPEAKER_00] your words if you need to, but that's a really important understanding, is how do my users describe what I have, and then also if you look at those words, or the search terms that they put in, you might discover new ideas for products and services, and my clients, and we've done this, we've actually said, hey, they're looking for something that's within our area of expertise, but we don't have it right now, so we could create it, we've created for content providers, and we've created e-books

[00:26:24] [SPEAKER_00] based on searches in the search engine, and of course that doesn't have to be free, you can charge for it, pieces of knowledge, but also actual products, we've also identified new kind of audiences, new types of people looking for what we have that we haven't thought about, so that site search is a really fantastic clues about what people are looking for, and because of that, sort of similar to the calls to action, you know, a lot of site search bars where you have that little magnifying

[00:26:54] [SPEAKER_00] glass are right at the top of the page, and the minute you scroll, you lose sight of it, right, so again, if you have some sort of search facility that is more available to people, it's worth thinking about whether or not they can see it, and whether you can encourage more people to use it, because it really does give you some fantastic information.

[00:27:15] [SPEAKER_02] Right, I'm curious, Philippa, in your experience, because I've also had experience looking at the analytics specifically, what you're talking about, what are people searching for on my site, do you feel, could you place a number, because I think some of this might be a volume game, if you're not getting enough website traffic, you know, if only X percent of your people are using that, then the number obviously is a little bit low, so based on your experience, what is, would you say on average, like, you know, one to two percent of visitors will use that bar,

[00:27:44] [SPEAKER_02] or if you could throw out a number, what would it look like?

[00:27:47] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, no, it is low, but that's what I'm saying, and I'm wondering if that's because we tend to put it in places where it isn't very visible for very long.

[00:27:54] [SPEAKER_02] Sure, sure.

[00:27:54] [SPEAKER_00] And if we change that, does that change? And, you know, this is the point about analytics as well, is we come up with all sorts of hypotheses and ideas about why what's happening is happening, but then, right, at that point, it's only my idea, my theory, right? We, then the thing to do is to test it, and these days there's all sorts of software that you can use to test it and to do what we call like A-B testing, where you randomly serve or show different visitors, you know,

[00:28:24] [SPEAKER_00] different versions of the same page and track which one does the best. But that's the next point, is unless it's something absolutely obvious, like a broken link or something, you then want to say, okay, what do we think we should do differently? And then start testing that to see if it does better.

[00:28:41] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, I love, I mean, everything you're talking about, I know for some of the audience that are really into, you know, TikTok videos and how do we do Instagram stories, they may skip this episode and they really miss out because this is the core of your business. And I love the fact that once you have the data, once you have a strategy, a need that's very, very specific and you know how to track the data and then you know how to interpret the results, you know how to test, that very little things I'm sure you've seen can have

[00:29:11] [SPEAKER_02] really big results. Can you share of all the clients you worked with in the past how changing one or two things had this big impact? Yeah. We don't name company names obviously, but.

[00:29:21] Yeah.

[00:29:22] [SPEAKER_00] Well, let's think of a good, you know, site search. One of the other things, I had a client where it was a manufacturing client and they sold manufacturing distributor parts and components and so on. And those parts over time changed their names or became replaced by a different part. And the client came to me because they were starting to lose sales and they didn't understand why. And, you

[00:29:52] [SPEAKER_00] know, we looked at the site search and they hadn't realized that they could do that. And when we looked at the site search, we realized that there were a lot of people who thought they knew the part number they wanted. And so they were looking for an old or obsolete part number. And the site search was simply coming back and saying, sorry, we haven't got that. Which is a really horrible answer anyway, because you should be saying, sorry, we haven't got that, but can we help you in something? What do we do now? Well, but even if it's something on your site search, again, if you have a site search,

[00:30:21] [SPEAKER_00] your site search results, if you just say, sorry, we haven't got that, it's basically saying and go away. Right? But, you know, is there anything else you can say like call us, here's a list of other potential things that might help you, you know, put this part on a wish list because it's out of stock, but we're going to have it back in two weeks, you know, whatever it might be. And in this case, as you just said, what we did, once you know the problem, then this solution was obvious, which is to create a lookup table that maps the

[00:30:51] [SPEAKER_00] old part number onto the new part number and boom, and, you know, problem solved.

