Links Mentioned in Episode

• Kevin Dieny LinkedIn
• Google Ads Paid Search Consulting
• Top Reports in Google Analytics [Blog Article]
• Top Advanced Reports in Google Analytics [Blog Article]

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Kevin Dieny: Hello and welcome to the Close the Loop podcast. I’m your host, Kevin Dieny, and today we’re going to be talking about the Top Reports in the Universal Analytics of Google Analytics. Now I say Universal Analytics because Google Analytics is changing, at least right now, it is. It is in the transition, over the next 12, maybe 18 months, every business is going to be switching from the Universal Analytics over to Google Analytics 4.

[00:00:26] Kevin Dieny: Basically their most updated version of the platform, the old versions will be deprecated, so they won’t provide support for them. And they may even just stop working. So today, what are the top reports? Right? If you’re a business owner, at least when I’ve been on a lot of calls, or meetings, demos, with businesses, as soon as the word Google Analytics is mentioned, people run for the hills.

[00:00:48] Kevin Dieny: I see cringes. I see. Ah, man, I see. I ha that’s like a. That’s a burden, you know, it’s, it’s like a necessary evil to have Google analytics. And that’s, that’s how some businesses are looking at it. So some owners are looking at it. If you’re not looking at Google analytics every week… I would say it’s probably painful for you.

[00:01:10] Kevin Dieny: If you’re not looking at it, maybe every month, it’s tolerable for you, but if you’re not looking at it every week. Yeah, I mean, it’s going to feel painful to look at it because you’re not used to it. There’s a lot of information in there and it feels kind of technical. It feels like gobbledygook.

[00:01:24] Kevin Dieny: So the purpose of Google analytics, right. Is to give you an idea of what’s working. What has been working on. And I think they also, I mean, we may also asterisks, like it includes applications. If you have mobile apps, it includes what’s going on in your website, mobile and desktop. It’s going to include, if there’s e-commerce components too, but generally speaking, it’s, it’s covering your

[00:01:49] Kevin Dieny: Your own property website what’s happening on there. So the top reports, right, that we want to talk about today are what are going to be those reports, those areas in Google analytics that are really going to give you a lot of value that are really gonna be a report you should look at every week.

[00:02:04] Kevin Dieny: Right? So what makes that cut? Now? Obviously the subjective side of this is, oh man, like what one business finds important is different than another business. And that’s absolutely true. Generally, I would say, if I was to come to your business, let’s say I’m the marketing consultant. And then what I normally do in my role is a lot of analytics anyway.

[00:02:27] Kevin Dieny: So let’s say I come over to your company to help you out. And let’s say I only have a couple hours to do that. So how am I going to walk away for a couple hours and leave you with, leave your business with something valuable that it could get out of your Google analytics? So let’s start there. That’s how I’d want to frame this.

[00:02:47] Kevin Dieny: So the first question I would ask, no matter what is, how does this business make money? How is this business generating revenue? So you could think about that for a second. How does my business generate sales and revenue? Well, it might be pretty obvious. It’s like, well, I collect payment information and that’s not really what I’m talking about.

[00:03:06] Kevin Dieny: I’m talking about the process, if someone was to do business with your company, Tell me the process that they would have to go through for that to happen. And you might say, well, they have to find me, okay. They have to need the services that I offer. Fair, good. Right. Then they have to schedule time, make an appointment, do something like that so that we can, cause you know, maybe you’re not the type of business that can just impulsively provide a service if it is, or isn’t fine..

[00:03:34] Kevin Dieny: So someone, either does it immediately or schedules a time for the service to be delivered? The service then gets delivered then afterward there’s a payment processed, for you, between you and the customer, you and the consumer, and then you get paid and then, either they’re a client or customer of yours from that point on like subscription-based, or it’s a one-off one-time deal sort of a situation.

[00:03:59] Kevin Dieny: So you may say, okay. Yeah, that’s, that’s kind of like how my business generates revenue. Okay, well then the very next question I’d have after asking. Okay, how does your business generate revenue would be? How does your business want, how does your business want to increase the revenue that it’s generating?

[00:04:22] Kevin Dieny: Right. And you’d say, okay, well, let’s go back to that original process. You told me about how you make revenue. Okay, they have to find me if, to know about me, okay. Well, if we increase the number of people that find you or know about. Right then we’re, we’re making the assumption, through correlation, we’re basically saying, well, if we increase in our people that know about me, then by that same token, I would expect more people to do more sales, more revenue.

[00:04:47] Kevin Dieny: More consumers customers to come out of that. And that’s probably true for most businesses you could go to farther down and say, okay, well, because I need more people who are fit and that’s probably a little more important, right? Not just people who know about you. So how, how are you going to increase those people who are a fit?

[00:05:04] Kevin Dieny: That’s an interesting question. Okay, now, after they’re a fit, they need to sustain their need to schedule, or they need to be able to, set an appointment. They need to be able to signify that the deal is going to take place that the delivery is going to happen and then they need to, then you need to deliver the service to them.

