Ep 226: How to Turn “Useless” Website Traffic Into a New Revenue Stream with Philippa Gamse

“If you’re not using analytics, you’re just shooting in the dark.”

Philippa Gamse doesn’t mince words—and she’s right. In this episode, Trudy chats with digital marketing strategist and analytics expert Philippa Gamse, who unpacks the powerful, often overlooked role analytics plays in business growth. “People look at the numbers and glaze over,” Philippa says. But once you know what to look for, data becomes a goldmine of insights. From why your visitors might never see your call-to-action to how a simple change boosted one client’s revenue with an eBook, this episode is packed with real-world examples and straight-talking advice.

Philippa has been working in digital strategy and web analytics since the early days of the internet (think: pre-Google Analytics!). With decades of experience helping businesses turn confusing data into strategic advantage, she’s on a mission to make analytics not just understandable—but actionable.

We Also Talked About:

• Why analytics is the one business tool most people ignore (to their detriment) 
• How to break through the “I’m scared of data” inertia 
• The one key question to ask before opening Google Analytics 
• What to measure and why “vanity metrics” can mislead you 
• How one client turned “wrong” visitors into a whole new revenue stream 
• Using Google Tag Manager and Search Console the right way 
• The myth of exact data matching—and why trends matter more
  

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Philippa’s Website: https://websitesthatwin.com/
  
• Five Hidden Gems (Philippa’s free eBook with real-life case studies)
• Website Wealth (Philippa’s newest book) (affiliate link)
  
• 42 Rules for a Winning Website by Philippa Gamse (affiliate link)
  
• Google Analytics
• Google Tag Manager
• Google Search Console

👉  Want regular access to tips, techniques, and advice from experts about growing your business?  My newsletter is for business owners who miss having weekends … and sanity.  If that’s you, sign up here.

_____________

Trudy Rankin is the host of the Online Business Launchpad Podcast, Director of West Island Digital and the founder of the Online Business Lift-Off program.

Affiliate Disclaimer: If you click on links on this page and then make a purchase, I may earn a commission (at no extra cost to you).  I am a proud affiliate of these resources because I use them in my own life and business.

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 226: How to Turn “Useless” Website Traffic Into a New Revenue Stream with Philippa Gamse

From website usability to YouTube drop off points, to E-commerce cart abandonment, Philippa breaks it all down into plain English. Now, Philippa’s been in the digital marketing game [00:01:00] since before Google Analytics was even a thing. She’s helped everyone from employment lawyers to wax manufacturers use their website data to uncover hidden gems that grow profits. Her mission, make analytics accessible, insightful, and actually useful for everyday business owners like you.

Trudy Rankin: Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast. I’m Trudy Rankin, and this podcast is for business owners who want to hear stories, tips, and advice from online entrepreneurs who have overcome business problems and challenges to get to success, because if they’ve done it, so can you.

My mission is simple. I wanna help you get what it takes so that you can have more time and money for yourself and your family, and more choices in how you live your life. 

 So Philippa, thank you so [00:02:00] much for being on the podcast. 

Philippa Gamse: Yeah. Hey, Trudy. I would say I guess it’s good morning for you and good afternoon for me. 

So I’m in California, right? Where it’s still wednesday afternoon. My partner calls Australia tomorrow land. 

Trudy Rankin: That’s about right. Yeah. It’s in the morning. It’s actually Thursday morning for me.

And yeah. It’s going to be a fun interview. I’m really looking forward to this conversation. Before we get started, can you just tell people just a little bit about your background and how you actually got into this whole world of analytics? 

Philippa Gamse: Not to date myself, but I’ve been around for lot of the history of the internet.

And analytics actually started quite early on. So there were various programs before Google analytics came along, which obviously is now the big beast in the market. And very early on, I went, this is interesting because for the first time, we can tell so much more about how our marketing and our websites are doing.

If say you publish a magazine or a newspaper, [00:03:00] right? You can tell me what the circulation numbers are. You can tell me how many of them you’ve sold, but you can’t tell me how many people actually open it up. If they do, how long they spend reading it, which pages they love, which pages they, or which sections they never go to.

Same with TV programs, right? We have these sort of TV figures for viewers and stuff. But on the web, you can do all these things. So you can actually say, which pages of my website does nobody ever look at? And if that’s true, why not? And now we can get into a whole new level of granularity.

