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The Brand Design Masters Podcast with Philip VanDusen is dedicated to helping you build the skills you need to design bullet-proof brands - for yourself, your business and for the clients and customers you serve.
In every episode, Philip, his co-hosts and interview guests will share inspiration, ideas, trends and techniques that will lift you to greater heights as a creative professional or entrepreneur - so you can build a successful creative practice, business and personal brand in the Creative Economy.
Demystifying Google Analytics with Amanda Webb
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Philip VanDusen: Hey everybody, welcome back to the brand design masters podcast. Today I am super excited because I'm here with Amanda Webb and Amanda is the owner of spider working. She specializes in digital marketing ROI and is an analytics mentor. Trainer and consultant. She's a Google analytics expert and helps businesses, agencies, and individuals get more sales and leads from their marketing for content on the spider working blog has won her awards both nationally and internationally, and she loves talking marketing.
And with that, I'd like to welcome Amanda.
Amanda Webb: Thank you. And thank you for the lovely introduction.
Philip VanDusen: So why don't you help us understand a little bit about. How you came to be a Google analytics and analytics expert.
Amanda Webb: Yeah, I've been I think when social media came along, I was running my first business at the time.
I just have a really long career story. So I used to want to make movies. I worked in the film business for 10 years and realized I wasn't going to be a film director. If I wasn't going to be a film director, I didn't want to do it anymore. So the next thing on my list was ticked on that. I want to start my own business.
So I started a business selling corporate gifts. And at the beginning, my website was not findable on Google, even if you typed in the brand name. Now this was a lot of years ago. Google was new SEO was a new thing. So that's how I started into marketing was learning SEO. And then I really got into social media, really enjoyed the connections it gave me and the.
Global recession came along. People weren't buying corporate gifts anymore. So I needed to switch business and it just made sense to do the thing that I loved, which was marketing and specifically social media at the time, but nothing stands still in marketing. I kept upskilling and learning new things.
And I went through so many iterations. I was the Facebook person. I was the blogging person. I was the live streaming person. I was. The video person I was all these different things without a particular niche, but eventually what happened to me? I was spending an awful lot of time because I didn't have a niche creating all this content blogging making videos doing all the things.
And I realized that actually not much of that was actually turning into customers. And the one thing that could save me to help me find the time to find a niche, to find the time and the energy to actually do this properly, to get some sleep and maybe get customers and maybe make more money was to start understanding my analytics better.
So that's where it started. I only really specialized in that Three years ago, I made the complete transition into specializing in that, but it's been a big part of everything I've done in marketing since I made that realization that it took more than just me plowing away, creating content all day to have a successful business.
Philip VanDusen: I think that's really interesting that it was the needs of your own business that brought you to learn this. New skill and that you that expanded then into a business on its own so you have a process called the ROI escalator and so how does that help businesses grow how does that improve their marketing results.
Amanda Webb: So it starts with analytics and I think that can be a thing that is intimidating to people particularly if you're using Google analytics there's been a big change in that over the last couple of years if you've logged in it's what is all this mean where did all the reports Go that I used to know and love.
So it can be quite intimidating, but you really do need somebody to guide you and help you make that starting point to start with knowing what your analytics are telling you and then build your digital strategy off the back of that. And I think that's part of the advantage that I've had from doing all the different marketing things for all those years was I know how to run a campaign.
I know how to put together a funnel. I know all these things. But unless you apply analytics to it, you could be wasting time like I used to. So the whole point is to make sure that you're getting return on investment, not just for the money, because that's great. You do want to know that your budget is well spent, but also for the time that you spend.
Cause very often as small businesses, we spend, we probably aren't paying ourselves minimum wage. If we look at the amount of hours that we spend. So actually working that into the equation and making sure our time is spent in a way that is productive and is going to give us return on investment is important.
So it combines all those different things into the method.
Philip VanDusen: A lot of people listening are creative professionals. And so I would ask you for creative pros, where do you, would you see the biggest gaps? In measuring marketing ROI or businesses in general, like where do you see those pain points for people?
