Last updated on October 19th, 2023
Online marketing has become increasingly complex when it comes to measuring its effectiveness. But fortunately, some digital marketing tools help in developing a much-needed insight. Google Analytics is one of such most sought-after tools. But, you need to understand it professionally to read the analytics and take the steps accordingly. Designhill conducted an online session with measure marketing expert, Chris Mercer who showed how to use Google Analytics to your advantage. Have a look!
The success of marketing lies in correctly analyzing its numbers and results. A wrong interpretation of the results can lead to wastage of the efforts. On the other side, professional reading of statistics will surely help in building a new marketing strategy.
When talking of marketing tools, Google Analytics ranks amongst the top such tools. But not all marketers, especially those who are new to it, can explore its full potential. Considering that Designhill conducted an online session with the marketing expert Chris Mercer on 7th May 2021. The topic of discussion was: Using The Google Analytics Super Report.
During the session, Chris shared his experience with the attendees on multiple issues that marketers confront while using the Google Analytics Super Report. He showed how to read the analytical numbers and results correctly. You can learn about the important traffic sources that work for your business and about the results you get from the traffic. Also, you will learn about the steps you should take to improve your marketing ROI.
About Chris Mercer
Chris “Mercer” Mercer is a renowned Measure Marketing expert who also is the co-founder ofMeasurementMarketing.io. He and his team assist marketers, marketing teams, and agencies grow their numbers.
Also, he is a regular speaker at conferences and events, such as Traffic & Conversion, Social Media Marketing World, Content Jam, TravelCon, Digital Elite Camp, Baby Bathwater Institute, and others.
In this blog, we have shared the video of the session and transcript in the form of Q/A where you can learn everything about Google Analytics Super Report.
Transcript (Q/A): Here Is What You Need To Know When Using The Google Analytics Super Report
Chris Mercer: These tools can be a little complicated. It can be very overwhelming sometimes to go through everything, and then you try to learn it all at once. Then, you just get buried in details.
So, when you have this training, just focus on one new thing. Focus on one new concept, one new thing that you heard a little differently. It may be one new action that you can take, you then take that action, practice that skill. Then, come back and pick up another new thing. That’s how we grow skills without getting kind of overwhelmed by everything that these tools can do.
We will cover three main topics in this particular training:
- Mindset – The first is the mindset. I think a lot of people do not understand how these tools work and fit together. So, we will talk about how measurement sort of fits in and how it should fit into your marketing.
- Framework – Then we’re going to talk about the framework itself. This is hopefully going to be one thing for many of you. That is because this will help put things into context so that you can organize things a little bit better on your end.
- Know what is working for the marketing – Then, you want to know what is working when it comes to our marketing, in which the super report will come into play. So we’ll go through and show you that as well.
Mindset
Chris Mercer: Let us talk about the mindset. You see two people talking about each other. They are just talking and having a conversation. There are then another two people who are talking to each other, having a conversation. But, what they’re doing is listening and responding. At least one person is listening, the other person is responding. And that is how a conversation happens.
Listening and Responding
But what happens in a physical store when someone is buying a golf club. There is still the conversation, which is listening and responding. The salesperson is helping that person out through the checkout process. There’s a conversation going on through listening and responding.
Now, what about when someone is sitting in front of a laptop and trying to buy something online. This is where a lot of digital marketers went wrong. I did too when I first started. It was just a whole lot of responding and not very much listening when they are going digital. And if you think about it, when somebody is on your site, that’s kind of what we do as marketers.
We are constantly screaming at our messages or changing our headlines or doing our ad targeting differently. Or, we are doing any of this other stuff that we try to do to get them to do what we want them to do. But we are not listening to how they’re interacting with the pages with the messages with our website.
Listening during digital transactions
That is what we need to get back to listening to their side of the conversation. Then we adjust by responding. We had a conversation. And that’s where it came from. When we started teaching stuff that measurement is how we listen, that is how you do it. You use tools like Google Analytics or Tag Manager, Data Studio, the ad platforms, etc. You’re listening to how that person is responding on that side of the conversation.
Then, the marketing kicks in. Marketing is what we do to respond. It’s how we change the conversation. That is how we respond to that conversation to keep the conversation going in the direction we want. And that might be changing the ad targeting because it was the wrong people in the room. Or, maybe just adjusting the headlines are offered with a copied body copy, you know, what have you, the design, obviously can come into play.
Measure Marketing
So, that is why this whole concept of measurement marketing is all about. It’s that mindset of listening and responding. Okay, so now that’s kind of the mindset aspect of this.
