Kristen Doyle 0:00
So you’ve set up your Google Analytics, maybe you check it every now and then and you’ve got some traffic numbers coming in. That’s great, but here’s the problem. Google Analytics Four really only tells you half the story. It tells you how many people showed up, it tells you what pages they visited, but it really doesn’t tell you much about what they actually do and how they interact with your website once they get there.
Kristen Doyle 0:28
See Google Analytics can’t tell you which button they clicked, or how far down the page they scrolled, or where they were on your page when they gave up and left. And that gap between here’s how many people came to my site and here’s exactly how they behave on my site, is really where you can learn a whole lot about how to make your website better.
Kristen Doyle 0:53
So today, I am walking you through some free tools that can show you what’s actually happening on your pages, the stuff that Google Analytics just really wasn’t built to show you. Plus, I’ll show you how to use Google Analytics’ own tools to see a little more information about the path that your visitors actually take versus the one that you want them to.
Kristen Doyle 1:18
You’ve got happy customers and a solid business, but you’re stuck guessing about what to focus on next. Is it your website, your systems, your marketing? If that sounds a little too familiar, then you are in the right place. Welcome to Small Business Savvy. I’m your host, Kristen Doyle, and every week we cover business systems, website strategy, simplified marketing, and the decisions that actually grow your business. No fluff, no shiny objects, just what works. Let’s get started, y’all.
Kristen Doyle 1:54
So there are actually two totally different types of website data, fundamentally different, and most business owners only have one of them. The first one is the quantitative data. The numbers. This is what most business owners have. This tells you how many visitors came to your site, how long did they stay, what traffic sources did they come from, which pages did they visit? Google Analytics is great at this. It tells you the what. And this is what we talked about setting up in Episode 186, so if you haven’t done that yet, definitely go back, listen to that episode and get this set up, because it is important data.
Kristen Doyle 2:36
But there is also behavioral data. This is the more visual human side of website data. So not just which pages did your visitors go to, but where did they actually click on the page? How far down did they scroll before they stopped reading? What button or section on your page did they totally ignore? This behavioral data tells you why certain pages might not be working as well as you want them to.
Kristen Doyle 3:07
You need both types, but most people set up Google Analytics and they think they’re done. So today’s episode is all about setting up that second layer of data. And the good news is there are free ways to do it.
Kristen Doyle 3:20
So what you want is something called a heat map. A heat map is a visual overlay on your actual web page that shows you where people are clicking. You can see how far down they scroll. You can even see how long they spend on certain sections of your page, so that you can tell what they’re paying the most attention to and what they’re ignoring. It’s all color coded by intensity, so the hotter the color, the more activity in that spot.
Kristen Doyle 3:50
There are three main types of heat maps that you should know about and be able to use on your site. The first one is called a click map. These, like it sounds like, show you exactly where people are clicking on the page. Sometimes you find surprises in there. People click on things that aren’t links. Maybe they thought that a certain image would be linked to something, but it’s not, and you need to go back and fix that. Or on the flip side, they miss a button that you thought was super obvious, and no one’s clicking that one. So you need to change things. This is something that you’ll never be able to find just in Google Analytics by itself. So you definitely want to take a look at your click maps.
Kristen Doyle 4:34
The second type is called a scroll map, and this one shows you how far down the page your visitors actually get. This one really tends to create some big aha moments for business owners, and sometimes not in a good way. A lot of us assume that people will read all the way to the bottom of the page, and the data just does not back that up. You are going to lose people immediately below your hero section, and then more drop off throughout the page scroll.
Kristen Doyle 5:00
In fact, a good benchmark number for your scroll maps is if you still have 50% of people at 50% down the page, you’re doing pretty well on that page. So it just goes to show you how quickly people can drop off. Those things we’re putting at the very bottom. People might not ever be seeing them, and we’ll talk about that in just a minute.
Kristen Doyle 5:20
The third type is called attention or engagement maps. Different platforms call these different things, and this type does usually require a subscription, but we’ll talk about that in a minute too. It’s not the kind of thing you have to pay for forever. You can subscribe just for a month or two and then turn it off. These maps track things like cursor movement as sort of a proxy for eye attention. It’s not super precise, but it can really help you understand where people’s focus goes on the page, and it can also tell you how long they’re spending looking at different parts of your page.
Kristen Doyle 5:54
One thing I want to point out, because it does come up pretty frequently with clients, like I was saying, we as business owners spend a lot of time working on those sections near the bottom of our homepage, especially. That final call to action, the section explaining your whole process, the testimonials, all of those things, and those sections are important. I would never encourage you to take them off your site, but they can only do that important work if people are actually seeing them.
