On today’s episode we continue to talk about the services that we need, including WordPress, to run a successful website. Right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast Episode number 377.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dawson Harzer. I’m excited to be here with you today, like I am every single week. And today we’re gonna be talking about Google Analytics. I do have one piece of news and one small plug-in I want to share with you though first.

The main news it’s coming out of the WordPress Basis Week comes from automatic and it is that Kinsey Wilson has been named president of WordPress.com. And Kinsey Wilson is a long-time digital executive who held leadership positions at major news networks, like NPR and the New York Times and he’s been named the president of WordPress.com. This has come from Matt Malonway, who has tapped him as the CEO obviously of automatic – he’s tapped him as the president, the parent company of WordPress.com and he will oversee the commercial product, the web publishing platform that powers millions of websites. And he’ll join the company early next month. Early in March.

Wilson has played a key-role in digital transformation of major news organizations since 1995 and most recently the New York Times. And so he’s gonna be a great leading, bringing some great and significant leadership to the WordPress.com platform, the product and what that whole looks like as a commercial entity and whatnot. So, excited, especially as part of – part of automatic to see this and to get to know Kinsey and how he can best help WordPress.com grow and continue to strive in this market.

So, that is the only real piece of news that I have this week. The plug-in what I want to share with you this week is called Who’s Logged In. And it is a plug-in that adds a widget area to your dashboard and it’ll start collecting a list of users that are logged into your website. When a log – user logs in, they are added to the list and when they log out, they remove it from the list. And it just – it just an automatic thing and the widget itself updates every five minutes inside your dashboard so you can see exactly how many people are online.

This is a great plug-in if you are running a membership site or some sort of site where a lot of your customers and your leads will log in to your site you can see how many people are on your site at a given time. So, you can log in, even see different pieces of information about them and why they are logged in and when they are logged in on your website. So, if you need a plug-in like this, I recommend checking out Who’s Logged In.

Another thing that you can do with Google Analytics – that we’ll talk about here in just a second. As you can see who – how many people are actually viewing your site at any given time. So, you can use Who’s Logged In to get an idea of people that are logged in to your actual WordPress site but then you can also use Google Analytics, which we’ll talk about here in just a second. And you can see how many people are actually on your site at any given point, which is really, really cool.

So, lets go ahead and just move into the section about the reasons why you need Google Analytics for your business. And we’re just continuing this discussion this month about different services or products that we need in, also with our WordPress website. So, we talked about, we need to have an e-mail list and we need to have a backup system and now we’re gonna need to have Google Analytics. And these three pillars are some of the main extra function that you need with your website. To make your website more successful and running and keeping it up and online and what not and building your brand and making more money with your website.

So, today what I want to talk about is Google Analytics because Google Analytics can provide you some very valuable insights that can help the way that your business strategy is successful. So, what are the – your website is there to build or to make money or you’ve build websites for other people to make money. Or if you’re just trying to get more followers, just try to figure out what people are interested on your website, Google Analytics is just a wealth of information. I’m sure that you can – once you start collecting data you can spend hours every day just looking at, just kinda pouring through the data to see what’s out there and to see what type of information that you can learn about people visiting your website.

It’s a little on the creepy side about how much information is actually there about each individual person coming to your website but it is a very, very, very important to kinda know and understand this trend. So, lets go ahead and dive into some of the reasons why you should have a – you should be using Google Analytics and collecting some of this data.

So, the first reason is, you can know where your visitors come from. So, understanding where your referral traffic is coming from is key. So, you want to make sure that you know where people are coming from. So you can figure out what kind of customers you’re looking for. You can set up Google Analytics to figure out where people are coming from. Are they coming from referral traffic, are they coming from Google searches, are they coming from social media? You can see all of this information and you can get screened [inaudible] [00:04:39] to where the highest percentages of people are coming.

If you find out that a lot of people are coming from Google, they’re typing in some sort of phrase inside Google and they’re coming straight from a search, then you know that you need to amp up your SCO game and make sure that you are writing your articles and targeting people in the right SCO manner. But if they are coming more from social media then you know that you need to up your game and start posting more on social media because more posts on social media means more eyes and the more eyes actually means more collects into your website. So, it’s really great information to know where people are coming from.

