340 – All About Google Analytics for Small Business with Chris Mercer of Measurement Marketing

Gift biz unwrapped episode 340 Measurement marketing is all about listening

to their side of the conversation,

listening to our users.

And then based on that feedback,

we adjust our marketing accordingly Tinton gifters bakers,

crafters, and makers pursuing your dream can be fun.

Whether you have an established business or looking to start one.

Now you are in the right place.

This is gift to biz unwrapped,

helping you turn your skill into a flourishing business.

Join us for an episode,

packed full of invaluable guidance,

resources, and the support you need to grow.

Your gift biz.

Here is your host gift biz gal Sue moon Heights.

Hi there.

It's Sue.

And have I got an important episode topic lined up for

you today?

Before we get into this,

I'd like to ask you a favor.

Think of this as an exchange for all the free content

you have at your fingertips here twice a week with the

podcast. If you haven't done so already in whatever app you

use to listen to the show,

will you please leave a comment in the form of a

review? Just tell me what you've learned from one of these

past episodes,

short and sweet doing this,

help spread the word about this podcast.

And I would be ever so grateful.

All right,

diving into our special topic of the day,

Google analytics.

I was introduced to our guest Mercer when I took an

online course of his,

that was offered by social media marketing world.

Gosh, I'll say about four years ago or so now it

was eyeopening in terms of all that Google analytics can provide,

although complex,

and to be honest,

overwhelming at the same time,

but his style of teaching and explanations were totally on point

and worth investing the time and brainpower for sure.

So when I was approached to have him on the show,

I was excited to share his knowledge with you.

But I asked him to talk with us about Google analytics

in doable,

easy chunks.

And that's exactly what you're going to hear today.

Think of Google analytics as your key,

whole peak into a customer's mind by employing the actions Mercer

presents to us today,

you'll have insight into your company and how people are interacting.

That may surprise you.

Things you didn't know before about purchasing behavior.

That website viewers go first to look at your pumpkin spice

candles, but then mostly end up buying vanilla or that the

promotion that you have on your banner,

isn't doing anything at all too often.

We interpret what's happening by intuition versus fact and many,

many, many times we're way off.

Then what do we do?

We make changes that either have zero impact or worse,

further us from interested customers wanting to make a purchase.

As the saying goes,

knowledge is power.

And in the case of Google analytics,

knowledge will bring you sales.

Okay? Mercer,

we are set and ready to learn Today.

I am a really looking forward to our conversation with Chris

Mercer, best known as Mercer who's co-founder of measurement marketing,

a sought after measurement marketing expert.

He's been helping marketers,

marketing teams and agencies plan out what's important to measure in

their marketing build measurement systems,

specifically using Google tag manager and Google analytics.

If you don't understand what that is,

stay tuned.

He also helps create actionable dashboard reports and finally use those

reports to forecast and optimize their marketing Results.

Mercer has a knack for teaching and is known for his

ability to simplify even the most complex ideas for his audience.

He also speaks at some of the top conferences in the

industry, such as traffic and conversion,

social media,

marketing world,

and content jam Mercer.

Welcome to the gift biz on repped podcast.

Thank you,

Sue. It's a pleasure to be here.

Thanks for having me.

Oh my Gosh.

I love all the energy in your voice too,

because we need that.

When you also combine that with the word analytics,

It's a fact you don't think data and like fun stuff,

But it can be,

and it can lead to really awesome things.

So we're going to get into all of that,

but I do have a traditional question here on the show.

All Right,

I'm ready.

Everyone. Who's listening is a creator.

So we're going to make you go into that creative land

too. And describe yourself now as a motivational candle.

So by color and quote,

what would be a Mercer candle?

So a Mercer candle would be,

I wear a lot of gray.

So at first I was going to go with gray,

but I thought,

you know what?

That's maybe not versatile enough.

So maybe kind of one of those beigey looking candles,

because it fits in a lot of different decor.

So I thought,

okay, it's versatile.

So I like a parcel color.

Beige would be the color.

Then the quote would be trust,

but verify,

because I think that encompasses so much of my mindset and

kind of what we teach at measure marketing to IO.

And just how to think about the world,

which is trust that things are set up correctly,

that your beliefs are correct,

that whatever it is is done is correct,

but you verify that it's not,

it was look for where it could be improved or where

it might not be.

Right. And you can definitely when it comes to data or

just life in general,

that trust,

but verify mindset and motto has helped a ton When it

just reconfirms that if you should still do what you're currently

doing or else you could go on for years doing something

and not realize that you could be doing so much better.

Right. How would you know,

if you're going down the wrong path,

unless you occasionally ask yourself,

is this the right path?

Exactly right.

Yep. Trust,

but verify,

Oh boy,

I think I fell into that trap.

So anyone else who's listening who has done the same?

Maybe this'll be a point where we can change that a

little bit.

So true.

Honestly, it's I started the same way.

Right? It's one of these things you learn as you go,

as you go through.

Yeah. And we can always get better.

Right. So no,

no shame here,

for sure.

So you always been an analytical numbers,

kind of a guy.

That's a great question.

I wouldn't describe myself as numbers and analytical because I'm not

the guy who lives in like data analyst,

world or data scientist mode.

Like I'm not thinking about terms like quant or linear aggression

or statistics.

Like, I don't think about any of that stuff at all,

but I am a systems person and that for sure has

been a thing.

Cause I,

my background is actually in sales and very quickly moved from

field sales into sales management.

So for a long period of time,

I was managing sales teams and training sales teams.

And that's always looking at the process that that team is

following the conversation.

They're having with prospects at various points in time and looking

at that system and how do we improve that system?

No, where to improve.

You got to measure it.

You got to see what the results are.

And so that's where the numbers part comes in is I

got very good at measuring systems to figure out what's working

and what's not so that we could ultimately improve it.

That's what I definitely am stepping more of a system.

I love that.

And my corporate background was sales,

moving into management as well.

Perfect. And the one thing that I loved about that is

you're based a hundred percent on your performance and like back

to your beige or gray idea,

you're either performing in hitting your numbers or you're not Right.

That's exactly right.

Honestly, there is such an amazing sense of peace for me

in that either it's green or it's red,

right? Lady is green or red.

There's no shades of yellow.

It says like it just works or it doesn't.

And there's beauty in that.

It's so nice when you can do things like measure your

marketing and know if it's working the way it's supposed to.

And if it's not,

you know exactly what part isn't,

that's kind of the whole beauty of this process.

Well, and that's the whole point too,

because green or red,

like if you're sitting in red and you see other people

in green to continue with this color analogy,

but you don't know how to get there,

then it's not peaceful and calm.

And it's super stressful because it's like,

why is everybody else in green?

And I'm sitting here in red and have no clue how

to make it over there.

Exactly. Right.

And this one is like,

to your point,

knowing that you're red,

right. And the other one is knowing how to get out.

And that is where most people break down.

They have no idea how to get out of that red.

Exactly. Right.

And that I think is what your analytics will help you

figure. That's exactly right.

The whole concept of measurement marketing and how to think about

it. Because I realized like there are a lot of people

who are not self-described numbers.

People. I totally get that.

I am of the firm belief.

Like it's kind of what we built our company around is

helping what we call normal.

People learn this stuff,

right? Not numbers,

people, numbers,

people are going to learn all their own.

