Thank you all for joining us today Like I said earlier, this is a nap time for me and all I ask is that you don't snore So it's also the day after May the 4th So I wore my favorite Star Wars t-shirt and if you're inert enough You'll get the reference because it's like a double entendre and I even wore my stormtrooper socks because Cuz we got to celebrate May the 4th, right? So it's we decided it's revenge of the 5th So, oh well close enough So I my name is David Zimmerman. I own a internet marketing consultancy called reliable acorn I've been in internet marketing, especially search marketing for about 10 years now four years ago, I went out on my own started my own thing and I tell you over all this time I've learned that the most important thing anybody can do When using their website to promote their business is to measure everything You know, this is where the power of internet marketing comes from You know, we're not Buying a radio spot and hoping someone sees it or here's it.  Hey, well that might be great and you might spend a lot of money and think it's I spent so much money Surely it's gonna work But then you'd kind of feel like it works And that's really disappointing and that's why I don't do that kind of marketing Because I like the power of the internet marketing because we know If it works or not the power of internet marketing is our ability to measure everything we do There is a problem though and that might be why you're here today because there's so much data What are you supposed to believe? What are you supposed to do? Should you look at your bounce rate? Should you look at the pages per visitor? should you look at the What's the difference between a page view and a visit in a session and a user and oh and so we have analysis paralysis and we look at all this stuff and we're like Looks good But it gets worse When we're paying for advertising, maybe we're doing ad words. Maybe we're doing Facebook. Maybe we're doing snapchat And we have to ask ourselves after we're paying for this traffic or Impressions not of necessarily the accuracy of the data. They're presenting to us But is Facebook giving us data that helps us to know it's effective or Is Facebook giving us data to make Facebook look really good? So we keep spending money with them and We we we have all these numbers and they it sounds great to have 10,000 impressions on our Facebook campaign but Did that help? It feels like it did it it might have I surely it did something We're losing the power in our confusion And so what I'm hoping to do today is to provide for you a solution a solution to analysis paralysis in marketing data a Solution to whether or not you should believe or trust this particular metric The solution is a measurement plan now. I Know we're all busy and I know that we just kind of want to get down to the nitty-gritty and If you were at Nathan's talk yesterday about making sure you have the time to plan ahead Even though you don't have the time to plan ahead, right? This is where we all live But as with most things in life Time to make a plan and develop a strategy will end up making everything more efficient Allowing you to have the power that you need to understand What marketing is working? What marketing is wasting money? Where you should double down and where you should cut off? Because you have a measurement plan to understand What you should be looking at so Let's start in episode one Forget about your website for a moment. All right for 10. We're not at word camp What is what are your business objectives? What does your business hope to accomplish forget about your website? forget about the Facebook and Zuck and the Twitter's and Jack and and and what what is your business objective now? Cobbers kids got no shoes. Sorry as I'm writing this presentation. I'm like That's a good point David. What is my business subject if I should put it down? So I wrote on a post-it note Right because I need the need the doctor needs to heal himself So the the business objective of reliable acorn is to help B2B companies grow Through remark reliable internet marketing advice and services That's my business objective To help B2B companies grow through reliable internet marketing advice and services That's what my business Wants to accomplish What does anybody know what their business objective is when a volunteer it? Yes, what's your business objective? Okay, okay, if you were to sum that up really short, what would you be if we could sum it up in like a one sentence? Well, how would you say it? Safe affordable home care if you want to provide safe affordable home care. That is a great business objective And I think you should win a prize for that You brought him up right who else a business objective. Yes, sir Okay, you teach for your answers to charge better rates give better advice and make Get better clients Make better business decisions. There you go. That's your objective your business. I think that's great, too You get a snow speeder now Oh right at the camera that's gonna be great on WordPress TV For your reference I bought three of these yesterday Only two made it here so So it's important to kind of summarize and distill what your business objective is because once you know Your business objective you can move on to the better episode episode to How will your website accomplish these objectives? Right remember when we're talking about business objectives really asking Forgetting about the web but step two is to say okay great. You've got a WordPress site How is that site going to accomplish these objectives? So let me let me suggest Some of your websites are selling things To accomplish your business objectives. You've got a product People you want them to buy it? It will better their life if they have it and so they want it But I think That a lot of business owners Forget that websites can do much more than just sell a product For instance me I don't really sell a product. I want my Website to give me leads Right my business objective Evolves giving my clients Reliable internet marketing advice and services I need clients to do that I get clients when I get leads Right But some of you have a business That's a brick-and-mortar. It's shop.  