You also wanna know where you’re people – where visitors to your website are coming geographically. Now, this doesn’t really necessarily make sense for everybody but if you are selling winter coats, you want to make sure that – you’re not gonna get probably a lot of sales for winter coats in the south, for the Florida, the Arizona, the warm tropical climate – the warm climates in the United States, if you’re selling to the United States. But you could target and see, “Okay, there are people from Montana and Minnesota and Wisconsin.” All these states that get really, really cold, then you can form your advertising or your campaigns or your promotions and you can put information in those ads that make sense to people in those geographical regions.

You can even – if you’re targeting Wisconsin, you can put something in there about cheese or Lambeau Field or something that a lot of Wisconsin people would actually – it would make a lot of sense to them. I don’t have a lot of experience with using – creating ads and whatnot for specific geographical regions but I can see that there’s a lot of value that you can add to your targeting and your promotions based on where people are most likely coming from and where they are buying things from your website.

Another thing you can do with Google Analytics is you can segment your customer base. So, every customer is different that comes to your website. They can react to your website differently and perform different actions on it. So, you can use Google Analytics advanced segments to feature, to classify customers based on certain factors. So, you may have maybe a clothing store and you have a special section for pricy design wear, there maybe only a niche of your customers that actually purchases these products. So, you can create a segment on Google to target specific campaigns meant for them. Then you can add more, it makes more value for your marketing strategy. So, there’s a whole bunch of things that you can go down – if you go down that rabbit hole. Just try to figure out how to segment your customer base.

One of the other things you can do with Google Analytics is you can track – you can create and track effective campaigns. So, you’re always – as a business owner or you’re trying to make money with your website –, you’re always trying to find more customers or more people to buy things or click on your affiliate links or whatever the case may be. To draw attention to your business, you need to create campaigns that reach out to your customers. And then you can measure the impacts of these campaigns you have with them.

So, maybe you have an e-mail target or e-mail campaign to target a customer segment and – so, within – We talked about a couple of weeks ago – talking about an e-mail list within some of these big e-mail providers like ConvertKit and some of the other ones. You can target and you can segment different pieces of your list. So, for example, for your website, engineer.com, I can target my segments or target my e-mail list into beginner WordPress users or advance WordPress users. And then if I was selling something specifically to advanced users, then I can send those specific links and I can create an e-mail campaign that’s targeting that segment of my audience. And then you can track what links are effective for that specific target.
So, it’s not like you – you don’t wanna really send out links to track a campaign and then – it’s something that’s only targeted for a small segment of your audience and you send it out to everybody and then it doesn’t really look like it’s gonna work. Or the results don’t come back because it’s not part of – You know, beginners are not gonna wanna learn how to use WPC Alli when they’re just learning how to use a dashboard. So, it’s gonna look like a whole segment of my audience doesn’t even care about this new product that I’m gonnna offer about WPC Alli if that was a thing that I was gonna do.

It makes sense to use – to send those to the more advance WordPress people or whatnot. So, that’s another thing you can do. You can track and create these campaigns to figure out what is of most value to segments of your audience. You can also check to – see if you are achieving your goals. So, goals within Google Analytics help you track how much business – how much your business is progressing. You can assign a number of goals based on a customer’s journey. So, maybe you can set it up so that a first time visitor who just lands on your website has filled out a form and provides her e-mail address. This is a goal, it helps you nurture them as a customer and then you can – thereby you can actually add them and say that this was a successful step or a successful action for the customer.

So, you could say, ok, someone brand new comes to your site and they sign up for a – your e-mail list. That’s a win. Or somebody comes to your website and then they put an item in the cart and then they get to the check-out page and then they complete a purchase. That is a successful goal. You’ve got somebody to your website and they checked out. There’s a bunch of things that you could set up. You could do a lot of really cool things.

