CW 179: Mastering Google Analytics with Justin Cutroni Director of Digital Intelligence for WebShare

Welcome to Creating wealth with Jason Hartman. During this program, Jason is going to tell you some really exciting things that you probably haven't thought of before. And a new slant on investing fresh new approaches to America's best investment that will enable you to create more wealth and happiness than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. He's been a successful investor for 20 years and currently owns properties in 11 states and 17 cities. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to financial freedom. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Good day and welcome to the Creating wealth show. This is your host, Jason Hartman and this is episode number 179. Thanks so much for joining me today. Couple things I want to talk about before we get to our main interview, which today is on that all important subject of getting found online. We have Justin Catroni who is a totally interesting expert on the subject of Google Analytics. And whether you work for an employer, a large company, a small company, a medium company, or you're in business for yourself, the web is that all important component of any business where it is important to get attention, to get found among the billions and billions of web pages out there. How can we make ours stand out? And I think you'll find this interview to be just fantastic. You'll learn a lot of stuff you didn't know before. So again, the show has two focuses. We talk about creating wealth, whether it be through investing or through business or the combination of the two. And you know, I was having lunch today with one of my vendors, one of my media buyers actually who buys advertising, radio media, television media for us from time to time. And we were talking about the two areas of everybody's financial life and our own financial life. And one of the things I mentioned to him was how I thought that I spent so much less time on my investments over the years than I did on my business over the years. I've probably made just about the same amount of money in each, but the investments have taken a lot less time than the active business. But the reason we have to do our business, our career, our work, is so that we can have that income stream to get the investments going. And when we make the business, the career, the work successful, then we can really invest with the big kids and we have access to much bigger and better investments that we don't necessarily have access to. Is a smaller player so that's. That's really where we want to take it. So we always have to balance those two parts of our financial life, our career, our job, our business with our investments. And they're both vitally important. Most of us can't have one without the other, so that's vitally important. So I want to talk a little bit about income property first before we talk about the business side of it and we talk about getting found online. First of all, I want to apologize because the last few weeks we had a big problem, a technical problem with our feed. And it's odd that we recently just had an interview with the podcast Answer man at the same time we were ironically having problems with our own podcasting feed. So if you felt that those last two episodes we posted number 178 and number 177, we talked about some stuff that was already out of date by the time you heard it. Well, that's probably because you probably didn't hear them. The episodes were actually posted. But the way our system works, it has to go from the main posting site, which is creatingwealthpodcast.com to Jason hartman.com to iTunes and all of the syndication distribution networks. And the feed was not working. The posts were actually posted and the shows were up. But most of you don't get the shows by going to creatingwealthpodcast.com. you get them from either Jason hartman.com or from iTunes or one of the other podcasting aggregators. Anyway, apologize for that. That was just kind of a technical glitch and hopefully it will not happen again. Let's talk for a moment here. First of all, the Creating wealth in Today's Economy bootcamp that we held last Saturday. That was a fantastic event. We had a great turnout, some really nice people, a lot of new business. So we're very grateful for that. And we presented some totally new thinking, some totally new information. I know that you listen to the show probably and follow my work because we really have some totally unique thinking about income, property investing, about monetary policy, about eliminating risk. And if you're a new listener, make sure you go back and listen to our, our core content shows, which really, really focus in on this. And this is stuff that you haven't heard before. It's not the same worn over, get rich quick and real estate junk that's out there and there's. The world is full of that stuff. So I understand completely. But this is really new and innovative thinking. And guess what? We have some new, new, more innovative thinking that you have never heard before. And we presented it for the first time last Saturday. And what this was is this was something that Doug came up with based on my work. And it was three different charts includes investment strength versus three main criteria. Number one being inflation, number two being deflation, and number three being taxation. So those three things affect our investment success pretty dramatically and also our career and business success. So what we did and we'll present this to you on a future show. Our producer just got it to me today and I listened to it and I think you're really going to like this because again, unique thinking, you haven't heard it before anywhere else that I know of. And we will show you all of the different income and investment classes based on these three issues. We constantly have to deal with inflation, deflation and taxation. So that'll be coming up on a future show which speaking of which, hope you enjoyed the last few shows. We had Steve Dexter on talking about buy and hold income property. We had Cliff the podcast answer man. We had Scott Myers talking about self storage. And by the way, if you're interested in self storage or mobile home park investing, give us a call, go to jasonhartman.com and fill out one of the web forms. Any of them just mention that when you do so on the site. And we are putting together a little group of us who is constantly looking for deals and we're making an offer almost every day on either a self storage facility or a mobile home park. And if you're interested in any of that kind of stuff, let us know through the website or by giving us a call. 714-820-4200. And we'd love to hear from you really to get into that game and do it properly with the stuff we're looking at, you need about a minimum of about $100,000 capital. And we'll talk to you about the opportunities we'll share, the opportunities we have there. So on this show, you know what we're talking about already. Number 180 is coming up next. And as you know, every tenth show we do a non financial topic and we're going to talk about dreams and just a whole bunch of interesting things on that show. We recorded that interview a while back and I think you'll really enjoy it. And then on show number 181, we're going to talk about enhancing your credit score. Number 182, we're going to talk about how to save on taxes through a small business, through a solo business, a home based business and a Little bit about income property there. Number 183, we have prognosticator Bruce Norris who will talk about his predictions for the economy. That's the second time we've had him on the show. And number 184, we'll talk about branding and marketing. Number 185, we have Rick Edelman, very well known financial advisor and radio talk show host nationally that I just recorded that interview and we'll have him on for show number 185. So we got a lot of good stuff coming up before we get to the interview with Justin on getting found online. I want to talk to you for a moment about property management. One of Ari's clients spoke with me yesterday about property