[00:05:21] Kevin Dieny: So how do you get more? Service requests, appointments, how do you get more deliveries? How do you get more projects? How do you get more appointments completed, anything like that? And then ultimately, how do you get more payments processed? Right? So each of those steps is a point along the process that, you come up with, I’m just going off of a hypothetical here.

[00:05:43] Kevin Dieny: All of those points are areas where you could actually increase the revenue for your. But some of those points are easier to increase and some of those are more difficult to increase. Okay. So how does all of this, how does all of this that we’re talking about right now? How does that have to, what does that have to do with Google analytics?

[00:06:02] Kevin Dieny: So it’s like glad I’ve asked, because I’m going to explain that. So Google analytics is going to tell you information about what’s happening on your website. Now your website I’d ask. All right. Pause it right. And I can put forward is part of, as part of maybe possibly most all, or at least some of those points we talked about and how a business generates revenue generate sales.

[00:06:28] Kevin Dieny: So where in your business would you say is Google analytics, is your website, going to have a higher influence in the process for your business in generating sales, and you could say. Some of the farthest away stuff as well. The website’s only, it’s a very, very beginning, right? That’s when people find out about me, that’s where people find out my phone number.

[00:06:51] Kevin Dieny: That’s when people find out my email, that’s where people find out more about who I am, or, or maybe there’s a directory site where you’re listed, or there’s a site from the insurance, or there’s some directory or there’s some way where people are going to pick, okay, they’re going to pick me, my business, me as a doctor me as a small business, a local business that there’s something.

[00:07:11] Kevin Dieny: There that the consumer’s doing their research and then they find out who I am, and then there’s sort of a contact point. How are they going to contact you? So if any of those points right, hits up with your website right there, that’s a good area to say, okay. The website probably has some influence in that.

[00:07:28] Kevin Dieny: So right then by the association of all that, how can we increase those events through. What’s happening on our website. So that’s where it gets a little, again, it gets everything here, so subjective, right? Every business is so different. So how do you increase the people who find you? Well, a lot of times we may think, oh, well, that’s SEO.

[00:07:53] Kevin Dieny: Well, sure. Looking at it like, okay, there’s the organic side. There’s also referral business. There’s also a paid advertising. There’s also like we had said directories there’s listings, there’s reviews. There’s um, gosh, you know, just a lot of ways people are finding out about businesses. They didn’t know about.

[00:08:14] Kevin Dieny: How are consumers who never have heard of you finding you? So that’s a really good question. And that’s part of good Google analytics can provide. So let’s say you want to know that question. Okay. How can Google analytics help me find out? And everything usually starts with the question.

[00:08:28] Kevin Dieny: How can Google analytics help me find out how people are finding me, finding my business? That’s a report that’s in Google analytics, right. And that’s usually sources. So what is bringing traffic, visitors, people to your website now that tells you where they were before and then where are they and how they got to your website?

[00:08:49] Kevin Dieny: Because if they don’t know who you are, let’s be honest. They’re not typing in, you know, Kevin’s Roofing Service or something like that. Or Kevin’s Heating Air Mechanical.com, right? They’re not, they’re not typing that in without knowing who you are. So how are they figuring out your website? How are they figuring all that out?

[00:09:09] Kevin Dieny: And that then a lot of times is, well, maybe they’re looking online, maybe they’re doing some research and when they do do that research, then that’s going to lead them to your website. So there’s, there’s a report. There’s many reports. There’s a couple of reports for this that you can do.

[00:09:20] Kevin Dieny: And there’s the custom side is you can make your own reports, but let’s just stick with the top default reports that are in Google Analytics today. Okay. So, if you are in Google analytics, you’re going to go to acquisition. Acquisition is basically how are people coming to your website?

[00:09:34] Kevin Dieny: Basically all the reports under that, like category of acquisition are gonna be telling you information about how people were acquired, how they come to your website. So you think, okay, that’s interesting. Now for your business, you may say, well, You know, if they’re coming from a place where I’m putting effort, then I would want to know that.

[00:09:54] Kevin Dieny: So you’d say, well, I’m spending money here, spending resources there. I’m posting a lot on social media. I’m making videos. I want to see if that’s having an influence. You may say, well, you know, our website has a blog. I don’t really know if it’s working or not. So as the blog generating, you know, bringing people in all of those are great questions.

[00:10:10] Kevin Dieny: Any question you have that has that line in there, how’s it bringing them to my website. That’s going to be within the acquisition tab of Google analytics. And you can answer that and say, okay, well, generally at the top level, I would say, start with the channels. Like listing sites, advertisements, organic, referrals, anything like that is all going to be categorized into those big bucket groups.

[00:10:32] Kevin Dieny: If you want to know, Google search, how many people from Bing search… how many people are coming in. How many of those sources are bringing visitors to my website? That would be more specific within, okay. I want to see organically. What’s bringing them here, but if you’re just like, okay, I’ll just lump every organic Google, you know, every search that people are doing online together..

