Making Data-Driven Decisions in Your Business with Ally Anderson
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Numbers don’t lie and that’s why it’s so important to be making data-driven decisions in your business. Ally Anderson joins us on the podcast to share what it looks like to make decisions based on data, what data you should be collecting as a business owner, and how you can collect it. Listen in to hear some of her favorite tools for data collection online and how to get started!
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Guest Bio:
I have almost a decade of experience in marketing, and I’ve been obsessed with data from day one—digging into metrics for every piece of content to figure out how I could make it perform better and get better results.
You’d think this would be standard practice, right? I mean, data basically puts all the content marketing “answers” at the end of the book. So I was genuinely shocked to learn that most business owners don’t use data at all. Or, they do their best with third-party reporting, not realizing that it doesn’t give the full picture.
I’m a fixer, so when I realized this, I got to work. Akari Digital was born and now, with the help of my team, I get to help entrepreneurs make better marketing decisions so they know exactly where to invest their time, energy, and money to achieve measurable, predictable growth.
Today’s episode is brought to you by my Client Hub Template inside the DIY Systems Template Shop. Business owners often have their client information spread across a variety of different tools, making it hard to access the information they need to make critical decisions. That’s why I built the Client Hub Template for Airtable, to take the guesswork out of building your own!
Here are the highlights…
[2:02] What is Strategic Marketing?
[4:03] Data You Should Be Collecting
[7:31] Conversions & Micro-Conversions
[9:25] Why You Need Google Analytics
[10:22] Google Analytics and ShowIt
[11:15] Getting Started with Google Analytics
[14:18] Instagram is Not Marketing
[20:00] GA4 of Google Analytics
[24:28] The Data Your Should Be Reviewing
[30:32] Data Tracking & UTMs
[37:09] History of Your Data & Making Decisions
[38:40] Seasonality of Data
[41:23] Biggest Fuck Up in Business
Mentioned in this Episode
Episode 41 with Carolina Guzik
Connect with Ally
Website: akaridigital.ca
Newsletter: akaridigital.online/newsletter-optin
Instagram: instagram.com/akaridigital
Free Reach Calculator: akaridigital.online/reach-calculator-optin
Review the Transcript:
Colie: Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Business First Creatives podcast. Today we are talking about data, my favorite subject in the whole wide world. I have Ally Anderson here, and she is a strategic marketing person who’s gonna help you make data driven decisions for your business. And I’m assuming that if you use some of that like voodoo magic, you could probably apply it to your real life.
But let’s stick with business for today. Ally, welcome to my podcast.
Ally: you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.
Colie: I mean, you, you and I know, so we had a coffee chat. I don’t know, it was like a month ago. And I have been so excited to talk with you ever since, cuz I’ve told you like I love talking about data driven decisions and the majority of the time I don’t get to talk about that goodness with most of my clients and most of the people that I interact with in like social media.
So let’s dive right in. I went through your social media and through your website and girl, you’re a little cheeky, like, so first of all, I think we need to start with what strategic marketing is. So can you give us a definition to kind of push us forward in this conversation?
Ally: Yes. So how I define strategic marketing is we have something that we are doing at every stage of the customer journey. We have something in place to reach people. We have something in place to nurture, connect, resonate with those people. We have something in place to convert them and then something in place to retain them, improve that experience afterwards, so that either they’re gonna tell people about us or they’re going to wanna work with us time and time again.
And that does not mean that does not all happen in one channel, in one platform, they’re going to. These interactions are going to take place over multiple days, potentially weeks and months in multiple different areas, and we have something in place to bridge that gap from one step to the next to the next.
Colie: Ally, you saw my face. You said that magic word, bridge the gap. I love that phrase. And the funny thing is I’m always telling people you need a CRM so that you can centralize and organize your client experience. But what you are talking about is kind of centralizing and organizing all of the different places that we can collect data on our clients and our potential clients.
And the reason that I find this so fascinating is because. Like you said, we are interacting with our clients everywhere. We’ve got Instagram, which I know we’re gonna talk about in depth on this podcast, but we’ve got Instagram, we’ve got our website, we’ve got our email marketing platform. You might even be talking to people in real life, you know, at networking events.
But we interact with people. In multiple ways, and it’s really hard to get all of that information centralized so that you can make data driven decision. So you talked about what strategic marketing was. Now I need you to define data. So bare, minimum ally, what is the data that every entrepreneur should be collecting on their clients?