management and I want to just give you all a warning with your property managers. I have noticed that since the economy has really hit the financial crisis that it seems as though property managers, and they're not the only ones that are doing this in all areas of life, we're having this happen. But property managers are starting to slip in some little extra fees from time to time that you may not notice. And I want you to be aware of these things. I want you to make sure that you're reading management agreements. If you renew the property management agreement, read the renewal form. If you're hiring a property manager, read the document and know what you're getting into. There are three main areas of concern I have here now mostly and again, this varies in different states, different cities, varies around the country. I always say embrace the fragmentation. Income property investing is a very fragmented business and that is actually good for us. Why? Well, because it keeps the institutional investors out of the game and leaves the opportunity for us. You're never going to see those crooks on Wall street come in and institutionalize the small income property investing business because it's just too fragmented and that's good for us. That might frustrate you on one hand to some extent, but it really is a good thing because if it weren't that way, the opportunity would not be here for us. Embrace the imperfections. Embrace the fragmentation. So the three areas of property management agreements I want you to really watch out for. Generally, property management adds up to about 10% per month. But in different areas, different managers do it a different way. Some might charge you 6, 7, 8% monthly, but they charge you a 50% lease up fee for when the property is initially leased. They might charge you a renewal fee to renew the lease every year if the tenant stays in the property. And here's one that Especially bugs me. I really don't want you to agree to this. And I have seen this just a couple of times recently where a property manager is trying to charge the owner when the property is vacant. Now you've heard me talk about it before, but there's this great little book written by Michael LeBeau and it's called the Greatest Management Principle in the World. And it has a brilliant statement. And this is worth writing down, it's worth remembering because it's really brilliant. Think about how this applies to every single area of life, whether it be your relationships, your marriage, your kids, your parents, government, social welfare programs, business in any angle, employees, vendors, whatever. Here it is. This is brilliant and it's really simple. What gets rewarded gets repeated. What gets rewarded gets repeated. So with property management, why would you ever want to reward your property manager for having your property vacant? You want to incentivize them to lease your property and create income. I saw one property manager that had in their agreement that the owner agrees to pay them $75 per month if the property is vacant. Now this property was only renting for $900 a month. Their fee was 10%. So they would only receive $90 if the property is occupied. I mean, to me that is completely ridiculous. And I don't ever want you to agree to something like that. You've got to just look at your agreements. Take the time to look at them. It's not very difficult. They're not very long. They're pretty simple agreements. So if you, you ever agree to some vacancy fee like this, because they do have to do a little bit of work when the property is vacant. But I just expect them to do that for free so that they get the reward when the property is occupied and rented. But if you do this, if you agree to anything, it better be a small fee, 20, $25 a month at just a totally nominal fee, certainly not $75, which is almost as much as they get when the property is leased. Lease up fees, watch out for them. Some managers are trying to charge a 100% lease up fee. In other words, the whole first month's ren. That's just too excessive. The highest you ever want to pay there is 70%, ideally 50%. And if you're paying that lease up fee, the management fee should definitely be lower than 10%. It should not be 10% plus a lease up fee. So that might be 7 or 8%. And a 50% of the first month's rent is the lease up fee. Renewal fees, watch out for these too. I think it's reasonable to pay your manager maybe $100 for a renewal fee. It's certainly better than having the property go vacant for a month in between tenants. But again, don't let them charge you 50% of one month's rent as a renewal fee. It's ridiculous. And one more little area to kind of watch out for is when they manage repairs of the property and so forth. Folks, just read your management statements. If there's something on it that bugs you, just email your manager and let them know that you're watching. Set the tone of the relationship so that they know you are are an aware, astute investor and you're keeping an eye on things. Property management. Again, it's not a high paying job. I always say it's a thankless, low paying job. But again, like any relationship, don't just take everything they say is the gospel. Be astute. And if you ever have any trouble with your managers, you've hired a manager through our network. Again, call us. We're a big client for that manager. Talk to your investment counselor at Platinum Properties Investor Network Incorporated and we will be happy to make sure that they are taking good care of you and doing the job right. Again, for existing clients, just a reminder, some of you don't use this and it's free, totally free. We offer free rental coordination for life. So if you need help, you have a vacant property anywhere that you've purchased through our network, just email your investment counselor here. Call your investment counselor. We'll get you set up with rental coordination, will place ads on your property. We'll kind of oversee your property manager a little bit for you and interact with them to make sure that you have success in creating as much income as possible out of your property. So we're right here with you for life. As long as we're around, we'll be around to help you. And that is what we are here for. Okay, let's go to the interview with Justin Cutroni. Let's talk about Google Analytics. Oh, hey, before I do that, sorry, one more thing. Masters weekend is coming up in October. The price increases on August 15th. Make sure you sign up for that. Go to jasonhartman.com and also while you're there, you should get two products there, maybe three. You should subscribe to our newsletter, the Financial Freedom Report. That is fantastic. And you want to get a subscription for a nominal $200 or I should say 197 per year. That's a great deal. You get the audio and the PDF copies of that and then our Master's weekend home study courses, like a best of that is a phenomenal product. It's got great sound quality and our creating wealth in today's economy. Home study course, a phenomenal product as well. We're getting very, very good comments on those products. You should buy them. The cheapest education in the world is simply getting a hold of these products. The most expensive education in the world is making the mistakes in real life. I'll give you an example. The Masters weekend, the live course we have coming up that we only do twice a year. The product that we have, the Masters weekend home study course. If you hired any one of those speakers that are the experts that are on that audio that are speaking live at the event in October, they would charge you probably anywhere between 150 and $380 per hour for their advice and their wisdom. And here you can get that whole Masters weekend home study course for $497. That is the best deal on education you could ever possibly have. It's the real world stuff. Just check it out. I think you'll be very, very pleased with our products. They're a very high quality. If you like the show and you've been listening for four, four and a half years, our products are even better. So take a look at those@jasonhartman.com and we'll be back with Justin right after this quick message.

