Melanie
The Monday Morning Marketing podcast is brought to you by Esther of IPA group, bringing premiere online promotion to your business.
Esther
And Melanie of STOMP Social Media training, who empowers business owners to manage social media and marketing for themselves.Welcome back to another episode of the Monday morning marketing podcast. Todaywe're talking about analytics and in particular reviewing them. How to do it and why?
Melanie
So reviewing your analytics is something that we all very urgently look at when we first start our business and we go back sporadically looking at later on. Especially we look at our analytics when we're doing maybe campaigns or maybe when we're trying to promote something or sell something or see how the interaction of an event that we ran has gone. And then we don't.
Esther
So true. It's like, Oh, life took over. Business is booming. So we don't go and see how people have found us or where they're coming in from or how long they're spending on our website, etc. But it is one of those things that, well, I personally find fascinating. I love analytics. I love reading them and I could stare at them for hours. But yeah, it's if, unless you're running a campaign or you're like, Oh, I've just put this new item up for sale. Let's see how many sales I've had. Then it starts to lose its momentum. It starts to lose its exciting feature. So how can we keep that enthusiasm going week after week and month after month so that we keep going back? Is it a case of setting a reminder?
Melanie
Well, that's what I've done in the past. In fact, I had a client in the office only earlier on today, and they got out of the habit of doing this social media for a while. And we decided to start with a benchmark. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it? Yeah. You can only see if something's working if you have a benchmark. So whether you've been doing your analytics or not, when you're hearing this podcast, whatever day or month or year this is, I'd like you to write down your analytics for your social channels, your website, whatever thing you're measuring and use it as a benchmark. Then Isuggested to this particular client to then put in a reminder on the same day every month. Even if they couldn't, no, even if it fell to be a weekend, say it was a Saturday, let's say, then they should diary it either to do that day or to move it to the first working day for them afterwards. It's just like most things. Things only work if you're consistent. If you're not measuring to see what is and isn't working, I'm sure I can't remember the actual saying, but doing the same thing all the time, never changing it, doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work. What would you do? You create websites. What would you say to your client about doing their analytics?
Esther
Well, when we create websites, it's important for the website to be connected to Google Analytics. In this case right now at the point of recording, we're talking GA4, which is the new one. You can no longer connect to the old analytics, but if you are still connected to it, if your website was built prior to 2023, you need to change over to GA4. Come July 2023, Google Analytics, as we know it, Universal Analytics, will no longer work and you will either not have any analytics to look at or you have very few analytics and numbers to look at. Say you're wanting to measure for the whole of 2023 how something went, how many people are reading your blogs, for example, you won't be able to do that unless you change over to GA4. There are lots of people out there that can help you with that, us being one of them. There's lots of ways Google themselves will help you to do it, but it needs done. That's point number one, it needs done.
Melanie
So you can set up... When does it need to be done by?
Esther
By the start of July 2023. That's the cut off. Do it before that because otherwise you're starting with zero analytics and you're starting, it looks like a brand new website. Again, it won't have any of the old information transferred over onto it. When you set up your analytics, you can set up what they used to call goals or events and say, okay, I want when people come in through a certain link, I want that to track as a specific event. And that one's very important. So say you promote a lot on Twitter, then you want to track that link, the Twitter link, over onto your website. So all of those things can be done. It's a little bit more in-depth and complicated. But there's so many things that you can track. But some of the most important things that you're probably going to look out for are demographics, age, location. If you're in the United States, you can even see their income level, things like that, which can help you to target better, can help you with your content. It will help you to be able to say, Oh, well, actually, I thought my product was going to be more helpful for women from the age of 30 to 50, but it seems to be women from 18 to 25 that are looking for it.
So either you have a problem with your marketing or your product is actually for a different demographic.
Melanie
Or service. Well, yeah. And there's other areas that your analytics will give you an insight into as well. And that's even your email open rate. That's such a valuable tool. I think people are neglecting email because GDPR sounded very frightening. There's so many areas that you need to stay on top of, and I appreciate that that can be extremely overwhelming.
Esther
And time consuming.
Melanie
Well, yes.