Kristen Doyle 6:26
And what scroll maps will often show you is that a significant chunk, half or more, of your visitors never make it past halfway down your page, or maybe even not past the fold, that very first section at the top. So if your calls to action are all buried at the bottom and people are bailing out before they ever see one, that’s a super fixable problem that you wouldn’t have known about without looking at the scroll map. So we want to look at a scroll map to give you ideas of what needs to be a little higher up on the page.
Kristen Doyle 7:00
That’s one of the things I love to look for when I’m working with a client one on one, and it’s something that we can talk about on a strategy call together. So if that’s something you would want to go through with me for your own website, you can book a strategy call with me at kristendoyle.co/strategy.
Kristen Doyle 7:19
Now there are two free tools that you can use to put those heat maps on your site. Either one works really well. Both Hotjar and Mouseflow have free tiers that give you access to heat maps and session recordings without paying anything. And I’ll put links for those in the show notes. But there are some things you need to know before you get started.
Kristen Doyle 7:37
So first of all, let’s talk about how they work. Both of them work by adding a small snippet of code to your website. If you are on WordPress, this usually just means installing their plugin. Not as technical as it sounds, because we have plugins to help us. If you’re on a different platform, you’ll probably actually have to paste a snippet of code somewhere in your settings, but you should be able to find instructions for how to do that for your platform.
Kristen Doyle 8:03
The other thing to know is that the free plans do have limits on how many page recordings they collect and what kind of heat maps you can see. That’s totally fine for starting out, and we’ll talk about how to use those in just a minute. Like I said, if you want those extra features, more recordings, or those extra heat map types down the road, you can always upgrade your plan for a month or two and then drop back down to the free plan, because really, this is not the kind of thing we need to monitor constantly. This data is only helpful when we are actively reviewing it and making changes to the website based on it. It’s not the kind of data that you just want to collect forever and ever.
Kristen Doyle 8:43
My personal approach for this is I don’t pay for Mouseflow. That’s the tool that I use. I don’t pay to monitor year round. I use their free plan all the time, and I have key pages tracked on the free plan. I upgrade my plan right before I do a website redesign, track the data for a month or so before I redesign, then I redesign those pages based on the data I’ve gotten, and I leave my plan upgraded another month or so after while I monitor and tweak and adjust things, and then I turn it off until the next time that I get ready to make big changes again, and I just use the free plan in those in between months.
Kristen Doyle 9:24
Now, one really cool feature that’s available in both, I believe they both still offer it on the free plans, I know that Mouseflow does, is actual session recordings. Now, this can feel super awkward at first, because it feels a little like you’re spying on someone, but it’s incredibly useful for spotting friction on your site that you would never notice otherwise, because you are actually seeing the person’s mouse move around their page in real time. You are seeing how long they stay on a section, what they scroll back up to to read again, what section they’re on when they decide to click away.
Kristen Doyle 9:58
It can feel a little awkward, but it is super, super helpful information to have. And it’s also important just to know that the way these tools are set up, they are protecting people’s privacy. They anonymize any personal information so you won’t see people type in things like their phone number or credit card numbers, especially on your checkout pages. It’s going to hide that information to protect their privacy, but what you are getting to see is exactly how someone interacts with your website.
Kristen Doyle 10:25
Now, one important constraint of the free plans is that you really do have to plan around how many pages you’re going to monitor at a time. So you just need to be really intentional about where you start. If you install the code as is and just let it go, it is going to track data on every single page of your website, and you are going to run out of page views really fast. Plus, the data is just too thin. If you have one or even five page views across 100 different pages, this is not nearly as helpful as having 100 page views on just five pages, because the more data we have, the better we can see trends.
Kristen Doyle 11:07
So you just want to be strategic. Both platforms have a way for you to tell them which pages to monitor. It’s as simple as pasting in the URLs. You just need to locate the right spot to put that in, depending on which platform you’re using. Start with the page you most want someone to land on. For most of you, that’s probably your homepage. You might also consider something like your services page or a specific offer or sales page. Ultimately, you want to make sure you’re tracking just a couple of those top most important pages at a time. That way you’re not burning through your limit without ever getting good data.
Kristen Doyle 11:39
Now, in episode 189, we are going to talk about how to look at your actual traffic data in Google Analytics to decide which pages you want to track on Mouseflow or Hotjar. But for right now, just pick one page and start with monitoring that one.
Kristen Doyle 11:56
Okay, the other thing that most people just don’t know exists or aren’t using that can actually give you a lot more information than the basic Google Analytics reports, is actually found right inside Google Analytics. It’s a little hidden, and you have to kind of look for it and do a little setup to understand it. Google Analytics has this built in feature called user flows or path exploration reports, and what that does is shows you the exact path visitors take through your website. It will show you what page they started on, where they went next and next and next and so on, and it will tell you where they eventually drop off of your website.