And I said that’s very interesting. There must be things we can do with that. That will be very interesting. And that’s why I got hooked. 

Trudy Rankin: It’s interesting to me that you can use numbers to tell stories, and a lot of people are scared of the numbers, they’re scared of the data, they’re scared of what they see in front of them, and it, because it looks so complex and confronting, but if you can get to the place where you can get it to tell you a story, It’s so powerful.

Philippa Gamse: And I think more than stories it’s what I like to say [00:04:00] is insights. You said a lot of people are not using this effectively and that’s absolutely correct. I’ve totally find that myself. And honestly, let’s just cut to the chase here. I honestly believe that if you have a website that is in any way important to your business and you are not looking at how it’s performing using these numbers, you’re just shooting in the dark with everything that you’re doing.

End of story right? You really are you’re honestly being pretty unintelligent and I have people who will come back to me and say, yes, but I’m getting plenty of sales. To which the response usually on my end is great, but very few businesses don’t want more sales if they can get them right.

And wouldn’t you like to know what’s happening with how you could make yourselves better or how you could for maybe increase your average order value or any of those, from the existing customers, any of those things. So my mission in life really is to make it less intimidating because I also recognize that.

If you open up a page of Google Analytics or you get into the [00:05:00] interface, you’re just confronted with a mass of numbers and charts and graphs and who knows what. And of course it’s completely overwhelming. Google Analytics has well over a hundred default reports. I think it’s more like 140, 150, at least.

I I don’t know. And if you don’t have any way into that, what on earth are you going to do with it? It makes perfect sense that you just glaze over. My goal in life is to make it interesting and applicable for business owners who would much rather be doing something else.

Trudy Rankin: I think one of the reasons people don’t, they’ll take one look at those graphs, if they even do that, and their eyes will glaze over and the effort that it would require to actually be able to make something of those is so high in their minds that it’s just so much easier not to do anything at all.

And so my question for you is. Based on the experience that you’ve had working with people, what might be one small thing that might help to break that feeling of inertia [00:06:00] or of, it’s too hard, I’m not going to do it? 

Philippa Gamse: I think honestly, the key thing is to really one, completely aside from the analytics, you need to understand your business.

And which sounds ridiculous, right? It sounds like a completely simplistic statement, but honestly, again, a lot of the time when we get into, I start talking to the business owner about, what’s your strategy? Who are your markets? What are you trying to do? What is your website trying to do?

They can’t always articulate that very well, which I know sounds terrible, but it’s, that’s the most important thing. You’ve got to be able to tell. To know what you want your website to be doing. And that means everything you want your website to do. Most of us think about sales or if, a B2B maybe leads or whatever the thing is, that’s the most important thing to make us money.

But there are a lot of other things going on and very few people buy anything immediately from their first visit. They want to know who you are, what you do. Can you do what you say you do? Do I trust you? Do I [00:07:00] feel good about you? Lots of these kinds of questions. And your website needs to answer that because you’re not in direct conversation with them.

And so what else is going on your site? Are there videos that you want people to watch? Are there product specs, if you’re B2B, that you want them to download. Is there content that you want them to consume in other ways? Are there forms that they need to fill in or, sign up for your newsletter or all of those other pieces?

All of those are important in building the relationship. And one of the best ways to approach analytics is to make a list of those outcomes. And again, all of them, not just the big one, because then you can start saying, okay, is this happening? It take an outcome, sign up for my newsletter. Is this happening?

If not, can we start figuring out why not, and why not could be really simple. A lot of people put their main call to action at the bottom of the page. And if that page has a lot of content, if people don’t scroll down the length of the page, they’ll never see that call to action. And one of the things that you can tell from [00:08:00] analytics, for example, is literally that, how far down the page do people scroll?

So if you discover that, 70, 80 percent of your visitors never see your key call to action at the bottom of the page, what are you going to do? Hopefully you’re going to repeat your call to action higher up the page. There’s nothing wrong with having more than one call to action on a page, right?

Maybe you’re going to test having different variations on what it says. By now is a pretty horrible call to action, right? Get there, but trying different wording, stuff like that, there are various things that you can do. I had a client who used to make, or still does make actually, a tremendous amount of video material, and the videos are really interesting.

