Knowing if Your Marketing is Working

Welcome back to Mastering Business Basics. In the last few weeks, we've talked about how to build a solid foundation under your business. And 📍 on top of that, of course, you build the structure of your business, your employees, your services, whatever it is that you are into. But at some point, you have to do a little marketing. And marketing can become a tricky business because how do you know if it's working or not? 

Well, we have a guest today that would like to talk to you about that subject, and it's called analytics, how to determine if your marketing is working or not. Her name is 📍 Philippa Games, and she's clocked over twenty-five years in digital marketing strategy and analytics. She's consulted with nearly five hundred clients and worked with websites that have cumulatively generated hundreds of millions of dollars. Owners and marketing executives hire 📍 Philippa to find new insights into their web analytics that will help grow their business and cut wasteful spending because many are missing those hidden gems.

Learn what You may be missing.  You will find Philippa's book , Website Wealth, at: https://books2read.com/u/4jjAol 

Transcript

 Knowing if Your Marketing is Working

Guest: Philippa Gamse

Roger: Welcome back to Mastering Business Basics. In the last few weeks, we've talked about how to build a solid foundation under your business. And on top of that, of course, you build the structure of your business, your employees, your services, whatever it is that you are into. But at some point, you have to do a little marketing.

And marketing can become a tricky business because how do you know if it's working or not? Well, we have a guest today that would like to talk to you about that subject, and it's called analytics, how to determine if your marketing is working or not.

Her name is Philippa Games, and she's clocked over twenty-five years in digital marketing strategy and analytics. She's consulted with nearly five hundred clients and worked with websites that have cumulatively generated hundreds of millions of dollars. Owners and marketing executives hire Philippa to find new insights into their web analytics that will help grow their business and cut wasteful spending because many are missing those hidden gems.

She's helped clients in North America, Europe, and the Middle East to translate the numbers into transformational ideas that move the business forward, reveal opportunities for new markets, podcasts, and services, and maximize return on their investments, all in plain English, not techy jargon, which is probably the part I like the best.

So let's get started. 

Roger: Welcome to the show.

Philippa Gamse: Thank you, Roger. Great to be here.

Roger: So would you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are today?

Philippa Gamse: Well, what I actually offer is, is kind of analytics and the strategies that come off of that. so it's really my favorite question that a really good client can ask me is Philippa, what do I need to know to run my business better? And from what I understand about your practice, that's probably would be a great question for you too.

And, and you, you'd answer it from a slightly different perspective. but the, the thing for me is that if you aren't using the analytics for your website, if you have a website that plays any kind of role in your business, which for most of us we need to have. if you're not then looking at your analytics, you are essentially flying blind with everything that you are doing, because you actually have absolutely no idea what's going on.

And even if you think your website isn't important. a few weeks ago I was speaking to somebody who, who said exactly that. She said, look, my website's old. I haven't done anything with it for like five years. Nobody comes to it. Nobody cares. But she actually had a lot of very, very good content on it.

She's a, a leadership coach for, senior leaders and a lot of really good material on there in terms of blogs that she'd written and so on. And, I said, are you sure that nobody comes to it? And we had a look and she was getting 500 visitors a. So she thought she wasn't getting any traffic. She was getting 500 visitors a week.

The website was old. It wasn't doing a lot for them. I mean, they were consuming the content and then leaving. So she was essentially wasting all that traffic. and she had no idea. So that is, that is the point of if you have a website, get serious about looking at what you, what's actually happening.

Roger: What's the best way to to go about looking at the analytics?

Philippa Gamse: Well, so, you know, something like Google Analytics is free. It's very easy to install on your site. and then actually the key thing is not to try to measure absolutely everything you can. And, and, and you know, I, one of the things that I know is, is, is true. And actually I, I had a book come out last summer, called Website Wealth, which is designed to tackle this exact problem.

If you are an average small business owner. And you're not excited about looking at a load of analytics and numbers and dashboards 'cause that's not how you wanna spend your day, which is completely normal. it can be completely overwhelming. And you, you log into Google Analytics, there are something over 200 or more default reports.

You have no idea where to start. And for a lot of people, that means you, you know, you very understandably go, oh no, this is too much for me, and shut it down and go away. the key to getting into it. Is to understand your website very, very well. You, you really do need to know what's going, what your site is for, what the goals of the site are.