That's what your website needs to accomplish and others Maybe you're selling ads on your site Maybe you have affiliate marketing revenue that you get from your site your business objective It's really all about publishing content to get more of the kickback, right? So there's several ways. There's probably more than this But there's several ways a website could accomplish your business objective and frankly sometimes You're using more of these right like My business objective is to help clients by providing them the most reliable Blah blah blah blah you got it. I don't want sound like an advertisement, but so I want leads But I'm also publishing Right, that's a way. I'm providing that advice. I have clients who who sell machinery industrial machinery But some of that industrial machinery is you know five figure machines and no one's going to give their credit card to buy a $50,000 rock crusher, right? So really it's a website that's selling rock crushing machines and it's not really selling it You're sending the lead to a sales person who then follows up. So it's selling and leads Some who want to get people in the door They want to get people in the door, but maybe they sell a little bit online too, right? Sometimes you combine these together. So so my two victims. I mean participants, right What how is your website going to help you accomplish your business objective? Okay, okay, I'm licensed by the state of Pennsylvania, okay Okay, okay, yeah Yeah, sure sure. Yeah Yeah Right Right, right Okay, but I use you can hit on an important point I think you might not be getting a lot of leads right now But ultimately that is what you would like to get out of your website, right? Right because publishing and stuff like that is really about Getting the leads, right? So your website helps you get leads Maybe not many yet, but it's okay. We're all there, right? And so you you're one way your website accomplishes your business objective is through leads and that's great How about you what is your how does your website help your business objective? Yeah, yes Okay, so you have a product, but is that fulfilled through the lead So the lead Okay, okay, okay great right so we all need to think about this how this applies to our business objective What our website or what do your clients websites business object? What does your clients websites do for their business objective? Well, we have to make a distinction Between macro and micro when it comes to how a website could accomplish a business objective Macro means What is the thing your website will do that will get you closest to the money? Micro is something that gets someone closer to the thing that finally gets you money Right, so in my case I want leads But I have an email list All right, I don't make money from my email list. I don't sell my emails, right? Don't put affiliate links in my emails. Well, sometimes I do but that's not my primary source of it, right? but the micro lead of Getting someone signed up on my email address is to get someone to fulfill the macro lead Which is that the sales lead? Hey David? I need your help. I'm going to pay you money That is where I Make the money. I make the money when I get the lead sell the client Then they pay me but I you can't confuse The macro and the micro and I think that's where some of us go wrong sometimes There's our websites want to accomplish everything and there's a lot a website needs to do productively But let's make a distinction between the macro goal Meaning the thing that's closest to when we get paid as the website owner or the business that owns the website And what are the micro goals which get us closer to the thing that gets us? So we can put this in context with social media for example. It is awesome to have a bunch of Facebook followers But unless you named Kardashian the number of Facebook followers doesn't well okay Instagram followers doesn't get you money Right that is a micro goal That gets you closer to They're following you on Instagram. They see your posts. They interact with you. They begin to trust you They begin to rely on your expertise and then when they need your help they call you There you go. They've called you. They've become a lead That's the macro goal. So when we're looking at all the data that we can look at we have to ask What is the most important thing closest to? Where you get paid that's the macro goal Everything else is a step towards that in a micro goal following me Any questions so far? All right, let's continue that so episode three is where it starts to get a little interesting How can you measure them? We know what our business objective is We we know how our website will help us accomplish that business objective How are we going to measure them? This is where we get the power of marketing through our website because we should be able to measure Everything and