Philippa Gamse on Web Analytics for Business Owners

speaker-0: Okay guys, welcome back to another episode of Marketing AI for SMEs. ⁓ today I'm with Philippa Games, who wrote a wonderful book which I just finished. It's called Website Wealth: A Business Leader's Guide to Driving Real Value from Your Analytics. Welcome to the show, Philippa.

speaker-1: Hi, thank you so much, Jeremy. speaker-0: Yeah. Can you give a ⁓ a quick introduction of yourself just for a bit of street cred? I know you've done this for like over twenty years.

Yeah, love to hear it from you. speaker-1: ⁓ yeah, I mean I've been working in analytics a long time and the reason for that is because I love the the mix of data and creativity that that analytics gives you because it's not just enough to be a geek and interpret the data, but then you know, the question is, so what are you gonna do about it? And that's where you can you can get creative. So I kind of find that inspiring.

Hopefully that comes through in the book. And speaker-0: Hundred percent. Yeah. A lot of stuff in here is actionable, I think.

Cause I think it's one of those timeless books where you didn't write about how to click this button, how to because there's people for that. You know, it's about how how to like how to approach it right from the beginning. And I want to read this passage from ⁓ page forty two when I read it and I was like, ⁓ this is this is brilliant. ⁓ it says, ⁓ your site should make visitors feel recognized and understood in terms of who they are and why they are coming to the site, engaged and interested in your content.

Convinced that you are credible and competent in what you do, supported in meeting their needs and solving the problems, and lastly motivated to move forward you. That's I think really sums it up. speaker-1: Yeah. Some time ago in my consulting practice I had a diagnostic tool that I called something like, you know, the top five emotions you need for your website that in the you need to create in visitors, right?

Yep. and that was the five emotions, the ones that you just read. Yeah. because it's it's basically about, you know, a visitor arrives and they're saying, Hello, am I in the right place?

You know, can you help me solve my problems? So your job first of all is to say hello, I understand who you are and what you need. And then they're gonna say, Well, prove it, right? 'Cause they don't know who you are.

so you've got to be able to establish credibility, that you are who you are and you do what you say and you can do it. speaker-0: Yes. Okay. ⁓ speaker-1: And then actually obviously at at some point you've got to motivate them to want to take action.

speaker-0: Yes, where that's where the CTA comes in. ⁓ speaker-1: As well. Yeah. And and then, you know, unless you're the sort of business which I also talk about in some parts of the book where, you know, you never want to see your customer again.

I shouldn't say that. But I mean, you know, where where there's a very long buying cycle. So somebody typically isn't going to come and buy from you very often, right? Like a car, for example.

you you mu it many businesses want their peop want people to come back and and re engage. And so there's that whole support, you know, post Say all piece. speaker-0: Yes, for sure. ⁓ and and one of the first things you said in the book was about how the clarity of business, how you should you know, the strategy and how many people can't really articulate it.

And then the business that well, the website doesn't really play into that anymore because they can't even articulate it simply to you, right? speaker-1: Right. Well, I mean the reason I'm saying that is because what you know, often if I if people come to me and they say, you know, can you help me? And then they say, How much experience do you have in my industry?

And to me, that's the wrong question. Because you know, if you're the business owner, you're the expert in your industry way more than I'm ever gonna be. What I've got is my expertise. And if we put that together Then I understand how the data works and how the analytics work and what they can tell you and what you can extrapolate from that.

And then you can say, right, but in my industry, the context is X or whatever, and we can put it all together. I can't tell you how your website's performing if you don't tell me what you want it to do. Right? Yeah.

I mean, I can I can do a certain amount, but really, ⁓ you you've got to know what you're what you're trying to get done. And that is an area that I have found problematic. A lot of people sort of throw a site up. Yeah.

⁓ and you say, Okay, I'm on this page. What am I supposed to do when I'm on this page? And they say, Well Yeah. You know and they don't really know.

speaker-0: Yeah, ful I fully get what you're saying. You know, I'm actually I'm in the industry, right? So I spend a lot of time in GA4, right? All the time.

And we we're going there for different reasons as you are going there, because you're more of a conversion rate optimization kind of person, strategy, big picture. We are in there to prove what ads have done for the client and how he benchmarks against other things, right? Which we'll get we can touch on later as well. But I like just say for example, my own website, like I go I'm going through this whole dilemma right now because I'm doing this pod.

Right. I have YouTube videos. I'm like, well, I'm a B2B, so maybe I should get them to capture email. So it becomes a mess.

