METRICS & ANALYTICS WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO TRACK YOUR WEBSITE VISITORS?

Transcription

1 METRICS & ANALYTICS Transcript Hi! I m Brandon and I m a WordPress Engineer on Team Forleo. In this training we re going to be talking about identifying and tracking key goals for your website that will help you achieve the success you deserve. KEY TAKEAWAYS Along the way, we ll talk about some potential goals that you might have for your website, and how to find the key metrics that will help you track them. We ll get you set up with Google Analytics, a free tool built by Google to help you get insight into your website visitors behavior and look through some of the reporting tools they offer. And finally, you ll learn how to create a dashboard that will give you quick access to the statistics that are important to you. WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO TRACK YOUR WEBSITE VISITORS? Let s start off by talking about why it s important to know what your website visitors are doing. Imagine that you re a baker, and you re creating the ultimate chocolate cake for a friend s party. You re really excited about your cake you ve come up with an award winning recipe, you ve sourced the best ingredients, and you have top of the line baking equipment. So you make the cake and drop it off at the party and head home. A week later, one of the guests at the party asks you to make them a cake for their party, and they tell you that all of the same people are going to be at their party that were at the last one. You think to yourself, Well, they must have loved the cake so I ll make it again! What you don t know, because you didn t gather feedback, is that only one person ate the cake the guest that is asking you for the second cake. So you make the same delicious chocolate cake for her party, but again, no one eats it. Your goal was to have everyone enjoy the cake at the party, but you had no idea that no one there liked chocolate. If you had asked the guests at the first party how they liked the original chocolate cake, you would have known that no one liked chocolate, and you might have made a yellow cake with strawberry filling. Pg. 1 Website Marie Forleo International marieforleobschool.com

2 Tracking the likes and dislikes of guests at a party is similar to tracking the behavior of your website visitors. You ll be able to tailor your creations to satisfy more of your visitors wants. You might find that some of your visitors like the content you re creating because they come back time and time again, but they don t spend much time on your site. This might mean that you should create shorter, more easily digestible content. You might find some new referral sources that could lead to more business if you communicated with them more. Tracking key metrics and analyzing historical data are the keys to making data-driven improvements on any website. HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT TO MEASURE? Knowing what to measure is an important, but sometimes difficult thing to determine. Before deciding what to track, it s best to decide what your goals are. Do you want to increase your total website traffic or do you care more about the size of your list? Do you want to get more sales? Depending on your goals, you ll want to measure different things. Additionally, it s important to measure data in a way that gives you access to the information that will help you make the best decisions for your particular business. There are generally two types of data Qualitative Data and Quantitative Data. Qualitative data is much more subjective. Sending out a survey, or having a feedback form on your website would be an example of collecting qualitative data. The information you get back from these types of initiatives generally has to be read through and processed by a human in order to capture the full meaning. We will not be covering qualitative data in this training. Quantitative data relies on aggregating numbers gathered over a period of time. You re able to compare trends across different time periods to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. The real benefit of quantitative data is that it requires no special audience participation. Pg. 2 Website Marie Forleo International marieforleobschool.com

3 SO, WHAT SPECIFICALLY DO YOU TRACK? Let s go over some common metrics that you will want to track about your visitors. E-Commerce Related If you re selling things on your website, you probably get notified whenever you make a sale. That s great information to have, but you probably want to know how that relates to your marketing efforts. In Google Analytics, you can set up sales funnels that will show you the paths your visitors took on their way to purchasing something. This can help you to identify problems in your sales funnel that lead to missed sales. Who Is Your Audience? You want to know a combination of things about your visitors. First, you want to know where they re coming from. This is called their Referral Source. You also want to know what kind of behavior they exhibit once they get to your site. Do they spend just a few moments on your site or do the spend a lot of time there, browsing page after page of content? Are they all first time visitors, or do you have a loyal tribe who visits your site every time you publish new content? Lastly, you want to know how they re accessing your content, and from what geographic location. The more you know about your website visitors, the more effective you can be at delivering content that they need. List Signups If you manage any sort of list to communicate with your visitors, you ll want to set up some conversion funnels. Similar to E-Commerce, these funnels will help you identify points of failure in your signup process. By setting up conversion funnels for each one of your opt-in forms, you can see which ones are the best at capturing your visitors attention. You ll also want to track the effectiveness of your communications by using Google s URL Builder. Referrals I mentioned referrals when talking about audience, but it s important enough to call out again. Knowing who refers traffic to your website can help you build relationships that will exponentially grow your reputation. It s important to maintain relationships with key referrers, but connecting with referrers who may have just found you is a great way to gain new advocates. Having other people promote you is always going to be more effective than you promoting yourself. Pg. 3 Website Marie Forleo International marieforleobschool.com