Amanda Webb: Yeah, I think for creatives we do I'm not a creative pro, but obviously I think anyone in marketing is a little bit creative. We have to pay,
And we can totally get. Caught up in the creative side of what we're doing and not looking at just the simple things that people miss and all businesses miss is are we creating content that is going to attract the people?
We want it to attract rather than just making something that is, Maybe it gives us a good user experience, but that's no good if the people who you attract aren't the sort of people that are ever going to buy from you. I want to sell the thing that I have created that is going to be useful to my target market to my target market. And I'm sure you and all of everyone listening as a creative professional is exactly the same. You want to sell the thing that works.
So instead of maybe just like throwing a load of content out there and seeing what works, you can use your analytics to be more strategic. So you can see things like, are you hitting the right people? Are those people arriving on your website? Where do they live? What age you're limited really on the age group and the gender, but you can see some information on that.
What language do they speak? You can. You can also see what sort of content people visit before they convert into customers on your site. So that's working really well. You want to think about creating more content around those topics that are going to bring people into your site. So those are the insights that your analytics can give you.
You just need to then leverage that to, to get that working even better.
Philip VanDusen: So in terms of the content topics, that's a great thing, and I'm glad you brought it up. And so one of the ways that people come to the topics that they're doing for the content is they think about what it is, the problem that I'm solving and how can I create snippets of content that will lead people to understand, appreciate be able to solve that problem for themselves or ultimately be led to you, obviously.
And there are tools that people can use, answer the public or even simple Google searches to understand what questions people are asking about the certain subject is that they're asking. That they are offering the product of the service that they're offering. How do you view that in terms of how people can develop content that is going to attract the customers that they want attracted to them?
How do you go about that? Or what would you suggest?
Amanda Webb: So those tools are great. They're traditionally viewed as SEO tools and they will give you a whole ton of content ideas that you can run with. But I also think just talking to people is the best thing that you can do if you have customers already.
So unfortunately, if you don't have customers already, you're going to start with answer the public or something like that, but you can just go and talk to members of your target market. But really there's lots of advantages to that. Firstly, you find out exactly. the problems that the people that you work with, why they came to you in the first place, what was it they were struggling with.
So anytime I mentioned that you want to write that down, but also the language they're using. No, the emotions that they're feeling, you don't get that from answer the public. You don't get the exact language. You might get maybe three or four different versions of the same question that you can combine together into some SEO post.
You can even get AI to help you with that, but you don't get the exact language that people are using. And I come up. With this quite a lot, because one of the, I think the crucial parts of having a good measurement strategy with Google Analytics is using UTM tracking. And even saying that, I know a whole lot of people heard that and cringed and go, yeah, I know that's important, but it sounds really horribly complicated.
So understanding that people might, Just want to know, have a better idea of where the traffic to their websites coming from or know that sometimes you don't see that unless you add little extra bits to your links that can be, that can be a way to do it or find a way. That it makes it more accessible.
So when I talk about UTM tracking, instead of going, Oh yeah, it's a link with some code on the end of it. I talk about like getting a letter in the post with a return address on it. And the return address is essentially your tracking bit of your link. So it's a similar thing to that. So I think making, finding the language they use really delving into the problem.
Why aren't people interested in this thing that I'm talking about UTM tracking or whatever the tech term is, because there's plenty in the creative world and trying to find an analogy that works for an audience, that isn't necessarily in your industry, if that makes sense.
Philip VanDusen: Yeah, absolutely. And so I want to clarify that term that you use the UTM tracking, how does that work for people when they're producing content?
Like what is UTM tracking and how does that. How do they find the data behind that?
Amanda Webb: So this is really useful for tracking which marketing channels are working for you. So if you're posting links, say into your Instagram bio or into the email marketing that you're sending, sometimes it's not clear when that traffic arrives on your website, where it came from, depending on people's like privacy, whether they're using ad blockers, also because the networks themselves, like things like Facebook and Instagram Sometimes put a barrier in the way they want to make sure they're sending people to a legit link, but that can strip the them knowing that it's come from Facebook out of the way, or if it opens in a new browser.