Do you know I mean? Like maybe someone wants to use me now. Maybe they you should put a contact form. So I think that I'm in the same seat as a lot of these people that you might be referring to.

It's like, well, your website's not clear on the strategy. Right? Are you trying to nurture them or you try to, you know, get them to do something right away? Do you do you run into that a lot?

Or can it be a mix? ⁓ yeah. speaker-1: I I I don't see why not. I mean, if you look at Amazon, you know, let's take an example.

Everybody knows, right? Way at the top you're looking at an item on Amazon, right? Way at the top of the page, there's a basically, you know, one click buy this now button immediately. So that if somebody's coming to the site and they know this is the item I want, I'm just here to buy it.

Don't ⁓ make me go through all sorts of hoops, just let me buy it. Boom. And I don't even have to put all my details in again because you already know them, just say send me this item, right? And then below that, there's all the stuff about the item.

There's the reviews, there's a description, there's the See This Company's page on Amazon and see all the other stuff they've got, right? So it's a and that's all the engagement stuff and that's for all the people who need to be convinced or have questions. So so absolutely you can mix it up. speaker-0: Okay.

⁓ that that's that's an interesting view because you know, like with the the stuff they preach is it is about niching down. I think there's benefits niching down and knowing an industry, just say you knew websites and you knew building industry inside out. Yes, it can help. But a lot of times, like because of your years of consulting, like you can put it together.

Do you know what I mean? You can look at a business, talk to the owner, see what they're capable of, and kind of draw out the information that's supposed to be there. Right. speaker-1: And actually a lot of the time, something that's worked in another industry might well be worth bringing in as an idea.

⁓ interesting. You know, I rem I remember early in the days of digital marketing, ⁓ the sites that were really creative and really good at at doing innovative things were the adult porn sites. Now I'm not saying that I consulted with porn sites. Yeah.

But if you remember that speaker-0: It's too close to action. Yeah, sorry. speaker-1: you know what they did now and for some of it was horrible obviously and pretty cheesy and all the rest of it, but there was some real thinking behind some of what those sites did to draw people in. ⁓ that could be extrapolated out and you know, that's what I'm saying.

speaker-0: Into a proper business. Yeah. speaker-1: If you're if you're only ⁓ if you only used to your own industry Yes. There are times when you when some un something that's happening in another industry you can adapt to your situation.

speaker-0: can I can relate to the because I look at architects websites, they all look the same. There's this so it's so art artful like how elegant they are. Like there's no way to tell what they're doing or contact them. You know, because they have to make it like it's like an art gallery.

Do you know what I mean? Like everything's got be beautiful, precise. But this doesn't really have call to action. ⁓ so I think it's an overturn window kind of philosophy, right?

Because architects can't be doing the the whole clickbait game, right? like click click funnel stuff. That's jump. Yeah.

But at the same time they they should probably take from some other industries that they they're more prestige. Yeah, cool. And yeah I know that ⁓ speaking of traffic and traffic quality, I know you have a really strong view because you have chapters dedicated to it on ⁓ bounce rate. speaker-1: Right.

Well, you know, luckily in Google Analytics for well actually they brought it back, didn't they? Because everybody was so upset that it went away. Well, engagement rates here is a different metric, and and that's the thing that's interesting. So just in case listeners n need the reminder, so a bounce rate is when some was when somebody comes to your site and they go to one page and they don't do anything else.

Like they don't click anything and they don't go to another page and they leave. Now that was an unhelpful metric. speaker-0: Engagement rate. speaker-1: For several reasons.

And one of them was like if you have a blog or an authority piece, right? Could they could read the whole thing. They might be on the site for five minutes. They might be watching your videos and everything.

⁓ but if they don't go to another page and they don't click ⁓ anything else, that's a bounce, right? And looks bad and everybody got all upset. Now, granted, you probably should have said something like, you know, here's what to do next with a strategy that we would ⁓ speaker-0: Yes, with the right. Yep.

Mm-hmm. speaker-1: But people would obsess about this bounce rate. A number of times I got asked, you know, help, my bounce rate's forty, forty percent, what am I gonna do? and and one of the things about that is that there's there's no question, in my experience, that there are will always be people who come to your website who don't belong there.

They just find the site by by mistake or whatever, and they've clicked something and they don't they're not buyers for you and you just need to let them go away. ⁓ and so everybody obsesses like, My site, my bounce rate's 40%. Well, okay, but that means that 60% of your visitors are staying to have a look around. Yes.