Except that, when you look at his analytics unfortunately, at least 50 percent of the people who start watching the video are gone by 30 seconds. 90 percent of them are gone by a minute because why? Because my hunch is, when I say why, what you then do is you come up with a hunch and then you can test it, right?

[00:09:00] My hunch is because honestly, I have to say he starts his videos incredibly boring. It starts, hello, my name is, and I am this, and this. And in my life, I’ve done this, and this. And If you’ve heard it once, it’s boring. What he doesn’t do is to say, Hey, in this video, we’re going to talk about this and you’re going to learn this, and you’re going to want to stay to the end because at the end, I’m going to tell you this, when I first said this to him, he didn’t believe me.

But when you show people the data that says, look at all these people leaving your video then you can’t argue with it, right? 

Trudy Rankin: That’s so valid. And I’m just sitting here thinking YouTube videos, podcast episodes. All of the different, in fact, it could even be courses, if people have gone to consume a free webinar or a free course and you don’t grab them straight away they will leave.

That’s fascinating. That’s really interesting. So do you actually look at data besides web analytics? Do you look at YouTube data? Do you look at podcast episode data? You look at data wherever it is? [00:10:00] 

Philippa Gamse: Yeah, but you have to be careful and really understand what you’re looking at.

So for example, YouTube statistics can be very misleading. They tell you how many people viewed your video. Now that’s from the front. You can just look at your screen where your video is and it will tell you how many views there were, right? Obviously you can get a lot more detailed stats if you actually have your own YouTube analytics, which everybody should have who’s using YouTube.

But just that basic viewer number on the front screen. I believe, and I can’t honestly remember off the top of my head it fires after a certain number of seconds, and it could be 30, I can’t remember. But in other words, it doesn’t tell you how many people finished the whole video. So again, it can be misleading.

If a lot of people drop off in the first minute, it’s not going to reflect that, if the video is longer than a minute, 

Trudy Rankin: so there are deep down inside the stats, part of YouTube for the individual videos, you can actually see the percentage of people who have, or what average percentage of people have watched to what length.

And you can see there’s [00:11:00] like a where people drop off and stuff. So that is really powerful in terms of going back and looking at the video that you’ve created and you see where people drop off and you go, oops, lost them there. Why? That’s really interesting.

Philippa Gamse: And if you actually are using YouTube analytics and Google Analytics for your website, you can pull that into Google Analytics, which is helpful because that tells you more. Like, where did people come from? What other pages did they look at?

And it gives you more context about who they are as visitors, because, one part of this is that there are always people who come to your website who really shouldn’t be there. For all sorts of reasons, they’re just not your target audience. Now, in my consulting practice, we’ve actually got a number of stories of times when we’ve looked at groups of visitors that are clearly not the target audience for the immediate product or service, but we’ve actually created something for those people.

Which is wonderful and I mean that certainly can be done. And at the same time, there are equally [00:12:00] times when those people are simply not for you and that’s the end of it, and don’t worry about it. I can give you an example that I find, I still find very strange. So as we discussed before we started recording, my name is, we, in my family we say Games some of my family say Gams, but we say Games, and it’s spelled G A M S E.

Right now, I don’t understand this, but I have people coming to my website looking for computer games and they actually spell games G A M S E and I don’t understand why, because it doesn’t feel intuitive to me, but they do. And I can take a look at those people and say, look, I don’t make computer games.

I don’t want to make computer games. They’re not my target market. Just don’t even worry about it. Because people worry a lot about bounce rate, which they’ve heard about, how people who leave your site immediately, but it’s important to put that into context. And that’s another thing that analytics allows you to do is to distinguish between what are the things that I can learn that I could or should do something about.

And what are the [00:13:00] things that I just don’t need to worry about? I 

Trudy Rankin: I think that’s really interesting. Can you just expand on that? What things should people be paying attention to? 

Philippa Gamse: For example if you’re selling stuff on your website and people put lots of stuff in their shopping cart on your site, but then they never buy anything, that would be a question.

Equally, if you’re selling stuff on your website and nobody ever puts anything in the shopping cart, that would be a question, right? You’re looking at what do I want to happen? And how much of that is happening and if it’s not happening, where does it fall apart? For example, supposing they start to checkout and then they stop and you get a very low number of completed transactions, you can say okay, where did they stop?