that's why we should all have Google Analytics on our site Right. There's many number of ways to measure data about our website Jetpack has their own, you know That's the same as on if you have wordpress.com site. You're using jetpack data There's other things like Facebook data that you could use I Think everyone really has no excuse not to have Google Analytics on their site It's easy to set up. It is have a treasure trove of that How many of you have Google Analytics on your site right now? Okay, great. You're getting there Problem is there's a lot of data in there, right? How do we filter through this? How do we figure out what we should be looking at? But the first step is just to install it. Any number of easy ways to do it monster insights is a great plug-in It makes it very easy If you want to go a little more advanced you can install an instance of Google Tag Manager on your site and let that serve up a Google Analytics that has a lot more flexibility for you, but At least get analytics on your site somehow Once you have analytics on your site, you're not done Because you need to connect The thing that your website's helping you do to get to your business objective To Google Analytics Okay, if you're selling something on your site That means you need to send the e-commerce data into Google Analytics You might be using a WooCommerce or something like that Sometimes if you're using Shopify outside of WordPress, there's ways to set up your system To simply send the transaction data Send the number of the number of dollars that someone have paid Like you want all that data to go into your Google Analytics account Because that is the macro goal That you want to accomplish if you are trying to get leads You need to set up what Google Analytics calls a goal And what that means is whenever someone submits a lead from your website You need to track and Google Analytics will will handle that event in different fashion If I recommend using a lead form on your website Because if everyone will come to your website They have to use the form to contact you and it's very easy to track form submission in Google Analytics Especially set up the form to go to a confirmation page Because then all you got to do is say hey Google Analytics This is the URL for the confirmation page anytime someone visits the confirmation page The only way they got there is by submitting the form therefore I know I got a lead There's other ways to do this Like you could put your email address on your on your website But if you don't connect that to Google Analytics All you know is I got people submitting or contact me by email But you don't have the power of Google Analytics to say how they found you and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah Yeah, yeah, the contact form is the same as the lead form You can use any number of form plugins, but I always recommend using a confirmation page I think it's a better user experience because it confirms the user that you did get their lead Nothing more frustrating to me when I fill out a form on a website and the form resets Did did did did I waste my time? Did they get it? Then I'm anxious and I'm like I'm done like I'm out of here So set up your form so it goes to a confirmation page If if your website is trying to get people into the door and that's your business objective It's a little more challenging, but you can still track it in Google Analytics What if you have a page on your site on directions to get to your store, right? I hope do I Mean you can use you know Google my business and stuff like that But have a page in your site what and you measure how many people are getting to that page as A way of saying people are interested enough in my business that they want to get directions to my store So now you know you have successfully interested people and coming to your store You want to get a little more sophisticated You have a web only coupon That they have to give you their email address to receive now when they give you that coupon The only way they got it was because they went to your website. So you know that is a website lead Right, and we just fancy things we can do with Google Analytics to see how they found you to get that in the first place But you want to track The goal the macro goal that is closest to making money in Google Analytics Now if you're a publisher You're informing people you are using if trying to sell affiliate links or you selling advertising on your site to make Money great now. We just need to know things like how many pages per visit because The more pages per visit the more people ads people saw the more you can charge For people they're advertising that you're saying right Things like that, but by setting up the tracking We're able to do something important and I Kind of struggle with how I wanted to call this macro micro or primary secondary. I ended on this some data is Primarily connected to What your website does to accomplish your business goal? That's your primary data Was a lead collected? Did someone make a purchase Did someone download the coupon? That's your primary Goal and you need to make sure you're able to track that in Google Analytics if It's something that data a piece of data that helps you understand how people are getting to there That's a secondary piece of data so Because clients have come to me and say well, what do I rank? What do I rank? What do I rank David? Hey, that's cool. I'm glad you rank I could go on a tangent and why who cares, but I won't go there. Let's pretend it matters