There's all sorts of ways that information. Doesn't get through. So one way we can mitigate that, one way we can help more of that data get through, because there's never a hundred percent ever, particularly in the day of data, days of data privacy, is to add our UTM tracking links. And basically that's what You've got your normal link to your website and then you put a question mark in and then you put a little bit of stuff at the end after that question mark.
And that is like the return address. That's like saying this is the town, the city, and the country that it came from. So instead of a town, a city and a country, you've got my social network, so say Instagram, you've got, that falls into the town of social media, which falls into the country of referral or something along those lines.
So that's what you're adding to your link. When people click it, it's bringing you to exactly the same place. The same way when you get a letter in the post, if it's got a return address on it still has your address on it still comes to the right place, but it carries that information into Google Analytics.
Okay. And that means in your Google Analytics, you can see all that extra stuff you put on the end and start classifying it. And this is particularly useful if maybe you use Facebook a lot, you can see you've got traffic coming from Facebook, but is it coming from a group? Is it coming from a page? Is it coming from something that you shared or is it coming from somewhere else, for example, or are the links in the comments working better than if you post the link with, the full preview.
Now that's the sort of thing it can help you with. In Instagram, it could tell you. When you put a link in a story, does anyone click it or are they only clicking the links in your bio? So there's so many different places you can use it And that really helps the mechanics of your analytics tell you more about what is working in your marketing.
I get very excited about it
Philip VanDusen: Yeah, i'm super excited about it I want to learn more about it now like exactly how you do it But we don't have time to dive into the like how to on the podcast I recommend anyone listening to go to check that topic out what would you say? There's Google Analytics for right when that dropped into the world, my head exploded because I pretty much understood Google, the original Google Analytics.
And when Google Analytics for came in, I was just like, Oh my gosh, they have completely, upended my apple cart. And so what would you say are that maybe the top three Google Analytics metrics that creative pros should really start by looking at if they haven't really started diving into Google Analytics at all?
Like, where should they start?
Amanda Webb: I would say that even though Google Analytics 4 is very different, I do think it's more streamlined. So it is a little bit easier to see what you want. It's just horrifying when you look at it first, because everything is so different. And I guess I used to obsess about the amount of traffic I got to my website.
So the number of people who visited my website, I was obsessed with, and because I obsessed with it, I got more and more people to my website, but that didn't translate into money. So that's the first thing. I tend to ignore that. Now. Sometimes I look and go, Oh, remember when I used to get all those hundreds of thousands of people?
Not that many tens of thousands of people visiting my website and they don't now. But you know what? Now they convert. So that's the first thing. I don't tend to look at that. I tend to look at my different marketing channels and which ones are driving, quality visitors. So people who visit my website and hang around.
So they might read the page. It looks like they stayed on long enough to read a page, or they've looked at a number of pages, or they've clicked some buttons, or they've watched a video, all those things I would look at. That's could combine that just for one metric rather than just giving you five in one lot there under engagement rate.
That's a new metric in Google Analytics for, and it tells you that somebody is a quality visitor. Essentially, the second one I would look at is, and this does require you to set up what in Universal Analytics, the old analytics was called goals. They're now called key events, but to have those set up and just see.
Which marketing channels are driving the most key events. And that can be stuff like people downloading a lead magnet. If you have one, it can be purchasing. If you've got an e comm store, it can be filling in a quotation form. It could be filling in a contact form. Whatever you decide is important to your business.
Whatever it is you want them to do, which marketing channels are driving that. And also what sort of people are driving that. So what countries are these people coming from? What regions are they coming from? That can really help you. No, are you hitting the right people or maybe help you find a new group of people who you didn't realize you were attracting, but are actually working really well for you.
Philip VanDusen: I love that.
So that's
Amanda Webb: Two. I haven't come up with another one. I could give you about a hundred.
Philip VanDusen: That is good. Alright, a while back you mentioned AI and AI is obviously on everybody's radar right now and that we're all figuring out a how to use it for ourselves for the benefit of our own businesses.
But then also as creative pros, we're trying to figure out how to recommend our clients use it to benefit the business. them because they come to us for this sort of information. So how are you using AI in terms of where analytics falls into AI? Can you use AI to help you with your analytics?