And within Google Analytics the goal section – you can set up a target, like, I want every day, I wanna be able to get ten people to sign up for my e-mail list. Well, then you can start looking over day after day and see how many – how often those goals actually been hit. If it’s only been hit once or twice a week, then you can say, “Okay, now I really need to focus on this. How can I get more people that are coming to my website?” Like, “Okay, I’ve got a 100 people that are viewing this page every day. Okay, but not even ten of them are signing up, there’s something wrong. Maybe my call to action’s wrong. Maybe it’s too hard to find – maybe the button’s not working.” You can look at all of this information and just dig in and figure out, “Okay, how can I make this better?”

Another thing that you can do – and I talked about this, like, referral traffic earlier –, but another thing is, you can learn what search terms are bringing in traffic. So, this is the – this allows you – and there’s a dashboard inside of Google Analytics – that allows you to see which key words are attracting a lot of your visitors. You can see the exact key words that people are using inside of Google before they click on the link to come to your website.

So, the – this is an example, for a footwear or a shoe company. The term ‘shoe’ or ‘footwear’ may not be giving you visible rankings on Google, but it is a common keyword. And so, you might want to start building that into some of the content that you are creating online. They may not be putting – maybe they’re putting in ‘party footwear’ to search and find the fancy shoes that you’re selling on your website. But you’re not really getting target and you’re not getting super search results for the word ‘footwear’ but combinations of words, like ‘party footwear’ or ‘great footwear for the beach’ or whatever their case may be. You’re getting more visibility within search rankings inside of Google.

You can also use Google Analytics to understand and study your competition. So, you can see in the competitor analysis – you can compare traffic stats with those that are your competitor, the people that are in your same field. You can see how many visitors your competitors are acquiring, you can check to see if your website is engaging enough to beat out your competition. So, that’s another really cool thing you can do.

Like I said, there are tons of things you can do here. I’ve got a few more here on my list but you can see the wealth of knowledge that’s out there when it comes to Google Analytics. You can understand the content or what kind of content you can create on your website. Then – this is – you can just find what are your most successful posts. You can see what pages people are coming to most on your – in your blog. And from there you can say, “Oh, well, people really liked the post about before and after photos of my home reconstruction.” Maybe that’s one of your things. That’s where you talk about – you talk about simple projects around your house. And you see that, “Oh, the ones that take – a weekend or last – those are the ones that are the most popular ones on my site.”

So, then you can start thinking about projects and things that you can post on your website that take a weekend or last. So, you can find out that information from Google Analytics. You can also understand why people are coming to your website and bouncing off and what that means. Like, you bounce, right? So, that’s essentially somebody comes to your website, they read an article, they stay a little while and then they leave. They don’t go anywhere else on your website. So, you can try to figure out why you might have a high bounce rate. Why is a large percentage of your readers come into your website and then hitting the back button, or leaving directly after that.

Are they staying on your website for 30 seconds and then navigating to another page, or they’re staying ten seconds and hitting the back button? If that’s the case, they are not staying on your page very long then you need to take a good look at, “Okay, what’s causing them to want to leave? Is that an annoying pop-up blocker that come – or the annoying pop-up that comes three seconds after they land on the page, or – What may be the issue that’s causing people to leave?”

So, you can look at all of that data and there’s detailed reports just of pages that are – there’s like a detailed report that you can go and see exactly all the pages that have a high bounce rate. And then lastly – the last one that I want to share is you can understand the social platforms to target. And you so have access to a view that enjoys – that you can see what social platforms are causing the most noise, I guess, or the ones that are working the most effectively. You can see which one’s is bringing in the most customers, whether it’s Twitter or Facebook or Google, or Google Analytics – that’s not a thing but – You can find all of these – this information out.

Maybe you can find a lot of traffic is coming from Instagram and you know that your Instagram stories is a way that you start getting people to come to your website. So, you can look at all of this information, you can see which ones are bringing in the most people and then what you can do there is you can just ramp up your social output there. Maybe if Instagram is the one that’s bringing in the most traffic, “Okay, I’m gonna start posting there more regularly. I’m gonna have more content there.”