[00:10:52] Kevin Dieny: Then just go to the channels report and that’ll show you, right. They’ll tell you channels. Okay. Here’s all the places you’re spending money, advertisement, channels. Here’s the organic that’s, you know, search engines, that’s organic. Here is all the traffic that is coming from social media. There’s a social tab there.

[00:11:09] Kevin Dieny: Right? There’s also things like referrals, which is like people posting links about your company. Okay. That’s interesting. Direct would be people typing in your URL, Kevin’s Heating and Air Mechanical.com, which is going to be some people, but not a ton, right? How many people are saving that as bookmarks, maybe, you know?

[00:11:27] Kevin Dieny: So that answers that question. That’s why that report those reports are very interesting because if your business is thinking. Okay, great. Now I found out that a lot of people are coming to my website from Google My Business.

[00:11:41] Kevin Dieny: Interesting, that’s a listing site. So what can I then do to do more of that? Or what can I do to replicate that in other listing sites? So that is the next that’s. That’s the third question, right? First one is how does your business sell? Second one is okay, how can I increase? Well, maybe we should increase.

[00:11:59] Kevin Dieny: Let’s say our listing presence. Then the third question is, okay, what are the actions needed to do something with what you know, finding out, okay, great. Google My Business is doing a lot for you. That’s fine information, but what do you do with it? Right? What’s the next step? How can you increase that?

[00:12:15] Kevin Dieny: What, what actions are possible to take for your business to do something with that information. And that everything before that is information gathering everything. After that, at this point, onward is orchestration. Everything now is taking an action. Everything now is okay, what am I going to do about that?

[00:12:33] Kevin Dieny: And that is where you put on your marketing hat. Before, I think you’re more like, you know, I’m have my inquisitive hat on my detective hat. And so you’re figuring, just trying to get, gather information and figure this out. So that’s what we’re after with any question. Right. So if you’re, again, another question you might have as a business could be okay, I’ve see where people are coming from when they get there to my website.

[00:13:00] Kevin Dieny: What are they doing when they get to my website? Okay. So this one, I would say acquisition is probably the S has the answers to most of the simple questions. The next layer of the reporting and Google analytics is called the behavior reports. And this is what people are doing on your website when they get.

[00:13:19] Kevin Dieny: Now, these are, it’s a step up, I would say in complexity only because you have to understand Google’s language and what they’re talking about, you have to know, okay, what’s a session, what’s a hit, what’s a engagement. What are interactions? What are bounces? What are exits? What are, clicks, um, scroll.

[00:13:40] Kevin Dieny: All of that stuff, it gets a little bit more into event-based tracking when you’re looking at the behavior of what’s happening on your website today. So just a simple one, right? Cause we’ll start with the simplest of behaviors you could say. Okay, well, what pages are people looking at the most?

[00:13:58] Kevin Dieny: Okay, now you’d have to clarify most right? Cause there’s like time on page by most you could say, well, what pages are people spending the most time on? Okay, well, what pages are people getting to the most? So time on page is a little bit more important, right? Someone’s actually reading the page.

[00:14:17] Kevin Dieny: I think if someone spends less than 10 seconds on a page, I don’t say, I don’t think I would consider that a visit or they really digested that page. I think you can get a glance of a page and be like, ah, this isn’t what I want. And then, you know, bounce off or an exit, you know, whatever they’re doing, but someone spending more than 10 seconds or something is probably actually taking the time to read it.

[00:14:39] Kevin Dieny: And so average time on page is pretty good or even scroll know. Did they scroll down the page? Those are all very interesting bits of information. And there are, there is information for this kinds of stuff inside the behavior reports. That’s the second category, you know, and down in Google analytics that you may want to consider it, that other reports you may want to look into. Now, one of the ones in there is, uh, into the behavior is the content, right?

[00:15:06] Kevin Dieny: Which is basically your pages, different pages on your website that people are looking at. If you have, if you’re your whole website, just one page. Or it has like two pages and it’s the main page. And then like a privacy policy. This is not going to be as important for you. The content and behavioral reports are for businesses that have different pages that satisfy different needs that deliver different values, different content, things like that on the website.

[00:15:32] Kevin Dieny: So that’s where you’d want to be spending your time looking at reports when you’re trying to say, okay, what pages are more valuable? What pages are people consuming? What pages are people jumping to? What pages are bringing people in is landings. What pages are people exiting from?

[00:15:47] Kevin Dieny: And there they’re leaving the site completely. So there’s a lot going on or bounces. It would be the same. So there’s a lot going on on those behavioral pages. But I would say most often a business is going to say, well, you know, I care about the revenue. So I want to know about the conversions, you know, show me.

[00:16:05] Kevin Dieny: Show me the information that’s leading to conversions. Okay, so that’s, that’s the third category of the reports and that’s, uh, the definitely the conversions tab of, of everything. That’s also referencing Goals in Google Analytics they call conversions goals cause a conversion, a goal is very subjective to a business.