Amanda Webb: There are so many ways that you can use it. And so many, I haven't, I've only dipped my toe in the. Best thing I found is I struggled to like there's a tool called Looker Studio, which makes pretty reports for you. But when I'm teaching analytics, that's a Beyond what people want to know up front.
So we tend to use spreadsheets. We use Google sheets because everyone can access Google sheets. But what I struggle with there is making user friendly spreadsheets. I've got all this data I want to collect. How do I do it? So I can ask, I use chat GPT and Gemini. Depending on what I'm using, I can ask it how should I format this chart?
And actually my, I'm sure my, the people who've worked on my, any of my courses are delighted now because the charts make so much more sense. Or not the chart, sorry the spreadsheets. And then secondly, I would have used to have used that from Google sheets to create charts that make it easier for you to visually see what your data is doing, which is great.
Cause you might be a visual learner or maybe just don't like looking at all that. Those numbers but again, you have to work for ages in a Google Sheet to get it to show you the chart in the way that you want to. So instead, you can actually import that Google Sheet into your AI tool of choice and you can ask it to make a chart for you.
And you can ask it to give you three or four different options for a chart so that you know where you want to go. And then you can keep tweaking it. You have to keep tweaking it because we know that AI hallucinates. Thanks. But it does give you that a lot faster than if you're trying to create it yourself.
So I really enjoy it from that data visualization point of view. Or if I am creating a Looker Studio dashboard, which I do for clients, it can help me understand what I should need to put into that. So I can go I've got this data, this type of data, and I want to produce this sort of report, which five or six Looker charts should I create so that the client can understand if their marketing is working.
And again, I think it's just it's just like anything with, I'm not like using any advanced or fancy tools. I'm just using chat, GPT or Gemini, but it's like having that little assistant next to you, helping you think in a more logical way.
Philip VanDusen: Yeah. Do you find that it gives you ideas or approaches to things that you wouldn't have thought of by yourself?
Amanda Webb: It does. Yeah. But you have to keep probing it. I don't think it ever comes up with the right answer first, but I will usually start my conversation going today I want to do this. Can you help? And it will give me a starting point. And then, so it's my thinking combined with, I think simplifying it using those tools would be what I really use it for.
So I want to do this. I found this. What do I do with this information or how do I structure it? Or that's how I mainly use it. But there is so much more you can do with it. It can do a lot of fast calculating that you can't do on your own. It would take you days to work it out. Whereas, your AI tools can do a lot of the calculations for you.
I'm only dabbling that at the moment, but this is guy, Andy Cresadina, who I'm sure loads of people have heard of who's doing a lot with that at the moment. He has a lot. I would recommend his online resources on using. ChatGPT alongside analytics.
Philip VanDusen: Oh, excellent. So what would you say the what are the mistakes people making?
So what would you say are the mistakes that you see small agencies or freelancing freelancers making when it comes to looking at their analytics or making decisions off their analytics?
Amanda Webb: It's definitely looking at the wrong numbers the same way I would do. We hear that term, don't we? That you, what you measure is.
What happens or something along those lines. And that's exactly what I was talking about earlier. Like I used to, two things I used to obsess about the number of people who visited my website and my domain authority. So domain authority really is a metric that gives you an indication of how well your website might rank.
On search engines is very vague, but I was obsessed with those two things. And because I was obsessed with them, that's what I got. I got, I was obsessed with more website visitors. So I got more website visitors. I was obsessed with growing my domain authority. So I grew my domain authority. None of those were leading to business.
So that's the first mistake. The second thing is giving too much data. So I see people come to me and they'll show me like a report from their agency. And it's they get it once a month. It's at least 10 pages long and that's going to take so long for the agency to create. And you know what? The customer barely looks at it because they don't know what they're looking at or they don't know what it means.
So I think they're the two biggest mistakes. You really need to just understand the questions that you want your analytics to answer for you. So it could be, am I targeting the right people with my Google ads? So that's a big question you could look at. So you can compare different types of people that you're targeting with your ads and how well they're converting, how many of them are actually active on your website, how many of them are engaging with your website and start basing your ad audiences on that information rather than the guesswork that you have to do up front until you start getting that data in. Or it could be, am I wasting my time on Instagram, which is one I get asked all the time. So there's different ways. Once you know, that's the question, you can start slicing the data to try and find. If the traffic from Instagram is valuable, or it could be is my podcast worthwhile are people who listening to my podcast, visiting my website.
