Refuel Your Website With Data: Using Analytics to Drive Growth

coming up next we're very very uh delighted to introduce uh one of our key organizers for this event uh who's also presenting this year uh ryan jones is the founder of marketing and technology agency refuel creative also one of our key sponsors with over 20 years experience in technology web design and marketing ryan's a skilled marketer technology consultant and google ad specialist ryan's also a certified professional marketer with the ami and

has been a speaker in conferences across australia and southeast asia on marketing websites and google ads ryan founded refuel creative just over three years ago now and has grown into a platinum hubspot partner um they're also the 2019 hubspot rookie of the year for the asia pacific region which is just a fantastic achievement for this agency based in port adelaide they're also a 2019 telstra business awards state finalist so without further

ado i would like to present to you mr ryan jones who's going to refill your website with data thank you robina hello everybody um and so if you didn't get the whole ryan does technology and marketing thing that bass it basically makes me a massive nerd and part of being a massive nerd means that i like data and we've talked at a great presentation from alyssa this morning about customer journey and

personas and and content what i'm really passionate about is taking all of this data that we have and using it to make informed customer-centric decisions i'm going to gloss over a couple of things now mainly because paul took all of my time thanks paul but also because robina has got an excellent presentation on this afternoon about customer journeys throw your questions in the in the webinar chat or the discord and we'll

go through those but what i want to have a look at is a bit of partly our experience with with website redesigns and some of the ways that you can intelligently refuel your website with data obviously a pun was required according to everyone here so let me just ask you how your last website redesign went so look and i have been watching shit's creek so there we go let me let me

guess it went kind of a little bit something like this you know it was a good idea it seemed great in theory but you know things happened and you ended up with a thing that wasn't quite what you were after now look and i'm i'm gonna i'm gonna talk pretty general in this so don't take offense because this isn't an across-the-board rule but why why is that like why do we have

such a bad experience when we're trying to do website redesigns and you probably did this when you redesigned your last website your website got to about two to three years old somebody went we should probably redo the website uh you requested budget budget from management for a new one and they went you want how much no so they approved half that budget expecting the same outcomes but also enforcing a really short

timeline because i don't know maybe the ceo was going to a conference or i don't know a thing was happening so but management along with that they want a really expensive thing uh they want a video on the homepage about a thing that they want they want that expensive thing to be included in their budget and they want it delivered in the reduced timeline so you compromise your website plan uh your

internal team or your agency have to compromise what they're doing and try and work within this smaller budget the website comes back management decide they want the logo bigger and that's their primary feedback and you basically get a prettier version of your current website i'm not sure if that sounds familiar to everyone i'll probably find a ton of gifts on the discord when i get out of this um but but why

i'm starting to sound like a repetitive toddler and i don't even have one why is that so some people still think of websites as brochures okay welcome to microsoft circa 1994.

some of you will remember the gloriousness that was the microsoft website so good but people think of a website as just a brochure it's just a thing like they just need a professional presence online no one's gonna go there no one's gonna do anything it doesn't really matter it's just a thing for when somebody looks up their domain some people still think of websites as expenses i'm spending five ten twenty fifty

hundred thousand dollars on a website that's an expensive thing it's it's just gonna setting fire to money some people think that a new website is just going to solve all of their problems they don't even know what their problems are because they haven't gone through and articulated it and looked at the data and tried to get an idea of what their problems actually are but this new website's going to solve all

of them they can't articulate what they are they don't know what they are but this is going to fix it people forget sometimes that the website of 2020 is not the microsoft website of 1994 they're really complicated things that are powered in the background by a sponge with multiple arms your website is now expected to generate leads for you it's expected to be your shop front whether you're selling online or whether

you're not selling online you're still expected to have that shop front it's expected to run your online sales and all of this has become more critical in the last three to six months as we all as we all know but the demands on the website to keep up with that are higher than ever it's expected to be our publishing platform um and it's got to be dynamic and interactive but it's also

it's got to do all that while being a revenue generator for you so it's not as simple as we want to redo the website and we want to put a bigger logo on it but but why why are we still having these conversations about our websites their performance the way that they work etc and i'm trying not to offend anyone here but people often plan websites for their boss not for their

customer um and that is definitely one of the things that we come across boss says i want this great that's not going to get you the outcome that you want but the boss says we need to have this but the boss wants an outcome but the boss okay i see where we're going at this all right so what what are we going to do here um how do we fix this scenario