Implementing measure marketing culture
How do you implement that sort of measurement of marketing culture in your organization? That is where we have the metric marketing framework. This is the second main piece we’re going to talk about in this particular training.
The measure marketing framework. If you go step by step through this framework, I guarantee it will improve things in your organization. You will have an improvement in your teams and for your clients, if you happen to be an agency. This is what you have to pay attention to because you can put this into place.
Three Steps To The Marketing Process
There are three key steps to this whole marketing process. The first is planning, which is you plan things out. Then you build things using the Tag Manager analytics. After that, you take action, or you act on the things that you built by the information coming in.
01. Plan
Marketing in the blind
Most people start with a kind of marketing in the blind. You do not have a good concept of what your numbers are. Maybe you do have some numbers, but you don’t trust the numbers. You are confused because you think Facebook says one thing while Google Analytics says another. You are not quite sure what the truth is.
That happens a lot. And that’s kind of this marketing in the blind thing. You are not quite sure what is going on. What you are trying to get to is that marketing predictability grows revenue and increases profit. You want to get to the point where your marketing is predictably growing revenue. With growing revenue, you can forecast what the profits are going to be. You can forecast what your marketing will be and the result you will have from it. That is what we are trying to get to.
Planning Stages
So, we go through a path to do that. I talked about that first one was planning, which is where you will have to start. A lot of people miss it and they kind of skip that part.
But in planning, there are three key stages:
01. Ask Questions
The first is the questioning stage. Write down all of the different questions that you want to get answers to. Ask questions about what we call results and ask how questions, and not just what our conversion rates are. How many people saw the product detail page and added it to the cart. What’s that sort of conversion rate such as micro-conversions along the way? So you write down all such different questions and get their answers.
02. Get Information
Now, in the next column write down the answers. Here is all the information that we are going to have to collect to get those answers. That is where you eventually use platforms like Google Analytics or Tag Manager to do that. You collect the information.
So, take for example a conversion rate. You need to collect the number of people who have reached your thank you page or fulfillment pages. You might need to know that on people who sell your product detail pages. You can divide those out to figure out a conversion rate. So again, the question being, what’s our conversion rate? Then the information is okay, I need to know people who saw this page and the people that saw that page, so I can get the answer to what conversion rate is.
03. Take Action
Now, the most important part of the planning is taking the action. And this is just in the planning stage, you have not built anything out yet. You’re not looking at Google Analytics, and not even thinking about Google Analytics at this stage. You sort of roleplay and you say, what actions will we take based upon the answers we get? And you’re doing that ahead of time, this is in the planning stages.
So, you have your first column with all the questions that you try to answer. The information is in the second column, and that third column is okay, what will we do based upon the answers we get? So if our opt-in rate is maybe less than 25%, then we are going to take these sorts of actions. If it’s greater than 45%, maybe we take these sorts of actions. And you think through that, and it’s always a kind of an if this, then that kind of approach to actions. That’s the first stage of planning questions, information in action.
02. Build
01. Identify Your Traffic
Now, once you have got your plan in place, you need to put your measurement plan in place. It is time to build. The first thing you want to do something about is traffic. So, traffic is really where you identify who is sending you traffic. What type of traffic is coming from that source? Why are they sending it to you? What’s the purpose of that traffic? That’s the traffic section.
02. Results
Once you have the traffic identified, you move into the results. What are you trying to get from that traffic? What’s the whole reason for it? Did it achieve that result? We want to be able to measure those results. And again, we’ll talk about that today as well.
03. Structure
Make reading your story read easier
Then, the third step to build your marketing is structure. You have to do it in a way that you can naturally read a story. And that sounds a little weird to those who do not quote-unquote, a numbers person. That especially if you’re not a numbers person, pay attention to this because this is how you think about it. If I gave you a children’s book, and I said, Please read me this children’s book. You could do that just fine. But if I take that book back, and I rip out all the pages, and I rip those pages up into pieces, and then I hand you a bunch of pieces back, and I say, please read me this children’s book, could you read the book to me?
The answer is, yes, you could, because I did not change your ability to read, you can still read, it’s just that I made it a lot harder. Because there are a bunch of ripped-up puzzle pieces. It is just harder, you have to put them all together, you might have missed a few pieces here or there. So, you got to kind of make up and make some assumptions about what might be happening in the story. It is a lot harder to tell that kind of story.
Google Analytics is like a bunch of ripped-up puzzle pieces by default. You have to use it in a certain way so that the pieces get stitched together properly. And this is what that structure part is, we’re going to talk about this today as well. So, this build process is really what we are going to be focusing on.