And then now with ads that are out there, you can start targeting Instagram ads of Facebook ads or Twitter ads or whatever the case may be. And you can advertise those to the segment of your customers that are coming to your website the most.

So, you don’t want to spend money on Facebook if only you’re getting one percent of the traffic that comes to your website per month is coming from Facebook. You can, if you want to grow that Facebook audience, you want to get more interaction and more engagement on Facebook. But, if you are already getting 50+ percent of people coming from Instagram, it makes more sense to be on Instagram.

So, these are the eight, nine, ten reasons that I wanted to share today about different reasons why you need to have Google Analytics. And it’s going to help you grow as a business, it’s gonna give you – I mean, I didn’t even talk about the stats. You can see the number of people that come to your website and you can see what type of mobile device they are using or what kind of device they are using. All these types of things. There’s a lot of viable information just to see, especially if you have a website where a lot of people are coming in on mobile but your website’s not mobile friendly, then you know that there needs to be some work there to fix your website and get it to work. So, you make sure that it’s more mobile responsive and more mobile friendly.

So, how do you do this? How do you actually get set up with Google Analytics? It’s pretty straightforward. There are only just a few steps to go through. You first have to sign in to Google. You can go to Google.com/analytics and there’s a button on the right hand side that says ‘Get started’ and then you follow the steps to set up a website. And it gives you two options: It’s a website in App. So you wanna do – go to website route. You’ll have to enter some information, like your website you’re [inaudible] [00:16:11], kind of get key words about the website and whatnot. And just put in some information there.

And then once you’re all signed up, it’s gonna spit out a tracking ID, it’s called. Yeah, it’s usually a UA dash and a bunch of numbers after that. And it is a tracking ID and then what you’re gonna do is you can install the plug-in Google Analytics for WordPress by Monsters Insights. That’s probably the most popular one out there. There’s a couple other Google Analytics plug-ins. But then you take that tracking code and paste it in there once you’ve activated your account.
The – this plug-in that I shared is one that you actually have to authenticate your Google account, so you’ll go into the plug-in and then it’ll say ‘Connect your account’ and then it’ll log you in with Google and then you can pick which one of the tracking IDs that you want. And so you don’t actually really have to past that number in, you just go and you connect your Google account and then you select it from your Google account. Maybe you have 15 websites that you are managing or building or whatnot. And then you pick the one that you’re wanting. So, you pick your website engineer.com for example.

And then it’ll start tracking the information. You have to set back and wait a few days for data to start collecting and – so that takes a little bit of time. And there’s some settings inside the Monster Insights’ plug-in that you can go to and tweak. So, you can say like, “Oh, I don’t want – all of my data, so wherever I’m going on the website, I don’t wanna be tracked, or –.” So, you can set up some of those things as well.

So, it gives you Google Analytics into your dashboard. You don’t necessarily have to go to Google.com/analytics to get the information that you need. You can see a lot of the real time data right with in your WordPress dashboard. Which is really nice. So, you don’t have to – you’re not gonna get all of the information that you need, probably from the Google dashboard, inside of your WordPress site, but you’ll get enough to get a – keep a pulse on what’s going on your website. And then if you need more detailed analysis then you go over to Google.com/analytics.

And, so, that’s really kind of the whole thing that I want to share with you today. It’s about some of the benefits of tracking data. And even if you’re not gonna get to this high level, like I don’t do a lot of these things because I’m not running a business, but it’s very important just to turn Google Analytics on and let it collect data. Like I’ve got eight years worth of data going into Google Analytics and I can start looking through it and just look at the differences between, “Okay, how many people are coming into my website in 2011 when I got first started and how many are coming now?” I can do comparisons of how well is my traffic going.

All of this information is really cool and there’s a lot of neat things that you can do. But you first have to set up Google Analytics, get a plug-in running so that it is – the plug-in essentially just makes that code visible on every single page on your website and then as Google sees that code as it’s loading the page, that’s how it collects all of its information. So, that’s what I wanted to share with you today. Go out and install the Monster Insights Google Analytics plug-in and get started today. And, until next week take care and I will talk to you again soon. Bye-bye.