They didn't they're numbers people,

but normal people,

aren't going to learn something like Google analytics or any of

that sort of thing.

So what we do is we sort of started a base

of changing the way you think about this.

So it's not,

when people think about Google analytics,

they think about data tables and numbers and overwhelm and frustration

and not knowing what anything means.

And some things seem,

they seem,

one thing says one thing and something else,

that's something else.

And you have no idea what to do and you just

get frustrated so better,

just not to look at it.

Right. And that's what a of people do.

I remember I did it in the very beginning,

but then I realized that the idea is,

has nothing really to do about the numbers or even the

tool, even Google analytics doesn't really matter.

It's the idea that we are measuring for a conversation.

And what I mean by that is,

let's say I had a shoe store.

You came into my shoe store in the offline world.

Many of our listeners here have brick and mortar stores.

So when somebody comes into the store,

you say,

hi, you welcome them.

What can I help you find?

You get them and maybe pick it up off the shelf,

try it on,

maybe buy another one with a,

buy one,

get one sale on the way out to upsell them and

get them on your email list.

And they're out the door and that's sort of the process

and the flow.

And in that process,

they would be a natural conversation.

I would be asking you questions.

You would be responding back to me.

I would be adjusting my compensation based upon the feedback that

you're giving me right in that conversation.

And all that's very natural.

The same thing happens digitally.

But most people just haven't realized that they set this thing

up to not listen to the feedback.

They're not listening to our customers.

So what I mean by that is somebody comes to your

Shopify store and you don't really know that they're there.

They come and they browse a certain product,

but you don't know what products they really are looking at.

They added a cart,

they checked out and then they bought.

And at that point you go,

oh, they made a sale.

Great. But you don't necessarily know how they made that sale.

You don't know the steps they went through.

You didn't listen to them along the way.

You didn't see that.

Maybe what the products they are buying happens to be the

one that have better images.

And these other products that are not buying,

maybe just don't have the best quality images.

Well, those are the sort of things that you can actually

set up measurement for.

So we sort of listened to the conversation.

That's the whole idea is as a user is using your

site, they're having a conversation in their head.

And if you think about it,

when you're go to a website,

you can hear the conversation in your head,

right. When you're going through,

I'm not sure if I should do this or not,

or let me go see what the sizes are.

And you're having a conversation between that website.

And obviously yourself,

measurement marketing is all about listening to their side of the

conversation, listening to our users.

And then based on that feedback,

we adjust our marketing accordingly to kind of keep that conversation

going. Yeah.

I mean,

two things come to mind when you talk about this first,

it is a disconnect,

I think for the majority of our listeners,

because as creatives,

you know,

that whole right brain left brain type thing,

being more analytical is the opposite of being a creator.

Not to say that we aren't,

we all have a little bit,

but naturally the majority of us tend to the other side.

So it is less comfortable for us.

But the other thing I'm thinking based on your description makes

so much sense to me is you think about the old

focus groups and a lot of us have done focus groups.

You know,

we've been a participant in the focus groups before where someone's

behind windows or something,

and they're listening and observing what we're talking about,

how we're responding to whatever the topic is at hand.

Would you agree that that's very similar to what you're talking

about in terms of looking from behind the scenes as to

how activity is happening on your website.

Exactly. Right.

And to put it into a slightly different explanation would be,

you know,

if you owned,

let's say your store,

right. The shoe store or whatever.

And you sort of sit above,

you'll see your office was above a kind of looking down

at the floor.

Right. And you could see how everybody was moving through the

store. And when you see that you then know not just

based on what they say they're going to do,

but what they actually do,

the actions,

they actually take the behaviors they actually make.

And you can see like,

wow, my expensive shoes way on the back right-hand corner.

But everybody comes in and goes to the left.

No, one's seeing the expensive shoes.

So maybe you can put up an end cap or maybe

you put up a signage that says,

Hey, check out the new shoes that we just got in

these exclusive offers.

We only have 12 pair available.

And all of a sudden,

you start to see when I do that,

oh, traffic.

Instead of going in into the left,

it goes straight back to the right and the go,

perfect. Now I have the behaviors that I'm looking for.

And all you did was look at the information and it

sort of showed that what was happening.

It wasn't what you wanted to happen.

So you would change a few things to elicit those behaviors,

to encourage those behaviors to happen.

And it's the same thing you can do online.

I'll give you kind of an example of digital marketing,

how this works in digital marketing.

Our flagship product is called the measure marketing academy.

It's kind of the system we use for do it yourself,

training on this.

And so the academy offer page,

we know to expect a certain percentage will go from the

page to the cart.

And then a certain percentage of those will go from the

car to actually purchase.

We sort of have an expectation of what this is.

And when we looked at our numbers,

we realized one day that for some reason,

out of nowhere,

the behaviors were very different.

So I'm just gonna use round numbers here.

But let's say we expected a,

roughly 10% of the people to go from the offer page

to the cart,

right? So one out of every 10 would go to the

cart page.

What was happening was we would get like maybe half the

people go into the cart page.

And at first glance you go,

wow, that's great.

Because half the people are going to the cart,

but they weren't all buying.

That's what we noticed.

It was like this really high,

what they call abandonment rate.

So people weren't buying,

they weren't making it through,

but they were definitely going to the cart.

So what that told us was,

and remember,

I'm very rarely using numbers.

When I describe this,

we're trying to talk in terms of behaviors.

And in my head,

I'm visualizing a group of people looking at the page.

And then some of those people,

a smaller group going to the cart.

That's what I'm doing in my head right now.

So what we noticed was there was too many people go

into the card.

There can be too good of a thing.

Conversion rate can be too high.

And so we looked at this and said,

why are so many people going to the cart without the

intention of buying?

Because remember they weren't buying,

they weren't making it through the cart.

And so what we realized was the page had gone through

a recent update.

And this was years ago,

the page had gone through a recent update and the person

who built the page or were updated the page accidentally took

off the price.

They deleted it.

So what happened,

where people were going to the cart to find out how

much it was,

and then they were going back to the page,

as we all do,

right? You always scroll down to the bottom and see the

page and you come back up to the top,

see if it's worth it.

So that's what was happening.

They would go into the cart and they will go back

to the sales page.

The only reason we knew that was happening is because we

were watching those numbers and we had our little report and

we went,

Ooh, that's weird.

There's a bigger crowd of people in a place that should

not have a big crowd of people.

Let's go see what's going on.

Let's go see the conversation that website's having.

And we realized,

oh, that website,

in this case,

the academy offer page is hiding some information and it needs

to not hide the price.

Right? It wasn't,

it wasn't on purpose.

It was an accident.

But as soon as we put back the price,

everything came back normal and it worked just fine.

Oh, wow.

But we could easily tell what was going on by what

those numbers,

the dashboards in this case we were looking at were telling

us. Yeah.

And to your example,

an abandoned cart sequence,

you know,

to recapture abandoned cart,

wouldn't have helped you at all.

Not at all because they weren't coming to buy Because the

problem was still there.

There was no price.

That's exactly right.

Imagine the frustration,

if you,

as a user came in and all of a sudden you're

getting an abandonment cart sequence.

When in reality,

you had no intention of buying anyway.

So now I'm giving a completely wrong conversation to you.

It was like when you come into the shoe store and

I say,

Hey, welcome to the shoe store.

What can I help you with?

You're like,

oh, sorry.

