Using Google Analytics to Make Better Decisions This transcript was lightly edited for clarity. Hello everybody, I'm back at ACPLS 20 17, and now I'm talking with Jon Meck from LunaMetrics. Jon, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. It's great to be here. I look forward to talking about this stuff. So you gave a presentation this morning. I was lucky enough to sit in, it was very crowded in there. Very excited, everybody wants to know about analytics, and specifically Google Analytics. And it seems like people are missing a lot of opportunities. So talk a little bit about why getting on top of your analytics particularly beyond number of page views is important. Sure. So Google Analytics is well-known. It's a free tool, and we did a show of hands, and almost everyone in the room already had it on their website. The problem is that most people stop there. So it's a tool that really can be customized, and tailored to fit your individual business. And there's a couple key things that people should be taking advantage of to make sure that they're getting the data out of the tool, that will help them make better business decisions. And so some of those things we can talk about are [inaudible 00:01:08]. Yeah, that's right. You're reading, you got it. So give me an example of some of the things people could be doing because my sense is, and maybe I already said this in the introduction, that there's a lot that can be done, it can be 1 Page Life Science Marketing Radio chris@lifesciencemarketingradio.com 925.322.1451
overwhelming if you're looking at reports, and going well, I don't know. One thing is I don't even know if I'm doing it right. You gave me an example where I was doing something wrong on my own site. So what kinds of information can people get, that are actually gonna make their marketing better without getting overwhelmed in a pile of data? Sure. So there's a couple of things that we recommend everyone take advantage of. And these kind of run the gamut of really easy to set up, and no tech skills needed, and a little bit more tech skills needed. And there's some products out there that make it easier. And then you need a full development team, and you need a schedule to get this down. One of the easiest things we can do is tell Google Analytics what matters to us. This is something called goals. And there are four different types of goals, and three of them you can set up right in the interface, it takes about two seconds to set it up. And these are things like I want someone to get to this very important page on my website. And now not only are people hitting those pages, but I'm able to say these sessions from a paid source that I'm spending money on, advertising that I'm driving traffic to my website, these sessions hit that particular page. And now I can go back, and say which campaigns were really driving the most amount of value to my website. The other thing that we tell everyone to take advantage of is using something called Events inside of Google Analytics. And this is one of the ones where you need a little bit of set up on our website. And there's tools like Google Tag Manager to help make this easier. But the idea is that the default installation of Google Analytics only measures when pages load. And if I asked anyone, and I can ask you right now, what happens after the page loads? There's a hundred things that might happen. Someone might scroll halfway down the page, they might watch one of the videos, or in your case listen to one of our podcasts. We wanna know that, and we wanna say that, that was a valuable interaction on our website. And so we can use this tool, the Events to send that information into Analytics, and give us better reports, that directly tie into the decisions we're making every day. So was it worth it to invest in that really nice YouTube video? These podcasts are taking off, but which subjects are doing better than others. And that's really what we wanna start doing is tying the data back to the decisions. 2 Page Life Science Marketing Radio chris@lifesciencemarketingradio.com 925.322.1451
One of the things that I've learned recently is not only to say hey, this campaign did really well to get people to this landing page, but maybe that's not the only way they get there. And you might find out that there's another segment that you weren't even thinking about. So it's look, taking that backwards look like of the people who come to the landing page where do most of them come from? And creating a segment like that, and building out segments right, tell me if I'm wrong, that you can then try to get more of like go find more of people who look like that. Exactly. So segments are a great tool inside of Analytics that we can use. We can turn those into audiences, and connect them to other tools like AdWords. So in your example someone may come to your website, and they may find your link on another site like Reddit, or a social media site, and you'll be able to actually track it back. For the public websites like Reddit you'll be able to find the exact conversation where it was happening. You can even jump into that conversation, and correct misinformation, add a link. Again create a segment of those people, and say these are people who found me organically. And there's a great feature inside of Google AdWords called Lookalike Audiences. So in there are similar audiences. I can click a button, and say find me more people like this group. And if we tie that into the Events we can say find me more people like this group who came to my website, and were engaged on my website, and agreed with