Are you interested in a property outside of our network? Do you need a second opinion? No problem. Let Jason's experts evaluate the deal. Our deal evaluator is only $50. For more information go to jasonhartman.com now.

It's my pleasure to have Justin Catroni on the line with me. He is the author of two books on that all important subject of marketing and analyzing your marketing results on the web. His new book coming out is entitled Google Analytics and then his prior book is entitled Performance Marketing with Google Analytics Strategies and Techniques for Maximizing Online roi. And Justin, online ROI is what everybody wants, is the holy grail of the Internet. So welcome to the show and tell us all about it.

Yeah, thanks Jason. It's really great to be here. And you're right, we're living in this really great time now for online business where we just have an abundance of data and it's actually quite obscene the amount of data that we do have. And the great thing about that data is it provides a lot of insight into how well our online business is performing. And really all we need is a tool to look at and analyze that data. And when Google launched analytics five years ago, they really opened up analytics and data to the masses. Every organization, regardless of the size, now has a great free tool that they can use to measure how well their website is doing, how well their online marketing campaigns are doing, and basically how their online business is doing. So it's really a great time because we can get that level of detail of measuring really specific things like how's my email marketing doing, how's my paid search doing, how's my search engine optimization doing? It's just been explosive over the last five years. What Google's brought to the table and really probably the best thing that we should talk about when we get into Google Analytics is making sure everyone knows a few basic things about configuring this tool. You know, one thing I've learned in working with clients of all sizes, enterprises, mid sized businesses, small businesses, regardless of the industry, I've always found people have mistakes when it comes to configuring the tool. And we have this great saying, garbage in, garbage out.

Sure. Yeah, that's the old, old acronym from the computer revolution back in the late 70s GIGO.

Yeah, totally. Right. So if you're pumping lots of crappy data into Google Analytics, it's going to give you lots of crappy reports. And you know, really, it's not a complicated tool to configure, but there's some, some basic things that I think everyone needs to, to in order to make sure they have, they have good data.

Well, Justin, I want to get into that and how to configure this great free tool that is available to everybody and then how to interpret what's coming out of that tool. But before we do that, I just want to go to the brass tacks, the real basics here in terms of what some of the key metrics are that everybody should be thinking about on their website. In the old days of the Internet 10 years ago, which is like the old days, it's like dog years. We call it Internet years or like dog years, one for seven, really. But everybody would say things like, this website got a million hits. And then people started to drill down and talk about visitors, unique visitors and page views and all of these different things. Give us sort of the main metrics and what they mean, if you would. And then let's go into the tool.

Absolutely. Hopefully the one thing that the listeners will take from this podcast is the data that they should be thinking about. And first and foremost, I don't want anyone to be using the term hits anymore. The term HITS has been retired. There's a wonderful woman in our industry, Katie Payne. She's been working in analytics for a decade and she, she has an acronym for hits. It's how idiots track success.

That's what I'm afraid of. Exactly.

So, so we've, we've moved beyond hits. And really when we talk about tracking a website, we're actually even moving beyond visits. We're moving beyond page views. And whenever we talk about tracking a website, regardless of the tool, we want to track the metrics that directly relate to the bottom line of our business. And these are conversions. In Google Analytics we call these goals. Normally a conversion for an E commerce website would be someone buying a product. A conversion for someone on a lead generation type of website would be maybe submitting a contact form or click to chat or click to caller or some type of event like that. Those are the real things that we want to measure. We want to measure the business outcomes for our website because that's what makes a difference to our bottom line. The more transactions, the more leads. Those are the things that we want our website to produce. That's what we should be measuring. Now obviously we need to understand traffic, things like visits, how many sessions are happening. We need to track things like unique visitors being the number of people that are coming to our website. But really, if you gave me one metric trick to track, I would say I want to track conversions on my website.