03. Act
01. Read The Report
Once you have taken the build step, you have got everything in your Google Analytics and reported, that’s when you read the reports. And to be honest, that’s where a lot of people start. They turn on Google Analytics by putting scripts on their pages or some integration. Maybe you have got a store, your Shopify store, whatever the platform is that you are using. Then you jump into the reports, and you try to read them.
But if there was no plan and no proper build, you were just looking at a bunch of ripped-up pages. It’s really hard to find the story. But when you do the planning and the build properly, you actually can read the story, it makes it a lot easier. Once you read that story, you still have an understanding of what’s working and what’s not. Again, we’re going to talk about that today.
02. You Can Forecast
Then, you can start to forecast because you have got your benchmarks. You understand how things work in your marketing. And this is a huge step. Because now you can instead of just saying, what just happened, what just happened? What just happened last week and last month? What just happened with that money we spent on Facebook?
Instead, you can now go forward, and say, we’re going to spend $1,000 on Facebook next week, here is what is going to happen. We are going to spend $100,000 on Google Ads next month. Then here are the results we should be getting from that. And not just here’s how much money we’re going to make. But here is how we are going to see the ad, click through the ad. Here people are going to then interact with our pages.
Then, there is what the conversion rates are going to be through those pages to ultimately create the number of sales that we need to make the revenue we’re making. You forecast all of that. And you will be able to do it with confidence. That is because you understand how things work, and you measure your results.
03. Optimize
Then when you forecast, you will send actual traffic. At that point, you measure against your forecasts. You will see what is working and what is not. It will be apparent and it would not be a guess anymore. Also, you would not have to worry about looking at the right thing or not. You will know the step that isn’t working as expected. That tells you exactly where you focus. So you can optimize that final step in the journey going through this framework.
Once you optimize, you then adjust things and you go through this process again. And that is ultimately what gets you to this point where you can predict where you can forecast revenue and results. That is the idea behind the measure marketing framework.
Designhill: How long does this whole process take?
Chris Mercer: It takes a lot of time. But it is something you go through just once, at least initially. And you will go through it again. But as you get through the different levels of it and acquire skills, it gets easier.
It takes 3 months only
However, when starting, give yourself at least 90 days to plan. You will go from the planning to the build stage and then to the point where you are actually at this stage. Just focus on planning and learning that stuff and getting that down the second month. Then, you focus on your building stage in the third month. So, in 90 days, you can be at this point, if you think forward, like where you are now versus where you could be in three months, it’s not that much time.
Start with the planning stage
So, if you have no clear roadmap, you’re not quite sure what questions you should be asking. You are not quite sure what actions you should be taking. In that case, you start at the planning stage because you need to focus on that. And you go through some questions, the information, and the action steps. When you go through those, you’ll have a clear roadmap. That’s how that works.
Tackle chaotic reporting
Now, you may be in the stage of chaotic reporting. Facebook says one thing who analytics says another thing like that, that’s the candidate reports. They are just confusing. When you look at that, if that’s what’s happening, it’s because your build is off. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Once you get that you get useful reports that are telling a story.
Random acts of marketing
Now, if you happen to have that, you are just in the stage of random acts of marketing. That means you get reports back maybe from your teams. Or, maybe you’re that person who does that, but you’re not quite sure what they mean, or what actions to take. That is what the
With these random acts of marketing, you just try something out because you heard the latest mastermind. Or, you heard about the most recent webinar or training or somebody’s idea in the company. That is random acts of marketing.
Instead of doing that, you go through the Act phase. This step is the one where you go through reading the reports or learn how to read those. Then, we will forecast our results. Then, you measure against your forecast and optimize. When you go through that, you will know what’s next. You will know what’s coming up, and you’d be able to measure against it. Then, you have a lot more control over what your marketing is like. So, that is the measurement marketing framework.
Now, when you use the framework, you should always go through the plan, build, and then act upon the information that you get back. When you use the framework, you can answer these key questions. You will probably ask what is working, and what is not. Now it is asking about traffic and results.
When the traffic is coming to your site, it can feel like everybody is coming in any which way. You are not quite sure who is sending you traffic, or what type of traffic it is. Or, why are they even there in the first place?
The Super Report
So with that, I want to talk about the super report. We are going to ease into this before we jump into Google Analytics as a platform. We are going to take up the building parts of the framework and first focus on its three key areas of traffic results, and structure.
Traffic
Now, traffic is the first thing you always focus on. It is a very popular question that we get. When it comes to Google Analytics, the first thing I should focus on is your traffic, and making sure that you understand who, what and why of it.
3 big frustrations
So, people have three big frustrations in the build phase. These are :
- Don’t know where: You do not know where the traffic is coming from.