[00:16:26] Kevin Dieny: Someone might say, well, they add something to a cart, that’s a goal. That’s a conversion, sure. For your business, it might be well, no, a conversion is when they call us when they could turn into a lead, right. Or a prospect or something like that. And you have to tell Google analytics, this is like sort of the caveat here up to this point, you can get away with the default stuff, Google analytics, you don’t have to touch anything.

[00:16:47] Kevin Dieny: And it’s out of the box. It’s going to work this way. Now, when we get into the conversion area of the report, the stuff you might say, well, a business owner, this is what I care about most. Conversions are not out of the box running for you. So if you’ve just put Google Analytics on your site and walked away, you haven’t done anything with it.

[00:17:05] Kevin Dieny: You probably don’t have any conversion set up. If you had an agency or someone else do this for you. If you, if there’s tools, you’ve bought that push data over to Google analytics, you might have the information in there, but at the end of the day, you have to set up, and it’s sort of manual, in the sense that you have to do it.

[00:17:23] Kevin Dieny: It’s not going to be done for you. You have to go into the administrative part of Google analytics. Then you have to go into that specific web property that you have for your website. And then you have to set up goals. You have to tell it, this is what a goal is to me. Now that could be they reach this.

[00:17:38] Kevin Dieny: Thank you page, right? That’s usually that simple version. It could be okay. When this event fires off, it could be when it could be e-commerce tied somehow, a tool that’s providing, pushing data into your Google analytics. You could say, okay, this is the second. It could be like a funnel where it’s like a, whenever they hit this page, this page, and then that page, all they have to see all three or all X number of pages.

[00:18:01] Kevin Dieny: That’s a conversion. Those are called like funnel goals. So there’s a couple options you have to, define what goals are to your business, what a conversion is, or what’s, what’s important to your business when you’ve set that. Awesome. Okay. So let’s assume for a second. You’ve set that up. You have that in your business.

[00:18:19] Kevin Dieny: Our tool that does this for phone calls, right? Our DNI tool. We’ll, we’ll push into Google analytics for you all the phone calls that occurred from all the traffic, right? Anyone who called on your website, let’s say, so we’ll push into your Google analytics every time someone calls off your website.

[00:18:36] Kevin Dieny: Now that’s very fascinating because you may say, well, that’s really interesting. Now I can see. Go back to acquisition report. What sources, what channels, right? What searches, what ads I’m running and anything like that, what is bringing people to my site? And then from that who’s converting. So what channels are causing conversions and goals to occur because of calls being a goal.

[00:18:59] Kevin Dieny: So what traffic is bringing visitors to my website, who are then calling my business. Awesome. Cause now, now you’re getting much closer to revenue and that’s very valuable information to know, and to be able to say, okay, well, this channel is bringing in a lot more calls in this one, so maybe I’ll move some more resources over there.

[00:19:16] Kevin Dieny: And that brings us to basically, the next level of questions, which would be the behavior-based. Okay, great. I see this traffic brought a lot of visitors to my website and they’re converting, meaning their phone, they’re calling my business, let’s say. But what are they doing while they’re on my site before they make that phone call?

[00:19:33] Kevin Dieny: Right? So that’s in the goal in the conversion reports, there’s something called goal flows, assisted conversion reports, time lag, you know, how long are they taking? So I would say, look at those with a grain of salt. Meaning assume that it’s giving you information, but it’s not giving you a hundred percent clear, accurate information about what happened there.

[00:19:59] Kevin Dieny: It’s giving you information that you can make decisions with, but it’s not giving you a hundred percent the clearest picture. Now the range of accuracy, there could be as poor as like 50, 40%, but it could be as high as 99% accurate. So somewhere in that range what it’s providing you, is a fairly accurate assessment of what it thinks now.

[00:20:21] Kevin Dieny: And I say fairly accurate because it’s, I mean, again, it’s not exact there’s, there’s things that cause problems with Google analytics and this isn’t to detract from using it because it’s still valuable tool. You can still make decisions off of it, but there are things like cookies, right? Browsers, privacy laws.

[00:20:40] Kevin Dieny: Every day things are getting harder and harder and harder to track and that’s affecting cookies. And the thing they’re trying to break up there is the ability of the companies you’re visiting to be able to store endless amounts of information about your web visit through a cookie.

[00:20:54] Kevin Dieny: So that’s changing and that’s making it difficult for Google analytics to give you a hundred percent clear picture about, okay, this is the same person that visited you six months ago, right?

[00:21:03] Kevin Dieny: Or three months ago. If you think you’re the visitors, your consumers to your business are researching you for weeks or months or a year or whatever it is, and that they’re taking a long time of researching you and visiting you before they actually make the conversion or call or whatever it is.