well obviously i have a background in data and working across uh paid search organic search social gives me a fair idea of color consolidating all of those tactics into one data set and we fix it with a bit of data now we don't want to use the data to avoid the humans okay we're going to talk about that in a minute but we need to use the data to allow us to

make informed decisions and i know that we have non-profits on um on the broadcast today i know that we have council we have people with small budgets data used to be a really expensive thing to do but it's not anymore um we used to have to do focus groups and research studies and things like that and all of that is still valid and all of that is still things that we do

when it's possible with the client but one of the more important things is to be able to use the data that they have to inform what we do with the website and you actually have a surprising amount of data so let's look at the data that we have and what we can do with it so to start with here's four of your key data sources one that i probably should have included

and i didn't is your social data which definitely comes into play here but we'll work through this list and we'll go we'll come back to it so your key data sources here are your customers or your personas as alyssa was talking about this morning so your semi-fictional representation of your actual customer your google analytics data which with your social data can actually inform who your personas are your search data because everybody

needs to be found online these days and people find you by using a search engine and finally your heat maps and i'll for those of you who aren't super familiar with heat maps i'll look through those in a sec so let's have a look at your customers and your personas and this is the first one that i've put here specifically because humans come first and i'm not talking about your boss i'm

talking about your customer your customer has to come first because if your customer is central to what you're doing and your customer comes first in your website build your boss will get the outcomes that they're looking for they'll get the online sales they'll get their lead conversions they'll get the visits so we need to think about how these customers find your website what is the content that they're actually interested in what

do they want to do on your site what are their pain points is the main thing that the customer wants to do on your website to place an online inquiry but that takes as jen was talking about yesterday seven or eight clicks to get to um to get to place an online inquiry they're just not going to do that so we need to look at what their needs are what their pain

points are and we can use our other data sources to look at that so you can use your analytics data to find some of that but there's this old-fashioned thing that the cool digital kids on the discord won't know about that's called a phone um and you pick it up and you dial a couple of numbers and somebody answers it and more often than not what you'll find is your good customers

are quite happy to spend 10 minutes talking about you 15 minutes talking about talking to you about what their problems are about their pain points and about how your website could be improved to help them and that's not a very big expense for your business so your next step is your google analytics now i haven't gone through and done a hey you need to have google analytics this is what it is

and this is what it does because i feel like we're well and truly past that at this point if you don't have google analytics and i'll go through some action points in a minute just go and do that now google analytics in this context what i'm looking for is issues with navigation that users might be having but also issues with information prioritization so which pages are getting the most traffic so you

can go into your site content your pages report you can see which pages we're getting the most traffic are they the ones that are the most important i was on a client call after social media day yesterday we spent an hour and a half going through some key pages on their site and the page that was the primary page on their site was actually one of the lower of the entrance pages

to their website so they had this parent page of all these different product offerings that they had i'm not going to name and shame but they had this page all these different product offerings that was their key page that went out to all the other ones and it was 0.74 of all of the entrances to their website one of the child pages of that page was four and a half percent of

all the traffic to their website so in their case they're looking at this page and they're going well if that's the most important page we need to do something about that so that people visit that page and see the full range what are your key traffic sources i love this one because somebody comes to you and they go hey uh we do a lot of twitter we don't do any twitter advertising

but they always go we do a lot of twitter um we uh we spend um 10 hours a month whatever it is um pulling um putting links on twitter posting on twitter there's very little engagement and we go into their google analytics data and we go actually you're investing all this time in twitter it's bringing no traffic to you it's bringing no followers and you're getting no engagement so if we want

to drive traffic to the site we need to look at what channels that we've got and potentially we can move some of that resourcing around to actually get a better outcome for you then we also need to look at the pages that bring in your traffic which i talked about before but that is under your site content and your landing pages again you want to make sure that that aligns with what's

most important to you and then finally we quite often find when we go into a new google analytics account uh that the client has got no goals set up they've got no idea on which channels are actually driving conversions on their site and even the simplest website has some form of goal that they want achieved on the website whether that is filling out a form clicking on a phone number downloading a

pdf whatever it might be so you need to question are you tracking those things do you have it set up at all and if you do who's doing that and what are they doing with that data we look at our search data and you know what are people looking for that you can help with now there's two ways to look at this i guess one is you know 20 years ago your