And, a classic one is they stop when they see the shipping costs. Because they suddenly go, wait a minute, it’s not worth it, or they stop when they see the payment details and maybe they’re looking for a different payment method than the one that you’re offering.

So as I said, understanding what outcomes you want, looking to see where those outcomes should be [00:14:00] happening. And if they’re not. What’s getting in the way. 

Trudy Rankin: So can you just walk us through maybe an example or a case study of somebody who’s gone from not looking at this at all to actually starting to look at the analytics and what difference has it made for their business?

Philippa Gamse: Huge, it can make huge differences and, and sometimes you just come up with, you realize that there’s stuff, okay, so one thing that happens that I see a lot is, you as the business owner or a decision maker or whatever if you’re involved in your website you get very close to it.

And you do, the point is. 

Trudy Rankin: I’m sorry, I’m laughing because I have several websites and I’m going, yes, that sounds like me. I don’t touch it anywhere near as much as I should have. Sorry, I interrupted you. Go ahead. 

Philippa Gamse: What I was going to say is because you’ve created or specified the content on the site and the design and that sort of stuff, you know exactly where everything is and you know exactly what’s on the site and therefore it’s quite difficult for you to walk in the shoes of somebody who’s not familiar with the site at all.

Who’s seeing it for the [00:15:00] first time. And so for example I have a client who a few months ago decided that he wanted to do a month long sale to sell off last year’s inventory in preparation for the next year. And he couldn’t understand why people weren’t going to the page where he was selling last year’s inventory.

And I said where’s the link? And he said there’s a link in the navigation menu. And then it’s down on the homepage. Yes, it was in the navigation menu but, you had to look for it. You had to pull something down, I think, to see it. And then the first thing that you saw on the homepage was a big kind of display of the new stuff. And so you had to scroll to actually see the information about the sale. And if you didn’t, or if you went off into the new stuff, and as I say you don’t specifically scrutinize the menu, you’re never going to see that there’s a sale. And I said to him, look, if your priority for this month is actually to promote this sale then we need to put it up front and [00:16:00] center.

And of course he’s saying look, the link’s right there. It’s obvious, isn’t it? And I’m saying it’s obvious to you. 

Trudy Rankin: Yes. And how did it turn out? Did you make the change? 

Philippa Gamse: You know what? I’m not sure. He’s somebody that I talk to, every so often.

So I honestly I know I should have the answer to that having told the story. But hopefully. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah because it’s an interesting thing that I’ve discovered is that you can tell people, until you’re blue in the face, what they should do. And you give them the logical reasons why they should do it and oftentimes they won’t do it. And I’m fascinated by that as a psychological aspect to just the whole, coaching and consulting side of things. This is that you can tell people because you can see it. Either they can’t or they don’t have the time or for whatever reason, they won’t change.

So just out of sheer curiosity, do you have specific ways that you work with people to try and get them past that whole, okay, I heard what you said, but I didn’t really hear what you say, and I’m [00:17:00] not going to do it sort of mentality. 

Philippa Gamse: Of course, obviously, sometimes there are great reasons why they don’t do something that I suggest.

Especially if there’s a cost to it, then you have to weigh off up the cost benefit. My job, I think, is to point out some opportunities. And on the other hand, there are some great stories, you said, what’s the outcome? And I fobbed it because I didn’t know.

For example, to tell you a different story this is a B2B story, but I had a client that was an industrial wax manufacturer, and he made industrial waxes for manufacturing processes around, and he had a global market. Very high quality wax. And when we looked at the analytics… cause he’s selling wax in industrial quantities, right?

When we looked at the analytics, we realized that there were a number of consumers coming to the site because he had done a lot of SEO. And so if you looked up beeswax supplies or something like that, you’d find his website pretty high up. And so consumers would come into the site because they wanted to buy beeswax to make candles, but obviously in very small quantities that [00:18:00] are absolutely not his business, not his market, not interested.

But there were so many of them. And, I we figured out that’s what was going on that he actually created a side business. So a little e commerce site. And so basically when you got to the website it said, if you’re a consumer and you want small quantities, click here, take them off to the side website, sell them little bits of beeswax or ducks wax or whatever it is.

