On today’s episode, we are going to talk about Google Analytics and how we can know our website visitors better right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast, Episode No. 331.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and today I’ve got a jampacked episode for you. It’s loaded with some news and we’re going to talk about it here in just a second. I’ve got a couple of plugins to share with you and then we’re going to dive into Google Analytics. So, let’s go ahead and just get going. There’s a bunch of news happening in the WordPress Ecosphere, especially things coming out of Automatic and it’s hard for me to keep up with these things because I am on a three-month paternity leave right now after our son was born just about two weeks ago. So, I’m going to try to keep you up to date with all of the things that are happening while trying to stay disconnected from work and not trying to dive into what’s happening over there at Automatic.

So, the first thing that just happened today was WordPress or, I guess, WooCommerce 3.0 has been launched. This initially was going to be a point revision. It was going to be WooCommerce 2.7 but there was just SO many features jampacked into this release that they’ve decided to call it 3.0 and it’s going to be kind of a more major type release. So, a few things have been added. They’ve updated the product gallery so there’s now a zoom in gallery review along with some mobile features – tons of speed and performance improvements. There’s an addition to CRUD classes and CRUD stands for Create, Read, Update, and Delete. These are basically operations you can do more quickly and better with WooCommerce 3.0. Basically, what this allows you to do is you can define the data for each resource and control its flow and validation.

You only need to know the names of the data you’re working with instead of the types and internal details. Less codes mean fewer changes and more tests. Like, all this good stuff is built into WooCommerce 3.0. Then another thing that is big with WooCommerce 3.0 is you can manage your data faster with WPCLI. So, there’s a bunch of commands where you can go and you can add shipping zones. You can add product variations. You can add tax or tax classes – all kinds of stuff that’s built-in right to this version of 3.0. So, I’ve got a huge blogpost for this release and I’ve got it linked up in the show notes for Episode No. 331. So, if you’re running on links I highly recommend reading through it, it gives you the steps and the correct procedure to update first the extensions in the WooCommerce and then go ahead and do that and get your site all updated and ready to go with WooCommerce 3.0.

So, that’s the first piece of news. The other thing by way of Automatic is jetpacked and has been released to Version 4.8. This is basically a redesign for the settings; specifically the stats settings got a big overall. Pretty much trying to mimic Wordpress.com interfaced with Jetpack interface and trying to make those brands and those visuals more coherent. So, if you’re running Jetpack you will definitely want to update to the latest version so you can see these changes. Again, there’s a lot of under-the-hood stuff and the cool part is the recommendation is if you can’t find something or you’re really looking for it, there is a search area, so if you’re looking for how to – the custom CSS within Jetpack, just search for custom CSS and that will automatically pull up. So, that’s a really, really nice feature. They’ve also added a new MailChimp subscriber popup widget that integrates with your MailChimp email list if you’re using MailChimp. So, that really works well and that’s just now built into Jetpack, so lots of happenings going on inside of Automatic space. There’s also been something happening in the community and that is the plugin directory has been relaunched. It launched last week and it’s been something the contributors have been working on for about a year rebuilding the directory with a new plugin design. It’s got better search capabilities and just to help you manage through those 45,000 plus plugins that are out there.

So, it’s got a search bar prominently displayed right at the very top and it’s a new visual for the layout inside of the plugin repository. So, if you’ve got a plugin on the repository, definitely go check it out, see what it looks like, see how you can improve. Maybe that cover art image or update different things or this would be a great time to update and let everybody know that it works with WordPress 4.7. So, that’s the other piece of news and then the last one is – this is kind of a weird story, I guess, but there is a website out there called poopy.life. If you go to poopy.life/create, it gives you the ability to automatically create a sandbox for testing WordPress. So, basically, it’s really, really simple. If you go to poopy.life and, again, it’s so crazy the URL, but then you can click on the link to create and it will open up a brand-new tab. It gives you the login URL, the user name, and the password and so you can go ahead and it creates a sandbox for you.

It tells me that it will expire on Wednesday, April 12th from the time that I’m recording this and there is a button right underneath it that I can add a week. I can add multiple weeks. The install is deleted approximately seven days after your last login. So, if you continue to log in, it will continue to keep that sandbox for you. You can also create a sandbox template and so once you’ve got everything set up and configured, you can make it so you can just copy the sandbox over and over and over again. It’s a really neat tool. It’s kind of a weird tool, if you will, but it’s something I saw in the WordPress space this week and I wanted to definitely point that out to you. All right, let’s go ahead and look at plugins. These aren’t the typical plugins that I find on the WordPress repository but the first one is at WPPB.me and this is a WordPress Plugin Boiler Plate generator.

So, what this does is you add your plugin name, your plugin slug, just some basic information about your plugin and then you click the build plugin button and it will automatically generate all the codes that you need to get set up for a plugin. Now, this isn’t a plugin that you install on your website. You just build it and you generate it right from the URL WPPB.me and then the other one is a very similar plugin and this is the WordPress plugin boiler plate. It is a standardized organized object oriented foundation for building plugins or high quality WordPress plugins. Basically, you click the download now button and it will download all of the files that are necessary to get up and running with a new plugin.

