#602 Unlock Hidden Profits: Web Analytics for Business Growth

In this insightful episode of Talking with the Experts, host Rose Davidson sits down with Philippa Gamse, a seasoned digital marketing strategist and analytics expert. With over 25 years of experience, Philippa shares her expertise on how business owners can uncover hidden profits and growth opportunities through website analytics.

Many business owners are missing out on critical insights from their website data, leading to missed opportunities for new sales, revenue, or leads. Philippa explains how even minor adjustments and strategic use of analytics can reveal new pathways to growth. By focusing on optimizing website strategies and uncovering data-driven insights, businesses can stop wasting resources and increase their return on investment.

Philippa walks through actionable steps for leveraging analytics to identify new markets, products, and services that will drive business forward. With her proven track record, Philippa has helped clients in North America, Europe, and the Middle East grow their businesses through smart use of analytics.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• How to interpret your website data for growth
• The tools and techniques Philippa uses to uncover hidden opportunities
• The importance of refining your digital marketing strategy based on data

Don’t miss out on Philippa’s valuable advice that will help you unlock new opportunities for your business.

✨ CONNECT WITH PHILIPPA

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philippagamse

Website: https://www.websitesthatwin.com

📍 PROMOTION

https://www.websitesthatwin.com/ebook

#TalkingwiththeExperts #RoseDavidson #PodMatch #WebAnalytics #DigitalMarketing #BusinessGrowth #WebsiteOptimization #ProfitMaximization

▼ ▼

Transcript

Voiceover | 00:00
Welcome to Talking with the Experts. This is where we discuss great ideas to take your business to the next level. How do we know these ideas work? 
 Well, it's because we're talking with business owners who are using these ideas. Business owners who have years of experience and expertise. All things business, by business owners, for business owners. And now, here is your host, Rose Davidson. 

 Rose | 00:30
Hello, welcome to Talking with the Experts. I'm your host, Rose Davidson from rosedavidson.com.au. Today, my guest is Philippa Gamse and she's going to be discussing with us website health and how we can find those hidden gems in our web analytics. Now, Philippa has clocked over 25 years in digital marketing strategy and analytics. I've consulted with nearly 500 clients and worked with websites that have cumulatively generated hundreds of millions of dollars. Owners and marketing executives hire Philippa to find new insights into their web analytics that will grow their business and cut wasted spending because many are missing those hidden gems. She has helped clients in North America, Europe and the Middle East to translate the numbers into transformational ideas that move the business forward, reveal opportunities for new markets, and help them to move forward. Products and services and maximized return on investment. Philippa, welcome to Talking With The Experts. Thank you so much for joining me today. 

 Philippa | 01:36
Yes, I Rose. Thank you so much. 

 Rose | 01:38
So tell me what got into doing web analytics and what is it? 

 Philippa | 01:45
What is it? Well, you know, it's actually been around for quite a long time. Before Google Analytics, there were actually other programs. And I actually was friends with a guy who made the most wonderful analytics program called ClickTracks. And to this day, I still think it was the best, most intuitive interface to something that can be really overwhelming and really complicated. But of course, and it was aimed at small business and it was just really easy to use and it gave you really good insights. But then Google came along. And put out Google Analytics, which of course is free. And of course my friend couldn't afford to do it for free. 
 So that was that. Because you can't compete with free, right? But I still miss that program. And I think the power of analytics is amazing because it starts to give you. Ideas and numbers about what your visitors are doing on your website that you couldn't otherwise know. 
 I mean, some people sometimes will say to me, could you just take a look at my website and tell me what you think? Yeah, I could, but it wouldn't do you any good. Because if I'm just looking at your website and telling you what I think, then my opinion is simply that, you know, an uninformed, well, not hopefully not totally uninformed, but basically, it's my opinion. My own subjective response to your website, right? But once you've got some level of data in front of you, then you've really got some stuff that you can work with. 

 Rose | 03:21
Yeah, I guess it's really important, I guess, to know what those numbers mean and how you can make your website better. Because as you say, people say, look at my website. But it's, as you say, subjective. 
 I mean, it might be all pretty and shiny. But, you know, until you get to the back end of it, you don't really know what's going on and how your website's tracking. 
 So tell me a little bit about some of the metrics that we should be paying attention to. 