So you need to build up a, like a measurement strategy for that to see if it is. And, in some cases there's always really good news that you yay, Instagram on my podcasts are really amazing. And in other cases, however, you slice and dice the data, it's just showing you it's not working.
But that's valuable too, because that can tell you either that you need to stop that marketing activity or that you need to put a measurement process in place, because that could be the reason that you're not seeing the data that you want to. And I would say it before I go that there are not going anywhere.
You're not, you
Philip VanDusen: can't go yet.
Amanda Webb: That, it's not all about your website. Of course, there are other places you need to measure that as well. If somebody, when they phone you or they get in touch with you and they become your customer, you might not see that you're getting any traffic from your podcast, but if they say to you, I listened to your podcast, that tells you that it's valuable as well, no matter what your analytics are saying.
Philip VanDusen: And that's a really good point. When I get a new business prospect or someone on a discovery call or someone who's book coaching with me. I always make sure to ask the very first thing after I say hello, literally is like, where did you find me? And I keep track of that. And I, my, my podcast is one of my favorite things to do besides YouTube.
But my, to be honest, my listenership is fairly small. This is the, this podcast is in the top 5 percent of marketing podcasts in the world. Except when it comes down to it, maybe marketing podcasts don't get that. That's a relative, vanity metric, but when it comes down to it I'm super surprised at how many people say that they found me.
It's always YouTube is number one, but my podcast is always number two. It's not my content. It's not the articles I'm writing or all the social media I'm putting out there. It's literally my podcast. And so I'm a Died in the world proponent of asking people like you said at the very beginning of the interview.
It's like, how do you find out ask people and so highly advocate for that activity. One thing I wanted to ask you about was there's a running debate on web site organization and navigation. One is that people don't read anymore and the longer homepage you have, people are going to bounce as soon as they have to scroll twice, right?
Other people, there's this whole new school of you should put your whole website, if you're a consultants or something, you put your whole website on the homepage so people don't have to navigate because it's, fairly proven that people, you lose 75 percent of the people as soon as they have to navigate to another page.
So where do you fall on the long homepage? Informational, approach or a shorter homepage with navigational path that leads you through various pages on your site.
Amanda Webb: Okay, from a personal perspective, I hate those forever scrolling websites. Absolutely hate them. I find them very annoying. I want a web page that tells me what, but that's personal opinion.
You can't go by that. And I think it is a case of you need to, which other option you go with. You need to be constantly testing it. That's the only way you're ever going to know. I prefer that I can track somebody from one page to another page, what they're doing. If they're interested, they're going to click.
So I don't care if it's like they scroll on forever. If they click onto another webpage, I know they're interested in that specific thing, which tells me what my most popular products are. For example, that's, that can be really useful to me. And also it depends how much you've got going on. So I have I think.
Five or six different packages. I don't want, I honestly can't imagine having that all on one page. No, I think you want to optimize each page and make it very attractive to whoever lands on that page. So if you're sending, I know that you can add a menu to a never ending scroll. No. So it brings you to the right page, but I just feel like.
I think maybe I'm just old fashioned, so I would test it. If you've got that never ending scroll page, you need to set up your tracking so you know where people are clicking, where people are coming to which parts of it are interesting to people and look at your conversion rates on that.
Without building two websites, you're not going to be able to do a really accurate test. Honestly, I'm not sure there's a massive difference. I think it's personal preference, but maybe just have a look at some websites in your industry. If there's a majority of them are doing one thing, there's two things.
You could either do that because you figure they've all worked it out or to do the opposite, because that's, what's going to make you sick now. So they really are. This I'm giving you that it really depends on so that everyone hates, but it really does my personal perspective. I just really hate one page websites.