And we’re gonna get into the how and the what you do with it after. After you tell us what data to collect.
Ally: Yes, love this question and it will look slightly different for everybody because depending on how you are marketing, you will have different data, but I. In its simplest, most vague form to begin with. All of those different stages, we need to understand how many people we’re talking to at each of those stages and how many are kind of continuing from one step to the next.
So what that can look like is if you are primarily finding people on Instagram and with ads. That data is going to probably live in those platforms. And so you’ll be able to see, reach, impressions, clicks, whatever it is depending on the channel. And then we’re looking at from there, we want them to arrive on our website.
So then how can I measure how many people are arriving on our website? You and I know Google Analytics is my favorite tool for website analytics because one, it’s free and accessible for small business owners. Two, it’s constantly evolving and getting better, so then you have a comprehensive website analytics set up.
Most businesses do that in Google Analytics, and then once they go into your conversions, which is probably where they’re starting to interact with a CRM or an email marketing system or an e-commerce platform, if we’re going there, but that’s not probably your audience as much, then we’re looking at that data.
In your crm, how many people are clicking. To your forms, how many people are starting to fill out your forms? How many people actually completed those forms? And then the data in your crm, which you could probably speak to just as well as I can about do they actually become clients? Do they work with you time and time again?
How much time does it take for them to go from a lead to a booked session or whatever it may be?
Colie: Yeah, Ally. Okay, so I heard you say two words. I, I’m sorry, guys. This episode is going to be very like definition driven because I feel like we’re saying a lot of words and I wanna make sure that we’re all on the same page. So you didn’t say the word drop off.
But I know that’s what you meant. So it’s really important when you’re going from something like Instagram to your website, you do wanna know how many people are dropping off because Instagram gives you analytics. They’re not great analytics, but like you said, ally, you can get basic impressions, you can get basic clicks. So that is like, I don’t know if I’d consider that to be a dropoff, but that’s definitely a metric that you wanna look at. If you’ve got this one post that was shown to 2000 people, And a hundred people clicked.
That’s data. You know what your click rate for that was. And then if the goal was to send people over to your website, you wanna look at how many people clicked and how many people actually did something on your website. Now I wanna now talk about conversions because you mentioned two different kinds of conversions and I feel like a lot of people don’t like segment those.
So first you’ve got the conversion. If the goal is to add people to your email list, You’ve got that kind of conversion. Did they fill out the opt-in form? Did they grab your freebie? Did they opt into your emails? Whatever that is. And then there’s the other kind of conversion, which a lot of us, you know, we’re business owners we needed.
That’s when they actually become a paying client and they pay you money. Those are the two conversions that I focus on. Are there any other ones that you think that we should be paying attention to?
Ally: I would say as far as conversions go, those are kind of typically the big ones for most websites, and so you’ll have what you’ll hear in the data or in the marketing world, your micro conversions and your conversions. So your conversions being people are paying you money, your micro conversions. They’re taking some actionable steps to
learn more about you, to be interested in your offers.
There are other things that I like to. And I would call them kind of your steps to conversions and data. We’ll call them your like just more typical events. And so if your conversion is somebody becoming a client, think of what are the steps that they need to take to get there. They need to view the page where this form is on.
They need to start filling out the form. They need to finish filling the form, they need to book the call. Whatever those individual steps are, that’s gonna give you so much more insight into. What can you do to make this perform better than just saying, I want to improve my conversion rate? So what?
Colie: Yeah, and it’s funny because when you mention steps after you’ve written down each one of those steps, every time you’re asking the potential client or the client to take action, you can either calculate whether or not they’re a conversion or they’re a dropoff. So every single step that you want someone to take is an opportunity for you to collect more data.
Okay. Let’s talk about that data collection though. You have a headline on your website that says, sorry, but your DIY Google Analytics setup up isn’t enough. And I will admit I laughed out loud. I was really glad I didn’t have coffee in my mouth. I feel the same way I. But I feel like we should take one step back, and I know that there are people in my audience that still don’t have Google Analytics set up on their website.
So number one, how hard is it? And number two, why should they put Google Analytics on their website immediately?
Ally: I love this question and I will say that some analytics, even the DIY is gonna be better than no analytics. And when I have clients that work with me and they just have the absolute basic, we can still get a good amount of information to make decisions, but we don’t get all of the information that I would love to have.