You're absolutely right. Conversions are the holy grail. Obviously people want to have their website produce money. But just before we get to the conversion thing, some websites are recreational in nature. There's a zillion stories now about the person. Maybe it's a mom who just started a blog. And that blog was just a thing to do. It was sort of a hobby really. And it turned into this mega enterprise, this real business where advertisers flocked to it and all sorts of revenue was created later. But how can we just tell? Let's just talk about traffic first. So if you, if you talk about hits, which is the retired term, what is a hit? What is a visitor? What is traffic?

Yeah, that's, that's a great question to kind of get into the nitty gritty. So technically we do still have the term hit. And technically a hit is anytime someone's browser sends a request back to your server. So actually when you look at a given page on a website, it actually generates multiple hits because that page might need to load multiple images, it might need to pull in different types of code, JavaScript files, so there's actually a lot of communications going on in the background. And so that's why we really don't focus on hits anymore. Maybe something's better to say is a page view. Right? So if we think about the data for our website in terms of a hierarchy, like a pyramid, at the top of the pyramid, we would have unique visitors, right? Those are people. And obviously we want to track the number of people because we want to understand our audience. How many people are coming to our website, lets us know, you know, how many people can we potentially sell to or expose marketing messages to or whatever it may be. So at the top of the pyramid, we like to measure those unique visitors below that. Right. That second level is visits. These are also called sessions sometimes. And a visit is basically someone's interaction with the website. And so me, Justin, I might visit Amazon.com once in the morning to look for some books, and then I might come back in the afternoon to actually make the purchase. So in terms of the data that I would produce in that scenario, I would be one unique visitor, but I would have created two visits to Amazon's website.

Just a question for you, Justin, on unique visitors, I'm wondering how the analytic is created for that. Is it based on the IP address, which is like your address, where you're coming from? Is that how they know what is unique, one IP address or another? Here's why I asked that. If I'm at the office, I use one computer at the office and a different computer at home, which have obviously different Internet service providers, different IP addresses. Am I counted as two visitors, even though I'm really only one person?

That's a great question, and it's something that I hear quite often. Google Analytics does not use an IP address to identify unique visitors. It actually uses a cookie. And everyone probably knows what a cookie is, but it's basically a small text file that gets set on your computer by the web browser. So Google Analytics actually has, at its core, four cookies that it uses to identify a person. Now, obviously, using cookies is not 100% accurate. We have issues with cookies. And for the exact reason that you explained in your scenario, if you visit the website in the morning, Google Analytics is going to drop a set of cookies on your computer at work that identifies you as a person. Then if you go home, Google Analytics is going to drop another set of cookies to identify you as a person. And that's just kind of a fact of life that we deal with in the analytics world. Any tool that is using cookies, which is a Majority of the tools that are out there has no way to synchronize those cookies across different computers or even different browsers. Right. If I use my laptop at home and I use Chrome, Firefox and Safari and I visit the website from each of those browsers, I'm going to get three cookies. It's. It's just a fact of life that we deal with. So. So, you know, the one thing that we say whenever we talk about any of this web data is that, is it 100% accurate? You know, like checking your bank account every month and balancing your checkbook? Absolutely not. There's so many factors that can cause discrepancies in this data, whether it's cookies or Internet connections or browser settings. But basically what we're doing is we're looking for big trends. If we get Google Analytics configured the right way, I'm pretty confident we're going to be within 95, 90% of what's actually happening out there. So. So the best advice is simply get over it, and once people understand that, we can move forward.

Excellent. So go on. You were talking about the different types of counting, the different types of statistics, if you will.

Yeah. So we have this pyramid and at the top we count people, unique visitors. Underneath that we count visits or sessions. So how often you come to the website and what you do. And then we have this bottom layer of data that we call page views. And page views are basically every time a page renders in the visitor's browser, Google Analytics will collect that data. So we'll see every page that you look at during one of your visits on the website. So we can see what products you're looking at, what blog posts. If you're adding things to cart, we can look at the steps that you proceed through in the shopping cart. So we get very granular. We can actually get a little bit more granular, like van page views and actually look at what elements you interact with, how you play with video players and things of that sort of. That's definitely more in the advanced realm. And we call that tracking events or page level events. But at the very least, we can measure you as a person, how many times you've come to the website and what you do during your visit. And along with the pages you look at, we can look at things like, on average, how long do you spend on the website? Like I said, the content, if you've been to the website before, one metric, that's really, really cool. And we've been promoting a lot over the last few years in the web analytics is a metric called bounce rate. Have you used it or heard of that metric before?

I've heard of it, but I can't say that I'm really using it. I'm not good at this stuff yet at my company, and we want to be.