4 Inquiries This one is a bit more qualitative, but it s something good to track nonetheless. If you have a contact form and a lot of your visitors use it to request similar information instead of browsing the content of your website, it might mean that you need to update your content to make those inquiries easier to resolve on their own. Save yourself some time and make the requested information easy to find so that you don t have to manually answer your visitors individually. Customer Happiness and Retention A good sign that your customers are happy is that you have a high rate of returning visitors and/or customers. Be sure to keep an eye on your bounce rate the percentage of people who come to your site and leave without any further interactions It may highlight a need for a better call to action. Additionally, if your returning visitors rate is high, be sure that you re continuing to give them new, relevant content so that you keep them engaged. Test Everything And finally, test everything. When you do go about changing things on your site, make sure you use the tools available to you to make data-driven decisions. The worst thing you can do is to make a change because you think it s right, only to decrease your goal completion rate. Google Analytics allows you to A/B test pages on your website to automatically find high performing variations of your content. You can test things like color palettes, phrasing, images, and fonts. The possibilities are literally endless. Pg. 4 Website Marie Forleo International marieforleobschool.com

5 5-STEP IMPROVEMENT CYCLE So now that we know what metrics to track, let s talk a little bit about the process of making improvements to your website based on data that you ve gathered. I want to make it clear that this is not five steps to ultimate success, this is a cycle. This is something that you will continue to iterate on throughout the course of your business. Just as in the fashion industry, trends on the Internet change every year. If you want to stay ahead of the game, you ll want to be testing your website s effectiveness all the time. Step 1: Gathering Data So, step one we ve already started to cover. This is the information gathering phase. In order to act on your data, you have to actually have data. Step 2: Create Reports The second step is to use Google Analytics to create reports that highlight data related to your key metrics around your goals. We ll go over exactly how to do this later in this training. Step 3: Analyze Your Reports Once you have your reports created, you ll spend some time analyzing the reports to get a grasp of your website s effectiveness at converting based on your goals. This is more of a creative process, and can be kind of fun. The key here is to detach yourself from the emotional connection you have to your website, and focus solely on coming up with ideas to improve your conversion rates. Step 4: Create Tests Now that you ve got a list of ideas to try, you have to go about setting up tests to see how the changes affect your conversion rates. It can take a while for your tests to yield enough results to confidently determine whether you ve improved things, made them worse, or had no effect especially when you re just starting out. The bigger the audience sample is in your test, the more confident you can be in your decision. Step 5: Finalize Changes After you ve let your tests conclude, you ll want to implement the changes that were successful and throw out the ones that weren t. This is partially an effort in house cleaning so that you don t get overwhelmed by tons of variations left over from old tests. Once you re done implementing the changes and cleaning up, head back up to step one and try something else. Pg. 5 Website Marie Forleo International marieforleobschool.com