the content I'm putting out. Yeah, so let's talk about content because I know a lot of people that listen to this particular podcast are interested in content. And you talked about how we can use Google Analytics to help our content creators create better content. One of those was site search, and then there was more. But start with that one. So the default Google Analytics tracking, one of the best things it does is it tracks what pages are being loaded. What we can do is actually start to add some extra metainformation about those pages. So we can create a report that lists out all of the categories of content we're creating, and see how people are engaging with those pieces of content. This can really inform our decisions about what content we should be spending time creating, where we should be putting our emphasis, and what's resonating with our customers. 3 Page Life Science Marketing Radio chris@lifesciencemarketingradio.com 925.322.1451
For the site search example that's one of the easiest things we can set up. 90% of websites you can do it without a developer. You just go straight in, and you adjust it in the Settings. And now we can start to see the actual languages that our customers are using. So the words that they're using, the way they're referring to your products. Sometimes even the questions they're asking. The way people search now with Google, and Bing is that they're asking questions directly into the search bar. They're saying where can I find this product. And we'll see that show up on our site search reports, and they're saying how can I answer this problem? And if we don't have a piece of content for that, we use that to influence what content we start to create. Here's a yeah, so that's definitely essential for all the content creators, and I think just easy information. What words do people use? Every good copywriter will tell you what are the exact words a customer uses to ask for your product? You gotta feed them right back. One of the things you pointed out, and we're gonna jump around a little bit here, that was, that I didn't know, and I think will be really valuable to customers in the Life Science industry is that if you look under Network, and Service Provider, you can actually see what institutions are coming to look at your website, which is do-it-yourself CRM in a sense. Exactly. This an easy thing to do. It's available in everyone's Google Analytics with the out of the box implementation. And what it's doing is telling you how someone's connecting to the Internet. For an individual like myself I have Verizon at my house. But when you get to big organizations, colleges, universities, hospitals, these places buy their own Internet. And when they show up on your website their Internet service provider has passed that information to you, and we can find that in Google Analytics. If you're following along at home write this down. The way you would get to that is you would pull up your reports in Analytics, you'd head to your Audience section, and you would click on the Network Report inside of Audience. Here it's gonna list that all of the service providers, and you can just look through that list to see, which places are coming. A really great tip is to just give them a call the next day, and pretend like you didn't even know, and say hey, is there any chance you'd be interested in 4 Page Life Science Marketing Radio chris@lifesciencemarketingradio.com 925.322.1451
something like our product? You might not get the right person right off the bat, but they might help you get to the place. And then so oh, actually we are looking at your products. We were just there the other day. Free, easy, go, and take advantage of it right away. Yeah, that I found particularly helpful about your presentation because when you go into Google Analytics like I said there's an overwhelming list of things to look at, and I'm going network. Why would I ever make a decision based on the network because I'm thinking what I'm gonna see is Comcast, Verizon, whatever. But now that I know that I might see University of Massachusetts, I'll have a completely different view on that data. What about content groupings? Tell me a little bit more about that. There's a couple new features from Google Analytics that they've been rolling out over the years, which is just different ways to group our content together. Content Groupings is an extra setting that you can do. There's a couple different ways you can do it. If you don't have access to make changes to the code on your website, you can do part of it inside the interface. And what we're doing is we're telling Google these pages belong in a group. So if you think about your website, we can immediately sort of group it the way that it's already organized on the website. Your top navigation already tries to do this, and we can replicate that inside of Google Analytics, and say most of our people are landing in this section of the website. Even better we can pass information in from the page. So with a little bit of tech help here we can pass in some information about either the vertical, or the product type, and we can roll all of that information up together, and say this group has the highest engagement on my website. And this group we really need to focus on, and start driving more traffic to. And that leads me to another thing you mentioned, which is the whole idea, Google should help everyone in your company not just marketers. So, that to a degree leads to product developers. So what kinds of data should they be looking at? Or how could they look at the data to say you know what, here's an area where either we think people are having trouble with our products? Or here's a thing that they're looking for they're not finding, and we should be developing 'cause it's really close to what we do, but not quite, or what? Sure. Everything we've already talked about today is gonna help with that. So your site search reports are gonna show you what people are looking for, and 5 Page Life Science Marketing Radio chris@lifesciencemarketingradio.com 925.322.1451