Well, you'll be good at it at the end of this talk. So bounce rates, another metric that's really, really insightful, can really help you understand your online marketing activities. And whenever I talk about bounce rate, I use the definition that my mentor, Avinash Kaushik uses when he talks about bounce rate. He basically defines bounce rate. As I came to your website, I puked and I left. And you know, obviously talking about data, this stuff can get a little bit dry. But using a description like that, it makes it a little bit more interesting. Let's dig into it, though. But bounce rate, what it really means is someone visited the website, they looked at one single page, and then they left immediately. And this is a very insightful thing to understand. If you can understand people coming from a certain marketing campaign are bouncing or leaving the website at a very high frequency, it means they're responding to some type of marketing message. They're landing on the website, they're looking at one page and they're saying, you know what, I don't really want to go any further. I don't think this is for me. And they're leaving immediately. You know, and how do we get people to buy a product or convert if they can't move beyond that initial page of the website? Right. If. If everyone leaves from where they land from that initial page, they're not going to move deeper into our site and do the things that we want them to do. So if we can identify different marketing activities or different sources of traffic that have a really, really high bounce rate, then we can start to understand where there might be a problem in our marketing. Maybe it's an incorrect creative or a wrong marketing message or something along those lines. And normally we can try to lower the bounce rate. That means we can get more people to move into the website. And if we're getting more people moving deeper into the website, it's more likely that they're going to do what we want them to do.

Absolutely. Before you tell us about some of the other stuff, I want to talk about some of the things that might generate faulty stats when viewing analytics. And the one that comes to my mind is the concept of spiders, because those create page views, tell everybody what a spider is. And if that creates faulty statistics or They've corrected for that.

That's a great question. Spiders, and they're sometimes called bots, they're basically automated programs that most often search engines send out to collect data. For example, for Google to create search results, it literally has to download the Internet. And I think they're downloading the entire Internet like multiple times a day. But basically they send out these programs that more or less pull back all of the different websites, right? They go out, they crawl, they collect that, the HTML, and they send it back to Google where it's then indexed. And so, you know, obviously you don't want to look at traffic to your website generated by spiders or bots. They're not real people. They should not be included in the metrics that you're looking at. And luckily, a majority of the spiders and bots that exist right now do not execute JavaScript. And Google Analytics collects data using a little piece of code, JavaScript code that you paste on every page of your website. So when these bots or these spiders go out and they crawl your site, they see the JavaScript, but it's like 99.9% of them won't actually execute that code. That means they won't actually. They don't. They don't trigger the Google Analytics mechanism for data collection. They don't generate any data. So. So normally you don't have to do any special configuration with Google Analytics to keep spiders or bots from generating data for your website.

So when you look at a Google Analytics report, for example, if someone is thinking of advertising on a certain website, or maybe they're looking at a business opportunity and they're looking at buying a website from somebody. This analytics stuff is really important because you want to know what's really going on. Is it accurate if you know how to interpret, if you know how to do the stuff that we're talking about today? Or is there any way that someone can pump up the numbers or cook the book, so to speak?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. There's definitely ways to cook the books. That's upset. That's great. You could definitely drive up the metrics in terms of visits or page views or unique visitors. You can absolutely do that. And most often when you want to manipulate the data in analytics, it comes down to that JavaScript tracking code that goes on the pages that can be manipulated in many, many different ways to make the numbers appear a certain way, either higher or potentially lower, if that was ever the case. So fundamentally, it all comes down to making sure you've got that code on the pages Making sure that code is installed the right way, and then that will ultimately lead to good data within Google Analytics. But yeah, it's one of those things where if you're looking at a website and someone's sending you some Google Analytics data and you need to make some important business decisions based off of it, you should absolutely ask about the implementation, about the configuration, you know, who did it, what types of settings they have in order to have that confidence in the data. Because the one thing I've seen is that if there's no confidence in the data, everything starts to crumble.

Sure, absolutely. We'll go on with the rest of the metrics. Are we done with metrics yet or we've got more to talk about there?

Right. Those are some good metrics. Visitors, visits, page views, bounce rate, again, bounce rates, a great one that I'm a big proponent of. And conversions. Right. To me, conversions are really, really huge. Even though that may seem like just a handful of metrics, what's key is that we start segmenting those metrics. Really one of the fundamental tenants of analytics is the segmentation of our data. Because, you know, in general, if I told you, hey, you know, my website got 30,000 visits last month, is that good or bad? It's hard to understand. But if I told you that I got 18,000 from my email marketing campaign and I got another 10,000 from my Google AdWords campaign, it starts to give you more context about what's happening with the website, how those different traffic sources are performing so that you understand the little pieces, because the little pieces end up adding up and causing the big macro thing. So even though we're only talking maybe about unique visitors, visits, bounce rate, and conversions, the segmentation of that data is really the critical thing to understand how those little buckets of traffic are performing and influencing the overall site.

The one stat you really didn't mention, though, in there is the session length, how much time someone spends on your website. Now that I think of it, Justin, I suppose that could be very misleading because I leave nine browser windows open all the time and walk away from my computer. And I guess that's adding up the length, right?

Yeah, the length of visit, the time on page. You know, obviously some of those metrics are exceedingly appropriate if you're a publisher and you're looking to generate a lot of ad revenue. Understanding which pages are generating a lot of time and attention from people, those metrics definitely have their own more or less unique challenges in terms of measurement as well. You could leave browser windows open I know for me personally, I might have the computer open at home and then my son or my daughter might say, hey, it's time to play baseball. And instantly my web work is done and off I go and then I come back two hours later. But, you know, a few things to keep in mind there. By default, Google Analytics is going to limit the length of your visit to 30 minutes and it will terminate that, that visit length after 30 minutes of.