- Don’t know what: You do not know what are the results you are trying to get.
- Don’t know how: You do not know how the traffic is causing the results.
Talking about traffic now, this is where we move again, from not knowing where to knowing where. As mentioned before, you want to know, what type of traffic are they sending you? And you want to know why they are sending you that traffic, right? So know who, what and why of it.
Now, here is the source medium report generated by Google Analytics. This report shows you the answers to all three questions.
For example, here in this screenshot, you see things like Infusionsoft and then email. So that’s telling me who is sending me traffic? It is Infusionsoft. We use Infusionsoft as our CRM, and it handles all of our autoresponders and cart purchases and everything like that. So, I know that infusion came to our site at measure marketing.io through Infusionsoft. Now, what type of traffic from Infusionsoft came? The email traffic came from our emails. Then another column says, what is the purpose of the traffic, why it came. The answer is Academy. That is why they were coming for the measure marketing Academy, which is our paid flagship training program.
So, they were emails from Infusionsoft that was the who, what type of traffic again, emails, right, and then why for Academy for that customer journey, so I know all about that traffic source.
Results
The ACE model
Now, when it comes to results, that is where we want to measure what we call A.C.E. This stands for Awareness, Complete, and Engage. So, it is when they are aware of it, then they complete the journey. And then as they engage along the way. This is the ACE model.
You can know from this model how many users are aware of the customer journey and how many completed the journey. So, in my example, 1400 people were aware and 43 people completed. The model shows how many people were aware of and how many people completed. It also shows how many are engaged along the way.
Have your clear customer journey
So in that, I have this nice customer journey, and I can see what my overall conversion rate was. I can see overall product revenue for this particular product. But more importantly, besides just seeing my results, I see how I’m getting my results. I can see the conversion rates in between to make sure that things are working properly as we go through.
Now, this is actually what it looks like in that super report, you set up goals in Google Analytics, and we set up three goals. That is how we did it. So, we had an Academy offer, which is when they’re aware of the offer page for the measure marketing Academy, we had that purchase, of course, seeing the thank you page, that’s when they completed the journey for the measure marketing Academy.
Then we had the engagement along the way, which is the cart page when they saw one of the two different options of the cart page that we have for the measure marketing Academy. So, we measure for each of these, and we can start to tie that to traffic sources.
Structure
Stitching a story together
Finally let us talk about structure. The structure is all about stitching a story together. You have to know what to look for, you have to learn how to read for this. But if you look at this and you are trying to answer the question, which type of traffic is more likely to make users aware?
Here is again the Source Medium report. We can see the different traffic sources coming into our site. The reports show who’s sending us traffic and the type of traffic that they’re sending us. It tells us that we got the traffic from a source called the Academy site. Then, it also shows us the goal.
So two traffic sources we can see by percentage at least when we come to these, we see some percentages pretty high. I’ve got Infusionsoft partner traffic. Then I’ve got a YouTube share. So, Infusionsoft partners are affiliates. When an affiliate is sending out traffic on our behalf, again, we use Infusionsoft for our affiliate platform. That’s why it’s whose partner is the type of traffic, it’s what type of traffic they are sending us.
Then I can see the results. Why is it for the Academy? And then there is its result, YouTube share, we have a YouTube channel, we do a lot of video training on a YouTube channel. So, when somebody is clicking over to learn more about the merchant marketing Academy from YouTube. We’re just sharing content. That’s why we call it to share, a lot of people call this social difference.
So we have that. And we can see that about 50% of those people that come in from this traffic source become aware of the measure marketing Academy. That’s pretty useful.
Now we are starting to understand what types of traffic sources are more likely to cause what type of results coming through. We can see this direct non-traffic where people that are coming in up at the top here. They are less likely there as 20% is likely to come through. I have become aware of the measure marketing Academy doesn’t work as well for awareness of the Academy, but these do.
Now, when we talk about a story, it’s not just seeing one particular data set, maybe this whole school model. So, you think about awareness, we know those two traffic sources. These are the partner traffic, and then that YouTube traffic. Now we are good at making people aware.
What about the second part of this ACE model? How many people are good at helping them to complete the journey? Well, again, we have different traffic sources that start to be better at closing the deal and making revenue happen.
Here, you can see Mercer’s Email. Why is it called Mercer? That is because somebody sent me emails, asking questions about the Academy. I will send back a reply, and I will answer their questions. I will say well go check out that when you’re ready, check out the Academy here if it’s a good fit for you. And I will make sure that Google Analytics knows that something is called UTM.