6 GOOGLE ANALYTICS I ve already mentioned Google Analytics several times, but why is that the tool of choice for most web professionals? First of all, it s able to collect data in a variety of mediums. Not only does it work on websites, but it can also measure user engagement in mobile apps. This can be helpful if you need to compare website data side-by-side with mobile app data. It s also really easy to implement with minimal or no coding knowledge required. You can track your progress over time and compare time periods against each other (for example December last year to December this year) to see how changes you ve made have affected your business. Google Analytics provides the ability to roll your own reports and create custom segments of your visitors so that you can really dive into the precise data that you want. And last of all, it s free. I probably should have led with that one because when you re just starting out, budget is key. SETTING UP GOOGLE ANALYTICS Now that we ve covered most of the why and the what, let s get to work and start digging into the how. Your first step, if you don t already have one is to sign up for a Google account. Once you have an account, head on over to and click the Sign In button at the top and choose Google Analytics. Once you re logged in, click the Sign Up button to enable Google Analytics for your account. You ll be presented with a form that you need to fill out to set up your first property. We ll use the example from our Do It Yourself WordPress training. For Account Name, you can enter your business name, in our case Mentor File. The URL is going to be www. mentorfile.com. You want to make sure you re consistent in your usage of your domain, so if you don t usually use the www. don t use it here. Choose an industry that is close to yours. If you can t find one, just choose other. I ll choose People and Society. This doesn t affect the functionality you get at all, but may help Google create custom reports for your specific industry in the future. Select your timezone so that you get results in timeframes that make sense to you when you re looking at reports. You can leave all of the checkboxes checked and click the Get Tracking ID button at the bottom. You ll be presented with Google s Terms of Service which you need to agree to in order to move forward. As I m not a lawyer, I recommend that you read through it completely so that you are clear on the terms. Now that you re set up with a tracking ID, it s time to get that into WordPress. While you can manually copy/paste your tracking code into your website code, I don t recommend it if you re using WordPress because there s a fantastic plugin called Google Analytics by Pg. 6 Website Marie Forleo International marieforleobschool.com

7 MonsterInsights that will handle all of the tricky bits for you. For the sake of this presentation I ve assumed you re using WordPress as that s our recommended platform and what we use, however there are other platforms out there that integrate with Google Analytics. If you re using something other than WordPress, I recommend that you use Google to search google analytics+yourcms replacing yourcms with the name of your CMS (for example Shopify, Squarespace, WIX, Weebly, etc). I found that the first entry gave excellent instructions for getting this code into other platforms. In the Do It Yourself WordPress training, we installed the free Google Analytics by MonsterInsights plugin from the WordPress repository. If you re doing any E-Commerce through your website using WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads, you might want to purchase the Ecommerce Addon at monsterinsights.com to enable that functionality. That will save you a ton of time. Navigate to the Settings page under the Insights menu item in your WordPress Dashboard, it s near the bottom. Click the Authenticate with your Google Account button. Log in to your Google account and click the Allow button. It will give you a funky looking piece of text that you need to copy before you close the window. When you return back to your WordPress dashboard, paste the text that you copied into the highlighted field and click the Save authentication code button. The page will refresh and now have a select list with the profile you just created in Google Analytics. Go ahead and select the profile you want to use and click Save settings. There are a number of options in this plugin that can be helpful in some circumstances, so I highly recommend looking through them to see if they would give you further insight into your website. REPORTING IN GOOGLE ANALYTICS Now that you have the Google Analytics tracking code installed, details about every visitor who comes to your site will be tracked. If your site is brand new and you haven t had Google Analytics running very long, the reports might look a little bleak, but give them some time and you ll start to see trends emerge. Let s head over to look at a site that has had Google Analytics running for a while and look at some data. One of the first things you ll want to orient yourself to is the way the reports are organized. Each top level set of data will have an overview so you can see some high level information. This is a good way to start looking at analytics, but it s not a great way to get a lot of insight. Pg. 7 Website Marie Forleo International marieforleobschool.com