Like, are you trying to sell things directly? Are you trying to get leads for your business? You know, somebody fills in a form or calls you. Are you trying to get people to sign up for a newsletter? Maybe your email newsletter that you are. You know, you'll promote, you're running. do you want people to read your blog or watch your videos or listen to your podcast, right?

You need to know what you want to be happening, and then you, then you can go from there because then you can start saying, is that happening? At the thing to do with your analytics is to know what questions you want to ask. So if you look at it from that perspective, you don't try to solve every problem and look at every number, but you say, today I really want to know if people are, are reading the blog post that I've just put together and I want to know which of my blog posts they're most interested in so that I know a bit more about what kind of content they really like.

Or you say, I've put together a load of videos and I dunno if people actually even look at them. Or obviously if you're selling stuff, you know, so I'm selling various different items. I want to know if people look at those items, but don't even buy, but don't buy them or start to buy them and then stop. You know what's going on.

So analytics is useful when you've got questions that you want to answer because then when you get the answer, you can do something about it. So if you've got something you're trying to sell and it's not selling, but people are looking at it, then you can say, okay, so maybe there's a problem.

What could the problem be? It might be something to

do with, with your checkout process. It might be that honestly the price is, is too high. It could be all sorts of things, but at least you start to know where you need to be paying attention to. Hopefully. Is this, is this making sense?

Roger: Makes perfect sense. You know,  I have on my website, uh, links to the podcast, links to my book, so forth and so on. I really have no idea at the moment how many people are clicking on those.

Philippa Gamse: Right. And you know, one of the things that I notice, so you can dig deeper than just how many people click. So for things like podcasts or videos, one of the things that you can measure, if you wanna get a bit deeper into it is, is how much of the content that people watch. So one of the things that you very typically see with videos is that people might start the video and after 30 seconds, if you're on YouTube, for example, that will say, people viewed this video, but then they might stop and very typically if people aren't grabbed, if you like, by your, your opening, 30 seconds in a lot of them will drop off. Right. If they don't feel compelled to watch the rest of it, a lot of them will drop off. I, I had a client once who was an absolute prolific video producer on his topic.

And literally he, he put up video every single day. And he, his viewing statistics looked pretty good because, as I said, obvious, sometimes you, the YouTube number that you see will, will basically tell you how many people started the video.

And I sort of dug into his, his deeper analytics, and he was, he didn't believe me. He was absolutely horrified because literally by 30 min, 30 seconds, he'd lost something over 50% of the people who started, and by one minute of a 10 minute video, he'd lost 90% of people who started to watch it. One minute in. And the reason for that was because, honestly, I think part of it anyway was that he insisted on starting every video like, hello, my name is and I do this and that and that, you know, blah, blah blah.

And if you're somebody that's seen it before, like, I noticed you didn't do a whole spiel at the beginning of this. We just jumped in. I dunno if you tack a spiel on later, but, you know, But if you do the same boring opening again and again, then obviously people who've who've heard it all before are just gonna tune out.

You need to be saying, good morning. Today we're gonna talk about, and this is what we're gonna learn, and if you stay until the end, I'll give you this, you know, great special offer and, and so on and so on. And you make it worth people's while. so once you know that you're losing a load of traffic, you can do something about it.

But if you don't know, then you just carry on making video day after day completely happy and with no idea, that 90% of your audience aren't watching them.

Roger: Well, I can Understand that. I mean, I tried a YouTube video, on the subjects that I teach, and I got to looking at the, as far as I could understand, the analytics on YouTube. Uh, and they are complicated. Like you said, you, do be careful what you look at and I saw the people were dropping off right away. And no matter how I started it, no matter what I talked about. So I said I don't believe the things that I want to teach people, YouTube is the right format for. There are people that you really constantly have to be grabbed. You got, you know, it's not something where you wanna sit down and study something unless you wanna learn how to build something, you know, or use some machine or something like that, how to videos.