So how easy is it to set up Google Analytics? If you are using a standard crm, WordPress, Squarespace, show it. Any of these, there are typically you need to copy and paste a piece of code, usually into one little box somewhere. Sometimes it’s not even like a code, it’s like a series of numbers, and then you press a button and it’s done.
Colie: It’s done, y’all. It’s done. I’m sorry. I told Ally I was gonna harp on this before we started hitting record. Now I will say I preferred it when I was on a WordPress only website because you could just copy and paste the code into one spot and call it a day. Unfortunately. For those show IT users
out there, which you guys all know, I love it.
Show it is my favorite. I love being able to put shit anywhere on the page that I want. But one of the drawbacks is you actually have to copy and paste your Google Analytics code on every single
page that you want Google to watch now. For some of you guys, I know you’ve only got like a six page website.
Good for you. Uh, I currently keep getting the error message. You have over a hundred pages. You will start to see slowdown. I know. And granted, I don’t want all of those pages to be tracked by Google Analytics, but if I did, I have to do it on every single page. So for a lot of you, it’s simple. For some of you others, you’re gonna have to like schedule like, you know.
30 minutes, maybe 45 minutes to go and copy and paste on every page. But once you’ve done that, you never have to do it again.
Ally: Yep, exactly. So it is really easy to start just get that code on there and it’s gonna track, I would say. 60% of what most businesses need, it’s going to track people on each page. Are they clicking from one page to the next? Are they leaving your website? And it does. Its best to track things like form submissions and scroll depth, but it is not fully complete.
And there is a certain level of somebody needs to figure out how this website is built in order to. Track those form submissions, and so I can’t remember off the top of my head. For WordPress, it’s a little bit easier. Typically in Squarespace it’s a little bit easier show. It typically needs a little bit more tinkering, but that’s kind of step one.
If you have that basic setup, you can start to identify when we’re talking about those different steps, if those steps are happening on different pages, you can get a pretty good idea of where people are dropping off.
Colie: Yeah.
I was having a conversation with Carolina Guzick in a previous episode. I will link it in the show notes. But one of the things that we were talking about as like business coaches for photographers is that quite often when someone comes to us and they’re saying, you know, I’m not getting enough bookings, If they don’t have Google Analytics, they can’t even tell us.
Okay. But like how many people are actually landing on your website? Like how many people are you starting with each month that could potentially inquire about your services? So I know that Ally and I are talking about some pretty high level stuff guys, but number one, if you wanna know how many people are visiting your website, you have got to get Google Analytics or some other form of.
What we’re talking about on your website so that you bare minimum know how many people are visiting your website each month. Because if you come to me and you say, inquiries are down, the first thing I’m gonna say is, okay, well did your, did the number of people visiting your website drop? And if you look at me with that, I mean, we can’t even try to figure out whether you have a marketing problem or you have a content problem or you have a conversion problem.
Unless we know how many people are visiting your website every month.
Ally: Yeah, and I just, I see it happen so often that then as business owners we’re like, business is down. I’m not getting these inquiries, and you start to panic and then you’re, okay, I’m gonna spend so much more time on Instagram. I’m gonna invest more money here. I’m gonna do all these things. And if you are.
Throwing time, energy, money, and you don’t even know where the problem is. It’s, it just makes the, I don’t know, it makes it more stressful. Whereas if you can say, okay, I know exactly where my problem is, and put all of that time, energy, money, channel it into the right area, it just makes your life a little bit more.
Colie: Uh, Ally, you said Instagram again. Okay. I think that was the third time. So we’re gonna dive in. The one thing that you wanna tell everybody is that Instagram is not marketing. Explain yourself.
Ally: It’s a good part of marketing. There is so much potential for a business to use Instagram for your marketing, but you cannot do all of your marketing on Instagram and put all of your eggs in that one basket and expect it to convert and, I don’t know. I, you see a lot of narrative out there or a lot of people saying that, oh, do this one thing, whether it’s Instagram or something else, but do this one thing and it skyrocketed my business.
It 10 Xed my sales, and that is such a small window into the big situation. And I don’t know, it also, Here’s my sass coming out a little bit. It infuriates me when you have these people with massive followings saying, I did this one little thing and it did all this magic for my business. And I’m like, yeah, but you have a whole bunch of people that are super engaged, excited, and ready to buy from you.