So, that is how Google Analytics knows it came from Mercer and what type of traffic did Mercer send. It sends email traffic for the academy and it is converted in this case you get small numbers but you get the idea.
Now, here at socialmediaexaminer/guest post and socialmediaexaminer/referral, traffic is coming from two different sources. The traffic is coming from my guest post and referral. Traffic from the guest post was because somebody probably clicked on the author link about me on Social Media Examiner. Then, somebody else just read a blog post and then came through, it’s what they call a referral, which means it doesn’t have a specific. So it just knows that it was on Social Media Examiner that it came over and it was referred by Social Media Examiner.
So, it is kind of a generic thing. And that is why it does not have a reason it doesn’t know why. They just sent them over there was a link, obviously on that site. They clicked on it and they came over. But in this case, they ended up purchasing as well.
But, I can see here that okay, maybe from a conversion rate perspective. Even though more numbers are coming through here, it’s a lot lower conversion, they don’t work as well as these do.
Is there a way that I might be able to get a little more traffic to social media examiner’s blog posts so that they end up purchasing on our site? Maybe that might be a strategy I could look at. And I wouldn’t know that if I wasn’t able to stitch together a story between traffic sources, and the results from those traffic sources.
Engaging part
Now, the third part is this engaging part. How many people are likely to engage? Here, we can see the Infusionsoft email. Regular emails are a little more likely to get people to engage. But Infusionsoft partner traffic, remember how good that wasn’t making people aware of the Academy. It’s horrible when it comes to making them engage in that customer journey. It is just not the traffic source that’s designed to do that, because it’s a little early in that particular venture for that type of traffic.
So, while it’s really good to make them aware of the Academy, they typically do not go to cart from Infusionsoft partner traffic. Something else brings them the cart, typically in our case, and ends up being email traffic that brings them to the cart page. Those are just some ideas of how we start to understand a little better.
The story that is happening with traffic sources is good at making people aware of the Academy. That means traffic sources are good at helping them to complete the measure market Academy journey and purchase from the Academy. You can see which traffic sources are good at helping them to engage along the way. And this is not always the same traffic source.
Now, we start to understand how to manage our targeting and how to change our traffic source messaging. That will help the traffic source get the result that it’s more natural and more inclined to get for us. That is why this is so important to do.
So, you should know who, what and why of it. Who is sending you traffic, what type of traffic is it, and why is the traffic all about it?
Then in the results, you think about the awareness. How many people were aware and how many people completed the journey you wanted them to complete? How many people Engaged along the way. And then structures where you do it in a way where it sort of stitches those two things together. And we are going to show you how to do that as well.
Continuation: The Super Report
Now, let us go ahead and take a look officially at the super reports. And we have been teasing that for a little bit here. So we’re gonna go into Google index. Where do you find this? This is in Google Analytics, you come into the Acquisition page because acquisition reports are all about where people come from. That is where the traffic is coming from. That’s Acquisition. We then click on the All Traffic button. We see all traffic, and then you’ll see Source Medium right here.
Get most of your answers
At the Source Medium page of Google Analytics, you have your Super Report. This one report can answer 80% of the questions that you have. Now, a couple of just overall tips, make sure you are looking at the proper date range. By default, Google Analytics will always do the last seven days. So, if you need to change that, you can just click up here. But always double-check what date range you are looking at, especially if you’re in Google Analytics a lot.
Sometimes it’s easy to get lost in looking at today’s date when you’re not. So always double-check your date ranges. And then and it will always default through yesterday’s, we’re recording this on May 7, 2021. You can see here it says May 6, because May 6 is a full day’s worth of data. You typically don’t want to look at it on the same day. That is because it probably just has a little bit of the data from the day.
So, it’s not all that useful yet, and wait till the data is fully cooked. That is yesterday’s data and why it will default to that. Now you can see general trend lines, with users and things like that here. But that’s not typically what I do. What I will do is I will scroll down. And I’m looking at this part because this is where all those juicy details are. Now, I am going to flip this.
If you have an e-commerce setup, you will see e-commerce. And if you have goals set up you will see goals coming through. If you do not have goals and e-commerce, you will not see anything in the results. And that’s okay. Because you can set up goals, which are not that hard to set up.
Set up your goals
You can just google how to set those up. There are lots of blog posts probably at this point to talk about it. So not hard to set up. What’s hard to do when it comes to goals is what should a goal be. But you know that now it’s this ACE model, you set a goal when somebody is aware. You set a goal when they engage you to set a goal when they complete the journey.