[00:21:22] Kevin Dieny: Then I would say Google analytics is ability to look back and tell you here’s all the places they went to. Here’s the time lag, here’s the assisted conversions. All in that conversion area of the report is going to start to get, it’s going to be closer and closer to being grayer and grayer and the accuracy, but the other reports, the behavior.

[00:21:41] Kevin Dieny: And the acquisition report are always based on the last thing that brought them there. Like the last visit, here’s the information that we have, right? So those reports are always accurate, always great. It’s just a conversion area of the report. And being able to look back, basically doing attribution is going to be what makes reporting so difficult.

[00:22:00] Kevin Dieny: And that’s, what’s so hard for marketers and businesses say, well, I just want to know when I spend money here, that it is generating revenue over there, and that’s fine. That’s exactly what every marketer wants to be able to tell you too. It’s just that the farther and farther back people start researching your business or, or learning about you, interacting with you.

[00:22:20] Kevin Dieny: They could be touching tons and tons of marketing stuff. But then if Google analytics can’t remember anything that they did, it’s only going to be able to show you what they can remember. And it could be that, oh, they just typed in Kevin’s Heating and Air Mechanical.com and then they convert converted.

[00:22:35] Kevin Dieny: And you’d say, well, how is that possible? How did someone, learn who I was type the URL in, and then immediately call right off the bat, without seeing any marketing, not going anywhere or visiting anything. Maybe they called within, the first 30 seconds. That should be a signal to you that the data there’s some discrepancies.

[00:22:55] Kevin Dieny: When we look at our Google analytics report for our company, and I look at this often, I’m going to see things where it says the number of conversions that occurred from people who visited the website and converted all within the same day is the highest. And it could be like 60% of our conversions are happening from the same day visit.

[00:23:14] Kevin Dieny: The only visit the Google analytics remembers of them. And it’s the only, it’s the only visit. It all happened in a day. Right? So the one we call it like the one call close the one day conversion, the same day conversion. And that has always been like, gosh, you know, how is that happening? Well, the truth is, is not happening like that.

[00:23:32] Kevin Dieny: The truth is, some of it is happening that way, but not, not that much. And that’s because people are researching, people are visiting and jumping around sites. There, maybe they’re doing a lot of research on your competitors and then they’re coming to you. There’s, there’s a mix of what’s happening out there, but it’s not realistic that everyone who visits your site the same day is making calls, right off the bat.

[00:23:53] Kevin Dieny: I think that, and within about 30 seconds, right. Now, A certain level of trust and stuff that has to be built. And I’m talking about new business, new customers, new patients, new consumers, things like that. That’s what we’re talking about here. There’s a certain amount of trust and research that every consumer has to go through to be able to get to that point.

[00:24:14] Kevin Dieny: Now, if someone says, Hey, they’re my someone’s like my best friend. And they say, Hey, just trust me. Just go here and call them. I may, or here’s the phone number? Just call them. Don’t even go to the website, things like that happen. But we, but that’s why I’m saying it’s not happening, abundantly, like it’s not happening at 90% of the time.

[00:24:32] Kevin Dieny: That’s where all businesses coming from is people circumventing all the marketing and research and anything else. So just trust going off a hundred percent trust in what one person said or something. It does happen, but not generally, not like tons. If that’s the type of business you are where it’s a hundred percent word of mouth, you’ve never had a website.

[00:24:49] Kevin Dieny: Then web analytics, isn’t really gonna do it for you. The top reports here, are not going to do it for you. But most businesses have a website. Most businesses that are in the small and local businesses, they have these websites, they just want to know is it working?

[00:25:02] Kevin Dieny: And if I’m going to spend time writing blog articles, putting out advertisements promotions, posting on social media, creating videos, I’m doing any and all of that, what is going to be.

[00:25:14] Kevin Dieny: So that’s what we’re trying to diagnose here. That’s why these top reports and Google analytics are going to help a business that one actually wants to grow to that business really wants to be able to increase. The things that their website or their digital marketing can influence in their business.

[00:25:36] Kevin Dieny: So they want to increase revenue from digital marketing website, anything having to do online. So if you’re a business that one we want to grow and two, and we want to increase the influence of that marketing channels online have, or that the website has then that’s right. Where you that’s, that’s where we’re at here today.

[00:25:55] Kevin Dieny: That’s where we’re, we’re trying to get to what are the benefits? What are some of the top reports? What reports are going to answer? The question that I have, right. So that’s why I’m trying to like bucket into these three categories. If it’s, what’s bringing him here, acquisition reports and then all those tabs underneath it are answering specific questions under acquisition.

[00:26:17] Kevin Dieny: And they’re there because Google has decided, well, these are probably the main reports people are going to be looking, wanting to look at or over time they figured out these are the reports people look at and that’s what’s under the acquisition tab. May not be everything you need in which case, I would say you’ve got to go into the custom reports tab and make a custom report.