Yeah. If you do one thing, you’re gonna see big results.
Colie: Okay, Ally, but so what bothers you about that is not the same thing that bothers me about that. I always tell people, but those are the people that are trying to sell you on doing
that. Like I. If there is someone just out in the world, and I do know these people do exist, guys like, I mean, my business coach is one of them.
She often talks about her successes and she’s not trying to sell you on an actual product that I tend to take more seriously than if you’re telling me, oh, if you do this one thing on Instagram, it’s gonna bring you all these leads, but you’re also trying to sell me on your product to help me do it. I mean, you do kind of have to.
Qualify the messaging that you’re given. Whether or not it is just someone trying to promote the thing that they sell, or if they’re legitimately trying to tell you something that would push your business forward and that they don’t have any kind of investment in whether or not you say yes or no.
Ally: Hmm. Totally, totally. Yeah. So I guess to come back to the, your initial question of Instagram can be a amazing tool for your business, and if you are comfortable marketing yourself on Instagram and creating videos, reels, doing all that stuff. Amazing use it, but know that in order to actually have that turn into dollars in your business to turn into clients, you need to have a way to convert them.
And typically that is on your website.
there are some people that have a really amazing DM sales strategy, and then they send people to a checkout. Cool. That’s an option too, but. For most people, if you’re not wanting to be in your DMS 24 7 every single day, you are getting people onto your website and that website needs to then convert them.
And then of course you need to have that retention c r M stuff that is gonna keep them around and keep them engaged. So
Colie: But also about conversions, Ally, like you, I mean, the whole point of having you on here was talk about data driven decisions, and the truth is, even if you are able to close. Deals on Instagram, the entire process, you can’t really collect data on it. Like every time you’re DMing someone, there is no data on that.
But if you were sending ’em an email outside of Instagram, that is data that you collect If they are on your email list and you can look at every broadcast. Sorry guys, I’m talking in Convert convert kit language, but if you are sending your broadcast and you can see that one has a much higher click rate than others, if you can actually see that the conversion rate, whereas someone who actually bought your products and services off of that one email, those are things that you can track.
But if you’re doing everything in Instagram, you don’t own Instagram. Instagram is only gonna give you the data and analytics that they want, and sometimes that’s not enough to make data-driven decisions. Right.
Ally: That 100%. And the other piece to add to it is, They can change things at any time and you have no control,
Colie: Yeah.
Ally: which happens sometimes, or it goes down. You always own your email list. You always own your website, but Instagram can change things. Typically they want businesses to be on there, so they’re not gonna just completely rip the rug out from under everyone’s feet, but,
We’ve seen how things evolve with all of a sudden, reels is required in order to kinda grow a business.
And that’s fine. That’s their prerogative. That’s the business that they’re building. But yeah, you’re right. You can’t track it and it’s, you are then always needing to adapt to how they want you to run your business on Instagram.
Colie: Yeah, I mean, and when it comes to Instagram, you mentioned cuz it is totally possible to send people straight from Instagram to a checkout page, but then that checkout page is giving you data
on how many people landed on it and then how many people conv, uh, you know, finished the process and actually purchased the product.
So I think what we’re saying is you can collect data anywhere. But you have to be really thoughtful about the data that you’re getting and as much as you can, you wanna push people to like one consistent path so that you can collect all of your data in that manner and then make data-driven decisions going forward.
Alright, so we’ve talked about. Google Analytics and how Instagram is not marketing. I do wanna make one other note because this is gonna come out after GA four has been forced on all of us. So just in case someone is listening to this podcast episode and they. Are still on Universal Analytics and haven’t switched over to GA four.
Can you first of all just like, say what that means and then say why Google Analytics decided to push forth GA four? Cuz I’m honestly not a fan, but I’m, I’m working on it, ally. I’m working on it.
Ally: Yes, so Google Analytics. So Universal Analytics, which is the version of analytics that we’ve been using for, I wanna say a decade. I think it was like eight years last year. So let’s say nine years, almost a decade. It has stayed relatively the same and how the, how people interact with different websites has changed drastically.
Now people are on their phones a lot more versus just on a computer. Privacy is, has evolved leaps and bounds since a decade ago, and so Google Analytics launched Google, Google Analytics four GA four. I wanna say two or three years ago in beta and then, yeah, last year at some point they said We are canceling Universal and everybody needs to move over to GA four.