 Philippa | 03:47
So, you know, that's something that people often ask me, like, what are the key metrics that we should be paying, you know, tracking? I have to say, I really believe that it's an ‘it depends’ answer and that just a generic kind of laundry list of metrics isn't particularly helpful. Because I think before you even start looking at your analytics, it's really important to be really clear about what it is you're trying to do. 
 So what's your website about? What are your goals? And not just the big goal, which is going to be either if you're actually directly selling on your site or it's a lead generation site or, you know, whatever it is that that's your main key outcome. But the other things that you might be doing along the way, like you might want people to watch a video, what videos, listen to podcasts, right? You might want them. You probably do want them to sign up for your newsletter if you have one. And so those are sort of, So, firstly, really understanding what are the outcomes that you're looking for? What's the content that you want people to consume? 
 You know, where do you want them to go? What do you want to do? 
 And then, you know, what are the outcomes that you're looking for? And then, you know, what are the outcomes that you're looking for? You can look at your numbers, your analytics in the light of understanding that so that you can start saying is what we want to happen happening today. And if not, why not? Right. Or if it is and it looks good can we do more of it you know then you can start taking it to the next step. But, you know, just to come out with, I mean, okay, you want to look at how many visitors you've got, but you want to do more than that. Were they the right kind of visitors? Did they convert? And so on. 
 So I really try to stay away from too much very general advice, because I really want to encourage people to think very clearly about their own situations. 

 Rose | 05:48
So let's deep dive into, you know, some of the things that you've just mentioned. And how can we, you know, find those opportunities for new markets, products or services? 

 Philippa | 06:00
Well, Sometimes it kind of stands out for you. So, for example, I've looked at websites where Talking about new markets, right? 
 I mean, very simple location, right? So you can tell where people literally where in the world. People are coming from to visit your website. And sometimes that can be unexpected areas. And sometimes that has opened up ideas for, you know, maybe this isn't the area that we would normally serve, but is there something that we can do that would serve those people? Like And even if we can't deliver them our products, maybe they want to buy gift certificates for people who live in our delivery area who would like to buy, you know, maybe we're some sort of very specialist provider of something, right? If you have a lot of content on your site or if you have products, then you really should have a search engine that's actually on your site. Google, but you know, something that can actually search the content of your own site. And that search engine is an absolute goldmine. For market research. Because It tells you so many things. It tells you how people talk about your products and services. 
 So what kind of words they use, right? And in an industry of which there are many, where there's a load of tech speak, It can be very important to understand whether your customers or your prospective customers understand and use the same terminology that you do. Because if they don't, then there's no point optimizing your site for all your techie terms if the target market isn't going to be searching for that. 
 So what do they put into your search engine tells you what they're expecting to find at your site. And how they describe that. And that can give you great ideas for products and services. If they're looking for something that's in your area of expertise, they're but you don't currently provide it. That's right there is potentially a statement of, you know, there's some demand for this, right? 
 So can we fulfill that demand? So there's lots of different ways of looking at what's going on. Maybe you've got, you can tell that there's a lot of visitors coming who are not in your core target market. 
 I mean, I've worked with a couple of different areas where a B2B business is You know, that only essentially sold to other businesses and industrial kind of quantities discovered that they'd done so well in search engine optimization that they had consumers coming to their site. For example, I worked with a manufacturer of industrial waxes. And it turned out that it was quite clear that they had a load of consumers coming to their site looking for small amounts of things like beeswax so that they could make candles. At home. That's not that wasn't my clients core audience at all, right? But in the end, we figured out that there were so many of these people that my client developed a small side business. 
 So it was a little e-commerce site that sold little bits and pieces of, you know, duck wags and beeswax and whatever. That was very easy to run. The site was doing so well in SEO that it got tons of traffic and it just made money on the side for them without needing a whole load of upkeep, a couple of people doing fulfillment. It's possible to look at this kind of thing and say, is there an opportunity here that we think is worth taking? 

 Rose | 09:40
It's really, and as we've said early on, it's so very important to look at those figures behind the scenes. And as you say, your demographics really is important. Highly important and, you know, as your client has done their SEO, you know, to the best where they've attracted a new audience. But for those that are starting out and don't understand what's going on because it's important that they understand what's happening behind the scenes as well. 
 You know, what advice would you give those people that are new to a website or are new to business. 