[00:26:38] Kevin Dieny: That way you could say, I want to see these metrics right. From these dimensions in this amount of time or something like that, and be very specific that way you can answer the questions you have. If you’re a marketer out of business and your bosses wanting to know, a specific answer to a question, usually just by their question, you can figure out what report you need to go to or what metrics you need.

[00:27:02] Kevin Dieny: The most common dimension across and by that dimension, I mean, cut or framing of the data in Google analytics is time. Right? So that’s why that, the date and time and everything is in the top right corner of Google analytics. Because it allows you to say, okay, I want to see what’s happened in the last month.

[00:27:23] Kevin Dieny: You know, last six months, year to date, in the last quarter, I want to see what information I’m doing in this specific timeframe. And changing the date and being able to say within these bars, right within this timeframe, what has happened is probably the most common dimension there is. And that’s across Google analytics because that’s, it’s used so often.

[00:27:43] Kevin Dieny: So usually when someone asks a question, how many visitors are we getting from one of our ad campaigns, right? How many people are coming to the website from one of our ad campaigns? Okay, well then I would specify. Okay. In what period of time. Right. So make sure that that’s always there.

[00:27:59] Kevin Dieny: If you just ignore that part of the report, you’re going to get some funky stuff you really want to be able to set, look at reports each week that are really important to you. Now, if you’re looking at a weekly, you may say, okay, I want to look at, a period of time. Up to last week and every week, you’re going to look at that and see how, measuring how things are changing, how one week’s time differences having an impact.

[00:28:19] Kevin Dieny: You may say, well, I’m going to look at a report, but I need to look at it weekly. Fine. That’s great. You can even schedule these reports to they come to your email. There’s things like that. You can do, you can go and open Google sheets in habit, and then have it run reports in there with the Google analytics add on.

[00:28:35] Kevin Dieny: So you can say, I want to see this data by this timeframe, and I want this to populate automatically. And then rock and roll. It can be all done for you automatically. It’s really cool. So let’s go over a little bit of a summary here. Number one, what information is in Google analytics? Okay. So yeah. Talking about acquisition, everything, but bringing people to your website, it’s all about your website, right where you’re at, but generally let’s say it’s generally about your website.

[00:29:02] Kevin Dieny: What brought them there? The B behavior reports are going to be what happened when they got there. What do they do? What pages are they look at? What was the order of the pages they looked at? How do they flow through the pages? The behavioral flow for them across the site.

[00:29:16] Kevin Dieny: How long did they spend there? What did they do when they got there? What pages did they gravitate toward? Any questions about what they did while they were there. When someone came in here, think of it. Like they came in here. Okay, well, where do they go? What do they look at? How would that help your business? Well.. psh man.

[00:29:31] Kevin Dieny: Tons of ways. Right? What pages are people spending the most time on? Okay, well, let’s put some resources there. What pages they spend the least time on, well, maybe we can improve those pages, right? If you’re able to improve the website experience, you’re going to get, you’re going to, again increase those points that are going to increase sales and revenue, it just will happen.

[00:29:52] Kevin Dieny: So everything in the behavioral category is getting you closer to sale anyway, and the closer you get to, what’s happening and influencing people before a sale, the more you’re going to actually increase those sales. And then the thing closest that web analytics tracks is the conversion report.

[00:30:09] Kevin Dieny: And the conversion, I said, remember, there’s that asterisk is a little bit gray there. The conversion reports. Are going to be susceptible to issues and errors in their accuracy, what they report is accurate, but it’s not the whole picture. You’re only going to see a slice of what really truly happened.

[00:30:25] Kevin Dieny: It can be frustrating. Let’s just put it that way to get, to get to the attribution part of what’s happening on your website. But generally speaking, it’s going to give you enough information to be able for you to be able to then say, complete the last question. I brought up earlier, which is what am I going to do with this information that I have, that that’s then going to increase revenue.

[00:30:44] Kevin Dieny: And that’s where it’s going to give you information where you’d say, okay, well, this ad is working. Maybe I should increase the budget. That choice to increase the budget. Is that orchestrating action that then, they’re actually doing something with the data. If you don’t do anything with any of this data, then you’re.

[00:31:01] Kevin Dieny: Going to be increasing revenue. It’s as simple as that. So any information that you get out of any of these reports, it’s always got, you always got to ask yourself, maybe write it down as opposed to, what am I going to do with this information? What am I going to do? What sales action am I going to take?

[00:31:16] Kevin Dieny: Is there an operational thing here? Is there something wrong with the website itself? There’s reports in the behavior section, which may give you, how long is your page taking to load things like that. That’ll be helpful in determining if your website’s slow.

[00:31:28] Kevin Dieny: If your website is bogging people down, if anything’s going on their pages that have a lot of bounces, a lot of exits. Pages that have very low time on site. There’s little indicators, right? That maybe there’s something wrong with, with a pager or whatever. And that’s information you may use to diagnose your website, just to fix it.