For example, this is what the Academy offers. So, we’ve set a goal for when they see the Academy page. When they see the Measure Marketing Academy offer page, that’s a goal in Google Analytics, which records that goal. While analyzing this data, if you’re looking for a more comprehensive analysis option, you may consider using Microsoft Excel or an Excel alternative, which offers a wide range of capabilities to uncover finer details of your data.
So, in my report, Infusionsoft email traffic is causing 122 awareness, meaning that 122 users were aware. And then about that traffic source, that means about 39% of that email traffic becomes aware, is direct none. 21% became aware, we looked at the Infusionsoft partner member that was kind of high 58% became aware, we did a webinar recently with a platform called zoom.
You are probably familiar with Zoom. So we did a webinar with zoom. And so zoom was the traffic source because we were using zoom for the webinar, and it was webinar traffic. I can see webinar traffic 82% of that traffic became aware of the Academy. So we know webinars work to make them aware of the Academy, YouTube shares again, so I’m measuring my traffic to my results.
Now, what I like about this report is even though that’s incredibly useful, you have your traffic and you have your results. You can type your results, you just flipped your goals I want to see offer, I can see them, that’s my awareness. If I go to my purchase, which is the completion, I can flip it and I can instantly see which traffic sources are good at completing.
That is how we know webinar traffic works for us. So I can see that it did a really good job, I see that conversion rate for that specific traffic source. So that’s how we know that works. And if I wanted to see engagement along the way to kind of measure where a drop-off might be, that’s where I flip it to cart. What’s our engagement when they see the actual cart page itself?
That could be like adding to cart. Or that could be starting the checkout process if you’re running an e-commerce store. You can see the good traffic sources. We are not good at getting people to engage, which might mean the messaging was off in that traffic source coming in. Or maybe that traffic source wasn’t designed to do that doesn’t mean it always was. So, this kind of gives us a story.
But again, what I like about this report is that it doesn’t just tell us the who, what, why, and the results. It also tells us a lot more when we want to get our story. So, I will go back to the Academy, we’re going to do this awareness when they’re aware of the Academy page. Here I can see who sent me the traffic. I can see the Acquisition that tells me how much of that traffic am I getting from my traffic sources. Then I see this next section under behavior. This is all about engagement. So, now you can see how engaged that traffic source was.
Then of course, next to that is conversions. That’s the results right we are talking about. Those are the physical results that you can see. And very often I’ll use just the kind of the source medium to identify my traffic and I’ll tie it to the results. But I like to get into this as well to make sure I’m getting enough of that traffic because maybe I’m not. I want to expand it or scale or work toward creating more of that traffic source. And maybe that answer works well, we just need more of it.
Know engagement and bounce rate
But here in this engagement section of the Google Analytics Super Report. This is kind of a fascinating area for me. On this page, you can look at numbers that show your bounce rate. Everyone wants to know what a good bounce rate is. The secret is, there is no good bounce rate. But there are bad bounce rates.
So, if you have a bounce rate that’s in the single digit. It is probably because there is an implementation error. If it’s at 100%, it is probably because there is an implementation error. It should be somewhere in the middle, and it bounces around the middle.
Overall, bounce rate is what somebody is looking at. For us, it gives us a benchmark of about 40%. Now, I don’t care what that number is, to be honest, I just care that it’s not 1%. It’s not 100%. So it’s 40%, I’m like fine, that will be my benchmark, something to compare to.
So, a bounce is just when somebody comes to the page and then leaves. They come to the page, they load it, they do nothing, and they go, that’s a bounce. So that means 40% have a page and they leave. That is no big deal. This direct non-traffic is 35. So, the lower the bounce rate, the more engaged they are because fewer people are bouncing off your site. 35% is a little lower than 40.
Google organic more engaged
I know that direct non-traffic is a little more engaged than overall site traffic. Here, my Infusionsoft email traffic is identical. In this case, it is about the same. It is identical in this case, but it performs roughly the same. Google organic is a little more engaged with people searching for us on search engines coming in from the search engine, and then you know, become aware. And you can see that 40% of that traffic becomes aware of the Academy, which is great for us.
We know Google organic is a really good awareness vehicle. But it is going to be a little more engaging. Look at my Infusionsoft partner traffic number, this is good at creating offer awareness. It helps people become aware. But look at this, the bounce rate is much higher. 40% is kind of my overall site bounce rate, what my site’s doing during this date range, I’m almost at 70%. That is almost 50% higher, that’s high.
Know the personality of the traffic source
Now, this particular traffic means it’s coming in hot for a specific reason and it is not there to hang around. We know how this traffic works. And what we start to get is I start to understand the personality of the traffic source coming in. I want to know how best to adjust our site to make sure that I adjust things. I want to adjust the conversation that’s happening between people using this traffic source, and the results I’m trying to get. It’s listening and responding. That’s coming through, but I know they are coming in pretty hot. They’re not sticking around.