It is similar, but still significantly different. I will say that for the questions that most business owners will be asking, of how many people are on my website, which pages did they visit? Where did they come from? Those questions are still easy to find, but of course it’s a different interface, so there’s a little bit of learning a new tool in order to find it.
So it probably won’t change much. Your numbers are not going to match up one for one, because what GA four does much better is it will count a user whether you are on your phone, on your computer, at your house, versus searching from the coffee shop. Down the street, it will, it does a much better job of pulling all of those together into one user,
Colie: Yeah.
Ally: so numbers will not match up one for one.
I hear that a lot from people of being like, which one’s more accurate? GA four is probably more accurate. But the numbers will be a little bit different, and I believe I haven’t seen it because I have migrated all of my accounts and my client accounts, but I believe that Google Analytics is technically migrating everybody if you haven’t done it by yourself by the due date.
So,
Colie: it’s July 15th,
so this is gonna air after July 15th. But like I know I did a website, I’m not a website expert, but I did a website talk recently at an online symposium. So, A lot of the people were like, okay, Colie. So I did the GA four like you told me, and now I’m getting this error at the top of my page and I’m like, it’s fine.
They’re showing that to everyone. The one that says, you know, if you don’t convert by this date, we will switch for you. I will admit one of the reasons that I’m not a huge fan of GA four is I used to like to look at someone’s journey like, and Universal Analytics allowed you to look at like one person, see what page brought them to your website.
And then you could basically track everywhere that they went on your website. And guys, that’s privacy issue, which is why GA4 doesn’t let you see it. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t miss it. I mean, I loved being able to do that, particularly when I was a photographer. Only I. I love to be able to see, okay, if someone landed on my homepage and then they were interested in newborns and they clicked on the newborn page, like where did they go after?
Cuz I was interested in drop off from each page or just what journey someone took so that I could make sure that it had the most up-to-date information or. The final page that they visited before they clicked the contact form. To me, that’s really important because that’s what helped them most make their decision to actually contact you and inquire about your services.
And so I always like to know what that page is, and now I can’t figure out a way to get it in GA four. And so I’m a little, you know, I’m a little irritated. I’m a little perturbed. If I had a contact at Google, I’d probably scream at them every day, but, On your website, being able to track this data
is what’s going to help you not only grow in your business, but use your marketing strategically.
So I do wanna come back over cuz I feel like we’ve talked a lot about marketing overall, the importance of centralizing your data so that you can make decisions. But we haven’t actually talked about like the decisions. That we should make from the data. So what is the number one piece of data that your clients, or that you’ve seen out in the real world?
What’s the number one piece of data that someone looks at and what decision is it that they’re trying to make going forward?
Ally: So I’m gonna break that into kind of a two step approach, cuz we need to first figure out where should I be spending my time, energy, money in my business and my marketing. And then, Now that I know where I’m spending it, what should I be doing are kind of the two questions that we need to ask. And so how the data can help guide us to answer those questions is in step one or question number one of where should I be spending my time, energy, money, that is looking at this user journey of how many people am I reaching, connecting, converting, et cetera, and saying even if.
Those are all collected on different platforms and you are literally putting it into a Google sheet spreadsheet and saying, this is how many people get to this step. This is how many people get to that step. It, it will get you a good enough idea to say, I need to reach more people, or I’m reaching enough people and I just need to talk to them more effectively or convert them better, whatever.
And so at that point, Being able to say, okay, cool, I’m gonna focus on reach then. If we’re using the example of reach right now, then it’s okay, do I want to do what I’m doing better
or do I need to add something new? And that’s where that’s a little bit tougher to give a blanket example cuz it is different for every single business.
But you can look into the data of your individual channels and say, Are there things that I can do on Instagram with my ads for seo? Whatever it is that you’re doing, and are there opportunities to make this work better or should I experiment with a new platform? And I think it comes down to this idea of experimentation.
Nobody, and if they say they can tell you the future, they’re lying or trying to sell you something,
Colie: you something.
Ally: nobody can tell you that something is guaranteed to work. But we can, with our expertise and things that we’ve seen before, have a solid hypothesis of, I’m pretty confident that if you do this, we will achieve X result.