8 You can start to scratch the surface of the power of the reporting features of Google Analytics by comparing time periods. This will be crucial in identifying the factors of your success as you track your progress over time. If you have similar sales cycles year after year, it would be helpful to look at the current month in comparison to the same month in the previous year. If you made some changes to your website or marketing efforts last month and you want to see how this month s traffic and engagement compares, this is how you d handle that. For now, let s take a look at our performance last month compared to our performance this month by selecting the date range selector from the top right. Start by selecting the first day of this month, then select the last day of this month. You ll then activate the checkbox to enable a comparison view and choose Custom from the select list. You ll then click on the first day of the previous month and the last day of the previous month. Finally, you ll click the Apply button. The graph and table below will now have side by side comparisons so that you can compare the data. You can also segment your data into smaller groups so you can see if certain segments of visitors behave differently. That way you can compare visitors that came from organic search with visitors that came from social media. This can be really powerful. Another thing I like to do is add annotations to the graphs. This helps me explain some of the peaks and valleys in my analytics with some context. Let s add an annotation showing when we released a new blog post this month so that we can track its effect on our traffic. Right below the graph, you ll see a downward arrow. We ll click that to open the annotations view. We can then add an annotation by clicking the link on the right, filling in the date of the blog post, and a short description so we know the significance of the date. This is a freeform entry, so you can make note of anything that you think might be affecting the data that you re capturing. Start trying to connect your marketing efforts with any sort of positive or negative variance in your data so that you have a clear vision of the things that work and the things that don t. If you re a visual learner, it can be handy to look at different values on the graph. You can change the value that s being shown by selecting the metric at the top left of the graph and even add a comparison metric. You can change the plotting frequency for the graph into hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly by using the selector on the right side of the graph. This can be helpful if you re analyzing long or short time frames. As we continue scrolling down the page you ll see some high level aggregate stats available within this reporting section. Pg. 8 Website Marie Forleo International marieforleobschool.com

9 AUDIENCE Now that you know the basics of moving around the reports in Google Analytics, let s get a little more specific. If you want to dig into the data about your users, the Audience section is where you want to be. On the left of the screen, click on Audience. The kind of information you ll find in this section are: Sessions that s the total number of times the website has been visited. Users that s the total number of unique visitors that have viewed the website. You can think of this as your total audience. Pageviews that s the total number of pages that have been requested. You can think of this as your total traffic. Pages per Session that s the average number of pages viewed in each session. Average Session Duration this is how long a visitor spends looking at any number of pages on your website in each session. Bounce Rate that s the percentage of visitors that only visit one page on your website and don t take any other actions. People ask us about bounce rates a lot, but we want to make sure you understand it fully. If you have a website with tons of pages and you have a high bounce rate, that s definitely something you should look into. But if you have Google Analytics on a single landing page that links off to a third party shopping cart, a high bounce rate is to be expected. Context is everything, so what s right for some isn t always right for you. Percent New Sessions that s the percentage of sessions that are from visitors that have never been to your site before. Now, unless you ve turned on Demographic and Interests data, you won t get access to that data. Again, please read up on the privacy and cookie laws I mentioned earlier. If you want to enable those statistics. Let s first take a look at where our visitors are accessing our site from. We ll be able to see who our primary audience is, the languages they speak, and start thinking about how local culture might be influencing their behavior. Pg. 9 Website Marie Forleo International marieforleobschool.com

10 Next we ll skip down to the behavior of our users. We can find out if a lot of our visitors are brand new or if they know who we are and are coming back for updates. Armed with this data, we can make some decisions about how we structure important information on our pages. Do we have to explain who we are or can we get right to the meat of our content? You can find out things like the most common browsers or operating systems that your users are using. One report I like to look at, especially when doing any sort of design related change, is the percentage of traffic for mobile, tablet, and desktop devices. That can be found under the Mobile sub report. If you notice that a high portion of your visitors are accessing your site from mobile devices, you ll want to make sure that your website looks and functions great at smaller screen sizes. Again, if you re more of a visual learner, you can select the rows from the table at the bottom of the page and have them plotted on the graph. ACQUISITION The next major section helps to define how your audience comes to your website. Now because I have some goals set up, I m able to start to see some correlation between visitors from certain referral sources and the goal conversion that I m tracking. If you have multiple goals, you can choose which goal you d like to see. At the highest level, the referrals are grouped by channel, but by clicking on the different dimensions, particularly Source / Medium you can begin to see individual referrers that are driving traffic to your site. If you have any paid advertising, you can look through the reports in the AdWords subsection, but I m going to skip that for now and jump into the Search Engine Optimization sub section. I find this super helpful when I m trying to write blog posts to increase our organic search traffic. Once I know the keywords that people are searching for, I can write content that targets them in the hopes that I will bring in more organic search traffic. Another interesting thing to look at is your average position in the search results for each keyword. If you identify a keyword that you think you should be more relevant for, take some time to look through your content to see how you can improve your relevance. One thing to note is that you may see a bulk of the keyword traffic being set as not set. Google will hide some of the keywords that are searched for because they re insignificant percentages or for a variety of other reasons. If you look at the Landing Pages report, you will see the common entry points that visitors come to when coming from search engines. Again, it shows you where those pages typically come up in the search results, so this is a great place to identify pages that are underperforming in organic search and test some changes to see if they bring in more traffic. Pg. 10 Website Marie Forleo International marieforleobschool.com