And then of course, here you see the opposite: that my Zoom webinar is highly engaged. I get about 50% in the good direction here. So they’re engaging. I know how webinars work. And if something that we saw as a company was okay, we got to do more of those webinars. That is because clearly, three that showed it was not us guessing or believing, or hearing somebody say webinars work. It was us knowing it worked because the numbers told us. It’s the conversation that we’re having with our market. And they were telling us. Yes, we love this webinar.
So, we know that it works because of those numbers. Because we are listening to the conversation. That is all the numbers are, that’s listening. And you can do that same thing with pages per session, you can do the same thing on time per page. And you start to get a really good understanding of what your traffic sources are. You know what the results of those traffic sources are. Also, you know you’re getting those results.
Again, you start to understand the personality types. I am not going to try to get Infusionsoft partner traffic to sell the Academy because that is not what it’s there to do. It’s there to get leads. That is what it is there to do. That is what it does. It is an entirely different goal than it has. I don’t try to do it to get a traffic source, do something it’s not naturally inclined to do.
Think about the whole frame
But, I tried to get it to do more of the things that it’s good at doing. And I try to, you know, focus on it. It is not trying to do things that it’s not trying to do. And you start learning these as you go through this report. So, I encourage you to think about the framework. Thinking about this whole traffic results in stitching together the structure and the story and getting all this in here.
Now, I am going to show you how you do this. And again, this will be something that you can go through. I will show you something called UTM, and how to get into YouTube share.
The measure marketing toolbox
Now, we have something called the measure marketing toolbox. It is how we get leads, emails and introduces them. Measurement marketing is a completely free thing that comes with weekly training. So, you have new training every week that covers all of these different topics, you want to learn about it.
It comes with about 40 odd tools. It is so much more than what is on this slide. But there are different tools like the UTM traffic tracking toolkit. So, you can learn how to track your traffic. There is an ace goals guide to learn how to set up your own. Ace goals and give you a framework and instruction for that. So all of this is free.
Now to do that, just go to measure.tips/Designhill. And because we happen to be on the live storm, I have this additional cool thing that I just recently learned we could do. So I’m going to put a little button in here, we’re gonna see how well this works. Just like doing this stuff live. So we’re going to go into some call to action.
Designhill: Do we have an example using j four?
Chris Mercer: If you are just starting out learning Google Analytics, stick with Universal Analytics. This is the original good old-fashioned Google Analytics. It is a little easier to use and to get through will apply to Google Analytics for when you are ready to learn that. Those who are not quite sure what Google is for know that it is the new Google Analytics that is out. This is still kind of in this beta phase, but they’re pushing it out like this is going to take over the world. It will probably not be till 2022 when the world will be fully using it.
But as a company, you may be already using Universal Analytics, and comfortable with it. Then start using Google Docs to get used to it because it’s completely different. All the reports are different. You don’t see Acquisition, or you see, you don’t see all these other reports that are here. They report everything else. And when I click an Acquisition, I don’t see All Traffic and Source Medium. It’s not there as well. So, how can we talk about the Super Report? It looks like everything is gone, but it is not gone.
Google Analytics has two different things. These are User Acquisition and Traffic Acquisition. User Acquisition is how you acquire the user and the visit from that user. So, when you click on the Traffic Acquisition and the page, you scroll down. Then, you see that familiar stuff such as Source Medium.
You can see your Zoom webinar, the numbers but in a little different format. Also, you see your engagement metrics. And so they don’t have bounce rate, they have engaged sessions, but basically, people that stay more than 10 seconds. So that’s there. And way over here, you can see your goals and conversions. So, I can measure for different conversions coming through. And that’s how you do your goals.
So all of this stuff, 100% applies to Google Analytics. It is a little different and it is a completely different setup, different platform, and different analytics. And you should be using both right now. So, if you again, if you’re just starting out learning this, just stick with Universal Analytics. It is easier to start with and learn if you have already been using Universal Analytics.
But you haven’t used Google Analytics to start to pick up Google X four, but you don’t stop Universal. And you use Universal and use Google Analytics. and then probably sometime in 2022, would be my guess for most companies, you’ll start pulling off of universal and Google Analytics will be the main platform that we’ll be using going forward. Because it was designed to take over eventually.
Designhill: How to find bots and genuine traffic?