Don’t bother the B2B lead people. And this little side business, it doesn’t take a lot of fulfillment, he had a couple of people on it or something, and because he was doing so well in search, it actually did very well and it wasn’t that complicated to set up the website, obviously and away you go.

Sometimes taking the suggestion, taking the risk, and running with it can really pay off. 

Trudy Rankin: I think that’s really interesting because you basically looked at the data, You’ve come up with a realization that you’ve actually got consumers that don’t fit the business model, but rather than just going too bad, go away, the guy said, Hey, maybe I can do something for them. But [00:19:00] it’s a completely separate business. Have you ever had customers who have had that kind of a situation where, instead of setting up a side business for themselves, they actually just find one of, maybe one of their might be a competitor, or it might be somebody else where they’ve said, hey, I’ve got all these leads coming in.

Would you like them? And would you like to pay me for them as well? Have you ever had that situation? 

Philippa Gamse: No, I have more stories where we’ve actually done it ourselves, but, obviously that would be a perfectly fine option. As long as you can, the key point here, though, is to isolate out a group of people with certain characteristics and say, these people are not our core market what do we want to do about it?

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, so could you give us another example of that sort of a situation? Because I think that happens to people a lot more than they think. 

Philippa Gamse: Another of my favorite stories is that we found I was working with an employment lawyer here in Silicon Valley. So what she did, it was not litigation, but she did training for large Silicon [00:20:00] Valley companies around creating a fair workplace.

So preventing harassment suits, et cetera. So stay out of court stuff. And that’s very much based on her expertise. And so there was a huge amount of content on the site and lots of news about employment law and analysis and so on. And on that one, we realized we had an ask the lawyer section.

So we got questions from people who came to the site and based on that kind of stuff, and the internal search engine, we realized that a lot of employees were coming to the site and saying things like, I think I’m being harassed at work. Do I have a case? And again, this is not her target market.

She doesn’t do litigation. She doesn’t work with individuals. But there were so many of these people that what we did was to create a load of little eBooks which were sold at like an impulse buy price. I don’t know, 14. whatever. And we created several of them. Things like, think I’m [00:21:00] being harassed.

I’ve been accused of harassment. I think I was unfairly terminated. I think I should be getting overtime and I’m not. So those kinds of things, and then we also created some bigger ones for employers. So smaller businesses or businesses outside of the state of California. And of course it’s all covered in legal disclaimers.

At the same time, apparently much of stuff that people think of as harassment isn’t. So the selling premise was before you go and consult a lawyer yourself and pay a lot more than 14. 95, buy this ebook to see if you might even have a case. EBooks are wonderful because it’s basically a PDF, right?

And somebody sticks in their credit card and they get instant access. So you don’t even have to have anybody doing fulfillment. So the site runs itself and that was started chugging along and it was making several thousand dollars a month on the side just by itself. 

Trudy Rankin: That’s a really interesting point, because it comes back to that concept of how can I help, The people who aren’t my clients, what could I do to help them out? I like that approach. A quick [00:22:00] question for the people that you do the consulting with, I’m assuming, and so I guess I’m asking, that they must have a business that’s either a certain size, or their website traffic is at a certain, size before it makes it worthwhile to bring somebody like yourself in?

Where’s that sweet spot between, Hey, I have to do it all myself, or actually it’s going to be better use of my time if I bring somebody else in to help. Where’s that spot? 

Philippa Gamse: Yeah I guess it depends to some extent on the business. I had somebody coming to me this week who has never put analytics on his website.

He does a lot of word by mouth referral. It’s one of those where he’s doing all right, but he’s realizing that he really needs to do more with his website. And honestly, we discovered that he gets about 15 visitors a week. And obviously I said to him, look, it’s not worth doing a load of analytics on 15 visitors a week.

So first of all, we need to get you some traffic. But is there a number that I won’t work below? No I think it depends on the [00:23:00] context. And how specialized it is. For example, there are some industries that I really don’t like working in and one of them is insurance.

Because to me, insurance is a commodity. Most of us buy insurance based on price because the whole point about insurance is we hope we’re not going to use it, right? So you really only find out how good the company is and how nice they are when you have to use it. And by then you’re already, in trouble.

So I hate marketing insurance because I just, it doesn’t feel like you market on value. You just essentially market on price. I’m much more interested in marketing using really good content and really interesting ideas or products, I should say. 