I really hate them. It's just I'm
Philip VanDusen: old, especially sales pages that are super long. They drive me crazy. So you work with businesses and individuals and agencies all the time, turning their data and their analytics into ROI for their. Can you give us an example of how one of your clients used data to actually create a bit of change in their business?
Amanda Webb: Sure. I was working with one customer and they had three different products that they were selling three different sales pages. The website was really well constructed and put together. But we discovered from our initial like audio on the site that one of those sales pages just had a terrible conversion rate compared to the others.
So that meant we could go and look at that page and we realized that actually it just wasn't very well written. It was that was it like the other pages were well written. This one seemed to be a little bit waffly. It wasn't clear into the point about what the product was. So we're able to make a change on that page and see it that conversion rate on that page.
It's called a key event right now in Google Analytics, but it's the same thing. We can see that begin to rise once we made the change because it was getting similar traffic. It's just the number of people who visited it, who were actually filling in the inquiry form was way less than on the other conversion pages.
So that was one like big problem. We found on their side that we were able then to actually make more money out of because obviously they were getting more conversions.
Philip VanDusen: Love that. And so marketing success, obviously, ultimately marketing success is sales, right? What tools beyond Google analytics would you say that you recommend for really mark that, measuring marketing success opposed to just sales, right?
So what else do you look at in terms of how to view people's marketing as being successful beyond analytics?
Amanda Webb: But the reason just Google Analytics, I think that's really, it's like I was saying, when we were talking about making sure you know where people come from, but also with a lot of particularly social networks, which of course is my background, they don't want to send people off site anymore.
So you need to really look at the other channels. So I know there are like chatbot tools that you can connect up to Instagram, which is all a lot of fun. But I also don't really think you need them unless you've got a massive Instagram audience unless you're getting lots of direct messages every day.
But that's something you can measure. So are people content to contacting you directly through your social media channels? So that's one of the things that I would look at. Email marketing. I think everyone says it. Everyone in marketing is you've got to have a list for me. It's really powerful because it's not just that the majority of my sales come that way.
I'm B2B. I have a long sales process. So no, it's a really good way to stay in touch with people. But also all those things about what questions do people have. That comes through your email marketing because when they get an email in their inbox from you and they reply you're getting like a personal response and you're able to strike up conversations with people to find out what it is they want to know more about or which emails that you send are resonating the most with them.
So I find that really useful too. So your direct messages. I'd always, if you're using a social platform. Sometimes you're going to want to link off site. Sometimes you can just say direct message me for more, and then you give them a link or then you just get into a conversation. So you want to measure all those individual parts of your sales path, really.
The email marketing, there's things you can measure and can't measure. And it's all a bit gray these days because They're doing things that make you think people have opened your emails or clicked your emails when they haven't. But again, that conversation, nobody can fake that. Somebody is getting back to you and asking you questions or if you're prompting questions in your emails, that can be really powerful too.
So that's actually something I measure within my email marketing is when somebody replies, I always mark them as having replied and then I can monitor those customers over time or. Not customers yet. I can monitor those people and see, do they become customers?
Philip VanDusen: And whenever anyone replies to my welcome sequence, and I always ask questions in my welcome sequence, whenever anyone replies, I always reply back to them.
And the email marketing experts that I've spoken to and who are in a peer mastermind that I'm in, they say that as soon as you create that email back and forth, it's like, the bots see everything. So they suddenly realize that you're a human, you're starting to have a conversation. And so that sort of reply, rather than just getting the information going, Oh, great.
They sent me an email back. But to create that back and forth actually improves your deliverability over time.
Amanda Webb: Absolutely. And always reply. They've gone to the effort to reply to you. You've asked them to reply. You have to just even from a, like a being a decent human being, it's worth it. And thankfully that does tie into your marketing.
So yeah, it's a conversation when you're throwing out those questions. I love it when people reply. I'm always really excited when I get more than one reply to an email. So I know that one hit home well.
Philip VanDusen: Yeah, I'm a firm believer in the less questions, better to, I, when I first started my email list a couple of years in, I didn't really understand what was most important to people.
I was doing a lot of, pushing information, but I wasn't doing a lot of listening and that was on me. And I got a recommendation from someone that said, just send an email with one question. Just say, what's the thing in your business that you're struggling with the most? Just hit reply and let me know.