11 Lastly, we ll take a look at Social. This will give you a breakdown of the different social channels that are directing traffic your way. Again, at the top level you can see if any of these social channels are driving conversions to the goals that you set up. BEHAVIOR Next we ll take a look at one of my favorite things in Google Analytics, Behavior. I find that this section gives me great insight into the places where our visitors are struggling. In the overview screen, you ll see what pages are most popular. Sometimes URLs aren t that easy to identify, so looking at them by Page Title can be easier. My favorite report view is the Behavior Flow view because it allows you to see how visitors are actually navigating your website. If you see a lot of back and forth or there is a significant amount of traffic that views a lot of pages, that may highlight the fact that your content is confusing, contradicting, or doesn t answer the visitor s questions fully. By clicking on any node in the graph, you can highlight individual paths that visitors take when they come in or pass through a specific page. If a large percentage of your traffic is dropping off consistently after visiting a particular page, you should probably look at that page to make sure there s nothing wrong with it. Another great tool in the behavior section is the In-Page Analytics. This allows you to view your website with overlays on all of the links that were clicks. This is a great tool to highlight buttons or links that you thought were driving a lot of visual attention, but instead are somehow being missed. While we re looking at it, it s worth noting that there are much better tools available for generating heatmaps for your site. CrazyEgg is one of those tools that not only provides the click overlay, but it also gives you a click overlay with segmentation based on referral, a scrollmap to see how far visitors scroll down your page, and a heatmap view that shows the percentage of clicks in a single area based on a heat scale. Lately Google has been making a big deal out of page speed. If your site is faster, it will come up higher in the search results. Under the Site Speed sub section, you ll find a report called Page Timings. This report provides you with information about how long your pages take to load. Typically the longer your pages take to load, the higher your user s frustration level is going to be, and the more likely they are to leave your site. There are some studies that have shown that for every second that your site continues loading after 4.5 seconds, you ll have a 2.1% decrease in cart size, 3.5-7% decrease in conversions, 9-11% decrease in pageviews, 8% increase in bounce rate, and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction. Those are numbers that no one can afford, so be sure to address any pages that fall into those ranges. You can get some suggestions on what to improve in the next report, Speed Suggestions. Pg. 11 Website Marie Forleo International marieforleobschool.com

12 The last thing I want to cover in the Behavior section is Experiments. I talked about testing out your ideas before committing to them earlier in this training, and this is the place to do it. In order to make an experiment, you have to have a goal, so let s go ahead and set up a goal now. At the top of the screen, you ll click the Admin link, then click Goals in the far right column. Click the New Goal button at the top to get started. There are a bunch of defaults that you can look into, but for now, let s create a custom goal by selecting the Custom radio button and clicking continue. Give your goal a name that you ll remember It s worth noting that this name will be used in reports so make it unique. Choose a goal type of Destination then click Continue. Next, you ll enter the destination URL for a successful conversion. This page should only be used to direct people to after they complete a specific action like opting into a mailing list or completing a transaction. If you look closely, you only need to put the ending part of the URL, not including the domain name. When you re done, click the Verify this Goal link to make sure that this goal looks correct and then save your goal. Now that we have a goal in place, we can try to optimize our sales funnel through an experiment. The interface for setting up an experiment is pretty much the same as setting up a goal, so start out by giving your experiment a name and choose a goal that you want to test. If you re making drastic changes to your website, you can choose to run the experiment on a subset of your total traffic so the potential of negatively impacting your conversions is minimized. Typically, I choose to run experiments on 100% of my traffic just so that I get a good representative sample. In the next step you ll put in the original URL and any number of additional URLs that contain variations on the original that you want to test. Once you ve entered them all, proceed to the next step and choose Manually insert the code. Usually this part requires some manual editing of WordPress theme files, but I made a simple plugin that you can install that will give you the ability to add this code without doing that. You can find and install the plugin by searching Simple Google Content Experiments under the Plugins menu in your WordPress Dashboard. Once the plugin is installed and activated, you will edit the original page in your experiment and paste the code into a custom field, just like I m showing here. Head back to Google Analytics and click Next Step and your experiment should be all set up and validated. The last step is to start the experiment. Once the experiment is up and running, it will continue to run until it finds a higher converting option or you stop the experiment. Pg. 12 Website Marie Forleo International marieforleobschool.com