How many of them are actually in the end doing what you want them to do? And why aren't you more focused on them? And what they're doing and how you can improve their experience so that you'll get more outcomes. Well, for sure.

GA4 has actually changed its whole bounce rate thing into what you just said, which is engagement rate, which does make more sense because speaker-0: And what they're doing. speaker-1: It's somebody who doesn't I mean, you can set the time on page. So if somebody's, for example, spends more than 30 seconds on the page, you can call that what they're now calling an engaged visit, which means that even if they don't go to another page, it won't record as a s as a bounce, right?

Yeah. Or they go to another page or they interact in some way, and that makes more sense. speaker-0: Yeah, it does. also just speaker-1: So the just the sorry but I can just finish the it's also just the focus on the concept of the balance right, like focusing on the bad news and the people that you've lost as opposed to the people that you could do more.

speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, 'cause in your book you cover a lot of the opportunities that could come from there as well, right? Both sides. The ones you lost, what why they came and also the ones that stayed, what else they could get.

Yeah, I was just gonna say, ⁓ you know, I've been in the in the G A four game, G Google Analytics game for a long time too. But one thing that I haven't done very well, and your book alluded me to this, was segmenting it based on only the people that you want to target. And then have a look at what they are doing. Like as in age group, location.

Whatever, you know, like if it's a local thing and you got bot crawling from SEO, you got things and all and then that ruins everything, right? About your your your bounce rate. So segment it based on say the geolocation. So for me, Sydney, right?

Sydney people who's in a geolocation who's say ⁓ it's a female audience and thirty five up. Have a look at what they're doing. Do you know what I mean? And analyze that in your reporting.

I say, ⁓ that's good. speaker-1: Just with a caveat that some of those metrics are ones which may not be main hugely reliable in, you know, because that that piece about are they female, are they are they yeah, thirty what yeah. If they're logged into your site and you know who they are and you've got a profile of them because they're a member, then you do know who they are. Yeah.

If they're just a visitor, then Google is kind of making some assumptions p based on their behavior. ⁓ The geographic one is probably a bit more accurate, but of course a lot of people use VPNs these days. Yep. ⁓ so you you do need to be careful about which segments you use and how much kind of faith you put in them.

But you know, years ago I had ⁓ the honour of teaching on with a company called Market Motive, which doesn't exist anymore, but if you know who Avanash Kaushik is, you know, he wrote Reb Analytics two point zero, which was like a fundamental book in analytics, like Yeah. I can't remember when it came out. Anyway, I had the honour of teaching alongside him. I mean, he's he's like the guru.

and one of the things that we would constantly pr try to drum into people is you can't treat all of your visitors like they're the same, because they're not. And this thing with segmenting, which you know, in analytics it's called audiences or it's called something I can't remember what comparisons, right? Yes. But basically what you're doing is saying, Show me only the visitors who fulfill some that kind of criteria.

So you could say, show me only the visitors who actually buy something. Because you're looking for the commonalities among them to see what is it that I can go for that might, you know, increase that pool. Yeah. Or show me the people who didn't do something, or show me the people, as you said, from a certain area, whatever it might be.

But that makes everything that you're looking at so much more valuable because you're not just taking all the people that are just messing up the picture. speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, and actionable too. Now I was gonna say, ⁓ with the with the audience thing you pointed out about the age and all that, I think we have to get critical volume. And that's when I think that, you know, having clients who are like have thousands, hundreds of thousands of people coming to the website.

I know that with the iOS fourteen and the pixel tracking privacy laws, you're gonna lose a lot of them, right? I think Google is better than Facebook in terms of ⁓ when it comes to data accuracy because people log into their Gmail, then they browse. So it's little bit better than than Facebook. Facebook now requires face like ID to to verify your account.

So it's getting a bit better as well. ⁓ I I I do trust the the age and and the ⁓ the gender actually. Yeah, but I do need that critical volume, like you said. If it's a local ice cream shop, then then no, there's thirty, forty people that visited.

No, I'm not gonna, you know, that's not enough actionable enough. Yeah. speaker-1: Right, right, right. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And and we should make the point at which, you know, I i w is that ⁓ yes you are losing a lot of record of of visitors because if visitors book cook well, excuse me, block cookies. you know, Safari, I think the Safari browser deletes cookies after not very long and so on and so on.