So, those are two different resources if you’re in the market for starting a plugin. I definitely want to recommend checking those out and those links are in the show notes for Episode No. 331. All right, let’s go ahead and dive into a little bit of information about Google Analytics and just knowing your visitors. This month, like every month this past year in 2017 I’ve just been trying to focus the entire month on a certain topic or certain area where we can kind of just spend some time and dig in. In the month of April what I want to talk about is just learning more about our customers or our visitors coming to our website. I want to help you target the people that are coming to your website, maybe how to advertise to them better, just to make that experience so much better. It comes to mind when – I think about when I get my mail the other day.

I got a flyer for switching to Time Warner. It is now become Spectrum and they wanted me to switch from Time Warner cable internet to Spectrum internet. Well, I got this flyer and I’ve gotten these flyers dozens of times but I’ve already switched. Like, Time Warner cable or Spectrum internet, whatever – they don’t know and they don’t realize that they’re targeting a message that I have already received. Like, I’m already a paying customer for Spectrum and now they’ve paid money to send me advertisements for something that I’m already a subscriber to. So, kind of what I want to do in the next month or so is just kind of – let’s talk about some of the things that we can learn from people who are already using our website and maybe the things we can do to make their experience better.

You want to – every person that comes to your website you want that to be a very personalized experience and the better that we can do that, the more that we can really understand who is coming to our website and how we can tailor our website and how we can kind of remember who is coming to our website and just better that experience that’s going to be for the people that are looking at our sites. So, let’s go ahead and dive in and just talk about Google Analytics. I’ve kind of looked back and to look at the show notes for previous episodes to see if I had talked about Google Analytics at ANY point in the last, I don’t know, 300 and some episodes. I wasn’t coming up with any good results, so I wanted to kind of dive in and talk a little bit about some of the things that we can learn by just studying Google Analytics and looking at the Google Analytics page on our website.

So, Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google. All you have to do is have some sort of a Gmail account or a Google Apps account and you can sign up and register. You can have multiple sites registered with Google Analytics, so I’ve got dozens of websites that have a small piece of tracking code that allows Google to do their thing and there’s just tons of information. I’m not going to bore you with all the information but I just want to talk about some of the things that we can find easily by looking at these Google Analytics reports. So, the first thing that we can do is we can look at who is visiting and WHEN they’re visiting. We can look at this information. It’s really, really crazy that some of the things that you can learn just by looking at Google Analytics.

So, once you’ve looked there you can go over to the Audience tab and then you can look at the overview from the Audience tab and it will give you a snapshot of useful information of just what’s going on, on your website. I’m pulling this up as we talk here. You can see during a specific period of time, like, you can have the last week, the last month, whatever, and you can see how many people are coming to your website, what language is the typical computer setup that’s coming to your website. So, for me, I’m seeing English. The U.S. version is 72 percent of my traffic and then English that is the Great Britain or UK version is 10 percent, so that’s the majority of the people that are coming to my website. I’m also seeing French. I’m seeing Dutch. I’m seeing Portuguese – Brazilian Portuguese. I’m seeing Canadian English. I’m seeing Spanish. So, there’s a lot of information I’m seeing here. I can see different countries by clicking on the country list.

I see United States, United Kingdom, India, Canada, Australia, Netherlands, Philippines, Brazil, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates. I’m seeing this information. I’m seeing different cities, if this information is public, and a lot of this is coming from people who are signed in from their Google accounts and then they’re browsing your website and seeing all of this kind of data. So, I can see that London, Brisbane, Dubai. There’s people coming and visiting YourWebsiteEngineer.com from all of these different locations. So, you can see precisely in what time period and where they’re coming from. I can also see in the same overview what kind of browser they’re using. So, 65 percent of people are using Chrome and then 15 percent are using Safari, and 15 are using Firefox and then it kind of trickles down from there what else they’re using. I can also see operating system.

I can see that 54 percent of people visiting my website use Windows, 31 percent use Macintosh, and then there’s IOS and Android, Lennox. All those things are open as well. You can see all this. I can see people that are using Time Warner Cable or Charter Communications or, you know, different ISPs, which is really crazy and really valuable information if you were looking for certain things. I can see, looking at the operating system or browser, okay, the majority of the people that are viewing the website in this last week when I’m looking here, are using Windows and they’re using Chrome. Like, that’s kind of a general statement that you can derive from that. So, I should probably focus more on making sure that everything is Windows and Mac compatible when I’m talking about resources and different things along on my website. So, those are some things that you can think about.

Those are some things that you can see when you’re looking at the overview of your audience. Another thing that you can see and I’m just trying to figure out where this is inside of the dashboard itself but you can actually look in there and you can look at the demographics and so you can actually see in the overview page you can see the different graphics of how old or what gender that people are using that are visiting your website. I just enabled – this is something that you have to enable and so this data is actually being pulled in, again, by people that are signed in to their Google accounts. So, that’s something else, like, are you targeting millennials and then you want to make sure that actually millennials are coming to your website. So, you want to look at that. That’s all under the Audience tab under demographics. You also want to see if people are new or are they coming back? This is another thing that you can see very, very easily. You can just look – this is all under the Audience. You can just kind of look at these different things. You can look at – I forget where this one is as well, but you can look at New Time Visitors? This is right under the General Audience overview and you can see that on my website in the last week only 15 percent are returning visitors coming to my website and then 86 percent are people coming for the very first time. So, I can see that a lot of people are coming to my website that are brand new, so I want to be able to kind of, in general, focus most pages on a brand-new person coming to my website. So, that’s something that’s interesting that I can learn and that I can tailor my website to. I can also look to see where people are finding me.