where you rank That Doesn't make you money to rank I can think of dozens of key words For which you rank number one That don't bring any traffic to you so Keep we're ranking if you're doing organic efforts Really is a secondary metric that leads to traffic Because you don't really want to rank You want rank that generates traffic, but you don't really want traffic Because we could get you traffic for all kinds of crazy ideas You want traffic? That produces a sale That's your primary goal Sales from the secondary goal Traffic as a result of Another secondary or tertiary goal rank Facebook You got a million impressions for your promoted post. Yes, that's awesome Did any of those people come to your site? Okay, so now we've got a secondary metric called impressions that leads to clicks of The clicks Because you've installed Google Analytics now, you know how many clicks became traffic and it's not always the same because they're calculated differently But more importantly how many of that how much of that traffic from your Facebook ads Accomplished your primary goal of your website This is where Facebook ads become really misleading in their data They tell you all this really cool information But it doesn't necessarily translate into the bottom line So we help by understanding what our business objective is How our websites accomplishing that business objective and what we're tracking as far as our business objective goes We're able to determine. This is a primary metric or it's a secondary metric set Metrics are good. You want to you have to have impressions in your Facebook ads if anybody's going to click on them But that's not it in itself If people click on your great, it's just an expense to you unless that traffic clicks become traffic But traffic doesn't really do anything for you unless it accomplishes the primary goal of a lead or a sale or someone in the doorway of your store or Seeing a lot of ads on your site or whatever your primary metric that you're tracking Yes following me so far Okay so Now that we're able to establish our business objective See how our websites going to accomplish that and Decide and set up the tracking to measure that now we can get to the best episode of all four and We can know how we can evaluate our website success So your data you know Because you sit up tracking you now see your report in Google Analytics and you got a hundred visitors From from Google organic. Yes, and those a hundred visitors became three leads awesome, is that good I'd take three leads Could it be better? Could it is that a month where you? You can't just take the data the data the numbers don't need anything by themselves This is why we have to begin to segment our data We can segment our data across several dimensions One is date You got three leads as a result of a hundred visits this month But you got ten leads as a result of three hundred visitors last month Now you're able to decide whether the three is good or bad Because you've segmented the data three doesn't mean anything Unless you have something against which you can compare it So one of the most common ways to compare data is by using a date comparison Another way is source of the traffic You got a hundred visits from your Google organic search traffic thanks to Google Analytics, you know that You got five visits from your Facebook ads Which was more effective by segmenting the data You now know especially when you're able to go to the primary objective and see that Facebook brought no conversions The Google organic brought a bunch right Segmenting the data according to the source of the traffic helps you to compare now, you know Double down on your SEO. Maybe you either need to completely revamp your Facebook ads or stop giving Zuckerberg any more money But you won't know whether it's successful or not Unless you're able to segment the data Another important segment is location If you are a local dog walker, it doesn't matter if someone in LA comes to your website because You are in Atlanta But if you look at your data by location suddenly that matters So another way to look to see if the data is good is by segmenting it according to location Another way you might look is new versus returning right for instance like Organic search is a really good job bringing new visitors in Social does a really good job bringing returning visitors in But of the newer returning visitors, which are more likely to convert not everyone converts on the first visit So now you can look at the primary tracked goal of your website that helps accomplish your business objective in terms of these segments and Mind you blow you away combining segments your Google analytics Google search traffic from last month brought in more leads from your hometown than it did the previous month Now you've combined all your segments and you know that is working and Now you know Where to spend your money?  