This is a transcript for episode 3 of the OMGrowth podcast, published on November 26, 2020
The ABCs of tracking your data is one of my very favorite subjects to talk about because it really takes the overwhelm and scariness out of data, and makes your analytics seem WAAAYY more approachable.
Now, some people may say this an over-simplified view of looking at your data and to that I say, GREAT because that’s what I want for you.
I want for it to be easy for you to think about what campaigns you’re running – which ways you’re promoting yourself – and like SNAP! know what numbers matters and ignore the ones that aren’t where you’re investing your efforts right now.
Once you have that, you’re able to kick your marketing efforts into high optimization mode. And what-the-hey is wrong with over-simplifying that for you, right?
A IS FOR ATTRACTION/AWARENESS
Welcome to the very beginning of what people call your client journey. This is when people first get introduced to your brand, your services, your offers, your podcast, your social media presence. It represents the time when new audiences are discovering you.
You want to know how you’re attracting new users because awareness of who you are what you do is the way you’ll continuously build your brand.
So how do we find that out? You’ll look at how NEW USERS are interacting with your site.
- What content and pages do new users looking at?
- Which platforms do new users come to your site from?
- What search terms are new users typing in to land onto your site?
By honing in on one specific data set like NEW USERS, you can ignore everything else – because there’s a lot of data to look at, right? – but it’s less overwhelming to be like, “I’m only looking at how my new users are performing.”
—> Maybe you’re collaborating with people to get in front of new audiences.
—> Maybe you’ve been strategic about being helpful in Facebook Groups or engaging on Instagram.
—> Perhaps you’re running ads or investing more resources into Pinterest or guesting on podcasts.
ALL OF THE ABOVE ARE MARKETING STRATEGIES WE ALL USE – why? – TO BUILD BRAND AWARENESS AND ATTRACT NEW USERS TO OUR BRANDS.
And the marketing metrics you’re working towards building your brand awareness: NEW USERS.
(I told you this would be simple!)
B is for BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS
Because once someone is aware of you, they either leave or – more hopefully! – they’re interested in picking up what you’re throwing down.
In this phase, people are engaging with your content, they visit your social media, they come back to your website.
Even better, they sign up to your email list because that’s the ultimate committed relationship status you’re looking to create.
So what metric are we looking at to see how people are subscribing or opt-ing into our email lists?
This is where I recommend you create what’s called a GOAL in Google Analytics because how and where this value shows up will be unique for everyone. I’ll get into how you set that up later, but let’s stick to the data you’re looking at right now: how are NEW SUBSCRIBERS interacting with your site.
- What content and pages do people look at before they sign up to your email list?
- Which platforms are generating the most leads for you?
- What search terms are attracting fresh leads to your site?
When you start investing in things like ads or the time you’re putting into collaborations, focusing on which strategies are generating the most NEW LEADS/SUBSCRIBERS – and which ones aren’t a very high return-on-investment for you – makes it very easy to identify which promotional efforts are worth it for you to say “yes” to.
THIS IS THE MARKETING PHASE WHERE YOU’RE BUILDING THOSE RELATIONSHIPS AND ENFORCING THE “KNOW, LIKE AND TRUST” FACTOR THAT TURNS FOLLOWERS INTO FANS.
C is for CONVERTING SALES
My friend Andrea Jones from the Savvy Social School uses the dating analogue a lot when it comes to making sales online: just as a wedding proposal on a first date probably won’t go over very well, neither will pitching the sale to someone you just met on social media. Like any relationship, the one you build with your audience is a process.
That’s why the As and Bs are so crucial to getting you to this phase of your marketing where you’re making sales and generating revenue.
For this, you will want to make sure your Ecommerce Settings are enabled in Google Analytics – and I’ll leave a link in the notes if you want me to walk you through how to do that – but what you’ll be looking at are UNIQUE PURCHASES and PRODUCT REVENUE.
UNIQUE PURCHASES will tell you how many purchases went through.
PRODUCT REVENUE will tell you how much money your products brought in.
#protip :: PRODUCT REVENUE and REVENUE are not the interchangeable; PRODUCT REVENUE comments on the actual value of the item sold whereas REVENUE includes all money being collected, including things like taxes or shipping fees.
By honing in on UNIQUE PURCHASES and PRODUCT REVENUE, you can start figuring out things like:
- What campaigns and messages are generating the most sales?
- Which products bring in the most money? Which ones lead to the most sales?
- Which ads or platforms have the highest ROI?
When you’re trying to answer questions like, “how much can I afford to spend on Facebook Ads?” or “what should my pay-outs to affiliates be?”… your UNIQUE PURCHASES and PRODUCT REVENUE are some key numbers you’ll want and need to know to answer those questions.
CONVERTING SALES IS THE CULMINATION OF YOUR CLIENT JOURNEY BECAUSE IT’S A VALUE EXCHANGE: THE IDEA IS TO PROVIDE ENOUGH VALUE THAT YOUR AUDIENCE WILL SHOW YOU THEY VALUE YOU AND YOUR OFFERS AS WELL BY BUYING THEM.
Each marketing phase will have its own goal and data set to represent that goal.
And what happens when Google Analytics doesn’t have the data set built-in to represent your Goal? Easy! You create it yourself!
GOOGLE ANALYTICS GOALS
You can create Goals in Google Analytics by going to your Admin tab and then all the way to right under the View Settings, you can select Goal and create up to 20 new goals.
By setting up a goal, you’re telling Google Analytics you have a specific objective to measure that is important to your overall website performance.
I always recommend you set up the following 2 goals:
- Sales made/Purchase complete
- Leads generated/Opt-in complete
By doing this, you can easily plug your Goals into any report or dashboard, and see how everything else relates to these two results – how you’re making sales and how you’re generating email subscribers.
Here’s a good question: “Why would I create a Goal for Sales Made when I can just use the Unique Purchases metric that’s already built-in?”
And you totally could just look at Unique Purchases! But because Goals are designed to comment on performance, your Goal will automatically calculate things like CONVERSION RATES for you rather than leaving you to do that math.
When it comes to data, you will almost always have options and as is the case here, you can totally use whatever suits you best.
But here’s my hot take…
THE 80/20 RULE APPLIED TO YOUR DATA
Reports full of data are close to useless. (Yup, I said it!)
Unless you can DO something with that information, I don’t think it’s worth looking at.
Don’t get me wrong – collect your data, put tracking pixels on all your stuff! – because this is something I say a lot but:
DATA IS NOT RETROACTIVE.
You want to have the information you need at hand, when you have a plan for what you want to do with it.
But the foundations of what you care about – and that will account for 80% of anything and everything you will want to know about how you’re performing online – boils down to these 3 simple phases and just these 4 metrics:
- When you’re working towards ATTRACTING new audiences and brand AWARENESS, you’re looking at NEW USERS.
- When you’re BUILDING relationships, we’re talking about NEW SUBSCRIBERS/LEADS.
- And when we’re talking about CONVERTING sales, we’re looking at UNIQUE PURCHASES or SALES MADE, and PRODUCT REVENUE.
That’s really it!
Think about how you’ve been marketing yourself – what outcome were you looking to achieve – and then look at the performance of its related metric.
Ignore #allthethings you COULD be looking at – that’s the 20% you can work on getting good at later – but let’s instead take the pressure off from trying to know #allthethings, and just focus on the outcome for these 4 metrics that will account for 80% of the information you need about the results you’re trying to achieve.