primary source of leads was prob well actually 20 years ago is that far enough back was probably the yellow pages and if somebody wanted a business they would go to the yellow pages they would flick through it until they find it and you'd have all these businesses whose business name is a aaa aaa aaa robs plumbing just so they could get the top result game the system but the world doesn't work

that way anymore people pull out their smartphone they go through they find the thing that they're looking for now so the first step here we know that people are doing this we know that this is a thing and we know that the people who need our help our product our solution they are going to be looking for us this way so first step here is what do we currently rank for what

keywords are we ranking for what are your competitors ranking for do we know that are they the same things are there opportunities there and keywords that we're not currently targeting but what are your customers actually looking for it's really important to find the keywords that your customers are using and find language and content that meets the customer needs you might call a product something that is a very technical piece of jargon

but in reality the customer doesn't know what that thing is they know what the simplified colloquialism is and they'll go over to that term so this is about meeting the needs of your customers making sure that you've got content that they can relate to so that they will find the site and when they're on the site they will find the information that they need which will get you the conversion that you're

after next up heat maps and screen recordings and if you're not already using these you really need to start using them so these will allow you to see the way your customers navigate um so we can look at things like how far down the page users are scrolling we can look at where the user is having issues we can pull up screen recordings which are are able to block things like credit

cards and personal information they just hide that data for us and we can really find out what they're doing and how they're doing it now i'll talk a little bit more about these later um but the two resources i'd recommend here the first one is hotjar which i see rabina nodding i know c link use hotjar um hotjar have a great free offering good idea to get started we use a solution

here called lucky orange it's very cheap but it's not free and it just gives us an extra level of data that we can then feed into our crm okay so we've got this massive data coming in from these different data sources so and most of you are probably thinking well i already know that i've got this data um that's fine i can i can make use of that data but how does

that become part of a website plan so we use a tactic here which is called growth driven design and if you haven't heard about growth driven design before you'll hear what it's about and you'll go oh actually that makes a lot of sense um the thing with growth driven design is it's those who support growth driven design believe that it's a smarter system for web design because the idea is to launch

a new site quickly but simplify the outcome of that initial website build but then make continuous improvements to the website over time based on real visitor data real feedback that you're getting from all of your different data measurement tools that means that instead of this model where you build a website and then you build another one in a couple of years and then you build another one in a couple of years

you're constantly making adjustments and improvements so you're constantly seeing improvements to your search rankings your conversions and it's more focused on not just the end user and the customer but the results that you're getting out of the project if you build a website today and you make no improvements for two years you're just going to get left behind in the world you need to be able to make small adjustments as you

go so what are the pain points that we're trying to solve with something like growth driven design well traditionally we have this model where you pay a large sum up front a lot of resources and time go into the website build in what is generally a relatively short period of time sort of two to six months depending on the project the results that you get out of that they're based on the

assumptions that you had at the start of the project hopefully you've used data to come up with some of those assumptions but more often than not it's back to that initial thing i said about management wanting their logo bigger and then the website stays static for two years at which point the website gets redone because your competitor got a new website if we look at growth driven design the cost is then

spread over time so you might spend the same amount as you spent on the new website but you spend that in monthly costs over the course of two years making those slight adjustments and those costs might be the agency that's supporting you or they might be the internal resources might be your internal developers if you're lucky enough to have internal developers but no matter whether it's internal or external resource there's still

a cost associated with that you want to launch the website quickly and you want to improve the website from there get the feedback get the heat maps get the customer recordings and work out what our next steps are we make database decisions on a regular basis so we have continuous improvement and the idea is instead of your website traffic graph and your conversion graph going step we are looking for that 45

degree angle so what can you as a digital marketer do about this today and for free give you some good takeaways so that you can take some of this data-driven approach and put it into your day-to-day work and i can tell you that most of the things that i've got here you could do over the lunch break if you're really keen 12 30 that's about lunch isn't it rabina so you can

get through it in your lunch break if you're desperate otherwise you can knock it off this afternoon over a bottle of wine bell so number one google tag manager if you don't already have google tag manager i put this number one excuse me so i put this number one so that you can start on the next steps because you will need a developer to help you implement google tag manager in a

lot of cases but once you've had the developer implement tag manager you can then modify and add your tags yourself it's putting the power of the analytics in the marketer's hands so you don't have to log a job with your developer every time you want to make a change to your analytics it's free you can go to tag manager and you can sign up step two google analytics and this is relevant