I'm here to get my nails done.

I was looking for the nail salon.

I'm like,

oh yeah,

they moved.

It's actually across the street now.

Great. That's not a problem that would perfectly be fine in

the normal world.

In the digital world.

What would happen is I would then follow you to the

nail store and then ask you to buy shoes again for

about three days,

just to make sure that you are still not in the

market for shoes.

And that's only because you came to the shoe store and,

but that's not at all.

You didn't have the intention to doing shoes and you can

measure for stuff like that.

So that's the idea is like,

we want to make sure that the conversation we're having is

relevant with our users and the only way to make sure

that you're saying something that makes sense to them and that

meets their expectation is if you get really good at listening

and the best part about this is the customers.

I think a lot of people I know for a fact,

I did,

I used to think this is like a weird puzzle that

I have to figure out the market.

Cause they're hiding from me and they're being coy and they're

pretending, and they don't want to tell me the answer is.

And in reality,

that was me just not being good at asking the right

questions. But the market will absolutely tell you if they like

something or if they don't and you just have to get

good at asking the questions,

but they will absolutely tell you if something's good or not.

Like when we hit the price that we knew instantly,

oh, the numbers totally changed.

The dashboard totally shows something different.

They are clearly acting in a way that is not what

should be happening.

Let's go make that adjustment.

Let's go find out where that error is and fix it,

you know?

And then it instantly went back instantly.

It was like within 24 hours,

we had the numbers all back,

which is pretty cool.

Well, that's cool.

Yeah. I mean,

showing results can change that quickly is very cool.

And I also feel right now that everyone is so weary

online of getting scammed.

Yeah. You know,

I heard about someone a couple of weeks ago who purchased

a bunch of things and never got them,

you know,

so virtually she sent money off into who knows where and

never got what she thought she was buying.

So everyone's antennas are way up with things like that.

Okay. So I would love to take this conversation to a

point where we have some tangible,

actionable things for everyone who's listening.

And then also talk about more of a what's possible.

But if we could give them a few things,

maybe if you were just starting off doing this and maybe

it's even just make sure your analytics are connected up properly,

you know,

I don't know,

like going back to that far.

Absolutely. Let's talk about the framework because this is a lot

of times this stuff,

it is overwhelming and it is frustrating.

I get it.

I get overwhelmed.

Frustrated. Sometimes I get it is because Google analytics has got

a lot of levers and dials and it is frustrating.

So I think first thing is you sorta just,

we use the phrase over and over again,

get good enough to get going,

then come back and make it better later,

but give yourself permission to be okay with where you are,

but do something,

but do something.

Right? So to your point,

it's okay if you haven't lit up.

So we have sort of three stages of this framework and

I'll go through the framework in a moment here,

but there are three stages to it.

The first is the cave set up and we call it,

the cave is because that's when people would tell us,

they're like,

well, I feel like I don't know what's working.

I don't know.

What's not,

I don't have any visibility in anything.

And I feel like I'm wandering around in the dark,

just making guessing guess,

guess guessing at what should be changed.

That's a rough place to be in,

but that's where most people are.

And certainly everybody starts.

If you were in the cave right now,

your goal is just to light stuff up,

find a flashlight and get out of the cave.

Right? That's the idea.

It does not to be perfect.

You don't have to be tracking loan or a LTV,

right. Lifetime value in anything else that they talk about that

you say one day you're supposed to have,

like, don't worry about any of that because you're in the

cave. You just need to light things up,

start using the tools.

So you can get used to the tools once you're out

of the cave.

Right. Which is again,

that is just starting the process.

You just do beginner baby-steps then you're going to go through

the framework again,

again, we'll cover the framework in just a minute here,

but then you go into what we call the valley of

visibility. Well,

now at this point,

you've kind of gone through the steps once and now you've

lit up things.

So now you're walking into analytics and you kind of have

an idea of what it's telling you.

It's not the perfect answer every single time,

whenever you need it,

but it's better than not knowing anything.

It's kind of like having a prescription glasses where there's a

difference between wearing a prescription that's maybe a little old or

not wearing any glasses at all.

I would much rather wear the prescription.

That's just a little bit old,

right? Because it's better than not wearing glasses at all.

And when You can see things,

you also then have a baseline to Work from.

It's exactly right.

You start to see more of what's there,

right? And then ultimately you get to the summit,

right? If you think about like a mountain top,

and then that's the very complicated stuff.

That's the things where people are doing LTV and everything else.

But at this point when you get to the summit,

it's because you've got all this muscle because you climbed your

way out of the cave.

You hiked your way through the valley.

By the time you get to the summit,

you understand measurement,

you know,

the strategies,

you know,

the tools and everything's just so much easier.

And that's how we think about it.

You think about like a vehicle to get through though.

You walk through the cave,

right? You bicycle through the valley and use a helicopter to

get from summit to summit,

to summit,

right? That's what you would do in mountaintops.

Well, a lot of people do is they try to,

they look at the helicopter,

which is very complicated.

It is.

It's complicated.

It's tough to use.

If you don't know anything about transportation at all,

it is,

but you would never start to learn helicopter right away.

You start by learning how to walk.

Then you learn how to ride a bike.

Then eventually you move into the helicopter.

And if you build a helicopter,

when you're in a cave,

it's not a useful thing.

So it doesn't even matter.

So that's sort of,

the idea is get good enough to get going.

And then you come back and make it better later.

Give yourself permission to be where you are,

no matter what,

you just need to be a little bit better today than

you were yesterday.

That's it.

Now the framework itself,

it's pretty simple as three steps.

The first is planning.

And that's the one I think we focus on today because

that's where most people kind of go a little crazy.

So planning.

Then you do your build out where you're using the tools

to measure stuff.

So it might be Facebook ads,

manager. It might be Google analytics.

It might be your Shopify analytics.

It might be the Etsy analytics,

right? Whatever the thing is that you're using.

And that's the build.

So first you plan things out,

then you build things out and then you act upon the

stuff that you've built,

which is you look at the reports and then you kind

of do the things with the numbers.

So plan,

build an act are really the three steps.

Now in the planning stage,

that that particular step is one I want to focus on

because a lot of people,

this is the part they skip because they don't know how

to necessarily plan.

They think that it's just,

oh, asking a question,

but there's actually a couple of steps to that.

So the first is asking questions.

You got to know what questions are important to ask and

get answers to.

And the way to think about the questions as you think

about your results that you're trying to get.

And then you think immediately about how you're getting those results.

So in my case,

it might be,

oh, I'm trying to figure out how many academy memberships I've

sold. So that's the Results I'm trying to get.

So I need to measure for that.

Right? Well,

my average sales are how many units I sold that sort

of thing.

But then you also want to measure how I sold those,

or I would want to know that.

So I understand how my process works.

So I want to know how many people saw the card

and bought how many people actually started the offer page,

right? Or in the case of an e-commerce store,

maybe the product detail page of a certain candle and of

those, how many added to cart of those?

How many started the checkout process of those?

How many finished,

right. That sort of thing.

So it was just Results in how questions is all you

do in the beginning.

I remember,

and we were talking about this a little bit in our

pre-chat about a program that I took from you several years

ago. And I remember specifically you saying,

don't just go in there blind because you're going to get

overwhelmed. You're going to shut it down and never go back

again. Right.

See what a good student I am Here.