13 CONVERSIONS You ve already seen how conversions tie into some of the other reports, but the last reporting section really lets you dig deeper into those conversions. Right off the bat, you ll see the total number of conversions, the conversion rate, and the individual goal conversion numbers. My favorite report under this section is the Funnel Visualization. If you ve set up a multi-page conversion funnel like I have, it will highlight issues that you might be having in your sales funnel. Because it shows us where users went when the conversion was lost, you can take that as an opportunity to add a clear call to action for the visitor to get back to their purchase. COMPARING VISITOR SEGMENTS Now that we ve gone through the basics of Google Analytics and talked about the kinds of data you have access to, let s start to compare some smaller groups of visitors to see if we can find out if there s anything that indicates why they convert higher than others. Google Analytics has a few default segments that you can use, but segments are really powerful when you create your own. Typically referral sources are a great place to start segmenting your data so you can see how effective each one is. If you re using Google s URL builder, you can segment by campaign, medium, or source. You can also choose from a list of sources that Google Analytics has captured to make things even easier. Once you have your custom segments set up, you can use them across all of the reports to find out how visitors from different sources behave. CREATING SHORTCUTS Pop Quiz: You want to create a report in Google Analytics that shows you the Sessions and E-Commerce Conversion Rate broken out by both the dimensions Medium and City. How could you create this report? I ll be the first to admit that I get lost in Google Analytics sometimes. There is so much data in there and so many different ways to slice and dice that data that it becomes difficult to know where to look sometimes. That s why I love shortcuts. Once you come up with a great segmentation on a report that you re going to want to go back to, create a shortcut so you can get back to it quickly without having to reconfigure it. Creating a shortcut couldn t be easier. Just click the shortcut link at the top of any report. Pg. 13 Website Marie Forleo International marieforleobschool.com

14 BUILDING A METRICS DASHBOARD Building a dashboard that contains the at-a-glance information that you want to see quickly and regularly will stop you from unnecessarily wasting hours trying to hunt down the information, then navigating from page to page to gather each little piece. You re able to take just the important things and pull them all together on one page. To create a dashboard from scratch, click New Dashboard under the Dashboards menu item on the left and choose Blank Canvas. You can then start adding widgets to your Dashboard as you see things that are helpful by clicking the Add to Dashboard link at the top of any report. You can choose which type of chart to display from a number of options, and what metrics to display. Another option is to import a dashboard from the Google Analytics Community. One that I really like is the Site Performance Dashboard. This pulls a lot of speed related data together in one place and is super helpful at identifying problems as they relate to speed. WRAPPING UP In this training you ve learned how to prioritize the metrics that really matter to your business so that you can make data-driven improvements to your website. You also found ways to identify successful marketing efforts by comparing current data to historical data. Remember to look at your data regularly, but don t make yourself work too hard to get it out of the reporting tool use shortcuts and dashboards to access the important things quickly. If you re really excited about digging even deeper into the realm of Google Analytics, you should check out Google s free Analytics Academy. The sooner you start tracking the more progress you ll make, and remember what you don t track, you can t improve. Pg. 14 Website Marie Forleo International marieforleobschool.com