Kristen Doyle 0:01
So you’ve got a website. You are probably doing lots of things to try to grow your business. Maybe you’ve done a little SEO, maybe you’re running ads, maybe you’re just hoping word of mouth keeps working. But if you can’t tell me how many people visited your site last month, where they came from, or what any of them actually did once they got to your website, then you are making decisions about one of your most important business assets completely blind. And that means that you need this four-episode series we’re kicking off today, all about website analytics.
Kristen Doyle 0:38
I know Analytics doesn’t sound that fun, but I promise it is going to be worth it. And the fix to get us started is free, and it only takes about 20 minutes. That is the part that we’re doing today. So let’s get into it.
Kristen Doyle 0:51
You’ve built a strong business with happy customers, but somewhere along the way, you picked up advice that says you need to be doing more, post more, sell more, hustle harder, but that’s not what you need. Welcome to Small Business Savvy. I’m Kristin Doyle, and I am so glad you’re here. On this show, we’re covering what actually works, business systems, website strategy, simplified marketing. The stuff that grows your business without burning you out. Let’s get into it.
Kristen Doyle 1:24
Before we even talk about what you need to do, I want to reframe this as a business decision you’re making, not a tech task on your list. See a lot of small business owners skip the analytics stuff because it feels like a tech problem. Big, confusing dashboards, reports nobody asked for, or is ever going to use, data that doesn’t obviously tell you anything or help you make decisions. But it really is a business problem.
Kristen Doyle 1:53
If you don’t know whether your website is working or not, then you can’t decide whether you need to improve in it, invest in updates, leave it alone. You just don’t know, or worse, you’re guessing at those decisions, and you’re doing things that maybe you don’t need to be doing. Analytics is not about becoming a data person. It really is just about having enough information to make smart decisions about your website.
Kristen Doyle 2:22
Now, quick note, whether you are a service provider or a product seller, this applies to you equally. You both need to know if people are finding you online or not, how they are finding you, and then what they do when they get to your website.
Kristen Doyle 2:39
All right, so two free tools every website owner needs to have and to be using. The first one is Google Analytics Four. Google Analytics is what tells you all about your visitors. How many people came to your website? Where did they come from? What pages did they look at? How long did they stay? Even what device they’re using. This is kind of the big picture of how your website is performing.
Kristen Doyle 3:05
And then the second tool you need is Google Search Console. This tells you what your site’s visibility is doing in Google Search. What keywords are you showing up for, which pages are actually getting clicks from the searches they show up in. Where in search are you ranking? So Google Analytics tells you what happens once someone gets to your site. Search Console tells you how they found you in the first place, and you do need both of those.
Kristen Doyle 3:34
Now, if you are on WordPress, then there is a quick and easy way to set this up. You do not have to touch any code. You don’t have to copy paste tracking scripts. It is super simple. What I want you to do is install rank math for SEO. Rank math is an SEO plugin that helps you optimize your pages for search. It is my recommended SEO plugin.
Kristen Doyle 4:00
But another really great thing it does is it gives you a one click setup for both Google Analytics Four and Google Search Console, so you can actually connect both of those right in rank math without touching a single line of code. No manually adding the tracking scripts, no editing your theme header, no getting in the weeds of all the stuff that you don’t like to mess with because it makes you worried you’re going to break something. Rank math handles that connection for you, and it takes just a couple of minutes to set up. Honestly, the easiest way to do this.
Kristen Doyle 4:30
So here’s what you’ll do. Install rank math, just the free version is fine. Follow its setup prompt. It has a setup wizard that it will launch immediately. As part of that setup wizard, it should ask you to connect your free rent math account. There is no need to pay for anything, just the free account is all you need. When you do that, it will then let you connect to your Google Analytics Four and your Google Search Console. And if you start setting this up and it doesn’t prompt you to connect to your Google account, then you can go back and get that done, or if you already have rank math installed, you can go back and get that done by clicking on analytics and the rank math sidebar menu in your WordPress dashboard.