That's it. One sentence. And I did that to my list of, I don't know, it was probably 6, 000 at that point. And I got 275 replies. And I was like, Oh my gosh, it made it so simple for people to reply. And the amount of information that I got just from those replies was shocking to me. I took all of them, I dumped them into a Google sheet, I categorized them by seven different major themes or topics.
And then I sorted them by the themes. And one of the things I found out, which was blew my mind. Cause I thought these are creative pros and they want to learn Adobe suite better. They want to get more clients. They want to, learn how to do social media better. The number one problem people had was organization and time management.
And I was, and this was like, it made my head explode. I was like, Oh my gosh, I had no idea that people were struggling with this so much. So the upshot of that is. Ask, right? So that's the answer. Ask your audience. Okay. Here's an, I'm going to take a little pivot video and is, a huge part of my business, but video is huge for engagement and the world has turned to video, right?
So 80 percent of the web traffic on the, in the world is video. How can creatives.
Amanda Webb: It's a really tricky question, and I say that because the impact of video is very often when it's you on the screen, it is you. It's people getting to know you and trust you. And I think that's really the power of video. And it's definitely, I used to run a weekly live show. But it wasn't about analytics.
So it's changed now, but it was amazing everywhere. I went every business, not everywhere. Not like when I went to dinner somewhere, but any marketing event I went to, I would meet people because they'd recognize me from the video. So that's a really hard thing to measure, isn't it? But again, I used to always like, whenever somebody would come to me and say that I'd make a record of it, people know me from that.
Or I have a first contact field on my CRM. So first contact means when we first met or when we first heard of me. And that always used to be the live show that came in there. So again, it was that asking the question. So that's part of it. You can look at things like how long are people watching your videos for.
But it's actually just seeing your face regularly and I think that moving face, even if they're just scrolling past you in a feed, they're seeing your face on a regular basis and they're getting to know you better. I actually had a really interesting conversation on my own podcast with a LinkedIn Brogan, who was talking about this.
But, even if somebody's scrolling past you for two seconds, that's long enough for it to make an impact on. Somebody for them to remember your face and the more they see that, the more they go, Oh she's talking about design, web design, graphic design whatever aspect it is and make that connection.
So one of the things that she was, I'm just going to completely quote Louise. So one of the things she was talking about is when you get video views, if it's on your personal profile, you're able to see who those people are and whether you know what industry they're in, where they live, that sort of thing, which again, gives you a really good idea, are they the right people that you are connecting with?
But because it's LinkedIn, you can just go and connect with those direct, so it's not as granular a measurement as you might see on other things. You can do things like, on my live show, I'll always have a link or a QR code and a link depending where they're watching it. Which are when they use that will tie them through UTM tracking that we talked about before to that particular episode of that particular show.
So I'll know, or that particular video that I have up on YouTube. So I'll know when they come to my website directly, but there's far more impact than that, because that's only going to show you a small portion of the people who've got to know you over time. It's not. I can give you all the metrics you can measure, but at the end of the day, it is just that personal connection that you only get either when you meet somebody face to face or when you watch somebody in a video.
Philip VanDusen: The one thing I, the story I tell about video for me and my business is that. When people do contact me and we have initial discovery calls and they found me on youtube One of the things I hear all the time is they say I feel like I know you already I've watched four or five of your videos And you obviously know what you're talking about.
And that is one of those things that is Immeasurable in terms of value, because it's not like you got to spend 45 minutes proving yourself and, going through your CV and making sure that they're understanding that you know what you're talking about and have gotten results in the businesses that you've worked with and.
That is just incredible. 'cause really when they're, when you have that conversation, they already know, feel like they know you, they already wanna work with you. It comes down to a question of scope and price at that point. Video is just one of those things that I think is, it cuts off a huge portion of the sales funnel really when it comes down to it.
So if a creative professional had. Only one hour a week to focus on their analytics, where would you say they should spend their time?
Amanda Webb: So initially is the setup, making sure you've got everything in place. So the first thing you absolutely need to do, there's a few settings at the beginning, that's all you're going to do that when you're setting up.