Exactly. Exactly.

So you were paying attention.

I was paying attention,

but how detailed of questions should you get?

I mean,

obviously they have to relate to our own business.

And maybe,

especially as we're just getting acquainted,

you take an example or two,

like you were just talking about,

but how many questions and how detailed should we be as

a beginner?

So this is where that rule comes in.

And this is how overwhelm happens is because you will start

to do it again.

And I did this.

There's no judgment on anybody that's gone through this process,

but this is how overwhelm happens is you will Google things

like what are the best questions for an Etsy store owner

to ask around numbers?

And you will get a million blog posts and a thousand

YouTube videos all saying the seven key questions that you should

ask, then you end up with hundreds of questions.

And now you're overwhelmed because you're like,

I have no idea what that stuff means or what I

would do it anyway.

So when it comes to the questions,

you trigger that rule in place,

which is good enough to get going and you use the

Results and how method.

So I get my Results questions,

and I get they,

how I'm getting the results.

And you do it to the best of your current ability.

And how do you know that when you're kind of like,

yeah, that sounds good.

If I know those that would be useful,

done, stop there.

Does that mean I'm going to ask the same questions?

No, because my skills are different.

So I'm going to come in at a higher level because

I have more muscle built.

Cause I understand measurement,

but if you're just starting out,

just get the Results questions like,

so if it's leads or appointments,

you're setting or a number of people in the store,

whether it's brick and mortar or digital or whatever,

number of sales,

like whatever the Results are,

you're trying to achieve for your business model.

And then a couple of the house steps of how you're

achieving those.

So you understand kind of the journey that happened in order

to produce those results.

And then that's it,

you stop there.

Once you have those,

then you do your information.

And this whole,

these parts that I'm about to talk about,

they kind of work together to improve each other.

So you have the questions,

you sort of start with your results and how just the

basics just good enough to get going.

And remember,

that's all it is.

You don't need to list 15 questions for three to five

is fine.

No big deal.

It's three to five questions to get started,

especially when you're getting started,

then it's information.

And you can think about this like three columns.

So first column is all the questions you're trying to answer,

right? Three to five,

just to get started because you're practicing,

right? This is the whole idea of when you're in the

cave is to practice asking questions.

So three to five questions,

then you do the information.

The information is the second column.

And what you're asking here is what information will I need

to collect in order to get these answers?

So your cart system might have the number of sales and

the average units and all of that stuff.

But Google analytics might be the platform to know how many

people saw the cart,

right? For example.

So you think about what's the information,

the behaviors that are happening on the site that I need

to actually collect so I can get answers to these questions.

And then this is the third and final part.

And this is how,

you know,

if you've asked a question that's useful because a lot of

people will ask a million questions,

but they're not necessarily useful for them.

And the way you can tell that is so he's got

three columns.

We have what we call this Kia process.

There's questions.

There's the information that you need in order to get the

answers to the questions.

And then this is the most important part.

What actions will I take based upon the answers I get.

Now, this is before you open up analytics it's,

before you look at your card system,

you're literally just doing this on a piece of paper,

if you want,

or a whiteboard,

you list that out.

And so you think to yourself,

okay, what actions would I take?

So my goal is 10 sales this week.

If I get less than 10 sales,

I'm going to go to back to that Facebook campaign.

And I'm going to see if I can play around with

the targeting because it's not bringing me enough people.

If I get more than 10 sales,

I'm going to go look to scale that campaign on Pinterest,

because we know that campaign is doing really well,

something along those lines,

but you're kind of,

role-playing it in your head as you go through now,

sometimes when you think about the actions you're going to take,

which this case I technically just did,

you will find that you need to refine your questions a

little bit.

So what I did in my actions as I referenced to

Facebook campaign or a Pinterest campaign,

but I didn't ask questions about Facebook or Pinterest,

right? As ask questions about the Results number of units.

Well, now I realize what I'm really asking is,

is my Facebook campaign generating at least 10 sales a week

is my Pinterest campaign.

At least generating 10 sales a week.

So now I have improved the question I'm trying to get

answers to.

Then I think to myself,

well, what information would I need in order to get the

answers? Well,

I gotta measure that in my cart system.

I gotta make sure that my cart knows they came from

Pinterest. And if I can't do that,

maybe Google analytics can tell me that,

which it could.

And then of course,

what actions will I take?

And then once I get that done,

now I've got my measurement plan in place.

At that point,

I then go into Google analytics or another tool to,

to do any sort of measurement.

And that's where I look to those answers.

And if those answers are not there,

in other words,

if I'm not collecting the information already,

I set it up so that it is collecting the information

so I can get answers to those.

Does that make sense?

Kind of how those two pieces work together.

It completely makes sense in terms of the strategy,

figuring out what you need,

which is the questions then what is the information I need?

What is the number?

So like the data behind the answers to the questions,

if you will,

and then based on the data,

which way you're going to go,

if you're seeing good results,

if you're not seeing good results.

So like creating the story before you open the book,

kind of Right,

that's a hundred percent,

right? What should this book be about?

What should my measurement tell me what is the conversation that

I think I'm having with my users?

And then we are going to plan all that out.

And if the conversation is good,

then I'm gonna do this,

that the conversation's not so good.

I'm going to do this.

Then you do your build.

And then of course that's where you're looking in the actual

reports or set it up so that it is able to

answer your questions.

And then when you get to the act stage was,

is that,

that third step,

remember plan build an act and the act stage you're looking

at your reports,

you're looking at it,

maybe the source media report in Google analytics,

or maybe it's a,

you know,

at the analytics report or something like that,

or your Facebook's ads manager.

And you're getting the answers to those questions.

And you're saying,

okay, well,

now that I know what my benchmarks are,

and I know I average about 10 sales a week.

Now you can start to forecast and do some really cool

things. So instead of just saying,

Hey, what happened last week?

All that money I spent on Facebook and you start saying

things like,

well, here's what should happen next week to the 500 bucks

I'm going to put on Facebook and then you start forecasting

Results. So of the 500 bucks,

I should have at least a say 400 people come to

the page.

And 25% of those should take my coupon code and opt

in for my coupon.

And then use that within seven days to purchase.

Now you have your forecast or what we call marketing forward.

Now you can start to optimize because what'll happen is your

measure against what you thought was going to happen.

And so very quickly you'll know like,

Hey, I spent 500 bucks on Facebook.

I thought I was going to get 400 people.

I only got a hundred people.

So something's probably often a targeting somewhere or something's because they're

not clicking.

They're not clicking on the ad,

even come over to the site at all.

So, you know,

it's probably on the Facebook ad,

but let's say you are getting those 400 people,

but then none of them are opting in or taking advantage

of your coupon.

Well, maybe it's an offer problem,

right? Maybe the coupon needs to be improved or the offer

needs to be improved.

Maybe it's the expectation.

The ad generated.

Sometimes the ad might say something like,

Hey, we've got sweaters on sale.

And then you send them into a page.

That's got shoes on it and there's a disconnect,

right? And so that's the sort of stuff where very quickly

you start to see,

oh, here's where the conversation's going,

the wrong direction.

It's this part of my customer journey that isn't matching what

they expect to happen.

So it's this part that as a marketer,

I'm going to go in there and improve and make and

change and make my best guests to make sure the conversation

goes in the direction that we want it to go in.