Trudy Rankin: Do they tend to be service based businesses or do they tend to be content based businesses?

Philippa Gamse: Oh I’ve honestly, I work with a complete range B2B, B2C. Yeah, it’s interesting because people say do you have any experience in my industry? And I actually think that’s not a great question because What I always say is theres more about your [00:24:00] business than I’m ever going to.

And the whole point of this is it’s a team effort where I get to ask questions about your business and what you’re trying to do. And you get to ask me about the analytics numbers and we put our heads together and say, what’s the best solution to things that come up. And actually I can bring in my experience of doing things in other industries that might apply here.

That you wouldn’t know about. So in fact, having not a lot of industry experience in your particular industry isn’t necessarily a limitation. In fact, it might even be a benefit. It 

Trudy Rankin: might be a benefit because you come in with a pair of fresh eyes. And besides, the key thing is that you’re looking at data.

It’s the data that matters. It’s not the industry specifics. It’s the data. That’s why I like the concept of putting two heads together because one’s got a lot of industry knowledge, that’s the business owner. The other one’s got a lot of analytics knowledge, marketing knowledge, that’s you.

Pair those two things together and [00:25:00] you’ll come up with answers that are completely different than if you had just one or the other of you looking at the data. I think that’s really interesting. I’m curious, coming back to the person that you mentioned, that, Basically runs a business off of referrals, and they hadn’t set up their analytics, because obviously they would have thought they didn’t need to, there was no point, wasn’t necessary.

What would you say to people who have either been scared away by the thought of having to set up the analytics, or they just don’t see the point? What would you say to them to help encourage them to actually get their analytics set up? 

Philippa Gamse: Definitely. I think that, if you want to grow your business, there are definitely opportunities to do it better online.

In his case, one of the things that’s driving him is that he has a new product. So he’s put together a specific package that he wants to sell. It’s a kind of mass market or much more of a mass demand package. And he’s in a pretty specialized area and so he wants to get the word out and at that point, he’s starting to [00:26:00] do some social media ads and stuff like that.

And once you start spending money on things like advertising, then you really want to know that you’re spending your money wisely. Because especially with social media advertising, Frequently, it doesn’t work as well as everybody says it should. You want to be intelligent about that.

And with analytics, you can see exactly what outcomes you got. Assuming you set it up correctly. What outcomes you got from each ad, each campaign, where people came from. You can compare, does Facebook do better for me than Instagram, than TikTok or whatever. And really get intelligence about where your markets are hanging out and how to approach them.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So given that setting up Google Analytics sounds foreign to most people. And then they may have actually gone as far as setting up a Google analytics account. And then looked at that and just gone, Ah, the learning curve is just [00:27:00] too steep. I’m just going to avoid, as we’ve said before.

What would be something that people could do to, instead of just looking at the screen and then switching it off, what might be the first little step that they could take? that would help them just build up just a little tiny bit of confidence in their ability to use these powerful tools.

Philippa Gamse: Yeah. I do think it helps to have somebody around who knows what they’re looking at, even just to show you around. And as I said the, to me, the most important thing is to come up with a question you want answered. So not just to look at the reports and try to figure out what they’re telling you, but to start out with maybe, what’s your key goal? Where is it supposed to happen? And is it happening? And start looking at things like how many visitors even started to engage with this goal or with the page that it’s on or something like that, You, I think you have to have questions in your mind in order to approach because then you know what you’re looking for.

Just staring at these things is [00:28:00] completely, people say what metrics are the key metrics to look for? And I, I just don’t know that’s a helpful question because, people tend to default to questions like, did I get more visitors this week than I did last week? Which is what we call a vanity metric.

Meaning that without further context, it’s pretty meaningless because you can say, Oh yeah, I did, I got more visitors this week than before, so I must be doing it right. And then you can go away because things are going well. But if none of those visitors have bought anything, if they’ve all left immediately, then they’re not worth anything to you.

 So you want to be saying like, am I getting more visitors this week who are doing the things I want them to do than I did last week? And if not, that’s where you start getting somewhere. There’s no point. Here’s a rule, right? There’s no point looking at the numbers for the sake of looking at numbers.

The only reason to look at a number is because there’s something you’re going to do about it. 