Kristen Doyle 5:14
It really is super easy to set up. Takes just a couple of minutes, and essentially all you have to do is log in with Google and then in the drop downs for Google Analytics and for Google Search Console, you just select your website from the drop down. And if you’re like most people, and you’re really only running one website, then you should only have one to choose from, and it should be super simple.
Kristen Doyle 5:35
Now, quick note, though, if you already have a different SEO plugin, like Yoast, or All In One SEO, you will need to switch from those plugins to rank math. What you don’t want to do is have multiple SEO plugins running on your site at the same time. But when you install rank math and go through their setup wizard, if they recognize another SEO plugin is installed, they will give you the option to import the data. Go ahead and say yes to that. They will do all the work for you. And then once that is set up, then you can deactivate and delete your old SEO plugin.
Kristen Doyle 6:12
Like I said, honestly, rank math is my favorite plugin for SEO, purely based on the way that they handle the SEO side of things. I really do prefer it over Yoast or All in One and it also gives you the benefit of easily being able to connect your Google Analytics and your search console right there in the free version of their plugin.
Kristen Doyle 6:34
Now, once it is set up, you do need to make sure it’s actually tracking your data. Setting it up is one thing, making sure it works is something else altogether. And a lot of people will connect a tool and never check if it’s working, if that data is actually flowing through. And then when they get ready to make decisions, they log into Search Console, or they log into Google Analytics, and there’s no data to check.
Kristen Doyle 6:56
So it’s actually really easy to double check this. Once you have Google Analytics Four connected, log into Google Analytics and go to the real time report. In fact, for most people, you should see that on the main dashboard when you log in. After you do that, open your website in a new tab, you do need to be signed out of your website, so don’t do this while you’re signed in as an admin, because rank math does have a way to block your own visits from tracking in analytics. That’s a good thing, except for when we’re trying to test it.
Kristen Doyle 7:28
So make sure you’re signed out and then open it up in a new tab in a different chrome profile if you have one, or even a different web browser. I personally use Chrome or Arc for my web browser, but I also have Safari installed because I have a MacBook. So sometimes switching to a different browser can help you get clean information on your Google Analytics, just to make sure it’s tracking properly, look at your site, click around a couple of pages, and then check your analytics dashboard. If you see yourself showing up as an active user on that real time report, then your tracking is working and you’re good to go.
Kristen Doyle 8:04
If you don’t see anything, if it still says zero visitors, then something might have gone wrong in the setup, and you’ll need to go back and check your connection. Takes just a couple minutes to do, but it really is worth taking the extra time to double check and make sure it is working properly.
Kristen Doyle 8:19
Now, for Google Search Console, it should start bringing in data immediately, but I would just check that the next day to make sure that you see something.
Kristen Doyle 8:28
All right. Now, let’s talk about what to track. Google Analytics does track a lot of things automatically for you, page views, sessions, referral sources, things like that. But tracking that someone visited your homepage doesn’t tell you if your website’s actually doing its job. For that, you’ll need what they call a conversion event, and you can look for that in the sidebar on Google Analytics. A conversion event is something that tells Google Analytics that the visitor did the thing that matters. So it will be up to you to decide what the thing that matters is, and set that up as a conversion event.
Kristen Doyle 9:05
For service providers, your conversion event is most likely filling out your contact form or booking a discovery call, something like that. The moment that the visitor becomes a potential client, an actual lead that you can follow up with, that is when I would consider them to be a conversion on the website. That doesn’t mean you’ve necessarily closed the sale of the client yet, but your website has done its job of getting you that call or getting you their contact information.
Kristen Doyle 9:35
And so for you, you would probably want to set up the conversion event on the thank you page for your booking form or your contact form. Just make sure whatever action you choose that it directly maps to that potential revenue down the road, and a way to get in touch and follow up with this person.
Kristen Doyle 9:52
If you’re a product seller, you’re selling online with a checkout page, whether it’s a shop or a single sales page and check out, your conversion event is going to be the purchase confirmation page, so a thank you page after your sales funnel, or just the purchase confirmation after your cart.