[00:31:44] Kevin Dieny: Not necessarily to make it, to shoot for increasing revenue, but if you fix problems, that’s removing those obstacles and friction, which is going to increase revenue, just not as much as, really improving how people are finding value on your site. So those are the three areas.

[00:32:01] Kevin Dieny: The acquisition, behavior, and the conversions area. There’s you can get conversions yourself. You can set them up by setting up goals, or you can have tools like we like our tool or there’s lots of companies that provide tools that push events or push information into Google analytics that helps you set up goals so that you can track.

[00:32:17] Kevin Dieny: How many people are filling out? How many people are having chat conversations. And if people are calling my business, how many people are emailing my business, how many people are clicking on this one button and downloading something, how many people are watching a video, you can set up any of these types of things as conversions it’s out there.

[00:32:34] Kevin Dieny: It’s very possible to do any of this. So it’s what matters to your business? How’s it selling today? How does it want to sell, how does it want to increase revenue? That’s what all these, all this information would be helpful for you to have not as long as you can come up with the question about, you have about getting, well, let’s, let’s get the answer to this.

[00:32:52] Kevin Dieny: Let’s see how many visitors are coming to my website and you see, wow. I have, you know, let’s say a couple of hundred people come in, maybe thousands of people coming to my website. What are they doing? How many of those are converting, right? Why aren’t the others converting? What are they looking at? What are they interested in?

[00:33:07] Kevin Dieny: If a competitor is doing really well, look at their website, if they’re doing web analytic improvements and stuff like that, it’s probably a pretty good guest to say whatever they’ve put on their website, it’s come out of their web insight, web research. And that’s why they have a page.

[00:33:21] Kevin Dieny: Maybe that’s dedicated to this. Maybe that’s why they have a. And you’d say, well, why would Kevin’s Heating and Air Mechanical.com need a blog? Well for the SEO, right? Or there’s a lot of reasons there, but understanding it. So you have the information to make a proper decision is what we’re after.

[00:33:40] Kevin Dieny: Google analytics is a tool. And its function is to provide you with information, that information in there you may need to look up, right? What’s this. What does Kevin talking about? When he says bounces, what’s a hit, what’s an interaction. What are clicks? What are conversions? What is he talking about?

[00:33:56] Kevin Dieny: If it’s going a little over your head, I would just say, go, Google this, go look it up. Go to get the definition down. So you have an understanding of, okay, this is what it means. And then you can be very clear about, okay, this is what’s happening on my website. And here’s why, and you understand it.

[00:34:12] Kevin Dieny: The things that are going to be hard to Google are the things I’ve talked about in conversion about why, ’cause it’s not. It’s not something that is a hundred percent. This is what it is for you, because every business is a little different. Every visitor who visits your site is using a different browser, different experiences.

[00:34:28] Kevin Dieny: So it’s not a hundred percent perfect that someone’s going to say, well, 75% of this, of this is accurate. There’s no one that’s going to be able to tell you how perfectly accurate any of your data is. I’m just putting it out there that you should just assume that anything in the conversions area has a little bit of gray.

[00:34:43] Kevin Dieny: There’s gray in what you’re missing. What you have is that. I would say you can learn valuable insights from Google analytic. Some of the top reports are going to tell you, answer questions. Where are people coming from? What channels are bringing them there?

[00:34:56] Kevin Dieny: What are they doing once they get to my website? And what pages are very popular? What pages are they even consuming and reading? What pages are they converting on? How many pages are they looking at before they convert? How long are they spending between their first visit and the visit where they convert?

[00:35:10] Kevin Dieny: How long is that period of time that Google analytics has the information on to tell me how many of these people are converting? Off of the second, third or fourth visit, right? All that information is in there. If you have the questions for it, if you have a means of saying, well, once if I knew this information, then I could write, run an ad change articles, make a video.

[00:35:32] Kevin Dieny: I would put resources here. I would take resources out of here. Anything you would actually make a decision on is the information that you’re after. And that’s why Google analytics is so valuable. And. Some of the practical steps you could take would be the last thing here. So I mentioned a few of them, but let’s say in an email is a great one.

[00:35:52] Kevin Dieny: For this example, let’s say you’ve run emails in the past. You’ve sent emails out. You want to know what are those emails? Bringing people to my website are those emails causing people who get to my website to convert, to satisfy a goal that I have. That’s an amazing question. And that would tell you, well, because I want to email them.

[00:36:12] Kevin Dieny: I want to make more of these emails. I want to start just emailing at all. So anytime you have any of this, let’s say you have a project. Let’s group it into a project. I want to do something. Okay. Make sure I measure it. Make sure you measure it right. Make sure it’s measuring the goals, then do it and then say, okay, it costs me this much to do it this much resources and time or budget or whatever it was.

[00:36:35] Kevin Dieny: This is what it accomplished. Give it enough time. Some conversions, some interactions, people may take a little more time to, satisfy the goals on. So give it some time. And then at some point, you know, draw a line in the sand and say, okay, up to this date, I ran it at this point.