Right. I mean,

because guess what we do when we're,

don't have all of this put together,

what, we're all probably doing the majority of us right now,

which is if a campaign doesn't work,

you guess,

as to why it didn't work.

It's exactly right.

And then you might take a totally wrong approach,

spend more money,

take more time because you really don't have an any real

solid data behind decisions.

It's all guesswork of why things are or aren't working and

you could be way off.

That's exactly right.

And it's literally,

like you saying,

like the market's saying,

Hey, by the way,

I can tell you how to fix this.

And you're like,

putting your hand up going,

no, no,

no. I'll figure it out.

That's what we're doing.

Or we don't remember properly.

Right. I'll give you an example,

goes back to what you talked about before,

about the tendency that people might be a little afraid of

being scammed,

right? Where somebody buys a product and they ever get the

products. Let's pretend for a second.

That was the hypothesis I had where I'm like,

well, I think the offer's not working because they're just a

little concerned and they feel it's too risky to purchase.

So what would somebody who has that sort of behavior,

if we can role play this real quick,

if they have that sort of behavior,

what would somebody who's risk averse?

And they want to make sure that they're not going to

get scammed.

What would they look for on the page?

What do you think you would look for?

What would I look For?

Like I say,

offer page and you're kind of like,

oh, I don't want to get scammed.

I wanna make sure this is a real thing.

Like what sort of things would you look for that might

elicit trust?

Quite honestly,

first, I'm going to look at the about us page to

see who this person is.

And if I think they're really an artist,

like there's enough built out on the page,

but then I'm going to look at probably reviews of,

of course the products,

pricing, Testimonials they might have Testimonials.

And that the checkout process is smooth.

There's no hiccups.

I'm not going off to some type of funny pages that

don't make sense to me.

Right. Which a lot of you exactly right?

Those types of things.

But first me personally,

I would do a credibility play with what's on the site.

And this is the best part about this process,

because you can say,

okay, well here's what we think is happening.

People in our marketplace that they really are risk averse and

they want to make sure that they're making a good decision.

So they're going to put a little more research upfront.

So what we're going to do as part of our customer

journey, as they visit the about page,

we are assuming they're doing that well,

how would we know if they're doing that or not?

That's where Google analytics comes in,

because we can go to Google analytics and say,

how many people saw the about page and how many of

those people went to our offer page after that?

And now Google analytics can tell you,

oh, here's,

everybody's going to the about page and then going to the

offer page.

And you can say,

wow, that's a lot,

I guess we're right.

There are people who are risk averse,

but if no,

one's seeing the about page,

then maybe they're not investigating that way.

And then we would know that.

So now we don't put a bunch of work into our,

about page making the assumption.

That is what everyone's seeing when in reality,

nobody is right.

And that's the beauty of analytics is because you go there

to your point earlier about asking specific questions of Google analytics.

You go there with a specific purpose in mind.

Like I believe people are looking at our about page because

they're trying to research us.

Therefore, most of the people that are on our offers should

have already seen our about page because that would have been,

if I'm right,

that would have been a natural part of their process.

So then I can go to Google analytics and say that

are people who are purchasing or looking at the offer,

maybe not in purchasing,

but looking at the offer,

did they go to the about page?

And Google will say yes or no,

which is the beauty of it because there's not like,

well, it depends.

It's no they did.

Or they didn't,

the market is doing this.

And the market's not doing that.

Not the market's not doing that.

You go,

okay, well maybe it's not the about page,

but I bet you they're looking at the testimonials and the

reviews that we have on our pages.

In that case,

you could set up your measurement system to literally this is

kind of a little bit more advanced,

but it's cool because it goes into the world of what's

possible. You can literally say when the review comes in,

when that review section shows,

like when they scroll down to where the reviews are and

they stare at it for at least the say seven seconds,

when now,

you know,

they're probably really looking at reviews,

they're investigating reviews versus just scroll past it.

So you can measure for very specific behaviors that would essentially

to you sort of communicate the intention of the person right

there, side of the conversation.

Because if they are looking at your reviews for 10 or

15 seconds,

they're probably looking at them.

They're probably really investigating them.

If you have videos,

you could tell if somebody interacted with the video and watched

a specific testimonial,

you can see how far they made it through the video.

So it's that sort of stuff where you can confirm instead

of to your point earlier about guessing,

instead of guessing,

well, maybe it's the headline or maybe it's the design,

or maybe it's I got to switch to some new platform

of the day.

What are the platform is it's none of that,

the market will tell you and say things like,

Hey, we really were concerned because we weren't sure if this

is going to be a real product,

not if people really liked it,

the about page,

didn't do it for us.

It wasn't our thing.

But mostly what we care about is really good quality reviews.

And if we look at reviews,

we're more likely to then go to the cart and you

go, aha,

cool. Now I got to make the page so that there

are more reviews.

Maybe there's an above the fold review because we know how

important that is that above the fold space.

And now you're making design changes to your marketing page,

right? As based on what your customers are telling you that

they want.

And that's based on the measurement because you're listening to them.

If that makes sense,

It makes total sense.

So what about people who have like a lead page or

something that goes into many of the people who are listening

here also do courses,

your training courses,

that type of thing that might come in through a lead

page is that also something that you can monitor?

Isn't it exciting how much understanding behind the scenes can lead

to better results in the future?

We'll learn more about that in just a minute,

but first we're going to take a peek at it.

A little bit of the behind the scenes from our sponsor.

Hi, I'm Nancy.

I get to work with all the beautiful colors of ribbon.

As I pick impact customer orders for the ribbon print company,

our ribbon printing systems include the software printer and everything.

You need to start printing ribbon right away in your shop

or craft studio.

And when you need new colors or sizes of ribbon or

ink, we call them foils where just in order away.

My favorite thing is when I'm filling an order and everything

fits in the box perfectly,

really. I don't know why,

but it's so rewarding.

Kind of like how our customers feel when they print personalized

ribbons and see the reaction on the faces of their customers,

pure happiness and surprise.

Besides the more obvious uses for customer driven,

I'm seeing it used for sashes party,

decor and bookmarks.

There really is no limit to its application in our small

town. The main street is lined with ribbon.

The city requested saying stand strong.

And we're in this together.

Our high school also used ribbon to motivate the students.

When we had Jason Brown competing in the Olympics,

it's a joy to be surrounded by something that can provide

motivation, enjoyed others,

to learn more and see the ribbon printer in action,

go over to the ribbon print company.com.

It is,

there are some times you are limited by your tech.

Not every platform that's out there is easily measured.

Lead pages is pretty easy to measure.

So you can tell things like that.

As long as you can get code on pages.

And if remember,

it's always,

it's kind of like the level I was thinking about that

the glasses prescription we talked about earlier.

So there's the difference between not knowing anything in other words,

not wearing glasses at all and bumping into walls or it's

do I have an older prescription?

That's maybe not the greatest,

but at least I'm not bumping into walls anymore.

Right? And then you do that long enough until maybe eventually

you say,

okay, our company is big enough.

Now we don't need to use lead pages.

We'll build our own platform,

abuse, WordPress,

it's a laser measure.

We can now answer this,

this and this,

right? But you do that more advanced stuff.

As you grow out of the level you're in,

I would never try to do level seven just because,

you know,

level seven exists.

You just don't do that.