Inactivity in terms of counting it as length. So the longest length is a 30 minute visit, even if you have that page open for four days.

Right, right, exactly. It's going to terminate it. The 30 minutes is an industry standard. Basically. 30 minutes of an activity within the analytics industry means that you've gone on to something else and most tools will terminate your visit after 30 minutes. So, you know, so like I said, said, those things are good, but they're more appropriate for certain industries in terms of their measurement. The other thing to keep in mind is something that we can't get out of Google Analytics and that's understanding the purpose for somebody's visit, why they're visiting the website. I really can't discern why you're using my website without asking you. Now, obviously my personal website, I write a blog about web analytics and Google Analytics, I know you come to my website to learn things, but if I'm an E commerce vendor, do I know if you're coming to the website to buy a product, to research a product, to get some help with something you previously purchased? So, you know, obviously those are three very, very different activities and the time it takes to do each of those activities can be very, very different. To buy a product, it might take a little bit longer than to find help on that specific product. So time, I think really needs to be looked at in the context of what were you trying to do rather than just as aggregate. Someone spent X amount of time on the website. Is it good or bad?

Good point. Good point. Let me take a brief pause. We'll be back in just a minute.

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Yep, there's a show for just about anything. Only from jasonhartman.com or type in Jason Hartman in the iTunes store. Can you always tell via analytics reports where someone came from and then where they went afterwards?

That's an awesome question because it really hits on to me. One of the most important things that people need to do when they're configuring Google Analytics and that's identifying their marketing activity. So if you go into Google Analytics in the left hand navigation, there's a series of reports called traffic source. And I'm a data nerd. And if I had to choose a set of reports, that was really my favorite. I love these reports because the traffic sources reports tells me where people are coming from. And that's where I can start to get into measuring my marketing spend and where people are coming from. And I can try to align that with what are my objectives. Right. If I'm paying for email or paid search or display advertising, are those different things driving traffic to my website? And more importantly, is that traffic actually converting? So that section, the traffic sources report, identifies where people come from. Now, I'd like to just mention a couple of reports in there to give people some direction on what they should be looking for. One of the first things we have in that series is a report called the direct traffic report. And direct traffic in Google Analytics means people coming directly to the website. So if I hear a radio ad for Coca Cola, I might go home and type in www.cocacola.com or coke.com or whatever the URL is, I've gone directly to the website. So direct traffic is how many people are coming directly to your website, going and typing in the URL. And that's usually a great way to identify how well any offline marketing is doing. So if you look at your direct traffic and you understand while I'm doing some major offline advertising in New York or San Francisco, Chicago, wherever it may be, you would expect to see maybe some brand impact in people typing your URL directly into the website. In addition to direct traffic, we also have this bucket of traffic called referring sites. Now, a referring website is literally any website out there on the Internet that has a link back to your website. So I'm going to go off in my blog in a couple of weeks and I'm going to say, hey, I appeared on this great podcast, here's a link back, and I'm going to put a link there. And so you're going to see the data as Coming from my website, katroni.com and you'll see it as a referring website. So referring websites are great because sometimes there are sites we expect to see in there. Maybe, obviously if you have partnerships or talk to someone and said, hey, will you put a link on your blog so it would drive traffic to my blog, or would you put a link on your store to drive traffic? You would expect to see those types of websites in there. Referring sites can also be very variable because you don't control sometimes people creating links to your site, bloggers and social media people generating a lot of content, they can add links or create links to your site a lot of different ways. And so, you know, obviously with referring traffic, there's things in there that you're expecting and then there's things that you're not expecting. It's always fun to find those not expecting things because then you can try to dig a little bit deeper and learn about, you know, well, who is this person and why did they send so much traffic? And maybe I should talk to them about a partnership or something like that. So so far we've got direct traffic people coming right to your website, referring traffic, which is people coming from other websites. And then kind of the third bucket, we have this thing called search engines, right? And I think we all know what those are. And Google Analytics will track search engines and actually create two different buckets. They'll track what's called paid traffic. And that's traffic coming from Google, Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Bing, all the different paid providers that are out there. It actually does take a little bit of configuration to track those types of paid search traffic. And we'll get that into that in a second. The second type of search engine, obviously organic traffic, right? So I'm sure a lot of your listeners are familiar with search engine optimization. Creating a good website that's easy to get crawled by the crawlers, and getting a lot of good links from other websites to increase page rank and other things to improve your overall ranking. So obviously those paid search and organic traffic, very, very different things in terms of how we go about doing it, right? We invest in the long term for search engine optimization and build great content on a well structured site. Paid search, we go out and we create bidding strategies around different types of keywords in order to generate traffic. So Google Analytics will break those two things out. So we have basically direct traffic, referring traffic and search engines. Now again, that gets into segmentation, right? You're looking at traffic where it's coming from in three different buckets and so now you can go and you can use those reports to understand, well, not only how much traffic did I get, but how many conversions did I get from these three different things. So you can start to see what are my conversions from organic traffic, what are my conversions from paid search traffic. And you can start to evaluate your traffic based on conversions by source, which is what we're trying to get at with this whole little part of the conversation anyways is seeing where people came from and then what are the outcomes that they did. So you can go to a report like Direct Traffic, and right at the top of the report there'll be a little tab called Goals. Click on that. You'll be able to see the conversions coming from your direct traffic. So that's kind of the default stuff. Makes sense so far.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So this is great information. I mean, just really you just put such a nice understanding on this whole thing with your example of the pyramid and everything. I guess the thing we probably need to talk about now is how to use the tools. I mean, I think you covered that a little bit, but there's some more technical, like how do you sign up and where do you click and what you paste this code where into your website and how all that works.