And you can still do this for yourself as a business owner. You don’t need to have all of the expertise behind you and say, you know what? I’m pretty confident that if I did this thing on Instagram, if I did this thing in my email list, I’m pretty confident that it’s gonna achieve. Whatever result. And so you try it and measure to see if it works, and then even if it doesn’t do what you want it to do, now you have more information to make a better hypothesis next time to get you closer towards where you need to go.
So I would say the easy thing that pretty much every business owner could probably do is identify that first question of where should I be putting my energy? The harder question to answer is, okay, now what do I do within here? But at least you’ve eliminated that. You’re not gonna start a YouTube channel.
If you have a big audience and you need to convert people, you’re gonna be like, okay, I need to convert. I need to do something on my website probably.
And you’re gonna be a lot closer than you would’ve been if you didn’t answer that first question.
Colie: I mean, it’s so fascinating that people don’t just start with the basics like that. Because one of the things that I will say is, let’s say that the two channels that you used the most was SEO on your website and Instagram. And let’s say that you, you know, you’re getting more and more followers are on Instagram.
More and more people are liking your information. But then when you look in your C R M at the question of how did you find me? If 80% of people are saying on Google and only 20% of people are saying on Instagram, I would say you probably need to start blogging a little bit more. You probably need to be doing some more stuff on your website because that seems to be the platform that is converting
for you, not all this time that you are spending on Instagram.
Now, I will also say, There are some people that put it out there. Okay. But like I’m not using Instagram as my marketing tool. I’m using it to interact with my followers. But to that, I would say your end result, like what you want is still to get hired. Right? So we should look at the, what the data is telling us.
And the data is not lying guys, Unless for some odd and strange reason, like people are just flat out telling you the wrong thing. Like, oh, I found you on your website when they actually found you on Instagram. Like people are really not that dumb majority of the time, so we don’t really have to worry about that.
But I. If you just assume that because you’re getting all of these followers on Instagram, that that is what’s leading to you getting increased bookings, I would argue. Okay, but did the data tell you that? Or did you make an assumption? Cuz you know what they say about assumptions? Right. I had a client who was running Google ads for her photography business.
And I was like, okay, but like have you looked at the data, like the, you’re saying that you’re getting booked solid, but are those leads actually coming from the ads? Like do you have your Google Analytics set up to show you that it’s actually people who are clicking on ads that are booking you or that it’s just people who are finding you organically on Google because.
That would be a decision on whether or not you continue to spend, I don’t know, 300, $600 a month on these Google Ads if they’re not actually producing what you need them to produce. So I think the number one rule today, Ally, is don’t
make assumptions, collect the data to prove your hypothesis rather than just assuming that something is true.
Ally: Yep. Yeah. I couldn’t say it better than that. That’s perfect. I was gonna try, and then I was like, Nope, you nailed it. Great.
Colie: uh, Ally. Okay, so another headline from your website is Marketing that you can Measure, track, and rely on. So I feel like for this conversation, that’s just really important that we look at the measuring and the tracking, and that is what we’ve been talking about today in terms of our strategic marketing.
Now, is there anything that people are gonna do in their business that you don’t think they’re gonna be able to measure and track? Like do you think that that exists?
Ally: There are things that are harder to track than others, and there are things that can be more complex than it’s worth it to bother trying to track. Definitely, I’d say for the typical. Small business owner that we’re talking to that is marketing online what your everything can be tracked, and this is probably a bit more of a advanced concept, but the thing that many people don’t take advantage of that makes tracking easier are what are called UTM tags.
And that is essentially if you are doing things like, well, email marketing isn’t always going to show up in your Google analytics. Some platforms do it better than others. So if you’re doing ConvertKit, it’s like a quick like turn it on. If you’re doing something like Flodesk, they make it really hard for you.
But it’s like, so there are things that you can do to track things like email if you use business cards or have little like posters or things that you hand out to people putting a QR code on them. By nature is not trackable. But if you use what’s called a UTM code, if you Google how to do UTM codes, I’m sure there are 10,000 blogs out there that can break it down in a simple way.
But doing something like that can make it easier. But by default, they’re not tracked. If we’re talking like television ads, those are really hard to track, but I don’t think the majority of the listeners are gonna be worried about that right now.
Colie: And for TV ads, I mean, all you could do was depend on the end user being truthful for you and remembering that that’s where they first saw you.
I mean, how many of us have bought a product and it says, you know, how did you find out about this product? And TV ad is like one of the options. If it’s something again that’s bigger, that’s actually
paying for TV ads.