You gotta work your way up through the levels because every

level that you go through,

every time you go through that framework of plan,

build and act,

every time you do that,

you build muscle and you get better at planning.

The next time you plan,

you get better building.

The next time you build,

you get better at acting on the stuff.

The next time you take action on it,

and then you go through it again and you come back

and you build a plan and you're gonna ask bigger questions

now, because now you already have answers to the basic questions.

Now you're asking bigger questions.

That's how this process works.

Okay. Let me take another example and tell us what we

could do with this.

I'm a candle maker.

I've added three new sense to my line just in time

for the holidays.

I've put them on my home page because there are new

products. So I want them front and center where people can

see them.

They of course linked to the product page where people could

check out.

I also have decided to run Facebook ads to that section

of my website,

right? And now I've run it a couple of weeks.

I'm wondering if the Facebook ad is working because I've also

been at craft shows and I've directed people just to come

to the website and I've done some Pinterest posts,

no ads on Pinterest,

just some posts story behind how I created these products.

Why decided that I was going to make do these cents,

et cetera.

Now I'm trying to decide what I should double down on

of all these things that I've done,

Whether it's Facebook or Pinterest,

or just doing kind of the face to face Or not

do either of those and just really hammer it home face

to face.

Yep. So in your Google analytics,

this is kind of the good part about Google analytics.

Remember there's always levels and versions to all,

but we'll start with the basics.

Google analytics by default will tell you if somebody came from

Facebook, it'll say something like if there's a report called the

source medium report,

anybody who would you go to analytics?

You can just start typing in source medium in the search

box. It'll pull it up,

but it'll tell you what are the different traffic sources.

In other words,

who's sending you traffic.

It'll tell you how much of that traffic they're sending you.

It'll give you some engagement signals about how engaged that traffic

is. And then it'll tell you the results of the traffic,

whether you're measuring for sales or leads or whatever the thing

is. So in this case,

Google analytics,

if you have that already set up on your store,

then it already knows they came from Facebook and it would

already tell you how many you've sold.

Assuming that your analytics is set up to do that.

Pinterest, same thing.

It'll tell you Pinterest,

and then sold the one thing it will not tell you

is the face to face.

And that's probably because it's what they would call direct traffic,

which means you just gave me a card or the website

address. And I typed it in and I came directly to

the page without coming in through another ad or anything else.

So to Google analytics,

it doesn't know that I was at a face-to-face fair because

obviously it can't manage that at the farmer's market.

Doesn't know that I'm there,

but it just knows that I showed up one day.

So it would be direct none.

Now that in of itself can at least answer.

This is out of the box.

You don't do anything to analytics for that to tell you

this part,

right? It'll tell you how many came from Facebook and making

Pinterest or how many people came in direct.

And that's the three main ways you can do that.

The next level up,

this is one of those things like the cave style setup

is where you sort of light up analytics and get used

to the reports and what they look like.

Then you level it up.

When you get into that valley visibility,

we talked about and it's something called UTMs.

So anybody can Google these UTMs,

but there are these little parameters that you add onto the

end of a URL.

So instead of going to like my site.com

and to go to my site.com

and then you'll see these things to say,

question mark UTM,

underscore source equals blah,

blah, blah.

And it sort of identifies what they call them UTMs.

Cause they always start with UTM,

but they identify the source of the traffic.

So they identify which brand is sending you the traffic.

They identify what type of traffic is coming from that brand.

And they identify the purpose.

Like why are they even coming over there in the first

place? So you could see it was Facebook paid traffic.

If you're using UTMs,

you'll see Facebook paid traffic,

you will see Pinterest paid traffic or in your case,

social traffic,

right. It's just plain social.

So Pinterest social,

the stuff that you're not boosting or paying for,

and you would also see your face-to-face traffic.

It might even say something like farmer's market because you can

set up a redirect,

but you redirect them to a UTM.

In fact,

at the end of this,

we'll use a redirect to measure how well this podcast is

doing. And if it's sending us traffic,

we'll know very specifically,

even though there is no computer and you're not having to

click on a link,

you can type the link directly in and it'll automatically tell

us if this podcast is generating traffic,

same way with a farmer's market or a live event that

your marketing app.

And so that's kind of the next level up.

And what I would do is I would go through that

planning stage first.

So you're thinking about,

okay, and this is kind of another way to think about

the planning process is how is this supposed to work?

So of the money you spend on Facebook,

how many people was Facebook supposed to send to your site?

How many of those were supposed to buy?

Same thing for Pinterest.

How many eyeballs were you supposed to get from Pinterest over

to your site?

How many we're supposed to buy and then the farmer's market.

How many am I supposed to meet?

How many are supposed to show up,

how many we're supposed to buy and you sort of pencil

those out and then you measure against what you thought was

going to happen.

So that's when you would set this up,

you look in your analytics and it will very clearly tell

you, Hey,

Facebook, they're not even clicking on the ads.

So if that's the case where you spend a hundred bucks

on Facebook,

but nobody's coming over to the site,

then you know,

it's something with your ad.

It doesn't mean Facebook necessarily doesn't work.

But that particular ad definitely isn't.

So you should probably work on the messaging and the targeting

there. Pinterest,

let's say,

as an example shows,

there's a bunch of people coming to your site,

but none of them are buying in that case.

It's something we call the expectation engine,

but you want to match the expectation.

So you think about what's that Pinterest posts that they're clicking

on and that particular post is it setting them up for

the expectation to investigate buying holiday candles.

Right? And if it's not,

if it just says,

oh, you know,

here's some candles,

but then you come over and it's like,

oh, here's holiday candles.

Maybe that's the disconnect.

And you should send them to a more generic candles page

and then put the holiday candles a little bit lowered to

highlight that feature.

And then there's the direct clients,

right? The ones that otherwise show up as direct nun,

if you can use UTMs to measure them,

ideally, but you can say,

oh my farmer's market traffic.

It won't be a lot of traffic.

But what I would expect is that traffic converts.

And so you should see,

you know,

a good 20 to 30% of those may be purchasing.

And if they're not doing that behavior or you're not even

seeing them show up,

then it's like you talking to a hundred people at the

farmer's market,

then none of them actually show up on the site.

Well, and you're like,

okay, I'll,

you know,

I'll still talk to them,

but I'm not going to count on it as a traffic

source because that's not how it works.

That's where analytics can kind of light up and say,

and you're always asking the question about analytics.

Here's what should be happening?

Is it happening?

And that's different than jumping to analytics to find out what's

happening. And I know it sounds,

it's a subtle,

subtle difference,

but it's monumentally different in your head.

One, if you say,

Hey, what's happening,

analytics analytics gives you the world and it overwhelms you with

all this stuff.

And now you leave confused and frustrated because you're never sure

what anything means anymore because it's giving you too much information.

But if you say no,

no, no,

I don't need to know everything.

I just want to know is my Facebook traffic sending me

at least a hundred people last week and did those hundred

people, did I at least get three sales analytics can be,

and then we'll say yes or no.

And then,

you know,

okay, here's what I need to adjust because I didn't match

expectations or it didn't.

And that's where you go through that key process.

Think about the actions you're gonna take.

And then at that point you would take those actions to

improve the,

Yeah. I mean,

I see so much application to this too,

because if you get a lot of people,

regardless of where their sources and they're jumping over to your

product pages,

but then nobody's buying,

is it your photos?

Well, first off,

is it the right product?