What is not where you should be spending your money where you should stop? Please start today on your way home think about what is your business objective? How does your website accomplish that? How are you going to track it? How are you going to segment your data to know whether it's working or not? Now I Have a little link here if you want some more notes I have some a video from Google that kind of works through how to create a measurement plan Some other resources that might help you Create it things to share with your team with your partners to help you kind of figure out this together I've other times have given this this has been the topic of conversation on a Monday morning meaning the next day as they kind of work Through these problems, so this might be a great resource for you start and you know what? I'm tracking you Because I want to know how effective Coming to Atlanta was I mean I had a good time. Don't get me wrong, right? But I want to know how effective these efforts are so if you click on the link You'll see the URL is not the URL this URL I'm using tag manager. I'm not tag manager Google URL builder to say hey, you know what so many people came to your website as a result to go into Atlanta and of those This many people became clients Now I can compare Atlanta to Birmingham and That's right. I'm comparing you to Birmingham and I know What was worthwhile? Because we need to be able to measure. I mean, I'm hoping to help you guys right? I'm not here to sell But please I don't want to be that guy, but I want you to think about it in terms of your business too, right? Don't just throw something against the wall and hope it works That's please don't do that as a waste of your time and money and marketing Measure everything get the most out of it All right. Thank you guys I'm happy to take some questions. I think we are wow that was quick. We have lots. I have no more Lego But I do have maybe some answers. Yes, sir Okay, so we're talking about the question how is that URL tracking the success of this here and now Okay, so This URL is set up as a redirect on my website It redirects to the landing page Which I forget offhand what it is But I also don't want to say it because I don't want you to visit it without going through the tracking But there's a tool within Google Analytics called the URL builder And what you can do is you give it certain parameters And you can say a source of traffic a What is the other dimensions? the campaign the Content keyword where it's appropriate things like that. So I filtered in data like this came from word camp Atlanta Blah blah blah blah blah right and so in Google Analytics when I look at my Google Analytics data It won't say so many people typed in reliable acorn.com slash plan Which would be in Google Analytics considered a direct traffic? Which doesn't really tell me much Instead it in Google Analytics will say the source is word camp The content was this particular presentation Right and so I now it's added more information inside Google Analytics So now I can see this traffic came but obviously I have lead tracking checked up if you submit a form through my site I'll know How you found me? Right. I tell you Clients always want to know How their leads came in? right I get Personally angry When I have to fill the lead form and the lead form makes me say how I found them That's your job I'm the customer don't make me do your marketing for you That little offensive to me Besides it's never accurate. I Have I have a client that always is part of the process of onboard and they ask how did you find us? Inevitably they say we found you by going to Google and searching for this Because we have lead tracking on it. I know it's not right This person did not really find you from Google Organic This person found you from Bing because guess what you have Google people on Bing Right, and they didn't know they had their browser set. Anyway You if you set up your tracking right, you don't have to let your Customers be their marketing data. You don't have to make them feel like their piece of meat You just another you can make them fit because you've set up your tracking To be able to attribute to that any other questions Yes So good good question so the question is Is there a way to know where leads came from from the first source? Okay, this is an interesting thing on how Google Analytics tracks visitors and their four leads Google Analytics Attributes a lead to the last non-direct visit Okay, so if you're following me that means if The last way they found me besides simply typing in the URL to my website so They could have Before they converted so if I know I got so many leads from organic search What that means is The right before they contacted me they did an organic search But they might have months before sort of following me on Facebook Right, so Google Analytics is limited in this ability because it doesn't do a good job saying how they first found me and So maybe they they went they found me on social media and Then they went to my website then they signed up for my email list and Then after receiving emails for six months. They finally Googled my name and filled out a form In Google Analytics, that's to be considered an organic visitor in a lead from organic search But Google Analytics does not do a good job tracking that far back Other analytics platforms that aren't free Do a better job at that There is ways to get a better view within Google Analytics at multi-channel kind of data But it's not how it's set up by default and so you get to find the data Because of a lot of what I do I'm more interested in the last click attribution But for more of a if your business is a longer buying cycle And it takes a lot more touches before someone has enough credibility to trust you home health care might be a great example of that Where they're gonna really want to make sure they trust you before? Yeah law firm so actually law firms different law firm is I just need a lawyer and Lawyers are very aggressive. So last click attribution works really well for law firms But with other things That it's not as effective. So the attribution model is what this is called