No, Ally, I love that you mentioned UTMs because I’ve been using them a lot to segment my audience because I want to know. Who’s landing on my C R M blueprint course page from the podcast? Who’s landing on it from, you know, a link that I put in my Instagram stories or a particular button on my email marketing program?
I mean, all of those things are where the U T M would be slightly different, but that way again, you can look at dropoff. You can look at conversions and we didn’t mention it, but we can also look at bounce rate guys. I mean, Ali very briefly said, you know, when people land on your website, you can see how long they’re spending and where they’re going, but.
Time on each page and your bounce rate are two things that you’re not even gonna have to do anything after you copy and paste that code. When you first log into Google Analytics, it’s going to tell you how many website visitors you had in X days, the average amount of time that each of those users spent on your website, and then it’s gonna tell you your bounce rate.
Now, bounce rate is so different now than it was like 10 years ago. I gotta tell you, Ally, I used to have a bounce rate that was under 10%.
Ally: Oh.
Colie: No one believes me. I know I have screenshots, but it’s okay. My bounce rate used to be incredible and I had people that were spending like two to three minutes on my website on average, which is huge.
Now I don’t have that now guys. I mean, several of my pages have like 90% bounce rates. Also, I will say one of the things that I like about UTMs is it’s gonna be able to track the bounce rate. The average amount of time that someone’s spending on your website using those UTMs. So like I will tell you flat out, people who are clicking on my website from an ad, they are a hundred percent bounce rate.
Now what do I do with that data? Well, I currently decided to stop spending money on I until I figure it out. But like that was a data driven decision that I made for myself because. No matter how well the ad was performing for me, like click rate, cost per click, I could see that when those people were getting to my website, they were not spending any time on my website.
It was a hundred percent bounce. So that means that I either need to tweak, I need to figure out why they’re dropping off, to bring it back to this conversation, or I need to figure out if there’s any of the, you know, messaging that needs to be different because what that might say to someone is okay.
They were engaged with whatever your ad was, but then when they landed on your website, it wasn’t what they expected. And so you have to make sure that those two things are aligned. But how would you know that if you weren’t tracking the data?
Ally: Yep. And a fun tool that is free and great for small businesses to start digging into that is using a tool called Microsoft Clarity. So it’s a Microsoft product. It’s kind of like if you’ve used Hotjar or like any of those heat maps or whatever, but it’s a Microsoft product. It’s free to use and it can start answering those questions of how far down did they scroll, because then again, you’re like, cool, why does ads traffic.
Drop or bounce immediately on my site. Ask yourself more questions. Are they scrolling below the fold? Are they seeing the button, the offer section, the like whatever content, like what are the steps that somebody should take on that page? And then ask yourself if they’re doing them. And so how I would do it is a really complex event tag set up in the backend, but.
That’s probably not a super accessible thing for most people to do. So using something like Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity is a great tool to start with. I will put the caveat of do not make decisions on like 10 sessions. Make sure that you have like,
Colie: my gosh, Ally, I can’t believe that I did not ask you about this because I feel like everyone makes rash decisions and I feel like you are the person that would say no. I mean, because even when it comes to like a, a, my ads.
I ran them for 90 days, I feel like 90 days
and like 427 clicks on one particular ad to take in the, that’s enough data for me to make a decision that, hey, this is not working.
I need to turn this off and make some tweaks. But like, you can’t make rash decisions in like 48 hours or after only 10 people have seen your, you know, your website, your copy, your sales page, whatever it is. So, yes. And then also, I mean, let’s get to the analytics though, because how long. Should you be looking at your data, because we’re talking about not making a rash decision, but like how long should you look at the data before you start to ask those more inquisitive questions, and before you start to think about and plan the strategic changes that you are going to make on your website, in your Instagram, all of that good stuff.
Ally: Yeah, so there is no completely perfect black and white answer here, but I’d say as a general rule of thumb, look at 90 days, three months, or look at if you have a site that has high levels of traffic. And so we’re talking, if you are testing something on a page, and maybe it’s only been live for two weeks, but you’ve had.
20,000 people there, you could potentially start to make some decisions, but then the things that you are eliminating is seasonality. Hey, if you’re in the middle of a launch, launch, traffic is going to look completely different. Or I’ll say launch or sale. It’s gonna look completely different than your typical month here or there.