So it's really important for anybody watching this to understand that you're not seeing actual auditable numbers. You're seeing indications of patterns. And so something that, you know, you get a lot is people say, Look, my CRM system is showing different number of sales well analytics is showing and which one is right. And hopefully the answer is your C RM is right because that's your actual tool of record.

speaker-0: Yes. Yeah. And the teal. speaker-1: should never be your tool of record.

It's a tool of indicators, right? speaker-0: Cor yeah, correct. And I it was so liberating when you I was reading that section because we go through it with businesses who who I I can't remember how you phrased it, but they overly invest in pushing to make sure that GA four and whatever data matches. And you spent a whole meeting talking about that, right?

Like, you know what I mean? It's it's lower twenty percent every month. So it's not like it's you know, like ⁓ uncorrelated, it's correlated. It's just that people are blocking it and your your own ⁓ first party data is picking it up.

But yeah, but I think that that happened a lot ⁓ probably ⁓ a few years after COVID when GA4 first came out. Man, there was meeting just dedicated to those. I'm glad that's that part's over now as well. So ⁓ yeah, in terms of now moving on to like content and AI, the example you gave the other day about the ⁓ 3 a.

m. hotel, how AI AI was able to scrape that information. Yeah. Remember that?

⁓ yeah, so I ⁓ think speaker-1: Talking offline w that wasn't part of something that we record. Yeah. speaker-0: Yeah, there wasn't yeah, so we're talking about we were talking ⁓ in the in the pre pre recording stuff, ⁓ about how like that's a kind of thing for AI now. speaker-1: Yeah.

It was very cool. It was I I was mentioning that I was doing that I'm finding myself doing AI based search, use I use Claude more now than I'm searching in Google. And I'm doing searches like, okay, I'm I'm traveling next week. I actually arrive in another country at ⁓ like four in the morning or something bizarre.

Yep. and can you tell me if the you know the hotel how do when what should I do? Should I hang around in the airport till it gets light? Should I go straight to my hotel?

This is the hotel I'm staying at. And it was able to say, look, I'm looking at the reviews, and the reviews actually mention how much people appreciate that they understand that people arrive at four in the morning in this particular location and and they'll be all all set up to welcome you. And that was very interesting. And you can't get that off of Google.

speaker-0: No, you can't. And and what ⁓ we were talking about is that how now that going forward, or you probably already do this, you know, advising and consulting, you kind of gotta put a touch of that, right? Like if you spot that, which you know, only experts will spot, right? You say, Hey, that's good, like that review is important.

Put that somewhere where it can be scraped. So that will be part of your consultation, like, with the AI and all of that. Would you say that? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, cool. All right, amazing. ⁓ in terms of ⁓ AI.

⁓ and analytics and we we both agree that it's gonna take away the grant work of of the whole analytics. Do you see anything else that you think that people should know about, should people should talk about? speaker-1: So I mean what I like is is yes, it takes away the grant work. I mean, if you especially if you're a small business owner and you want some really basic help, you know, GA4's got AI Clarity, which is the ⁓ screen recording heat maps kind of very useful tool that shows you how people actually move around on a page.

It's got an AI help. You know, and you can see basic stuff that it will point out to you. And it will point out sudden peaks and, you know, things that it's not expecting, ⁓ which is very helpful and ⁓ what I really appreciate is not having to do so many diagrams and things because it will make really nice diagrams. I'm really not my strong point.

But I I still feel that honestly what it can't do at the moment is the so what. because the point of of measuring anything in my world is to say, is this something that I need to do something about? And if so, what is that? What do I need to do differently?

What do I need to test? in my experience and and that's where you need to put it into the context of that specific business. speaker-0: Yeah, it goes bigger and bigger. I think I think so.

I think that it tries to though. If you ask it to do some recommendation, it'll come come up, come back with it. So I'm talking to this just came up like recently as well. I I don't know why it took so long to come up.

So these days I do proper reports, right? Proper reports. AI helped, but then I I do all the reporting and everything else. So now the clients just instantly runs it through AI.

Right? He goes, Tell me what I need to know and tell me where this guy's wrong or whatever, right? Like if they wanted be really tough about it. And then they'll make five recommendations.

I read those recommendations. It's not good, man. It is not good. It is not good recommend.

