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Lesson Info

Practical Applications of Metrics

So what we're going to do now is I want to talk a little bit more about how to apply this, so so you've heard about the metrics that you need to use. You've heard about this system, you know, that you need to have a system and what I wanted to highlight about what tim said is you create a system so that when you need it, you can use it, so what you don't do is, you know, just constantly check numbers. So when I started blogging, it was constantly checking my traffic, but I realized I was checking this three, four times a day, and it wasn't taking any action based on how many people were coming to my block. Basically, I was feeling good about myself or I was feeling depressed, and there was there was no action associated with it, and when you start getting into these numbers, you can kind of get obsessed. But what I want to underscore, I said this, tim reiterated, I want to say it again, is what gets measured gets done, so you want to measure the things that you're willing to take actio...

n on, and for some of you, that means starting to measure things that you weren't taking action on, that you need to, because you want to grow your list and it's not growing. Or you want to start getting people to buy from you and they're not clicking anything that you're doing, and so you've got to figure out how do I create this conversion path? How do I get people to where they want to go? But I want oh, I want to scale back I want to bring it back down to the ground level what tim has talked about what I've talked about these are progressive systems that we've built and are still building over time what I don't want to throw at you as you need to be measuring everything all at once, or you're failing what we what we do with metrics that we do with systems is we start measuring things that we can replicate a success or not repeat a failure so that's very simply, this is why we want to measure things replicated success or don't repeat a failure so let's apply this now teach one of you and what you're trying to do, and in some of the obstacles that you're already starting to encounter, what is a success that you could replicate it that you want to replicate? But maybe you don't know how and let's talk about what we could measure for that or what might be a failure that you don't want to repeat again, I want to throw that out to the you know, the chat room folks to let's talk about what we can be measuring that's going to dr action, so be thinking about that mccall in you, jessica, because you do I mean, you have an email issue got a substantial size email is you've been figuring out what to do with it, but you're here because you want to do what you're doing better, and I think you do already have some systems in place for what you're measuring sending out newsletters, and so I want to put you on the spot and ask you, what have you learned? And and maybe what's one problem that you're having that we could talk about? Yeah, so click throughs are very important for us, and we've noticed with certain types of content we get very, very high click through rate and with other types of content that we thought was going to be a great success of people we're going to be really interested in reading about it doesn't get the highest click through rate, and even if it follows the same sort of format in the email, you know, we've got a compelling picture. We've got a couple lines of a teaser, ah, very clear called action button to continue reading on our block andi think the content is really good, we see these dramatic differences, so so I can I interrupt you if that's so what do you do when you're measuring click throughs, which is great and so then when you expect this is a great example, you expected to do amazing you've got the system in place that you're measuring click throughs which is just on automatic thing on on a male chimp campaign you're measuring that what do you do when it doesn't align with your expectation? What sort of changes do you take afterwards so step setting back and looking at you know what? What type of content it wass um you know well, maybe I should step back also and say the format hasn't always been quite the same, you know, maybe there was, like, a little bit of extra information that we included at the bottom of one that we did including the bottom of another and it's like, oh, are we giving people too much tio click on potentially or is it overwhelming toe look at maybe we should simplify that so taking a look at that and looking at really what the goals of our user bases and what they're trying to achieve you know are they are they most concerned with building their audience right now are they most concerned with, you know, after launch what to do with the next thing or, you know, just kind of stepping back and getting to know where users a little bit better that's kind of helped us great on what problems are you encountering if if any right now what's what's something that you would love you know, solve um I guess uh just kind of figuring out stuff that's relevant and exciting tio we have a very wide user base of people that are filmmakers, musicians, writers, comic book artists all types of people on bears a lot of different types of content that we could talk about from like pre building your product tow launch to like interacting with customers after the fact so like narrowing down on what's really important to them and delivering great content on you know, on something that's relevant for everybody is super hard yeah so just to remind you guys just go works for a company called gum road and they it's ah it's an e commerce platform shopping cart where entertainers and, you know, online product developers and service creators can can sell their services and their products and so they've got a pretty wide user base of all kinds of people and she's tasked with the responsibility of trying to find ways to deliver relevant content to them that's going to help grow the business and also serve you know, your existing customer base, right? Yeah, which is a big challenge, so but I love that you're measuring stuff and I love that you're taking action on the things you're measuring so thanks for sharing that so what questions or problems have come up a cz you guys have been thinking about what to measure, how to measure how to how to start measuring it. Lisa. First of