Chris Mercer: I go back to our Source Media report. That is a problem for a lot of people. Here I am pulling some bot traffic for example. When pulling up I just changed my date range to show a much larger section of the traffic. Then, I see this little bot traffic live referral. So what was very nice about this particular bot traffic is they identified themselves live. You get all excited right away because sometimes they won’t identify themselves. So, here I got a bunch of users. And they’re not all new users. That’s good. That must be real people.
Bot traffic is strangely different
But then you start seeing the engagement. You can see all the traffic sources, have metrics, and numbers. Then you can find this bot traffic. It is strangely different. Almost 100% of people think that there is not a good bounce rate. But there is a bad bounce rate when it’s close to 100%. Or, when it is in the single digits. That’s a problem. So you can see here it’s 100% and one page. They saw that was it, and no time on that page. So, it is probably bot traffic and also no results being achieved. And how many were aware of the Academy? You know that coming through is bringing in traffic, but they don’t. It’s like, okay, probably bought.
So, even if they don’t identify themselves, this was kind of nice that they did. But you would look for things like this. And then you’d go like, okay, that’s probably but especially if there’s a tonne of it coming through.
Designhill: What to do with the toolbox?
Chris Mercer: When you sign up for the toolbox, you can get into the membership area, which has many tools that you can explore there. And there’s also weekly training. I will also say, for those that want to learn more about the training, if you go to measure marketing, io, forward slash YouTube, you can see all of their video training there.
Lots of different things will show up. There is a playlist on Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Data Studio. Whatever you want to learn about, you’ll see it there, so we have all of those. So we talked about ga for
Designhill: What is the best traffic source for tracking accurate traffic?
Chris Mercer: Cora, Facebook, Twitter Medium are the best traffic sources. Cora and Facebook here tell you about the ‘who’ of the traffic. So, if I come to the Facebook traffic page through my Source Medium report, I type in Facebook because I just want to see Facebook. Here they have what they call a table filter. So I’m filtering this table just to show me Facebook traffic.
So I can see my Facebook traffic. I can see this paid traffic. These are referrals. This is traffic, and that was untagged. I didn’t have UTM on it. But it was just people sharing our stuff, which was nice. I see shared traffic, the stuff we put on there. And then I saw somebody had an affiliate link that they used on Facebook. I can see those differences, what types of traffic coming from the source. So, Facebook tells her who sent the traffic.
Designhill: What is the best platform for measuring where traffic is coming from?
Chris Mercer: I think Google Analytics is great. It works well. So just use that. And it’ll measure core them as your Facebook gonna measure Twitter, intermission, Instagram video on all the sites out there.
Designhill: What kind of marketing tactics do I need to do to drive maximum traffic to a website?
Chris Mercer: The first step you should take is to understand the conversation. You have a better idea of what’s going on, with what that traffic is there for. For example, I can see here, the Academy offer page that was set up. So, as I have the Academy offer page here, it’s 24%. But what was Facebook CPC supposed to do? It was supposed to get people to become aware of it, and it did not do a great job.
If I flip to another goal, where it is what we call the toolbox goal, that’s the idea. That is supposed to become a traffic source to get toolbox members. And here I see that it did not do a great job at all about getting people to the toolbox.
This is where you understand the conversation, if the traffic source is designed to achieve something and it’s not achieving it sort of naturally leads you to the next step. You shouldn’t have to be guessing what the next step is, the numbers should guide you.
So you can see here my Facebook CPC if it was intended to get toolbox traffic did not do a good job. If it was intended to get the Academy to offer traffic, and 25% of numbers looking for a great one, it goes back to the actions in our planning stage. If the answer was as well, I thought it would do 50%. Then I have to go look right if I have some actions to take.
You have to understand that conversation and use it. And I am still in the super report in the Source Medium here. So that’s why it’s called the Source Medium report. But it works well. And your standard traffic sources. It will pull that out. I know, just in our time remaining. I try to get through as many questions as I can. And I think we got them.
So, these are the major considerations you should keep in mind when using the Google Analytics Super Report. With careful manipulation of the report, you can have a second look at your marketing strategy.
However, along with the right use of the analytics report, make sure that the visual identities of your brand are impressive. No marketing plan will work much if your logo, website, business card, brochures, etc. visuals are ill-designed.
To create unique logos etc visuals that stand out from competitors, think of outsourcing the design work to Designhill. This leading creative marketplace has thousands of graphic designers. Many of them will work on your design brief to come up with unique design ideas that represent your brand personality. So, get started with your design contest at this marketplace right away.
Wrapping Up
Google Analytics Super Report is an effective tool to measure the marketing readings. Measure marketing expert Chris Marcel elaborates on how to do the planning, building, and taking action using this tool for marketing.