Trudy Rankin: That’s a really important point and a really important distinction about the whole [00:29:00] coming with a question and knowing that you have this question, that gives you a reason to try and set up your analytics in such a way that you can answer that question.

And then it makes you much more likely to go back and look at your data to see if you’ve gotten an answer to that question. So I think that’s really critical. Yeah. 

Philippa Gamse: Now, what I would say is that Google Analytics, and I’m talking about Google Analytics, because it’s the one I work with most in conjunction with another program called Google Tag Manager, which allows you to really control what the analytics does in a very customized way.

And that’s really important. Google Analytics default out the box is not necessarily. The most optimal tool, however, it has massively useful customization capabilities that you can start tailoring it to answer your specific questions. There’s a specific page on which something can happen and you can really hone in on stuff like that.

And so it can be worth hiring somebody [00:30:00] to help you set it up in a way that really works for your business. Even if, you don’t continue to employ them but even just to get the right initial setup, make sure that some of the default measurements are, some of the stuff out of the box in Google Analytics is really, I don’t honestly understand why they did it that way.

For example, the default data retention period is two months. Which is nothing. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, 

Philippa Gamse: If you want to compare this quarter over last quarter and you have, you’ve only got two months worth of data, you can’t do that. So you can change that, but you need to know upfront that it would be a good idea to do that.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, absolutely. So it’s like, how do you need somebody to help you with those sorts of things, you’re not going to, unless you’ve done this before, you’re not going to actually know about those sorts of things. I’m going to throw a third tool in there. And that a lot of people actually don’t realize exists, and that’s Google Search Console.

Do you tend to work with that triumvirate that, you’ve got Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Google Search Console? How do those three things work together? 

Philippa Gamse: Yes, absolutely. [00:31:00] Firstly, in Google Analytics, you can plug in your Google Search Console. So we should explain to everybody that Google Search Console is an SEO tool.

And it helps you to understand how, if you’re doing search engine optimization, so you’re trying to do better in Google search, Search Console is a tool that helps you do that. And it tells you how many people are looking for different keywords how many times you show up for different keywords, how many people click on your listings roughly where on the search results you appear, et cetera, et cetera.

If you link it with Google Analytics, then in the analytics, you can see, now you can’t, unfortunately, you used to be able to tell which keywords brought people to which page. Unfortunately, for privacy reasons, they don’t do that anymore, but you can see which keywords brought people to the site. So you can see which are your most important keywords.

And right there can be some really good clues. The typical thing I see when people haven’t really thought about search engine optimization well is that almost all the keywords that bring people to your site are what we call branded keywords, i. e. they [00:32:00] contain the name of your business. Because people go, okay, I want Joe the plumber, right?

I can’t remember his URL. So you go to Google and type it in. And while that’s lovely of course that doesn’t mean you’re not getting traffic for people who need a plumber, but they don’t know the name of the plumber they want. Non branded keywords, i. e. keywords about what we offer as opposed to our name.

Is an area that unless people are more savvy about SEO, they tend not to do so well in. Actually, that’s how you grow your audience and your awareness. So that’s why doing things like plugging in Search Console to the analytics is really helpful. And yes, absolutely. That’s something that I always ask for.

And also Google ads. So if you’re running pay per click ads, equally, you can link your ads account. into Google Analytics. And what that does is understand the ad traffic. It looks at who comes in from Google ads of those visitors [00:33:00] who converts, who does something you want them to do. And you can tell Google ads what a conversion is, right?

And then it will say, okay, so it will start figuring out the most valuable types of visitors are these people, like who came from this particular ad or this particular, it could be all sorts of things where geographically they come from pages they look at or whatever, and start figuring out what are your most valuable types of visitor and ways to get them around.

And it will start actually going back to ads to optimize if you’re using, getting ads to help your bid strategies, it will use data from analytics to, to hopefully optimize the bidding. 

Trudy Rankin: And that’s useful to know because for people who are running ads. Oftentimes getting the conversion tracking set up correctly, and I’m putting up my hand saying this is me, but I also know it happens to a lot of other people as well, getting that conversion tracking set up correctly can sometimes do your head in, [00:34:00] because either you’re trying to do something weird or strange, or you’re new to what you’re doing and it can take a little while to get things working properly.

Do you have a really quick story about maybe somebody you’ve helped with that whole ads conversion tracking side of things? 