You know,

are they coming and seeing something they weren't expecting to see,

that would be first,

but are your photos really grainy?

You know?

So that is the quality of your product too.

I mean,

it relates unconsciously.

If you have bad photos,

do you not even have a description?

It just says vanilla candle price.

Well, what's enticing to me about that.

You know?

So you have to build all those things out.

Like if people are coming over,

you're getting the audience.

You're not convincing them that they should buy.

So that's a very different thing than if people aren't coming

over at all.

Then the other thing I'm thinking Chris,

and do a strategy check with me on this.

You're doing a farmer's market this week,

two weeks from now,

I'm doing a craft show another week from now,

I'm doing a different show.

So let's say that first one,

the farmer's market got a ton of sales at this farmer's

market. So face-to-face selling was awesome.

I didn't have very many people coming over to the,

did you just go,

yay. But you didn't see many people.

You didn't see your organic traffic what's call it like the

average, because you already have your average of how many people

are coming on a regular base And you didn't see like

a spike coming into your right.

You didn't see a spike,

right? So you know that for farmer's markets,

I'm going to pretend like they're all the same.

Okay. But that's where you're going to sell product.

So then you want to look at it pretty quickly,

right? After that time to vent,

then you go and you see what happens.

You see where your Results you do.

Exactly. Chris,

what you said,

like you've got your question.

Did the farmer's market bring any additional online traffic and additional

sales based on the behaviors you see,

then you form your actions and some of the actions might

be okay,

I get it.

Farmer's market great.

In-person doesn't really convert for me,

which could be very different from the neighboring booth at the

farmer's market.

You know,

this is very individual,

At least they're not engaging with the conversation as it now

stands. Right.

That's exactly right.

Right. Exactly.

So you'd want to look at those numbers in close enough

time to the event for the example I'm describing now.

So then in two weeks from now,

I go to a craft show.

I don't sell as many at the craft show,

but I come back and my traffic and sales skyrocket,

and it still looks like it's organic because to your point,

the face-to-face and I'm giving them the website from my cards

or a brochure or something.

But because of the timing of that event,

I can pretty much say that there's been a huge boost.

And I just did that craft show.

So my thinking with all of this talk is that you

can understand what you're doing overall in a lot of your

business and how the sales are coming in and understand farmer's

markets face to face.

Yes, they'll have exposure to your site,

but they like to buy from you in person.

They want to see your products because that's the audience that

goes there.

That's the idea of a farmer's market,

right? You want to know the person you're buying from Craft

shows may buy from you there,

but a lot of people might decide they want more later

after they've been there.

Want to think about it,

follow up and purchase it online,

Coming for inspiration and ideas maybe.

Yeah. So then you would no longer be saying this craft

show didn't work for me.

Like I just covered my cost of the booth,

but then really that's not true because you really generate all

these other sales later by being at the craft show,

then it just gives you so much more perspective on what's

really happening with your business.

It's exactly right.

Especially if that's a repeatable trend,

the truth is in the trend,

the power's in the pattern when it comes to all of

this stuff.

So if you saw like every craft show or,

or most craft shows,

there was always a little bump in the traffic after the

craft show for the next week or so,

you're like,

Hmm. Now I can start to forecast how a craft show

should work.

I'm going to show up,

I'm going to make a little bit,

I'll pay the costs of the booth.

But then a week later with the next week,

I'm going to make an extra percentage of sales based on

who I'm talking to at that,

because that's how craft shows work.

You could also then compare craft show against craft show too,

to see which ones are the right ones for you.

Exactly. Right.

Exactly. Right.

And to your point about the farmer's markets,

I think it goes back to this thing,

we call the expectation engine,

right? Which is always,

you have to match every step that we take anywhere in

life, but specifically digital marketing.

When you go to click on a Facebook ad or whatever

the ad is,

or the email you're about to open it,

you click on the link or you're about to click on

the link.

There is an expectation of what you think is about to

happen. That's the only reason you are about to take the

action you're about to take is because you've already forethought.

What that expectation is.

So when you click on that link and then the expectation

is matched,

you stick around and now that place,

that draft,

maybe it's the offer page or something like that.

It has a chance to sort of,

obviously it matches the expectation and then it creates a new

expectation for the next step,

right? So it gives him an offer page.

It might be building the value of the candles so that

I can mention to get you to the cart page.

The cart page is the expectation.

I'm going to give you a payment information.

And the cart page is going to look like it's got

some authority to it,

and it's going to take your credit card and make it

a smooth process and eventually get to a thank you page,

et cetera,

et cetera.

So in the farmer's market example,

you might be doing the exact same communication and both the

craft fair.

And this is kind of a fascinating example because it's offline,

which I love.

So it's to get the craft fair model,

you've got the farmer's market model,

you're doing the same thing to both markets.

But to your point,

the mindset is very different of a farmer's market person,

because they're all about the relationship and the craft beer person.

Cause maybe they're all a little bit more about research and

inspiration. And they're naturally going to go to the site more

often. So the farmer's market one,

you can go,

well, I'm going to sell out in the farmer's market and

I'm not going to get a lot of organic,

at least doing it the way I'm currently doing it because

they're not likely to do that.

However, what if I gave all of those people who bought

a little thing that said,

Hey, go to the site and leave me a review.

And if you can do that within three days,

I'll give you like this little mini candle bonus or something,

right? Some reason to leave,

or now you're giving your buyers a reason to go to

this site so they can sign ups and get them on

a list or whatever.

And they're leaving reviews,

which is now going to help for the craft fair.

People were coming over to investigate.

And now you're leveraging the same activity of farmer's market.

So even though you may be getting sales from them directly,

you are getting other things from them,

encouraging that way.

And that's the beauty of measurement because it could have been

that farmer's markets worked just like craft markets or craft fairs

do, in which case you're like,

cool. I like doing both,

but if it's not,

you go,

what else can I do?

How can I adjust the conversation that I'm having to get

them to do something different and something that's going to be

a little more useful for the brand that you're managing.

Yeah. And I love this example because you're using one to

boost another two,

Leveraging These aren't just separate entities.

You can build them on top of each other to strengthen

the whole.

Yeah. And again,

it's all of a sudden you start realizing,

wow, my marketing is it's pretty good.

Marketing gets a pretty good plan.

And you can pull drone at a mastermind group when you're

talking with your friends.

Right. And they're saying,

well, what are you guys doing?

Here's how we do it.

We go to farmer's markets and we do this.

And that ties into this and that knocks down this domino.

And that's what causes this to happen.

And you can measure for all of it.

You'll know if it's working or not.

That's the beauty,

because if they don't come to that specific page,

you set up for them to do testimonials.

You will see it.

Analytics will say,

yeah, nobody showed up this week and you'll see it.

And you're like,

okay, well that,

wasn't it.

Let me try something else.

Right. But that's the beauty is you don't have to guess.

You don't have to hope.

You don't have to randomly know with the called random acts

of marketing.

You don't have to try that.

You just know like,

oh, it's this one part I have to figure out.

And you can focus all your energy and resources on the

part that is most likely going to move the needle.

It's like a puzzle instead of guessing all the time.

Right? It's a lot more fun to figure out how to

put a puzzle together than it is randomly guests,

your way to success too.

Especially when it's a picture that I really like When it's

a picture that you've created.

Exactly. Right.