there's some numbers in there, some metrics that are gonna help you identify the ones that are having problems finding that. So we look for search terms where they didn't get a good result, and they didn't stay on our website after that. And that's a red flag, let's address those. We can look at content, and say, which pieces of content do better than others. That can help sort of inform the way we write about our content, the way we talk about our content. Even the words that our sales team are using on the phone with their customers, they're able to use that information, and change the way they talk about the products. And then with the Event Tracking we can start to measure engagement on specific product pages. So a lot of the companies we work with in the Life Sciences industry they have tech sheets, they have data, they have testimonials. And we can see what people are interacting with, and what they are hoping to find in your website. If you're able to prove that the tech sheets, and the data sheets are the most important thing on your website, make those more prominent. Move those to the top of the page. When someone arrives on your website, and they get to the landing page, we should make it very clear, make it very easy for people to do exactly what they wanna do. And we'll let the data sort of tell us what that is. Another common mistake that you pointed out is, and honestly this was the problem on my site, the bounce rate. Right? So you helped uncover the source of that in 30 seconds, and I'm really grateful for that. And the good news is I have as many visitors as I thought, or as many individuals, but not as many pages as I thought. So you helped us figure out that. The other one, and the other thing that you pointed out was that if you're doing it wrong, your data will look better than it should be. And I will just tell everybody listening that it's really hard to make that leap. I mean there's a red flag going off in your head. I'm telling myself all year long, my bounce rate I know it's not supposed to be that low, but I couldn't figure it out. It's probably, it's right. But today I resolved that thing. Tell us what we get when we start though tagging more events. Even though the data might not look as good, it becomes more useful, and more accurate. So there's a phrase that I like to say, and I thought it went over well today. But the phrase is that bad data makes us look better. Good data makes us money. So the bad data if we make mistakes often what we'll see is elevated 6 Page Life Science Marketing Radio chris@lifesciencemarketingradio.com 925.322.1451
traffic levels. We'll see our bounce rate drops, and it looks like people are engaging with our site really well when in fact what's happened is we've started counting them twice. So one is we need to identify all of these technical issues, and make sure that they're working correctly going forward. The other thing though is that again by default the way people install Google Analytics, a lot of people will just install it once, and then forget about it. Set it, forget it. That's not really the way we wanna do this. What we wanna do is we install it, and then we customize it, and we tweak it, and we make it better. And we tell Google these are the touchpoints that people have, that should count as an interaction on my website, that should indicate that someone has interest in my website. And what that will do is help your analytics more accurately reflect the user's behavior. So your bounce rate while it shouldn't be zero, it could come down whenever you start to say this bounce actually if someone watched a video they shouldn't count as a bounce because that's an interaction, that I care about. And by default Google won't recognize that, and so you need to tell Google Analytics they watched a video, and that should improve my bounce rate. That should tell Google Analytics that, that was an engaged user on my website. So you actually can redefine bounce for Google. So for example I send out an email whenever I've done a podcast to link to it to say hey, here it is. Someone goes to that page that's the only thing they care about today. There's new news, but they went there. That's not a bounce that's all I asked them to do. Exactly. So you tell Google exactly what you want. It's all in the text lines so it's as we're setting up the events there's just a flag that we can say this is, does this count as an interaction? Right. Is this an active step that a person took, that indicates some sort of engagement? So if they came to our website, they looked at it for 20 seconds, and they left I would call that person unengaged. If they came to my website, and they landed on the email that I sent them, and they saw the podcast, they clicked, and they listened to that for 20 minutes, that's a very engaged user, 7 Page Life Science Marketing Radio chris@lifesciencemarketingradio.com 925.322.1451