But not educational. So I says, well, let me do podcasting because I love, I love teaching people. I've always been a teacher at heart. I was an education major in college some 55 years ago. And, uh, I decided I couldn't teach in the public school. So, so I've been teaching in the private business world ever since. But, I was amazed when I went to podcasting because suddenly I'd put out like seven episodes and I get a, email from BuzzSprout. You have 500 downloads. Congratulations. I'm going, good grief. You know, I couldn't even begin to get that many when I was doing the videos.

Philippa Gamse: Mm-hmm.

Roger: But this is, this is more content oriented because most people don't watch, they listen.

Philippa Gamse: Right.

Roger: And so I can talk direct to them as if I'm having a conversation with them, and I think that's why I've been more successful. But, you know I use BuzzSprout for the analytics. And it gives me all of these, and it gives me in a pretty simplified form. Thank goodness I don't have to delve into them. It just tells me what's going on. so I understand exactly what you're saying about the videos. It's just, it's really, really hard to do videos,

Philippa Gamse: Mm-hmm. Yeah, but as I said, that, that applies to all of your content. So, you know, and content is really in interesting and important because if, if you have a business with a website where you are trying partly to use the site to establish your authority and your expertise and you know, your, essentially your qualifications that you do know how to do what you say you do, then that content is important because people need to know who you are and figure out that they can trust you before maybe they approach you. And so very few people go to a website and, you know, just click through a couple of things and buy something immediately. So you have to do other things to engage 'em and to, explain who you are and, and, and all of that good stuff. So, so understanding how people use your content and what resonates with them is, is really important.

Roger: Absolutely. I understand that. So, what's the best way for people to start learning how to do analytics, would you say?

Philippa Gamse: Uh, well, there are some amazing resources online. I mean, there's plenty of, well, YouTube, but there are plenty of really good courses for people. You know, on LinkedIn, on YouTube, there are, there are blogs, there's, there's a lot of material if you want to know how to just use it, sort of very, as a sort of starting point as I said. 

I don't do that kind of training. My, my interest is more in working with people around the strategy and how to think about it and what questions to ask as opposed to literally how to use the interface.

Roger: okay, well that's interesting. What's the process in coming up with a proper strategy?

Philippa Gamse: Well, so I mean, presumably your website strategy should obviously be tied in with your business strategy, but as I said, you should know what your goals are for the site. I mean, as you put your site together. Presumably it's going to be trying to do some things and it needs on, I mean, on every single page of your site, you need to have a clear goal.

You need to know what you want people to do as a result of seeing that page, because if you don't direct them to do whatever that thing is, whether it's fill in this form, sign up for this, you know, buy this item, uh, listen to this podcast, whatever it is. If you don't make it clear to them what they should be doing, they won't they'll maybe try to figure out, or maybe they'll just leave. so calls to action throughout your, your site and everyone on every page are really important. And so you, you need to think about, you need to be clear about what are those outcomes that I'm looking for. So that if you know your goals, then you can start measuring those goals and, you know, looking at sort of success rates, and so on.

So it, it's really like any other type of strategy, you know, what am I trying to do? And then evaluating, you know, how should I do that? What kind of tactics are involved and what's working, what's not working?

Roger: Yeah. I find when you look at most websites, uh, for companies, you go out and the, the main page is nothing but pretty much describing what they do.

Philippa Gamse: Well, the main page is, is essentially the homepage. The job of the homepage is to direct people into the site. To wherever they need to be. So a lot of sites have potentially more than one audience, right? Maybe they have people looking to do different things. They have different industries that they work with, and they have different pages for those, they have different types of services.

I mean, the homepage's job is to say, is to allow the visitor to say, do I belong here? Has this site got something that might need my current need? And if the answer to that is yes, where do I go? so that's why the homepage typically says, this is what we do. But that's its job is to, is to direct people further in.

And that's something that I see a lot in analytics is that it doesn't do that. And so you see a lot of people looking at the homepage and then not going further into the site, because maybe they don't know what to do. Maybe it's too overwhelming. and, and another very common problem is that the home pages on in general are getting longer because of mobile devices.

So it's much easier to scroll on a mobile than it is to start clicking on things. but you have to be very careful. It's the same kind of principle as the video. If you, you, with the analytics, you can actually see how far down a page people scroll. And again, very typically, unless they're interested, they don't.