Yeah, absolutely. I think maybe the last thing I'll touch on with identifying where people come from is to just give everyone here. The biggest mistake people make is that, you know, I mentioned Google will identify direct traffic, referring traffic, it'll identify organic search engines. The one thing everyone needs to remember to do, probably to me, the most important configuration thing you do is whenever you're doing any type of online marketing, whether it's email, whether it's paid search, whether it's display ads, even if it's social. Right. If you're, if you're putting links out on Twitter, you need to go through this process called link tagging. And you know, I'm not going to get into it too much, but I just want to point everybody in the right direction because this is the biggest problem I see. Whenever you're going to send out any piece of marketing material, you need to actually modify the URLs that you're putting into those materials. Right. Think of an email. When you send out an email, usually there's some type of call to action in that email. Buy now, Learn more. Some type of link that you want someone to click on. Well, you need to. That's called a destination URL. And you need to modify that URL within the Email, or if it's display ads, there's a destination URL there. You need to modify that URL in that tool that you. You're using to traffic those ads. And you need to modify it by adding a few extra parameters to the end. And this process is called link tagging. And the reason why it's so critical is that when someone clicks on that link in an email or someone clicks on that display ad, they'll land on your website and in the URL there'll be a few extra parameters that are specific to Google Analytics. So Google Analytics, the little code, it looks up at the URL and says, oh, look, I know you came from an email because of those parameters, or I know you came from a display because of those parameters, and that's what's critical. So that when you go into that traffic sources section of reports, there's actually a report in there called the campaigns report. That's where you'll see all your marketing campaigns after you do this process of link tagging. So then right now you'll be able to go and say, I want to evaluate how well my $10,000 for email did. Go to your campaigns report, look for the name of your marketing campaign, and you will have a nice table of data. It will show you how much traffic in terms of visits. It will show me how many pages were served up. It will show you the bounce rate to help you understand if people move beyond that landing page when they got to your site from that email. And then there is that goal tab right at the top of the table, you will be able to click on that and say, now let me see the conversions that came from people visiting the site from that email. And to me, that's nirvana. But you get the traffic number, you get the bounce rate to see if they moved in. And if once you understand if they did move in, you get the conversion numbers. And now I think all of these numbers start to make a lot of sense. Because if a campaign has a really, really high bounce rate, it usually means there's some type of disconnect. Whatever you're sending out or the marketing materials, it doesn't exactly. Right. I'm not sure if you guys have talked about scent, but maybe the creatives different, the message, the offer might be different, but bounce rates a great way to understand if there's some problem with that connectivity between what you're sending out to people and what they're seeing.

Oh, and Justin, that's a huge problem. I mean, as just as an Internet user, I can't tell you the number of times I've been interested in something. I got an email, I clicked on a link, and the page I was referred to was sort of irrelevant compared to what I thought I was going to find there. So that's a really expensive loss. Now, is link tagging the same as tracking links? That's the same thing, right?

Yeah, more or less. You know, I think if people should definitely go to the Google Analytics support site and there's a whole section on campaign tracking, because there's a certain set of parameters that need to be used to identify your marketing activities to Google Analytics. So you can't just create some parameter out of the blue. You need to use the ones that Google actually has predefined for you.

Because I've heard that referred to as tracking links for years now. We use that. But link tags tagging is the way that Google requires you to tag it so that it reports properly. Is that what it is?

Yep, absolutely.

All right, good. What else?

Well, I think, you know, obviously to me, the best way to start is to get in there, make sure you're tagging your marketing campaigns so that you can see them in the traffic sources reports. The other thing that's critical is make sure you're configuring your goals, right? Make sure you're telling Google Analytics, hey, this is what a conversion is. And the great thing about Google Analytics when it comes to a conversion is a conversion can be almost anything. It can be be seeing a certain number of pages, like five pages per visit. It could be spending a certain amount of time on the website, like 10 minutes, at least 10 minutes. Or it could be reaching a thank you page from submitting an order. So obviously you need to go through that so that when you're looking at these campaign reports, in any report, you're getting conversion data. The other side of setting up the goals is another thing that I really, really suggest everyone doing is that when you create a goal, you can create what's called a funnel. And funnels are basically a series of steps that someone needs to proceed through before they reach a goal. So the classic example is E commerce checkout, right? You need to give your billing, your shipping, your credit card information before you get that thank you page. And so to me, this is another really, really valuable source of data because when you get someone starting a checkout process or any type of funnel, they're literally within two or three clicks to converting. And they're so close, you've already spent all this money getting them to the Website. You've spent all this money building a website to convert them or persuade them to convert. You're within a couple of clicks. You don't want to drop the ball here.