Esther
Because if you have a Facebook page, you have Twitter, you have LinkedIn, you have your email campaigns, you have Pinterest, you have Instagram, you have your website. Those are all places that you can track your analytics. So having it that you have to go into each and every oneeach month can be a little overwhelming and you just think, Oh, well, I havenow go to seven different places. And then you get thrown down the rabbit hole of, Oh, but somebody sent me a notification on this platform, so I have to reply to them. Set aside five, ten minutes each month and only focus on grabbing your analytics and putting them somewhere that you can see them and track them and measure them.
Melanie
Exactly. Something that doesn't disappear or miss file or put in the wrong place or anything. But we mentioned a lot of things that you can track there, but not everybody's a neurotic social media manager or website designer. We totally get that. You may be only on three or four platforms.
Esther
Or one, which is totally valid as well. Yeah.
Melanie
So you do not need to be on every platform. You just need to be on the right platform for your audience. You did it again, didn'tyou?
Esther
I tried to.
Melanie
I would suggest that you don't need to be on every social platform. You don't need to be on every digital platform. Your website is a very valid, strong one to be on. But there's no real proper analytics behind a website unless you attach Google Analytics to it. So much more thorough. What we want you to get into the habit of doing is committing a certain amount of time per week, per month, literally per month would be best, because then you get a bit of time to build up some actual data. It needs to be something that you give time to build and grow because a lot of things won't transform over in a month. Now you can talk.
Esther
Well, I was just going to say, you can see so many things on analytics that you might not even have realised. So if you guest blog on someone else's website, or if your podcast was picked up and shared on a different platform, we hosted an event some months ago and that was shared out by social media examiner. Examiner, exactly. Social media examiner found that and shared it out and we had a ticket seal through it and we only knew because we checked our analytics.
Melanie
Yeah, we were blown away by it. Where did that comefrom?
Esther
Yeah, absolutely. But if you don't know where your people are coming from, then you don't know who's looking at you, who's watching you, who is seeing your stuff. And if your stuff isn't being seen, then there is a problem. Yeah. Okay. So whether that's your messaging has an issue, or the analytics are not correctly set up could also be an issue.
Melanie
This podcast is all about getting you guys in better strategies, in better time management, and in better habits.
Esther
Yes, definitely. We definitely need to. We have to take our own advice here as well.
Melanie
Speak for yourself. There's nothing wrong with my habits.
Esther
No, but it is one of those I'm more likely to check analytics for my clients than I am for myself. It's just like, Oh, I've seen it all for so long. I just forget to do my own and click over and tart. But I'm really interested to see where people come from, especially. And like I said, it could mean that you need to tweak your message. It could mean that you need to share the blog that most people are clicking in through even more. Just reading your analytics, not even understanding them fully, but just reading them and going, Huh, I did not think that that blog or that ad would have that impact. Then you can understand your audience better by doing this one simple thing.
Melanie
Having a bit of accountability, I think, is important as well. I was telling Esther before we started recording today, I used to do my analytics as and when I remembered, basically. Really, the only time Ireally started doing it properly is when I started getting a planner. At the end of the month, it would have put your analytics here. I was like, Damn, that's a fine idea. Yeah.
Esther
Having those little reminders either on your Google calendar, whatever calendar system you use, a physical planner, and not just skipping the reminder. I'll do that some other day. Because it is important what gets measured gets the results. Let us know how you get on with measuring this. We will be checking your analytics to see where all you're listening to us from. I do it constantly for the podcast as well.
Melanie
Isn't that mad? We both do it all the time for the podcast. We see all the listens, we see where you're listening from. We'regetting into new countries every single month, which is I'm blown away.
Esther
It's brilliant. Just like I said, knowing that this information is there is so powerful and it can really help you hone your message and target in on the audience that is actually listening to you. So on that note, we'll say ta ta for now and we'll be back next week with more Monday morning marketing. Until then, bye bye.
Melanie
Bye guys. Do you know what we should do? What? We should ask our audience, if they ever bother listening to the end of these things. We should ask our audience to put down where they're listening at the time. Are they listening at home in China? Are they in the office? In New York. In New York. Where are they listening to us when they see our posts on social? That'd be cool, wouldn't it?
Esther
Well, we know the answer to some of those already.
Melanie
But then other people can see that we know where theyare.
Esther
Is that not a little bit stalkerish? Yeah, I suppose that is.