Necessarily scroll that far and there are analytics packages. I mean, for example, I use a, a, a tool called Microsoft Clarity, which is also free, and which you can put onto your site. And it's, got screen recordings and heat maps and you know, you can see exactly where people's attention go on a page.

And it actually shows you, the screen recording actually shows you somebody moving around your site. Now, obviously you dunno who that person is. But it shows you like where they're putting their mouse or their attention, what they click on. Right. And, and people are stunned when I show them these, these recordings or the heat maps that show them that say halfway down a page is the same thing as the video.

They've already lost, you know, 80% of their visitors, people just haven't scrolled that far, which means that any content that's further down the page that's important to the site, people aren't seeing it. So it's a really good point. Like, don't have your key call to action at the bottom of the page, because unless you know that people are scrolling down that page, then that means that the, the vast majority of visitors will never see the most important thing you want them to see on the page.

Sorry, you look kind of stunned. Sorry.

Roger: I, I didn't realize that that type of information on the scrolling was even available.

Philippa Gamse: Oh yeah. I mean, this is the thing. So as you said, you get basic analytics from like bounce rou or wherever you said. and that's fine 'cause that tells you how many people sort a page. But, but the thing, if you really wanna get serious about this stuff, then you wanna go deeper. because I saw a page isn't that useful to you?

Like, how long did I actually spend? Where did my attention go? What did I click on? What did I try to click on that I couldn't? So in Clarity, which is a tool that I absolutely love, it's got a, a thing called Dead Clicks. So a dead click is when somebody sees something on a webpage that they think should be clickable, like a picture or some words that they go, oh, that's interesting show me that.

And they click on that and it doesn't work because it's not actually a link. And that is can be very frustrating to people, you know, they're right there at the MO in the moment saying, tell me more. You've got something that I'm interested in. And they're clicking away and they can't get to find out more about what they're seeing.

And that's a real problem. and again, there's no way you would know that from basic analytics. You need, you need to go deeper, but that information can be absolute gold dust.

Roger: Well, I'm, I'm getting ready to rebuild all of my websites and, I definitely, I definitely have to that.

Philippa Gamse: Well, and, and so that's a real, you know, one of the things that I found over all my years of doing this is that we make our absolute best plan for our website. And there's, you know, we have our strategies, we have fantastic copy, we have a lovely design and all of this until it goes live and until you've got some of these tools.

 working some of the stuff that then happens just amazes me. 'cause I still, you never quite know what people are gonna do. You never quite know what people are gonna find really engaging and where they're gonna get stuck and where they're gonna be clicking that you'd never thought, well, why would somebody click there?

Because you are very, very close to your own content. You know, you know it, you know how it works. I can't tell you the number of times I've talked to clients and, and I've said I can't understand, you know, I'm looking at their site for the first time, right? And I'll say, look, I can't understand how I'm supposed to do this.

Where do I click? And they'll say, but it's obvious. It's right there. Look, look, look. It's right at the top of the paper, or it's right, you know? And I'll say it's obvious to you because it's your website, you know where everything is. So it's hard for you to walk in the shoes of somebody who's seeing it for the first time and doesn't know where everything is.

 and that's why some of these tools that, that do things like the screen recordings, I mean, not just the numbers, but the actual, this is exactly how a person interacted with this page can be, can be really revealing.

Roger: Well, you've definitely given me a lot, lot to think about here. That's great. So, you teach all of this stuff. How do you, mean, do people like hire you to go and do the analytics? Exactly, how does your business work?

Philippa Gamse: So, yes, and I do, I have, uh, various services. So I, I have sort of special small business services where yes, I mean, I'll make sure your analytics is properly in implemented and then look at some of these, these issues, like where are things going wrong? Right. What, what are people, where are people getting lost on your site or where are they getting hung up?