It's probably one out of five, I say, ⁓ yeah, I could look into that. But it's not good at joining the dots. So I guess I'm mixed feelings about it 'cause I feel feel like, yes, I want to continue using AI to do all these wonderful things. But it's like there's a big gap from my experience.

speaker-1: And, you know, who knows whether it will get closed soon or not. I hope not, because I'd still like I you know, what I'm hoping is that for people like us, the high where we come in is the higher level stuff. And and that's great. I don't want to do the grunt work anyway.

speaker-0: No, no, we do yeah, no, it's good. as as we wrap up, ⁓ I mean, please tell us about more about your services. Tell us where people can get the book, where they what they you think they'll get out of the book. And yeah.

speaker-1: So so the book is really you just said this great thing that is my book is based on, which is when the client said to me, I was trying to explain all this stuff, and he said, Philippa, just tell me what I need to know to run my business better. And I love that. And I went, That's it. That's the question.

Right. So the book is for business owners and leaders who I maybe haven't really grappled with analytics yet, maybe find it overwhelming, which is entirely understandable because there's so much that you could get. It's full of stories and examples that are all in English. I I really tried to write the whole book without any techie.

speaker-0: It is. I can testify that. Yeah. It's very very easy to be read.

speaker-1: But but really lots of ideas about what you should look for, what you can find out, what you can do with it. hopefully designed to inspire you to at least have a go, get started, or bring somebody in to help you. But the thinging the real central message of the book is that if you have a website that plays any kind of a role in your business and you're not looking at the analytics, honestly, you're flying blind with everything that you're doing. ⁓ I had somebody I was talking to a few weeks ago.

Her site was really, really old. She hadn't done anything with it for several years. She was actually, ⁓ this is very much B2B. She's an executive coach in ⁓ her, you know, her fee's like 25,000 because she works with really high-level people.

She had a load of content on the site about leadership and you know, that that's that kind of topic. ⁓ but the site was old, as I said. And she said, ⁓ I don't worry about my website, nobody ever goes to it, I never use it. It's a complete waste of, you know, don't yeah.

And I said, Are you sure? And she hadn't looked at the analytics in forever, so I said, well let's just take a look. And she was getting five hundred visitors a week. Five hundred people a week.

Because she had such great content that she was showing up in search and everything. She had no idea. She was complete that's two thousand people a month, right? She was just losing them.

Now they're not all going to be about to spend twenty five grand on her business, but there might be other things that she could do with them, and some of them might be, right? She had no idea they were even there. Yeah, And that's why analytics is so important. speaker-0: Yeah, and I think you've talked about in your books as well about these uns unf unseen low hanging fruits that you can capitalize with the examples and stuff like that.

Yeah, I think you you you spoke about people who ⁓ like business leaders who ⁓ looked at it or been looking at it but don't really understand it or want to do better at it. Also, I I would add to that list people who've been burnt before with people that's you know analyzed it but they don't know what they're talking about. You know what it is, and I'm gonna sound like a racist, but it doesn't matter, it's my show. It people with accents and stuff, it's very hard to talk to them.

And you know what I mean? And then they might be wizards, but they really need someone like you because we need to converse. We need to ask questions and get questions answered. We need people living in developed worlds who is know about the the environment and the game, right?

That w what what's what the situation is on the ground. So they can look at the website, they can relate, they Yeah, I don't think people's gonna go do that. You know, I don't think people living in this suburb is gonna go and do that. You know what I mean?

Like and I think that's really important. I think that that's what makes you stand out. speaker-1: Jeremy, I should point out that we've both got very different accents, but speaker-0: Yes, I know. You're you're in Cali now, right?

Sorry? You're in California now? speaker-1: I am in California but I'm not from here, as you can hopefully hear. speaker-0: Yeah.

From UK. Yeah, I'm talking about like there's there's wizards that's on the ground, but they're not very good at explaining stuff. Right? And it's hard to understand.

I think that's where people, like business owners get turned off from continuing, et cetera, et cetera, as well. Right. Yeah. So I think people should get a hold of you.

How do people get a hold of you these days? speaker-1: So my book is available online and at all bookstores so that's pretty easy to find. ⁓ hopefully you'll put a link in the show notes. ⁓ wait and ⁓ I'm available on LinkedIn.

I think I'm the only person in the world with my name. So it's very easy to find me on LinkedIn and I I very much like hearing from people. And ⁓ I'm actually working on my own website right now, it's about to be completely redesigned. So websites that win dot com speaker-0: Yeah, nice.

Websites that win dot com. So ⁓ says Philippa Games. Their last name is spelled G A ⁓ S E and the book is Website Wealth, a business leader's guide to driving real value from your analytics. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Philippa.

Much appreciated. speaker-1: Thank you, Jeremy.