 Philippa | 10:23
So again, going back to what we started out by saying, you know, you need to really think about your own business. What's important? What's going on here? What do you want to happen? And just our just ask some very basic questions. 
 I mean, literally, what's the key outcome of your site and are people doing it? I at a level that you think is maybe reasonable right or not and see if you can take it a step further and try to you know analytics we have a term called segmenting which basically means dividing your traffic into different groupings. 
 So you can segment by all sorts of different things. And one of the things that's very helpful to do in terms of seeing which are the most effective markets is to segment by, the way that you got the traffic to the site. 
 So, Typically, organic search, that's Google searches, not the paid ads, but the regular search and email are the most effective in terms of getting qualified people who are really interested, because your email newsletter is sent to people who've already said they want to hear from you. And organic search is people who are proactively looking to solve a problem that have found you. Right. 
 So both of those are good examples. Potentially good targets. Whereas In my experience, a lot of times social media traffic is much lower quality because a lot of the time people on social media aren't looking to solve their problems. They're looking to talk with friends, watch videos, you know, that kind of thing. Right. So understanding which are your most effective marketing tactics as well can be very helpful. And you can only do that, as I said, by breaking it down into different groupings and seeing how those different groups behave. And an analytics tool like Google Analytics can do all this, right? 
 So this isn't something that you have to write tons of programs for. If you've got a decent tool, it will do that for you. 

 Rose | 12:35
So does that require a plug-in to be put into your website? Like, you know, Google and Leaks is called something else now, but... For websites or, you know, do we use something else or do we just use. Normal Google Sheets? 
 You know, how do we find out or do we need to plug in for that? 

 Philippa | 12:54
So Any analytics, different analytics tools have different ways of implementing. Google Analytics, which is probably still the most widely used by smaller businesses. It requires a tag, which has to go on every page of your site. But usually now, website building tools have a way to easily, you know, kind of globally implement that. And once it's there. 
 So you don't have to worry about that. What you do have to worry about is potentially customizing it. To really meet the needs of your business and the things that you really want to know. And out of the box, it's got some default settings that I almost always go in and change immediately because they don't make any sense to me. 
 So, you know, it's again, it's worth if you're implementing it for the first time, even if you don't want to hire somebody, you know, on an ongoing basis to hire somebody who understands the program, who can just really check that you're measuring what you want to measure, that it's customized to your specific needs. And that all the settings are the way that you'd want them to be. 

 Rose | 14:02
So I guess, so anyone wants to, you know, get Google Analytics, you just have to Google Analytics and it will bring up a page and then from memory, you just put in your website and it tracks your website from there. As you say, you need to add that tag into your header in the back of your website. 
 You know, they're, What other ways can people measure their analytics other than using Google? 

 Philippa | 14:34
So there are absolutely other tools. There are some European tools in particular like Pwik and Matomo, which are... No, sorry, I think Matomo is now part of Pwik. 
 Sorry, I'm not totally up to speed with them because I do normally use Google. But there are certainly other tools. And there's Adobe Analytics for much larger sort of corporate enterprise level solutions. There's some level of concern in Europe about Google Drive, for example. 
 You know, even though Google's really tightened up on the privacy issues, these other analytics programs, they sometimes feel a little more comfortable with. So, you know, it depends on what you want, what your goals are, how much money you've got to spend, because some of those are not free. But no, there's certainly choices. 

 Rose | 15:26
Yeah. Yeah. 
 Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure. And, you know, I guess the ones in Europe would be based for, you know, the European standard of website. I think there's different rules in different countries. About websites. 

 Philippa | 15:44
Right, but the thing is that the Those rules apply based on the country the visitor comes from. So if you're in Australia, but you have visitors coming in from France and Spain and Germany, you have to be GDPR compliant for them. 
 So it's a little complicated. 

 Rose | 16:01
Yeah, I think I've made sure that mine are compliant with that. And it's. 

 Philippa | 16:08
Not that difficult. I mean, basically it's what we call consent. You just make sure that you have permission. And sometimes people are using browsers or some kind of tracking blocking technology. That means that they're automatically blocking tracking anyway. 
 So something that your listeners really need to understand is that when you're looking at the analytics numbers, what you're not looking at is an accurate record of how many visitors you had. It's almost 100% certain that it's not accurate because the, There will be a proportion of visitors where tracking has been blocked, however that's done. 
 So, and I, you know, I get so many people saying, well, I don't understand why my back end, my e-commerce, you know, my CRM system with all my sales in it doesn't jive with the Google Analytics e-commerce system. Records right and the thing is that the analytics tool is not your tool of record of your sales and so on it can't be. Because we're blocking a certain amount of traffic. What you're using the analytics for is to track patterns and trends in your visitors so that you can optimize your site using kind of this. General picture of what people are doing, but not it's not true to say that, you know, exactly 43 people did this. It's that's not the. 