Or, you know, if you, if we know what your objectives are, where are they happening and where are they not happening? I, I also, can sometimes see opportunities for new products or services. We've, we've done that too. So as I said, I, I, my book came out last summer. It's called Website Wealth, a Business Leader's Guide to Driving Real Value from Your Analytics. It's all in English exactly as I'm talking here. It's, it's got tons and tons of stories in it with the idea that. Each story sort of describes a situation or a scenario, and then what happened? And even if it's not your industry, I'm hoping that if you read the book, you know the scenario, you can say, oh yeah, that could be me, that could happen to me. So you know what to look for and But so, you know, I, I help people with that. So I have also in their stories about, as I say, we've, we've seen demand for new products or seen opportunities for targeting different markets maybe geographically or maybe demographically, however that is, however

 and then I also have a, a suite of services for more senior leaders. you know, we, we were talking before we started recording about, you know, how you help people address the risk of making bad financial decisions or choices and what that could cost them. I kind of do that with analytics. So, you know, sometimes if people are looking at, for example, you are looking at a redesign, where people might be looking at a major investment decision, like a redesign, like an investment in an ad campaign.

 and looking at whether the, the evidence that they're using to support that decision is actually the right evidence. So, for example, somebody, I, I had a client recently, you know, they, they, they, they were working with an agency. The agency wanted to renew their contract. They were spending quite a lot, with that agency on, on the ad campaigns that they were running.

 the agency was telling them that everything was going great and they were doing very, very well. But is that true?

Often agencies do things like report click through rates from the ads. So the number of people who click on an ad and come to your website and on, based on that, they were doing a great job.

That the problem is that for the business, that's not the end of the story. If people click on the ads, but they then don't actually buy the stuff, you know, or, or whatever it was that the ad was supposed to generate, you know, it's a lead or whatever, then the number of clickthroughs isn't really helping 'cause it's costing them money without, without a proper return.

And sometimes the agency doesn't know about that part of the story, but the business needs to know to put the whole thing together to make a proper decision about investing in another ad campaign. And similarly with, with a website redesign, one of the things you do need to be careful about is understanding what's happening on your current site.

Because, for example, if you've got a, some page or some content which are working really, really well and those are indexed in search engines, if you. If in your redesign you, you take those pages away, you rename them, you lose that content, you're risking actually losing traffic that you had that was valuable traffic because you didn't know that, that it was valuable 'cause you hadn't looked at it.

 but potentially your, your new website could perform less well than your old one because you've kind of killed the wrong stuff. Does that make sense?

Roger: Makes perfect sense. I'm glad you made that point.

Philippa Gamse: So I do things like decision, investment reviews and, and website change reviews. Just to sort of say, you know, before you redesign your website, just be aware you don't wanna lose this and you, you wanna think about that and, and so on.

Not, don't, don't do the redesign. And sometimes, you know, an agency will come along and say, your website's outdated and nobody likes it, so you should redesign it. And the business owner will say, oh, okay. And again, is that true? I mean, if like my, my uh, client's site that was getting 500 visitors a week, that's not a bad situation, right?

So instead of throwing out the whole thing, maybe what we should do is, is give it a fresher look, but sort of keep the basics of it.

Roger: That makes perfect sense. You know, I hadn't thought of any of this stuff in, in what my future plans. Just what you've taught me in this, this few minutes here is probably gonna save me a whole lot of money and a whole lot of time

Philippa Gamse: Well, there you go.

Roger: and that is awesome. Awesome. if people wanna get a hold of you, how do they go about doing that?

Philippa Gamse: So I'm on LinkedIn and I think I'm actually the only person in the entire world with my name, which won't surprise you 'cause it's so hard to pronounce. So, I'm always happy to connect with people on LinkedIn. as I mentioned my book's called Website Wealth, A Business Leader's Guide to Driving Real Value Through Your Analytics that's available at Amazon and all other good bookstores.

And it's a very quick read. It's, and as I said, hopefully it's an easy read. And, my website is currently under construction of course, because the Cobbles children and all that. but I'm always certainly happy to, to hear from people on on, on LinkedIn.

Roger: I appreciate You very much coming on the show today uh, very good luck in your business as well.

Philippa Gamse: Thank you

Roger: I hope you enjoyed that conversation. I certainly did. If you would like to get a copy of her book, I have put a link to it in the show notes. It's a wonderful read. I went out and bought it. It's a wonderful read, and it'll teach you a lot of things you need to know. Even if you're starting out, these are the things you need to be thinking about as you build the structure of your business.

Until next time.

You have been listening to the Mastering Business Basics podcast with your host, Roger Pearson. For more information about all of the business education options that are available, we invite you to visit seagulltechnologies.com and continue your journey.