Kristen Doyle 10:12
Either way, pick the one action that once someone takes it, you would say your website has been successful, no matter what your business model is, and set that up as your first conversion event. Just that one thing, start there. You can add more later, but I would encourage you don’t go too far down the rabbit hole of trying to set up every conversion event you can think of. Once this is running, you’ll be able to see if your website is actually converting traffic into those actions that matter the most, not just whether or not people are showing up to your site online. So pick one and set it up and then add more down the road, if you need to.
Kristen Doyle 10:50
All right, now, let’s talk about what to skip, because the fastest way for you to completely give up on all of this data tracking is to go down a rabbit hole on day one of configuring a million different things. So here’s a whole list of things you don’t need to do right now.
Kristen Doyle 11:07
Do not worry about custom channel groupings or custom attribution models. You honestly will probably never need those. And they also require months and months of data to be meaningful or useful at all. Don’t worry about setting up every available event, scroll depth, video views, time on page, outbound, clicks. Any data you are not going to act on soon is not useful data for you, so don’t worry about it yet. You can always come back and add them later.
Kristen Doyle 11:39
Cut some dashboards and reports. Skip those for now too. It can be fun to go down this path of setting up all these custom things, but honestly, you will spend tons of time on it, and the default overview really tells you all you need to know when you’re first starting out.
Kristen Doyle 11:53
The next one is GA4 explore reports. These are designed for analysts, not for typical business owners who are doing quick monthly check ins. So unless you’re super into data, skip those for right now. You also do not need to connect to Google Ads until you are actually running paid traffic. So there’s no reason to connect this early, just in case. If it’s an ‘I might run ads one day,’ then just wait and set it up then.
Kristen Doyle 12:21
And then the last one is Google Tag Manager. It is powerful. It is great for what it does, but it is a whole separate learning curve with its own setup process. So let rank math handle what you need for right now, set up your one conversion event and worry about Google Tag Manager a little bit later, once you get comfortable with the basics.
Kristen Doyle 12:42
The filter for everything on the list is this. If you cannot answer the question, what decision would I make differently based on this data? Then you don’t need to set it up yet. So get your setup, get clean data flowing first, start by making some basic decisions from your data and then build on it from there.
Kristen Doyle 13:04
All right, let’s recap. Let’s run through your 20 minute analytics setup checklist. First, make sure you have a Google account. If you don’t have one yet at all, create one. Most people are using Google workspace for your business email anyway, so that’s all you need. You can connect to that account.
Kristen Doyle 13:21
Step two, install rank math on your WordPress site, if you don’t already have it. Go through their setup wizard, and if that does not prompt you to connect your Google Analytics and Google Search Console, then go to analytics within the rank math menu on your WordPress dashboard, and then set it up from there.
Kristen Doyle 13:41
Step three is to double check that your tracking is working, so open your site in a new tab in a different browser, maybe, and just make sure that you’re seeing yourself on the Google Analytics real time report on your main analytics dashboard.
Kristen Doyle 13:57
Step four is to set up your one conversion event inside Google Analytics, probably either the thank you page for booking a call or the contact form, or if you are selling products, your purchase confirmation page. Set that up as a conversion event inside Google Analytics.
Kristen Doyle 14:15
And then step five is walk away, and that is all you need to do for right now. Come back in about 30 days when you have some data to look at and see what information you can find. We’ll talk a little more about what the information is you can find in the next episode.
Kristen Doyle 14:30
So that’s it. 20 minutes to set you up with analytics so you can stop making decisions completely blind about your website. Nothing too complex. Don’t go down any rabbit holes. Just get the basics set up so you can check the things that really matter.
Kristen Doyle 14:43
If you’ve been putting this off because it felt too technical, or you just didn’t know where to start, hopefully today’s episode shows you that it really doesn’t have to be, and if this helped you, share it with someone else who maybe has been avoiding their analytics too. I’ll be back next week with some more tips for you about how to read and use those analytics. I’ll talk to you soon.