[00:30:56] [SPEAKER_02] Right, right. And it's funny you mention that because I think you'd agree also like 404 error pages, same thing, opportunities to guide people to other, so customize that page, right?

[00:31:06] [SPEAKER_00] Right, right, right. Yeah. And, but, you know, again, that to that site search problem, you, you never on your website, you never want to be doing things that are basically saying to the visitor, oh, sorry, go away. You know, you wouldn't do that if you saw them in the real world presumably, right? So think about that too, you know, where are you just putting roadblocks up that people can't get beyond?

[00:31:26] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, this is all great advice, Philippa. So, you know, a lot of people that listen to this podcast and if you go to my LinkedIn profile, I'm all about DIY marketing. So probably like you as well, Philippa, people hire you because they want to internally be able to better understand this and, you know, work with experts and I'm the same way. So, you know, if, but I also give my listeners the option of like, hey, if you want to try to figure this out on your own, there's definitely ways of doing that. And are there any, you know, because everything we talked about seemed to be central to Google Analytics.

[00:31:56] [SPEAKER_02] So I guess there's a technical side that people need to understand, which is the actual platform, which just changed like a year ago. So I think a lot of people are still trying to figure it out. And then there's the whole understanding the metrics space. So are there any resources? And I think you might have some free resources or books as well, but any, you know, on both of these sides, does GA4 have like an academy that you'd recommend or is there a book out there? You know, what would be your recommendations for the listeners of how to, you know, if they're really keen and obviously they should be reaching out to you as well if they're

[00:32:25] [SPEAKER_02] interested, but above and beyond that, any, you know, thing you could advise them to invest a little bit of time in if they really wanted to go deeper into it?

[00:32:32] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, absolutely. So, and I should say that, you know, there are some really, really good training materials out there for GA4. I'm currently writing a book. My book, which I'm hoping will be out in a couple of months, is designed for business owners to talk in the way that we've been talking this morning, which is much more in sort of business terms as opposed to technical terms. So I don't myself produce training, interface training materials, but there are a lot of really good ones online. Dana Di Tommaso,

[00:33:02] [SPEAKER_00] there's a great site called Analytics Mania, which is Julius Federicius, I think it is. I love Julius, I'm just not sure how to say his last name.

[00:33:10] [SPEAKER_02] We'll figure it out and put it in the show notes, but yeah.

[00:33:13] [SPEAKER_00] But Analytics Mania, Dana's site, you know, there are some really excellent training materials out there that I use also because I've decided that because there's so much technical stuff online already, I want to do a slightly different version of it.

[00:33:28] [SPEAKER_02] Right, and I think you're writing a book just, I mean, it just shows that there really is a need out there for that, which, you know, that's awesome that you're going to fill that gap and, you know, definitely let me know when you publish that book. We'll put the link in the show notes. Cool, thank you. So this has been great. If our listeners, our viewers want to reach out to you, where should we send them?

[00:33:48] [SPEAKER_00] So LinkedIn, I think this is kind of unique. I think I'm literally the only person in the entire world with my name, which is pretty amazing. You know, if you heard the term Google, I don't have any Google gangers. So you can easily find me on LinkedIn and my website is websitesthatwin.com and on that website, there's a free ebook, which is five, it's called Five Hidden Gems and it's five stories of actual insights that my clients and I have

[00:34:18] [SPEAKER_00] gained from, and different types of clients, different industries, from looking at analytics that we wouldn't otherwise have known and the changes that we made because of that, significant changes either the business or the website. In English, again, no techie, no charts, no graphs. It's just because I know a lot of business owners find that it kind of, it loses the inspiration for them if you make it, if you have too many of that sort of stuff in front of them. So I want it to be inspiring and I want it for people to look at it and go, I wonder if that

[00:34:48] [SPEAKER_00] situation could be happening to me and if so, whether I can do something about it.