Kristen Doyle 12:36
In some ways, this matters more than heat maps, because heat maps are only tracking those pages that you tell them to track, and if we’re limiting them, like I just said, to maximize usage of your free credits, then you’re probably only tracking a couple of pages. The user flow in Google Analytics will track the user’s path for all the pages on your website. And what you might find when you start looking at your user paths is that almost nobody is taking the actual path that you intended for them to take.
Kristen Doyle 13:07
So when you created your website, or when you worked with your web designer, they probably had a logical journey in mind. People land on your homepage, they go to your services page, then they book a call. But visitors have other ideas. They start clicking around random other places in your menu or a blog post link. They get distracted. Maybe you’re actually getting more calls booked from a blog post than from your homepage. Who knows? But you won’t know that information until you take a look at your user paths.
Kristen Doyle 13:37
Other things you might find are visitors landing on a page that you hadn’t really considered as an entry point, and then they immediately leave, because maybe you didn’t put a clear next step on that page. People going from your homepage straight to your about page instead of services.
Kristen Doyle 13:55
This can tell you one of two things. Maybe you need to tweak your homepage to communicate your offer more clearly, or maybe you just need to lean in to what people are doing and tweak that About page. If this is what people are doing, let me make the about page point toward my products or services or offers, or point toward booking a call. Really high drop off rates might also come up on pages that you thought were doing well. And so lots of good things that you can find in there.
Kristen Doyle 14:21
Let’s talk about how to find this inside Google Analytics. You will log in to your Google Analytics and then on the left side, click on explore. At the top, look for start a new exploration and click path exploration. It’s going to open with two columns of variables and settings on the left, you can close those out for now. They just drop down to the bottom of the page so you can always reopen if you need it. Your starting point should automatically say session start. This basically just means people showed up on your website.
Kristen Doyle 14:54
And what you want to do is edit what is in step one. It usually automatically shows page view as the first step. But that’s not very useful. When people show up, they view a page, yes, not super useful information. Under step one and all the other steps as you add more, you’ll see a drop down that says event name. If you click on that, you can choose page title and screen name to see the actual page names that people have clicked on, and they’ll be listed in order with the most popular at the top.
Kristen Doyle 15:26
You can also choose page path and screen class to see the URLs instead of titles, and that can be super helpful if you have changed page titles during an update. Because page title, if you’ve changed that page title during your update, can show you the difference in performance before versus after, where page path is going to combine them all together. So it just depends on which information you want.
Kristen Doyle 15:53
Click on any page title, like your home page, and then it will open a step two, showing where people went from there, and you can just continue clicking to see what people did. So if I want to know people who arrived on my homepage, how many of them clicked work with me? Where did they go after that? Did they book a call? Look at case studies? You can click through all of those things. It can take a little while to get used to the interface, but the data itself is actually pretty easy to read once you know what you’re looking at.
Kristen Doyle 16:20
Now, if you are newer to Google Analytics Four, or you haven’t set it up yet, go back to episode 186 to walk you through the setup and all the basics.
Kristen Doyle 16:27
All right, let’s talk about what you actually need to do, your action steps this week. Don’t just file this away as a cool new tool, some interesting information that you learn. Here is what I want you to do.
Kristen Doyle 16:39
First, set up heat map tracking. Pick Hotjar or Mouseflow, sign up for one of those and choose one page to start tracking. Either your homepage or your main offer page is almost always the right choice. Install the tracking code, set that one page as your active tracking page, and then give it at least two weeks to collect data before you start drawing any conclusions about it. Keep in mind you need a meaningful number of visitors, ideally at least 100 before that data becomes really useful for you.
Kristen Doyle 17:08
And then, second, explore your user flow in Google Analytics Four, find that path exploration report, and then just spend five to 10 minutes looking at where people go from your homepage. Spend a little time getting acquainted with the data. Don’t worry about trying to fix everything right now. The goal isn’t to overhaul your whole site based on this, it’s just to start seeing your site the way that your visitors actually experience it, because that shift in perspective can help make every website decision that you make just a little bit stronger.
Kristen Doyle 17:41
Now, if you are looking at your data and you’re realizing there’s a gap between what your website is currently doing and what it should be doing, that is exactly what a website game plan call is for. We can look at what you have, what you need, and talk about what your smartest next move is, whether it’s a full redesign, a homepage refresh, or something in the middle. Head over to kristendoyle.co/gameplan to book a free call. I’ll talk to you soon.