and that's a very good question Yeah, yes, ma'am Working with clients and trying to help them understand their analytics are there any templates or formats that you found helpful to show a client Especially if they don't have a lot of that tech knowledge To make it really easily So the question is how do you How do you present data to clients in a way that is a little more manageable? Okay? So there's several tools that are available Google has a product called data studio Which allows you to import your Google analytics data and your other data from other sources combine them in one nice neat looking report I mean you can do some really neat stuff with that it'll involve a lot of setup for you But sometimes it's a great way to provide your client with the data that matters to them. I Mean rather than getting them distracted by going down the rabbit hole of Google analytics I love I mean my clients should all have access to their analytics. Absolutely. They should own that account by the way not I Should not be the delegator. They should own that data. However They get confused and they go oh my gosh my bounce rate is terrible Is it because blog posts are always gonna have a high bounce rate because blog posts mean someone came to your website for a question Found your blog post answered it and left because their question was answered. So guess what? That's a bounce. That was a successful visit Or if it's a bounce they came to your website called your phone number They are a lead but because you didn't set up phone call tracking We don't know that they're a lead and it looks like a bounce. It looks terrible But in reality, it's a success. And so I like data studio. I set up a little basic report that just weeds it down to the very basics and They can literally look at that report at any time. They feel like they want to look and it has some limited segmentation There's also ways to set up unique dashboards in Google analytics and some of my clients I'll set up a dashboard and just have Google analytics automatically email them the relevant data I actually do that for all my clients. I'm tomorrow morning 7 o'clock Google will send me a bunch of different reports for all my clients. I use that to say oops, someone removed the tracking or Oops, someone removed a major section of their site in the traffic dropped and it didn't tell me about it, right? I mean, am I the only one? All right, maybe I am but thank you But like I said these reports mostly for me to keep up But I can also in the custom report dashboard of Google analytics set up the data only I want to see and That ends up making it really efficient for me. So I just go through all those reports real quick.  I'm going to take some time to look at that fix that problem So those are two good ways to do that Any other questions? Yes Okay, okay, so we're talking about there's a way within Google analytics you're asking to set up what's called an event and That's a way where if something happens on your website. It's sent to Google analytics And it's not considered a view of a page It's considered a different category of data called an event and you're asking about Google tag manager as it relates to tracking events So they are two different products. So Google tag manager is a wonderful product That you can think of like a bucket You install tag manager on your website and on every page of your website and in that bucket Serves up all your analytics tracking codes or other things that you want So for instance if you're a developer of websites and you install tag manager on your client sites before you release them Your clients aren't going into code and break in your site Because they want to add a new Facebook pixel or a Bing tracking pixel, right? Because they got a goal they have to do is go into tag manager and say add this to my bucket within tag manager It another advantage is you don't have to add the event tracking code within the HTML of the page So no one has to break The code in order to set up event tracking. So it is a superior way to do event tracking But yeah, it's a different way. And so I it's why if you guys are building websites for clients You know you can prevent me from breaking your site when I get it to do the marketing If you just go ahead and install tag manager on it And because you don't want me going into your client sites and breaking it because that's just going to make you Hate me and I like you Even you yeah, so Chad did my logo recently We have a little argument about that. I love him. So Pointed yeah events is a great thing to track and you can track all kinds of things as events so if if you're producing content for instance and You want people to watch video you can track as an event when someone clicks on the play button You set that up as a goal in Google Analytics now You know someone viewed a video on my site and if it's set up as a goal Google Analytics is able to tell you Guess what so many people who visited you from this source of traffic viewed the video on your site and Now you can segment your dad and you can say hey Guess what more people who came from Facebook were more likely to click on the video the people who came from Bing Right, so this is another way to track events and doesn't have to be a goal I've seen some crazy things done with events. It's really powerful But yeah, does that help me seriously question? Cool. You know the questions about One more question Yes, thank you, I will have a good way home. All right. Thank you guys for coming have a wonderful day