and I wanna make sure that Analytics knows that. And I use an event to say hey, they started the podcast. Hey, they got halfway through it. Hey they finished it. Right. No, that's really helpful because I think we do tend to look at the default definition of a bounce rate, and we know that not all of those are uninterested, but many of them are so we'd like to know exactly how many are, and of course- And we get that question all the time. Everyone wants to know what is a good bounce rate? And that's where I stop people, and I say there's no standard, there's no industry standard. You're gonna find blogs out there, you're gonna Google it, and you'll find a million results, that will try to tell you in my market, in my vertical this is a good bounce rate. That's entirely untrue, right. So we get to say what is a bounce rate for us, and we should feel comfortable that our measurement is accurately reflecting the options we have on our website. And our bounce rate is very custom to us, and instead of looking across the board at other industries, and other people, which you don't actually have access to see, what we should be looking is against ourselves going backwards. So we look at trends over time, and we say is our bounce rate going up, going down? We also look at different segments, and we say well, let's compare mobile versus desktop. Does one of these segments have a higher bounce rate than the other? And that can inform some of the content decisions that we make, or design decisions. Should we hide things? Should we make things more prominent? Cool. So I wanna thank you for this conversation. Before we go just give me the three things people should be doing when they're listening to this thing to either do themselves, or go to their IT Department, and say I need this, this, and this to get started doing my analytics right. Absolutely, it's pretty easy. So if you are doing any sort of advertising, or marketing where you're trying to drive traffic to your website. So if you're sending out emails, if you're posting links on Twitter, or links on Facebook those need to be tagged with something we call UTM parameters, or campaign parameters. You add a tiny little bit of information to the end of the 8 Page Life Science Marketing Radio chris@lifesciencemarketingradio.com 925.322.1451
URL, and you're telling Google Analytics I brought that person to the website, I get credit for it. If you don't do that then Google's gonna give credit to something else. It's gonna say oh, they found you on Twitter. It's like no, no, no I did that, I'm the one posting. And I'm trying to prove that my efforts are successful. So UTM parameters is number one. The next thing Events. This is a little bit more technical. You may need a tool like Google Tag Manager. You may need to go take a class. Or if you have a tech team they should be able to handle this. We want to track anything on the website that is interesting to us. Any sort of engagement. If you have calculators, if you have videos, if people are scrolling, filling out forms, making purchases, all of that requires a little bit of extra effort to make sure Google Analytics can see it. So that's number two is Event Tracking. And the third thing also is pretty easy to set up, and that's goals. We need to tell Google what matters to us so that we can start to do a better job of looking at our traffic sources, and saying these traffic sources brought in traffic, but really what we care about is that they brought in qualified traffic. Good traffic that converted, and they gave me their email address, they signed up for my email newsletter. Whatever it is we're hoping people do, we need to tell Google Analytics this is important to us, and that will help you make better decisions about budgeting, about marketing, and about messaging. Nice. So you mentioned in your presentation, you had a white paper, or a case study with Teach for America. Where can people go find that? Absolutely. If you just go to LunaMetrics dot com, you look at our Case Studies page. We've got a great study with Teach for America. They're trying to drive more qualified applicants to their program. And what we did is it's a great story, it's a start to finish story. So people came to their website, and they filled out a form. We captured some of that information, and stored that inside of Google Analytics. That's a little bit more advanced. And then we used that information to change the way we marketed to them using Google AdWords. So we were able to say these people match everything we want. They have the right GPA, the right interests, the right majors, and they're in the right cities. And I really wanna make sure they 9 Page Life Science Marketing Radio chris@lifesciencemarketingradio.com 925.322.1451
complete their application so I'm gonna show them a very custom message that says hey, don't forget come on back to the website, and finish this application. They saw a 35% increase in conversions when we started to use this targeted advertising. But it all starts on their website, it all starts on Google Analytics, and it all starts with proper implementation. Very cool. Jon Meck from LunaMetrics. Thanks for joining me on Life Science Marketing Radio. Thanks for having me. The Next Golden Age of Audio There is no better way to grow an engaged audience of loyal brand advocates than through a podcast. But getting started might seem a bit daunting. I know how you feel. There's a lot to learn. The good news is you don't have to do it alone. I've been creating podcasts and audio stories since 2014 and I'm ready to help you set up for recording and handle all of the editing and post production. It's easy. 1. Schedule a call. 2. We'll develop a clear strategy. 3. Start growing your audience. 10 Page Life Science Marketing Radio chris@lifesciencemarketingradio.com 925.322.1451