Author: John Jantsch / Source: Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John J: In today’s show we’ve got a really sexy topic. We’re going to talk about google analytics.

Now, I know people don’t get excited about analytics and data, but the fact of the matter is businesses that track their data, that use the data to get better succeed, and those that don’t get lucky, I suppose, occasionally.

So I’m speaking in this show with Jeff Sauer, he is a Google Analytics expert and trainer. We’re going to talk about some of the most important things. We don’t get too in the weeds. It’s the most important things that you need to know so that you can get the most out of your data, so that you can improve your business by getting the most out of your data. Check it out.

(intro music)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Janssen, my guest today is Jeff Sauer. He’s a digital marketing speaker, professor, and Google Analytics consultant. So Jeff, thanks for joining me.

Jeff S: Hey John. Hey, thanks for having me John.

John J: You bet. So tell me about the professor part. Where are you professing?

Jeff S: I’m an adjunct faculty member at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, in Minnesota. I created a digital marketing certificate program there, and that program basically takes professionals who are looking for a career change or looking to boost their skills and it teaches them a crash course in digital marketing. In the end they get certified and move on to the workplace.

John J: Does this university actually pay money for this?

Jeff S: Yeah, it’s a pretty good business. It’s a class that we sell out a couple times a year. Lasts for a bout two or three weeks. It’s been a good arrangement for the university, myself and for the the students.

John J: Probably pretty good, just from a branding stand point it’s probably a pretty good credibility badge for you as well, I suspect.

Jeff S: Yeah, absolutely. It’s my alma mater, actually. So when they approached me and said, hey, I want you to teach here, I was like, oh, I didn’t even know that I was qualified. But I always like to give back to my community, and also I’ve learned a lot of my skills from the classes I learned in school as well.

John J: And do you get free basketball tickets?

Jeff S: Yeah, I think you can get free basketball tickets anyways, it’s only division three so (laughter).

John J: Alright, so let’s, enough of this nonsense, let’s talk about Google Analytics. So, everybody has it installed on their website. I see it … I shouldn’t say that. 92% of the people have it installed it on their website and I work with so many small business owners and all they can tell you is they think it’s there.

Is there advice that you give to people that say, “Look, okay, put the code step one, but how do you set this thing up so that it’s not just this maze of stuff that they don’t know what it is?”

Jeff S: Absolutely, you hit it spot on. I think it’s something in the 85 to 90% of website owners have Google Analytics installed, and in order to do that we’ve all gone to the same place, which is on google.com/analytics, and they say sign up for an account, put some code on your website, step three is just you collect enough data that you can magically have insights. That’s what they recommend that you do, and that’s what everybody does to get started.

But they sort of sell the story short. They make it sound like everything ends once you do that third step, which is to log into your account after you’ve collected data, but there’s actually a few little things that you should do to get the most out of it.

The first thing is that you should make sure that you have goals configured. There’s a section in Google Analytics where you can say what your marketing goals are. If you’re a small business, for the most part your goal is going to be somebody filling out your contact form, or if you’re a retail business, it’s going and trying to figure out what your store hours are or when your store is open. If you’re selling stuff online the goal’s going to be that they made a purchase.

It basically is just training Google Analytics to recognize what makes you successful.

John J: I think that that’s … The sad thing about it is, and I’m sure you can do it in your sleep now, but I tell people that all the time and the go on there and they go, “Where are the goals?” I think Google sort of buries it

Jeff S: Yeah. Absolutely, it’s sort of buried in there, it’s hidden.

John J: It’s sad because it’s such a fundamental step it ought to be … a pop up box ought to come up after you log in and say, “Have you set up any goals?”

Jeff S: Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny because you’re right. I’ve had 7,000 plus people go through my class and I always … the first day I don’t even tell them how to set these things up because they’re afraid they’re going to break things and I just want to get their confidence up there. But it is sort of scary to set up a goal because you need to go into the administrator section, you need to make sure you have the rights to do this. You think you could screw up your data, and you actually can. You can configure these things and you can mess up data, so it does get scary, and you think Google would make it easier. But ultimately that’s sort of why I have my programs for training, is because it just gets you over that hump of the scary parts.

John J: Yeah, you make a living out of Google’s confusion, right?

Jeff S: Absolutely.

John J: So, let’s talk a little bit about the goals, though. I think a lot of times, again somebody thinks, “Goals, well, my goal is I want more business.” And I think it’s really crucial to break it down to micro goals. What would be steps or actions that people would take that might hint at the fact that they could become a customer. Would you say that that’s kind of an accurate way to look at it?

Jeff S: Yeah, absolutely. I think that it’s easy for me to say you should configure Google Analytics to recognize when somebody fills out your contact form, but if you’re in the situation where that happens once a month, then it’s probably not a big effort to do that and it’s probably not going to give you that much insight.

There’s other things you can track as well to be indicators of success. We call them micro goals, or just steps along the way. You might not have a lot of people filling out your contact form, but you might get people downloading this free pdf that you put out there. A white paper, whatever you’ve invested your time into creating. You could track that.

I just did one, I did a product launch for one of my things, and I tracked how many people played the video, how many people made it 25% of the way through the video, 50%, all the way to 100%. Then I was able to track how many people made it all the way through. Basically, anything that you do in your marketing perspective, there’s a measurement component to it. What you want to do is you want to make sure that if you’re spending any effort at all creating marketing programs, creating a reason for somebody to come to your website or to engage with you, you want to have a measurement plan to go along with it. It doesn’t need to be complex, it should be about as complex as your marketing strategy in the first place.

John J: And I think a lot of times, people will say, okay, I’ve got a measurement plan, I’m measuring lots of stuff, I’m getting lots of data, but it really, the point of view sometimes that I think people miss is that the reason we collect this stuff is so that you can get better.

Jeff S: Absolutely.

John J: I read a great analogy the other day that said imagine if you played golf but you only practiced at night, when it was pitch black. So you got no feedback on a whether or not the ball was going straight, or far, or anywhere. There would be no chance for you to get better, and I think that’s what happens when people don’t set up these goals and collect data. It’s like playing golf in the dark. You can’t possibly get better.

Jeff S: Yeah, absolutely. You can’t really compare what happened in the past to what’s going to happen in the future, you can’t predict things, you can’t optimize your budget, you can’t optimize your efforts. What I always try to tell people is to look at it as basically 80-20-ing your efforts. Analytics helps you figure out what the 20% of your efforts are that deliver 80% of your results.

Now, yes, you might have fewer results if you focused only on analytics, but is also makes you much more efficient.

John J: One of the things that is powerful about analytics is, especially the free version of analytics is the dizzying number of reports and configurations of those reports.

How do you help someone break it down and say here are the three or four things we should be looking at?

Jeff S: Yeah, for sure. So beyond goals, the reason why Google Analytics exists, and the reason why it’s free is because the Google AdWords advertising platform, pay per click platform … What they determined was not enough people were going to spend money on pay per click if they didn’t know what was happening on their website. So in order to get people to spend more money on pay per click advertising, they gave away a free website analytics tool to measure how things would work. Because it was … When I first started in this, 2005, you had to have an AdWords account in order to even get into Google Analytics. It was like a, you had to have this in order to get that type of arrangement. It’s still the tightest integration between products, so one of the things you want to do is you want to make sure that if you’re running any paid advertising through Google, that you hook that…

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