[00:36:51] Kevin Dieny: The project completed here is the findings. Here’s the outcome. And then you could say, well, do I want to do more of this or less of this? Can I improve this? Right? Those are all great questions that a business may have to improve something that they’re doing to increase their sales and revenue. Any point along the way of the process, it takes to make a sale.

[00:37:12] Kevin Dieny: If you find and identify points that your website is that then Google analytics and obviously. It may be a channel acquisition improvement. We say, well, to get more referrals, I actually have to ask for them to get more ad visitors. I have to pay for them to get more organic traffic. I have to write more blog articles or put pages.

[00:37:31] Kevin Dieny: I have to optimize my pages for specific keywords to get people who are more local. I may have to reframe, post on sites that are more local. I may have to run ads and make sure they’re targeting local. There’s a lot of ways you may think. Well, that’s simple. I was planning on doing this anyway, but now with Google analytics, I can make sure that I’m measuring its impact there.

[00:37:51] Kevin Dieny: What it’s doing, what it’s causing a great question. One that is difficult, but it’s so awesome to, to ask is the people I’m bringing to my website, right? Are they quality? Are they a fit? If your business, sells wheelchairs, let’s just put this out there. Right? And the people who are coming to your website have no interest.

[00:38:12] Kevin Dieny: In wheelchairs, they’re getting there for some other reason and they never convert. You want people who are looking to buy a wheelchair to get to their site where you’re selling wheelchairs. The same concept applies to any business. If had to go back to Kevin’s Heating and Air Mechanical.

[00:38:28] Kevin Dieny: I want someone who is looking to install the new air conditioning unit who needs help, who their heater broke, or their ducks are dirty or their machine, stopped working, anything like that. That’s the kind of people that I want. So how am I, how do I know the visitors to my website? Our fit that mold for that value.

[00:38:50] Kevin Dieny: And that’s where, you could say, well, if they do fit that mold right, then I should see them converting. And so you’d say, well, I see a lot of traffic coming from these sources. A lot of money’s being spent here. They are bouncing around a lot of pages, checking them out, scrolling, consuming a lot of content, but they’re just not converting very much.

[00:39:09] Kevin Dieny: Not converting as well as you’d like. Okay. So cause remember 2% or something like that is the global average conversion rate across websites. So if you’re above 2%, maybe you have to change your point of view here because you’re actually doing fairly well. But if you’re like, look, because of my costs, I need like a 7%, 8%, 10%, I don’t know, 15% conversion rate.

[00:39:29] Kevin Dieny: And I expect that when I have these high quality people coming to my website, so you’d say, okay, well, if they’re not converting, is it the marketing that brought them there? Is it the web pages that are not relevant to those types of people? Maybe they need more time. There’s a lot of, let’s say it’s like a Pandora’s box because once you open the door of Google analytics and all the amazing information that’s in there, it’s going to start rolling out more and more and more questions.

[00:39:54] Kevin Dieny: It’s going to lead you down these rabbit hole paths. And it can be, it can feel like man, just Google analytics is like that. I don’t even want to open the Pandora’s box and that’s fine. But that’s why I said Google analytics is for the businesses that a. B, they want to improve something and they want to do, and they want to, they actually, they find the value and the insights.

[00:40:15] Kevin Dieny: Interesting enough to actually do something about it. They want to make a decision based on the date. So if that’s you I’d say jump into Google analytics, give it another try. There’s plenty of videos out there. That’ll dive into a specific reports, specific insights, but it’s gotta be really relevant to your business.

[00:40:31] Kevin Dieny: If you need help, reach out, ask questions, we can guide you that there’s not an in-charge of this. You just reach out, ask people questions. How have you done this? I have questions about this as this. This is what it means. I think it means, cause I want to make an important decision based on this.

[00:40:44] Kevin Dieny: All of that is, is all stuff that businesses are dealing with when working with Google analytics. And I really, really, really recommend it to you. I really recommend to any business, to, to find a way to include Google analytics and their weekly. Something that’s important to them that they want to keep track of find a report, just one. To start find something valuable that you want to know how it’s going on a week-to-week basis.

[00:41:07] Kevin Dieny: At worst, I guess, a month to month basis, just so you become more and more familiar with the platform and that way it’s not so daunting, it’s not so terrifying and anything you’re learning, you could then take and go do something about it. That’s pretty much it. We have a, article on our website of some of my top favorite reports in Google analytics.

[00:41:26] Kevin Dieny: I really wanted to frame this podcast episode all about how you would determine that for your business, because every business is different. What matters most to your business? Where in that sales process, can you interject or create more revenue for your business?

[00:41:39] Kevin Dieny: So I hope that’s been helpful. I hope you’re feeling inspired to go get your data hat and then your marketing hat on by diving into Google analytics reports. So thank you for your time today. I really appreciate your listening and I’ll catch you up, catch up and I’ll catch you again next time.

[00:41:55] Kevin Dieny: Bye.