Philippa Gamse: Yes, I do. I’ve certainly helped people. The thing about it is to get it right, and to test it carefully and to understand that people go crazy because the numbers in analytics do not match the numbers in ads.

And they almost never will not necessarily massive discrepancies, but some level of discrepancy. And people expect the numbers to be exactly the same. And then they drive other people crazy saying, why aren’t these numbers exactly the same? And, it’s because of different data modeling, different times when the data is updated different, what we call attribution, which is saying, where did this visitor actually come from?

 If they do a regular search in Google. And they come to your website and then they come back later having followed on an [00:35:00] ad. Attribution is about how do we credit the source for that visit? And it can get very complicated which we shouldn’t talk about here there are some complexities there.

And that’s something that I think is really important to stress. Analytics, the numbers you’re going to see in your analytics are not accurate, period. They do not reflect the entirety of your visitors. A, because people refuse consent to be tracked. And if they refuse consent to be tracked, you don’t track them.

Or they’re, automatically blocked by their browser or something like that. And so you have to understand that you’re almost certainly getting more visitors than are showing up in your analytics. But what we’re looking for, and as I say, the numbers don’t necessarily completely reconcile one to one with another tool like ads, or search console, but what we’re looking for and what it’s useful for is identifying trends and patterns that will allow you to make some of the decisions that we’ve been talking about.

So it’s not your tool of record, [00:36:00] right? It’s a really important for people to understand that. 

That’s really important. It’s the patterns, it’s the trends, which is really all you need anyway, because it’s just getting that sense of what’s actually happening so that you can take action.

Trudy Rankin: Philippa, that’s been really interesting. We could probably talk about analytics for a long time. And It is an art and a science in some respects because it’s an art working with the people, but it’s a science around looking at the data and trends and patterns.

If people were interested in getting in touch with you or finding out more about you or might actually want your help, where’s the best place for them to go? 

Philippa Gamse: I love connecting with people on LinkedIn and the good news is that I think I’m the only person in the world with my name, which is pretty amazing.

So it’s quite easy to find me on LinkedIn. And I do have a website, which is websitesthatwin.Com and on that website is an ebook that’s free. It’s basically five stories of real life stories of things I’ve done worked on with clients where we’ve made a big decision based on the [00:37:00] analytics and it talks about what we found, what we did. There’s, but it’s in very non-techie. There’s no charts and graphs in it, and the idea really is just to inspire people to say I wonder if that’s something that could be happening for me that I could take advantage of. And try to help people get an idea of the power of analytics without making it overwhelming.

Trudy Rankin: So that sounds interesting. So I’ll put the links to that into the show notes. And is that ebook that you’ve , that download? Is that the 42 rules for a website that wins? 

Philippa Gamse: Sorry. That was my book. Okay. So that was a book that I wrote a few years ago. I’m actually in the middle of writing a new book, which is actually about analytics for business owners in English.

So hopefully that will be out in a few months. 

Trudy Rankin: That sounds like it’d be really useful. So I’ll put links to your five, I’ll call them case studies, 

Philippa Gamse: yeah, it’s called Five Hidden gems. 

Trudy Rankin: Your Hidden Gems. I like that. That’s good. And then I’ll also put a link in there for your actual book.

Philippa Gamse: Thank you. 

Trudy Rankin: And we’ll put all the links in the show notes for people. Philippa, it’s been [00:38:00] fascinating talking to you. Thank you so much. 

Philippa Gamse: Thank you 

Trudy Rankin: that was a pretty big gold mine of insight from Philippa Gamse. Who knew that analytics could be that approachable if your eyes usually glaze over at the site of charts and graphs.

Hopefully, this episode made you want to take a second look, because remember, it’s not about being a numbers nerd. It’s about using data to tell the story of what’s actually working in your business. And if you’re interested in digging deeper, remember to check out Philippa’s five Hidden Gems Case Study ebook.

It’s in the show notes and it’s a great next step. Thank you so much for listening. If this episode gave you an aha moment or even just made analytics feel a little bit less scary, please subscribe, leave a review and or share the podcast with a friend. Your feedback helps others find the show, and it helps me keep on bringing you more of the good stuff.

So until the next time, keep asking questions, keep testing, and keep growing that online business of yours.

[00:39:00]