The first thing is getting those, what used to be cool goals, which now called key events, making sure you know what people want to do on your website and making sure that you've got that set up as. A goal, a key event, and that is like you'll need things like you need to have either you really ideally if you're setting up yourself, you need a confirmation page or a thank you page so that when somebody.
Download your lead magnet. You send them to a thank you page on your website when they get there. You know that they've completed that particular thing or when they sign up to your email list or when they fill in a quotation form or if they're purchasing just make sure your e commerce is hooked up on the back end.
Because without that you're You're only seeing half the picture. You can see how people are engaging with your website. You can think, Oh, this is brilliant. Look at all these people that are coming over from the podcast. Look at all of those. And they're really engaged, but you don't know what they're doing next.
So that's really key to know that. And you can break that into your different sections as well. Some of those key events are going to be more important than others. So you need to know yourself, like this key event is. Somebody that's going to buy from me because they filled in my quotation form, whereas this person is, further down, further up the funnel, rather than down the funnel, further up the funnel, because they've just joined my email list or they've just completed this.
They've signed up for this lead magnet, which flags them as being somebody that's interested in what I do. So you need to understand where they fit into the whole sales process. That is the most important thing because. All the rest, you can go and create the reports. You can go and look at your reports afterwards and see what is driving people to those.
But without that, you're only seeing half the story. So that's the number one thing. So if you've got all those thank you pages, which you should, because then you can keep driving people on with more information and keep telling them more about your business and just do good marketing. That's quite easy to set up if you've got that.
So that's definitely the first thing. The second thing then I would just like dabble with customizing reports, which a little bit more tech required, but you'll find all the information you need on YouTube on how to do that so that your reports are showing you exactly what you want to know. So at the moment, if you go in, you'll see there's a traffic acquisition report and there's a user acquisition report, which will tell you different things.
So a user means when it can, it's tracking the first time that user came to your website. Where did they come from? Whereas traffic is this time that somebody came to your website. Where did they come from? And you can customize those down. So that you just see traffic from Facebook or traffic from your podcast or traffic from search or whatever channels you're using.
So that would be the first reports I always like to customize because they're the ones that can tell me where I might be wasting time on my marketing, for example.
Philip VanDusen: That is awesome. And Amanda, this has been an amazing conversation. I could talk to you forever and I would learn so much. I know it. And so I know that you have a resource that you want to share with our listeners.
So what is that resource and where can they find it?
Amanda Webb: So I threw a bunch of things together for you which you will find at spiderworking. com forward slash bonfire. And there you'll see, I've got a phrase book, cause that was the first thing that freaked me out about Google analytics when I Google analytics for when I went there, it's like, they have all these.
It's what I call goo goody gook, like complicated language that gets in the way of you understanding what's going on with your analytics. So I put together a quick phrase book that has some of the most common terms that you're going to find and what it actually means in more simple terms. So that's free.
You can give me an email address, but you don't have to sign up to my newsletter. You have an option there. So go grab that. It's also got details of, I have a UTM tracking course. Now I'm based in Europe, so it's in euros, but it's 9. 99. And that's, you can complete that in under an hour and you'll have your UTM tracking sorted.
So if you're still going, ah, that sounds horribly complicated, it will de complicated that for you. And then there's some information about me my services and which aren't exciting at all and where to connect with me on LinkedIn. So
Philip VanDusen: you'll find everything there services are completely exciting. I'm absolutely exciting,
Amanda Webb: but not as exciting as a freebie.
Philip VanDusen: And anyone who's listening, who has been thinking about joining Bonfire, which is the mastermind community that I run for creative professionals. Amanda is actually coming to speak with Bonfire as a visiting expert in a couple of weeks. And we're really excited about that. And she's going to dive even more deeply into this to make it very understandable and actionable on the part of people in the group.
And so the URL that she mentioned was spiderworking. com slash bonfire. B O N F I R E. The link will also be in the show notes to make that easy for you guys. And thank you so much, Amanda, for sharing those resources and also coming to talk to us today. We hope to have you back on the podcast again soon.
Amanda Webb: Thank you.