Yeah. So,

all right.

So all of this happens in Google analytics and if you

don't have Google analytics already connected to your website,

everyone just go and start doing that because it starts gathering

data. Whether you're looking at it or not.

Right, Chris,

Absolutely. It'll start.

As soon as you activate it,

it will start collecting some information.

Now it won't be perfect.

Again, this is like the blurry version of the glasses,

right? The prescription.

But it will be better than not knowing anything At all.

You got the glasses on.

Exactly. You got the glasses on and then eventually you can

get used to it.

Then you start learning how to actually set it up,

how to educate it and train it.

So that knows how to tell your story.

And then it gets better and better.

And I'll give you an example again,

for the people who are like,

I, I'm just not a numbers person.

You don't understand.

I'm not a data person.

So if I gave you,

if I gave you Sue a children's book,

and I said,

read this Charles' book to me,

it was like Goldilocks three bears.

Chances are,

you could read that pretty easily.

Now you hand me back the book,

I rip out the pages and I rip those pages into

pieces. And then I put them on between the covers of

the book.

And I hand you back the book and I say,

read me the story.

Now, could you read the story?

The answer is,

yes, you could,

because I did not change our ability to read.

You're still a good reader.

It's just that I made it a lot harder because everything's

kind of split up in different puzzle pieces.

And you got to figure out all the different pages and

paste them together.

And this is going to take you a lot longer,

but you can definitely read that story.

It's going to take forever and probably get frustrated.

Google analytics,

when it's first turned on is kind of like a bunch

of ripped up pages.

It's got a bunch of data.

It's got a bunch of stuff coming in from left,

right. And sideways.

And it's not really trained yet.

You haven't pasted it together.

You haven't taught it to tell you a story.

And so when you first started,

and this is for the people who have like,

no, I've tried analytics before,

but you probably just turned it on when you meaning you

activated it,

it got a bunch of data.

And then you try to use that data to make decisions.

It's not quite ready right away to do that.

You want to learn how to use the reports.

If you're starting out,

learn the source medium report.

If you just learn that one report,

it will solve 80% of your questions that you have.

So does something called the source media report,

get good at that one and then figure out how do

I make this report even better?

And that's where you'll learn stuff like,

oh, UTMs.

I can identify my traffic sources a little better.

I can do some cool things with that.

Oh, I'm going to set some goals in Google analytics.

So I can identify which traffic sources are good at making

people aware of my candles,

which traffic sources are good at actually selling candles because they

may be different.

And then you start to really level things up and you

get more into it.

And the tool again,

naturally tells you a story.

It can be very much like reading a kid's book,

but you got to put the pages together first.

And that's the trick that most people just don't realize they

used to do.

Yup. That's a perfect example because I think we've got a

lot of people here who have the cover of the book

with all the little pieces inside.

And they think to themselves,

I'm not a good reader,

which is sad because they are,

they just haven't put the pieces together.

That's all it is for sure.

What is Google tag manager?

Great question.

So tag manager is definitely for that level up when somebody

is kind of used analytics and they've got analytics set up,

but by default,

if we think about measurement in general measurements,

really doing three things,

first, you sort of collect the information that you need to

get to get the answers you were asking,

right? So you have to collect that you need a tool

that collects it.

You need a tool that then stores that somewhere and you

need a tool that builds reports.

So you can actually see it.

Google analytics does all three by default,

it collects basic information.

It collects,

it stores that information in its database,

and then it has reports.

And that's really where as users,

that's where we use it.

We're interacting with the report side of things.

So that's what it does all three,

but it collects basic behaviors.

It doesn't collect very specific behaviors.

And here's an example.

It will collect when they see a page,

let's say like your about page,

but it cannot really tell us without some advanced developers coming

in. It can't really tell us,

did they scroll down to the about page and look at

the testimonials where people were leaving reviews about how good we

were for at least.

Did they look at that section for 13 seconds?

It cannot tell you that.

But tag manager can.

So tag manager is a platform that Google created that said,

listen, we know Google analytics is kind of limited.

It's good for basic stuff for sure.

But there's a lot of people who want to know about

more advanced behaviors,

not just did they load the page,

but did they scroll down to a certain point of time?

Did they stick around on that page for a certain number

of seconds?

Did they look at a particular page or interact with a

particular widget on that page?

Like a video,

or did they listen to the podcast?

Like the player,

audio player,

that sort of stuff.

Did they interact with our pictures on our Shopify store?

Right? You can measure for that sort of thing.

And they needed a platform that could do that easily so

that marketers could use it.

Not just that you had to get a developer to do

it. That was tag manager.

So tag manager is created as a tool that is built

to collect information.

And it's really good at that sort of stuff.

Like, Hey,

I want to know how many people saw my candle pictures

and at least clicked on three different pictures.

Tag manager can tell you that.

And then you tell tag manager when you have that information,

send it to Google analytics and then Google analytics stores,

but that information in its database.

And so that's how these two platforms work together.

So tag managers,

when you level up and you want to get better at

collecting more specific behaviors that are happening on your site,

way beyond page views,

if you just need page use analytics is fine.

If you're just starting out,

you only need pages.

I promise get used to that level first.

Then eventually you ask bigger questions where you require more specific

behaviors to be collected.

At that point,

you've now grown out of your current implementation and you move

into something like tag manager adding into the stack.

And so you add in tag manager to collect behaviors,

you then have Google analytics storing those behaviors in its database.

And then let's,

I'm going to ask them this,

but I'm going to volunteer it.

There is another platform that's called data studio that you may

have heard about data studio is on the opposite end.

It doesn't collect anything and it doesn't store anything,

but it is really good at reports.

And it's very good at visual reports.

So like in our case,

I don't have data tables that I look at it I'm

comfortable with numbers,

but I do not want to stare at a spreadsheet all

day long.

So I like kind of like,

it looks like a flow chart.

Whereas here's people that saw step one,

here's the people that saw the card.

Here's the people that bought.

And I can see a flow chart of all that happening.

That's because of data studio.

So tag manager collects all the behaviors that we want to

collect on the site so we can see how the conversation

is that the users are having,

it sends all that information to Google analytics,

which stores it because Google analytics is absolutely amazing at storing.

It sits there to store behaviors and then data studio hooks

into Google analytics and builds my dashboard.

And then that's what I see as the end-user I come

in and I look at the dashboards and that tells me

what's working and what's not.

And if the thing is working,

the conversation is going the way that I expect that it

should be going.

So that's how those three platforms work together.

Tag manager,

analytics and data studio all completely free.

Thank you Google.

But remember if you're not doing any of them,

just start with analytics because you build your muscles there and

then you grow into the other two.

Yeah. Don't get overwhelmed.

Start small,

or get comfortable with a certain level.

And then you can add on top.

Good enough to get Going.

Yeah. And none of this helps us at all.

Even if it's free,

if we're not looking at it or using it a hundred

percent, right?

Yep. Yeah,

for sure.

Okay. So as we're winding down here,

what are a couple of common mistakes you'll see people make,

so I want to intercept those for people who are gonna,

they've gotten interested here and they're jumping off and are ready

to do something.

What are some things you would caution people about?

I would caution people for sure.

Doing too much too soon.

That's what most people try to do because they see what's

possible. And they start going like,

oh, well,

you know,

I heard this guy talking on a podcast and Mercer was

saying that,