Are they coming from search or are they coming from direct links from different places? This is valuable information as well. You want to see are people coming specifically from Google or are they finding some sort of search engine? Are they coming strictly from links clicked on Facebook? Are they coming from – you know, where are they coming from? So, again, if the majority of people are coming from Facebook then you want to spend more time on Facebook promoting your links and whatnot, so that number will increase even more. You also want to look for – you can see what people are searching for inside your website. So, you can see like what are the search terms that people are using to look at your website.

This is valuable too, so you can see like are they typing in Your Website Engineer into Google and expecting to come to YourWebsiteEngineer.com or are they searching how to build a custom template for WordPress? Is THAT one of the biggest search terms that people are searching for and showing up on my website? If that information is the case, then I can spend some time creating a custom page specifically built for that and just make that experience that much better when people land on that page. Within Google Analytics you can also see what your top content is, you can see what your worst content is, so the top content is obviously the pages that are getting the most views. Then on those pages you want to make sure that, hey, they’re getting the most views so you want to make sure that they have very customized opt-in pages.

Maybe you want to offer something special for people to sign up specifically for those top ten pages, you know, whatever that case may look like. For the worst pages, you maybe want to just quit using them completely. Like, completely delete those pages and get rid of them or there’s tons of different things you can do when you learn. Oh, this is a very poor performing page – maybe I can spend some time making it better and make it rank a little bit higher. Just keeping working on those bottom pages every week and just try to make them better and make your site just a little bit better. So, I recommend spending some time, at least once a month, if not weekly, depending on how much time you have and how important your website is to actually generate traffic or if you’re making money from your website, or whatever your case may be.

It’s a very general statement here, but Google Analytics is definitely worth your time to study and uncover and look through and just spend some time clicking around. This is, again, of course, if you have Google Analytics installed on your website. If you don’t have Google Analytics installed, I highly recommend just turning it on, like, doing the process of getting it all set up this week and then once it’s set up it will take a few weeks to start generating the information. But then you want to make sure that you are looking at it and analyzing it. Put it as a repeating item on your “to do” list or on your calendar or something. Just make sure that your website is optimized for the right content in geography. Like, are you making sure that it’s in the right language for the most amount of people coming to your website. You want to make sure that you are spending your marketing dollars in the correct way, you know. If you’re only getting 5 percent of people coming to your website from Facebook and you’ve already been doing some Facebook marketing, maybe try Twitter marketing for a little bit to see if that’s any better.

It’s just the more information that you have, the better decisions that you can make. In this daily – not daily – in this monthly or weekly review, you can find the needles in the haystack that are showing the different sales. Like, one thing that I didn’t mention is you can set up conversion pages and you can make sure that if somebody makes it so far to like the checkout page, what percentage are actually getting to the “thank you” page. So, you can check what kind of conversion rate you’re getting. Okay, I’ve got 100 people that get to the cart page but only 5 percent of those people actually are submitting and paying for something on my store. So, you can set up all of this different information. You can just monitor trends. You can look at how you can improve your SEO. There’s just tons of information, tons of things that you can do and just a lot of information you can learn about your customers, the people that are coming to your website.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of what you can do and learn from Google Analytics. I’m just a very, very novice user of Google Analytics. Like I said, I set some of the stuff up just now, especially like the age demographics. I have no idea so I’m just going to start collecting that information now but this is a big deal and you should be spending a lot of time in the next month or so just looking over and trying to get a baseline of who is coming to your website, how many people on average are coming per day, and how we can improve that and make that number bigger. All this information is just super, super helpful. One other cool thing that you can look at within Analytics that I didn’t mention is you can actually look at real time so you can see who is looking at your website in real time.

You can see – like, right now as I’m recording this I see that there is one active user on my website. In the last couple of minutes, I see that there was up to five different people in the last few minutes. I can see where they’re coming from. I can see the top social traffic. It does probably make a difference that I’m recording super late at night here and that there’s not a lot of people in the United States that are awake right now. So, that makes probably a big difference but it’s just really neat information that you can see and you can learn and dive in to just try to not overwhelm yourself and just look at certain pieces of the information at a time. I recommend just spending a little bit of time in the Audience section and then look through some of those bigger categories – the demographics, the interest, the behavior, the technology. Are they mobile? What kind of benchmarking tools do you have set up? There’s just tons of information and that’s really the big thing that I want to share with you this week. So, spend some time looking at Google Analytics this time and see what you can do to improve your website based on some of the results you’ve seen inside of Google Analytics. That’s what I want to share with you this week. Take care and we’ll talk again soon. Bye-bye.