I would say if you are testing something for conversions, Get at least, at least a hundred conversions before you make a decision. You probably want more like 300, 500 conversions, truly. But like that’s a lot harder when you’re looking at a smaller business to really make those decisions. And so then if you’re expecting a handful of conversions a month, you probably can’t make super definite decisions for six months or a year, and that’s okay.
But you can still make some observations and some hypothesis and do the best with the data that you have.
Colie: I love that you mentioned seasonality because in particular for the photographers and the audience I don’t want you to compare your website traffic from January and March. So like June through August, like, please don’t do that. Like please think about your business in terms of seasons and if you really must compare data, I want you to compare this coming fall to what happened last fall.
Like that’s how you make decisions. And in fact, that even pushes forward Ally’s idea of taking time because you can’t make a data-driven decision within that year. You’re not gonna be able to see comparable data until the next fall season,
and then the next fall season, which is why it’s so important for you to start collecting this data now so that you have that data next year to compare like, well, what were you seeing in July and August of 2022 versus July and August of 2023?
I mean, sometimes it’s not about comparing things in your business from month to month or even quarter to quarter. For those of us that have high peaks, And for those of you that do launches, what I’m saying applies to launches too. You would never wanna compare what you’re seeing during a launch period to what you’re seeing during like evergreen sales.
Like that just doesn’t make sense. You wanna compare apples and apples and oranges and oranges. I.
Ally: Yeah, like I’ll say with my clients, we typically do our big strategic thinking and planning once a year, so, And then every quarter, so every month we’re like temperature checking of is anything going completely awry that we need to fix now, or are we on track with where we expect to be with whatever targets we’ve set?
And then every quarter we’re doing a bit more of analysis to say, do we need to pivot, adapt based on. More information that we have, but the big changes are planned about a year in advance. And that can be, that takes a little bit of time to get your business into that flow. And that’s, that doesn’t happen right away.
And that’s okay. If you’re thinking quarter to quarter and that’s gonna be ambitious and what you need to set to right now, great. Do that, but don’t, yeah, one week to the next be like, ah, these ads aren’t working. Cut everything. They might be. It’s just needs a little bit more time and ads especially need way more data in order for them to function properly because they have tools that are trying to optimize on their end, and if they don’t have enough data, they can’t optimize.
It’s a bit of a beast.
Colie: Yeah.
All right Ally, this conversation has been amazing, and we’re gonna end with the question that I ask every single guest on this podcast, and that is, what was your biggest fuck up in business? What did you learn from it, and how did you grow?
Ally: So my biggest fuck up is just trying to do everything myself and not asking for help from anybody, and then it has just held me back in so many ways. And now that I am asking for help, getting the right people in my corner. I’m seeing way more growth than I was before and it kind of gives me the sad, like, ah, why didn’t I do this sooner?
Sooner? So for me, I was trying to do everything for everybody from a marketing angle. I was doing all of my own admin, all of my own, like content creation from start to finish. And it really limited what I could do. And now it kind of started with me hiring a coach because I was like, I need somebody to help me get outta my own head.
Colie: Mm-hmm.
Ally: It was the best decision that I made at that point, and now we’re working at me delegating other things, and it’s of course a learning and growing process for anybody that starts delegating. It is hard and
Colie: It is hard.
Ally: we’re learning, but now I have one contractor that is working up to 30 hours a week, so it’s like consistent and.
We’re delegating things and the business is growing without me needing to do every single thing and my sanity is back. It’s wonderful.
Colie: Ally, that’s If the listening audience wants to learn more about you and your offers, where can they find you on the internet? It will be in the show notes, but I like everybody to say it out loud.
Ally: So Instagram, I rant on it, but I do use it for my own business in its. It has its role, it is not my entire marketing, but so Instagram, at Akari Digital. So Akari is aka a r i digital. I have a website, which is ari digital.ca. I’m Canadian. I’m waiting for that.com to come available. And I have an email list, which is probably, if you want to hear from me most consistently, that is where you will find me, and you can sign up for that on my website.
Colie: Awesome. Ally, thank you so much for joining me in this conversation. I hope that everybody in the listening audience, if you take one thing to do after you listen to this podcast, if you currently do not have Google Analytics or some other kind of data tracking on your website, do it today, your future self will.
Thank you. All right, that’s it for this episode. See you next time.