[00:34:52] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, that sounds like a great resource, Philip, but just, you know, one last question for you, which is, and I recently recorded a podcast episode of the concept of a quarterly audit, of keeping it simple. And I'm sure the listeners say, oh my gosh, I have no time for all this. And I'm assuming you would agree that it's not something you necessarily need to do on a daily basis. In fact, it takes time to compile that data and to see the trends. So do you recommend just, you know, final advice, you know, and I know it's going to be different for every situation, every client, but are you looking at

[00:35:22] [SPEAKER_02] this more on weekly, monthly, quarterly? What's sort of the cadence when you work with clients that you're coming back to them with a report or with a meeting, just so that people listening get a better idea of the frequency of the work involved?

[00:35:35] [SPEAKER_00] Right. And, you know, as you say, it depends, of course. And I think partly it depends on whether, obviously, if you have a pressing question right now, then you want to get that question answered. If you are starting to run a major new campaign that you're spending money on, obviously, you want to monitor that quite closely to make sure it's effective. You're getting the results that you want. If you're just sort of chugging along, then, you know, maybe every month or so. But again, those nine metrics that we talked about earlier, where

[00:36:05] [SPEAKER_00] you're saying, what do I need to measure today in order to do something about it? Those are going to change. Of course. Because when you resolve one or you get it to where you want it to be, you're going to want to replace that with something else. So again, I don't think there's a one-size- fits-all answer. And chugging along is kind of sometimes a bit of a dangerous state to be in because then you may not pick up something that you need to know about. So what I would be doing maybe is reviewing not only the actual

[00:36:35] [SPEAKER_00] metrics that you're reviewing, but why you have those metrics particularly selected so that you know that at any given time, you're kind of tracking the most important things for your business.

[00:36:46] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. And I hope at a minimum, everyone listening, if you don't have that already, what are those minimum things that you will measure? What are the things that after listening to this, the ideas that you got, they go, you know what, maybe this fits our situation and we really need to be on top of this. So once again, for websites that win.com and then on LinkedIn, I'm assuming it's Phillip Games. Yes. LinkedIn.com slash in slash. Is that one word or is there a hyphen?

[00:37:12] [SPEAKER_00] One word.

[00:37:13] [SPEAKER_02] Okay, perfect. So we'll put that in show notes if you're confused about the spelling, but it's actually a lot easier than it might sound. But Phillip, thank you so much for your time and sharing your expertise with my audience.

[00:37:24] [SPEAKER_00] Oh, thank you so much, Neil. It's been absolutely fun.

[00:37:27] [SPEAKER_02] All right. I hope you enjoyed that interview. And hey, did you know that I publish a weekly newsletter? If you go to newsletter.neilschafer.com, hopefully you know how to spell my name. But if you go there, you can actually see all of my weekly newsletters and subscribe so that you are the first to receive the next one. I normally publish these podcasts on Wednesday mornings and I normally publish my newsletters on Friday mornings and I limit it to really the top 10 things that you should know, both from my own

[00:37:57] [SPEAKER_02] branded content as well as the news and just the great advice out there in the blogosphere about all things SEO, email marketing, social media marketing, AI marketing, all things digital threads. And that's it for another episode of your digital marketing coach podcast. This is your digital marketing coach, Neil Schaefer signing off.

[00:38:16] [SPEAKER_01] You've been listening to your digital marketing coach. Questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast.neilschafer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes. And neilschafer.com to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community. If you or your business needs a little helping hand, see

[00:38:46] [SPEAKER_01] you next time on your digital marketing coach. Thank you.

[00:38:50] Thank you. Thank you.