no matter whether you're already on google analytics or you're not because it changes a lot and if you don't look at your configuration on a regular basis now's your chance so go into google analytics check your configuration do you have your goals set up have you got your demographics and interest reports correctly configured do you have your cross device analytics set up so we can start to measure people coming from mobile

and desktop have you excluded your internal ip addresses which i tell you is an absolute pain in the neck with everybody working from home with dynamic ip addresses on the plus side our website traffic went up quite considerably but you should be excluding your office ip addresses finally are you excluding bots because you you don't need that interfering with your data make sure you have it correctly linked so google search console

for your webmaster data but also make sure you've got a link to google ads if you're doing google ads so you can see exactly what's driving your traffic set up your e-commerce tools if you're actually using e-commerce some of the e-commerce related tools that we use now are very sophisticated and we can bring offline data back into the website using events and things like that definitely have a look at that finally

review the data you have we don't look at our data often enough in a lot of cases so i really recommend you just have spend five or ten minutes looking at your data maybe all you will get out of that five or ten minutes is a shiny sense of satisfaction because you can see that you've done a good job you can see that you've improved the data over the last 12 months

and it's a good thing to see what a good job you've done on a friday afternoon if you don't have google analytics like i said before just go and sign up go and sign up now go through my checklist and get that started so number three would be heat mapping now i mentioned this before no matter what tool you use go and set up your heat maps on your key pages go

and set up your recordings so that you've got your recordings of your customer interactions on your website um and finally set up funnels if you're using something like hotjar you can and you're in an e-commerce business you can set up a funnel to follow through and see where people are dropping off on your flow so that you can help them avoid dropping off um okay apparently all gifts which is great um

hotjar is free but they're limited in the number of heat maps and recordings you can have um their pay plan starts at about us thirty dollars lucky orange the one we use that's uh ten dollars a month not free but it's the recordings are a bit more sophisticated the heat maps are a bit better and we get some daily updates on progress and things like that um number four your search traffic

now in this case we would use something like semrush or ahrefs now i said something that you can do today and for free neither of those are free but they offer free trials and they can give you some initial data so a way to get started very quickly you can see how the search engines see your website and also how people are finding your website you will find all kinds of terms

that are limited linking to your website that you never expected if this is the first time that you're looking at that data very simple to go through and look at what's going on and get some benchmarks and some comparison data and i mentioned in the discord before but if you shoot us an email or dm me on discord we'll pull that semrush domain report for you so you don't have to pay

for it and just give you that idea of what's going on on your website um number five build out your personas so follow alyssa's tips this morning on personas use all the data you've got to inform who your personas are wait for rabina's tips on customers and journeys at 1 45 after the break and build out some personas that you can then report on make sure you're actually meeting their needs if

you use hubspot obviously we're a hubspot agency i know that some people do use it you can actually set your personas up in hubspot so that you can start to customize the information that you're providing those people and also track how many of those personas you've got so you get an idea of who your biggest persona is it's a great way of being able to take personas from being a theoretical representation

to being a much more real representation of what you're doing number six do we call this a bonus tip can we call this about a step okay let's go a little bit keep tabs on your data so measurement is one thing but monitoring and acting on it is is a very different thing for that we use a tool called databox which is free obviously paid offerings but starts at free for a

certain number of data sources it supports most of the common data sources that you would use whether it's google analytics google ads facebook instagram twitter etc but it allows you to create mashups and custom data why haven't i said google data studio in our experience it's easier and more reliable to get the data that we need into databox that it is google data studio box is also more real-time and more alert

driven than what we get out of google data studio and these look a bit like this i nike are not a client of ours i stole this from databox's website that's okay but you can see here that it's measuring our results over the last 30 days and they've got a smattering of their google analytics data on the one board so they can see their kpis if you're a slack addict like we

are here you can set up alerts so that if something veers from kpi um or a kpi is achieved you get an alert in slack very cool tool to make sure that you've got your finger on the pulse of your data all right that is all you need to know to get started with data in your website redesign if you do have any more questions you can jump on the discord ravina's

monitoring it closely to see if there's any last questions otherwise just give us a call hit me up on discord or jump on the website no mayonnaise is not an instrument thank you very much so robina if there's no more questions you want me to throw to lunch all right so we're going to have a lunch break and at 12 1 45 we're going to come back with rabina talking about customer

journeys have a good lunch everybody