 Rose | 17:29
Case. Yeah, I think people have a misconception too about the analytics and what they do and what they mean. And especially if you're new to the whole process or you're a bit not tech savvy like me. I can build a website as long as there's a plug-in. 

 Philippa | 17:45
Right. 

 Rose | 17:47
Perfectly fine but you know to look at the analytics of it and understand what they mean I'm it's just a little bit beyond me but I guess that's when we look at hiring somebody to do that for us and and so your business does that for others and your business is the total net value incorporated. So tell me a little bit about that and what they offer clients. 

 Philippa | 18:15
So actually, the business name that I work under is Websites That Win. So total net value is my official company name, but my website is called websites that win.com. It's probably easy to remember. And actually, you know, thanks to the internet, I literally do have clients all over the world, including in Australia and New Zealand, which is very fun. And I mean, I offer services around making sure that your analytics are correctly implemented so that the data that you're getting is accurate, as well as then going into the, okay, so what do we find? What are the hidden insights? What's working well? What isn't working well? What should we be doing more of? Where are you wasting potentially money and resources? 
 And then what additional opportunities can we find? So it's from the sort of nuts and bolts of is this screwed in right? To, okay, what's the big picture and where can we go from here? 

 Rose | 19:15
Yeah, the big picture too, you know, sometimes a broad picture of what we're looking at I think is probably a little bit more understandable for us. Us that aren't into, you know, facts and figures so much. But getting down to the nitty gritty, I think, you know, if you get someone to do that for you and, you know, put it on a graph if you understand graphs or put it into a report and so people can see, you know, what's trending on your website and what isn't, it can be very helpful. 

 Philippa | 19:44
You know, I like to say, that I don't think I've ever had a client that came to me and said, Philippa, the thing I want from you is 50 pages of analytics reports and charts. Right. My favorite client question was, doesn't potentially require any of that because it simply says, Philippa, what do I need to know to run my business better? That's it. Right. Just talk. Look at you. Look at the numbers in the graphs and the charts and all that. 
 And then you answer that question for me. Let's sit down and talk about that. What do I need to know to run my business better? 

 Rose | 20:16
Great question. Absolutely. 

 Philippa | 20:18
Yeah. 

 Rose | 20:19
So you can find Philippa on LinkedIn under Philippa Gamse, Games. Sorry, Philippa. And you've got an ebook that you're offering our listeners today tell us what's in that. 

 Philippa | 20:33
So I have an e-book on my website. It's five hidden gems. It's so, you know, it's five, it's actual stories from my experience where we found something in the analytics that we couldn't have otherwise known, where we were able to make a substantial difference to either the website or the business as a whole. 
 So again, following my philosophy, this ebook is entirely in English, there's no charts or graphs in any of it, there's no technical language, but it's here's the situation we found, here's what we figured out, here's what we did. And my hope is to inspire people to take a look and think about maybe this situation, something that we could try. And I'm actually, by the way writing a book, which will be my second book, To This Effect, which will hopefully be out in a couple of months or so, with just five. Way more stories and ideas and things to think about. But again, All in English without all the techie stuff. 

 Rose | 21:28
I love... Plain English and no techie stuff. 

 Philippa | 21:31
Honestly. Right. And interestingly enough, my editor is Australian. 
 So hopefully everybody down there will buy it too. 

 Rose | 21:39
Wonderful, absolutely wonderful. Philippa, if you were to give some advice to people that, you know, to... Better their websites and, you know, using these web analytics that, you know, that we've discussed. What would that be? 

 Philippa | 21:55
Well, honestly, it would be if you're not doing this or if you're not doing it at a level beyond kind of do we have more visitors than we did last week, then start try something, even if it's just asking one question about what's going on, because. If you're not looking at your analytics and you have a website that plays any kind of role in your business, then you're really shooting in the dark with everything that you're doing because you really have no idea what's happening. As I said, where you're wasting money on resources, where you're losing opportunities and, you know, where you're missing out on ways to make to grow and to make more revenue. 

 Rose | 22:33
Great advice. Philippa it's been an absolute pleasure thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today I've actually learned something so that's great. 

 Philippa | 22:42
Well there you go thank you. 

 Rose | 22:46
Bye for now. 

 Voiceover | 22:47
You've been listening to Talking With The Experts, hosted by Rose Davidson. Make sure you have a look at our back catalogue over at talkingwiththeexperts.com. And be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don't miss out on any episode. We look forward to your company next time.