You know, there are a lot of abandoned shopping carts out there, aren't there?

Oh, unbelievable. It's really unbelievable how many crappy shopping experiences exist. And using a funnel, you'll be able to identify the steps in your checkout process or whatever process you define and where people are leaving from. So literally, it's in the goals section of Google Analytics and it's a report called Funnel Visualization. And you'll be able to say, okay, for my checkout goal, show me the funnel, show me the steps. It's great. They have these big bars that are green and red. Red means bad, green means good. So you want to see a lot of green and a little tiny piece of red. If you're seeing a lot of red, it means that that step has a high abandonment. A lot of people are bailing out a process at that step. And in a. So obviously it's not going to tell you why they're leaving, but at least now it's giving you that vector of saying, hey, step three of your checkout process. Really crappy. Everyone's leaving. And again, I love this data because if you're going to make any changes to your website, I'm going to make them right there because I'm within 12 clicks of getting a conversion. And so that's where I'm going to start optimizing and changing my website.

Good advice for sure. So how does someone sign up for Google Analytics?

There's two different ways. If you're currently using Google AdWords, analytics is already baked right into AdWords. There should be a tab for it. You can just go right in there and create an analytics account within your AdWords account. Or if you're not using Google AdWords, you can go to google.com analytics and there should be a big blue button that says get started. And they'll walk you through the process right there.

Fantastic. You don't need a web developer to help you out with it.

It's easy to creating your account, very straightforward. They're going to ask you for basic information like your name, the website, your website domain, your phone number. Now, when you're done with the process, they're going to show you that little piece of code that needs to go on every page. So if you're Johnny on the spot and you're doing everything for your web business, they'll give you that code, then you'll need to go add that code to your website. If you have a vendor that you work with that does your web development, you can give it to them. It's nice because they actually have some questions there that asks you, will you be installing this code, will you be sending it to somebody else? And if you're sending it to someone else, they'll actually give you a nice little template email that you can use to send to them. So again, it kind of depends on you and your business and who does what. But once you get that code on the page, you'll start to collect data. Then get in there and do set up some goals like I said, and make sure you're doing that link tagging for all your marketing activities.

Excellent stuff, Justin. This is really, really valuable. What else do you want from people to know?

Well, you know, I think to me, Google Analytics is really the gateway drug of web analytics. And if I could encourage you guys to do anything, get in there, look at the data. Always look at it through the lens of what am I trying to do as a business? Where am I spending money and am I getting a return on that money? Once you start to regularly use analytics, I want you to actually move beyond Google Analytics and I want you to start to do surveys. I want you to start to collect qualitative data about your website traffic. And by that, I want you to start understanding why are people visiting the website. And there's a lot of free tools out there that people can use to ask very simple questions. Because once you start to understand that why, that can change a lot of your strategic thinking about your content, your layout, your marketing. So yeah, just remember Google Analytics is an unbelievable tool. You're going to find it really useful for a long, long time. But it's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to data.

Fantastic. On the survey point, Justin, which survey system do you recommend? Because I think surveys are a big miss for a lot of businesses. A lot of websites that they can just activate and use and it's either cheap or free. Do you have a recommendation there?

Sure, absolutely. The, the tool that I always get people started on as a free tool. We love free.

Free is good.

Free is great. From a company called iPerceptions. It's called 4Q, the number 4 and then the letter Q. And the great thing about 4Q is that it's, it's simple. It just asks four questions. Why did you come here? Were you able to do what you wanted? If not, tell us why and then do you have anything else you'd like to add? And to me that's a great way to get into it so you can run out. And just like with Google Analytics, the system works more or less the same. It's a small piece of code and you'll be off and running with surveys.

Well, Justin, what you do is so important because I believe it was the very famous David Ogilvie who was one of the original advertising men who wrote Confession of an Advertising Man. He said, I know that half of my marketing or half of my advertising is working and half isn't. I just don't know which half.

Yeah, I think it was Ogilvy and I think John Wanamaker said that as well. That's a great quote.

And nowadays people don't have to be in the dark about which half is working and which half isn't. They know where to spend the money. They know where to spend their effort and devote their energies. And that is the great thing about analytics. This is so important. People should read your books. Your books are available on Amazon and can just search them by your name. Justin Catroni. And also you have a great blog that is@cutroni.com that's C-U-T R-O-N-I.com blog. Any other resources you want to tell our listeners about.

Really appreciate the shout out there. Those are great places to get started. You'll be able to find other links off of the blog. I'm also on Twitter ustincatron. It's great because every now and then what I'll do is an hour of Twitter support. So if I've got an hour to kill, I'll just open it up. And anyone that wants to ask a question over Twitter, I'm more than happy to help out. So those are the best ways to find me.

All right, fantastic. Well Justin, thanks so much for joining us today and telling us about this. A very important part of Internet marketing and making money online. Thank you.

Thank you.

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