all, it reminds me that I've actually been using some of these techniques for years. Great, my personal photography website, wow. I mean, I look at what people look at and look at if I tell a story with a slide show, yeah, I look at the fall off rate, you know, when people stopped looking, ok, thirty six pictures is the limit, you know, tell your story and thirty six pictures and stop yeah, you know. So I know these things so that's cool. The challenge I have is on that web site also have a link to a google analytics link, and when I open up the google analytics page there's way more information than I have any idea what to do with their there's graphs and charts and numbers and it's overwhelming so well, that's my challenge, a quick one on one on google analytics or any analytics platform that's giving, throwing a lot of numbers at you, a few things to look out and kind of what these things mean, there are page views and a page view is a person going to a certain page and looking at it, obviously on then going to another page and looking at other page that's, two page views. So you want to be careful because people misunderstand analytics when they they go, I got one hundred page used anything that's, one hundred people it's not necessarily true that's one hundred different pages on your website and it's a relevant statistic because it tells you how many people not just how many people but like, how relevant your content is, how many people are looking at different pages on on your website so there's a page you, then there's a visit and a visit can be one person visiting your website multiple times. Eso it's? Not necessarily a person, and then there are unique visitors and a unique visitor. Is anybody on a certain computer it's a computer viewing your website so kind of the nuances of that is page views aren't people busan's visits aren't necessarily people, but it's it's, good to know if you know if you've got one hundred unique visitors per day and you've got two hundred er visits, then you know that some of your readers are coming back to your website more than once per day, which just good, um but then a unique visitor can be misleading because that might be that might be the family computer and five people all go to your website. So that's, why it's, good to have, you know, at least those three things to look at, but when I'm really focused on people that I'm reaching, I look at unique visitors and visits a little bit because it lets me know, um, here's, how many people are coming to my website, and that gives me an idea of how many people I'm reaching? And then how many of those people I might be able to convert to customers, readers, email subscribers, that sort of thing, so I wouldn't pay attention to those three things and look at those relative over time just like a list list growth, how much is this growing? And then how can I take those visitors and convert them to readers? And so google analytics is important, or any kind of analytic software is important what we're doing here, because it lets us know how many people coming to our website, and then maybe how good of a job or how bad of a job we're doing, converting them so it's. It's not enough to talk about how many people are on your list if you don't know how many people are coming to your website want to measure how many fewer coming your website and then see how many people you're converting in, as tim said, if you got one hundred, people on your website and you're converting fifty of them that's great. So it's not just the number it's also the conversion rate percentage of people that are signing up for your email list again, there's no magic number here, but I think that the magic number is you want to start where you are and make that number go up, find ways to increase that percentage, and if you have a high percentage of people you know of people that are coming your website that air, then converting your email list, what you want to do is you want to increase the amount of people that are coming your website, because hopefully that conversion rate is going to stay true. And then you want to test that if I send more people, I continue to have a fifty percent conversion rate, or does it go down to thirty percent? And then how do I optimize maximize that? But all of this is just about experimenting, you put some tools in place that you can measure what you're doing. And then it affects your activity as you pointed out lisa period you had a question I think that'll be that'll be it heard the terms of four but not exactly sure how beneficial so in your experience search engine optimization and then also using key words or tags on blog's could you talk a little bit about how that place into the analytics or you know sure as you right? Yeah so seo search engine optimization is basically creating content on a website that is going to attract organic search traffic and that means when you go into google or yahoo or whatever and you search for a term like sea kayaking then you're going to get first thing they're going to get it you're going to get a couple of sponsored paid spots where you know this is content that people have paid for its advertised contacting people have paid money to get placed on that page and then right below that still usually above the fold there's going to be you know usually about ten search results of you know, the most important the most relevance you know, web sites are web pages on that topic why s ceo is important is because a lot of people obviously use google and why it's really important is if you get on the first page of google something like seventy percent of people searching for a term that number is constantly changing so you know don't quote me on that but most people never click to the next page revel in search engines came out you're like on page thirty two looking for a relevant you know web page but now that doesn't happen because google's really smart and a lot of search engines have copied what they're doing and how they rank content and so when you search something online that first page of articles of resource is that's a pretty reliable list so with ceo that is a very in depth topic I mean you could teach a whole other course on it but really what you want tio on this is one reason why you could well I could make a case for creating content for your website in addition to having newsletter so how this pertains to newsletter is when I'm writing content and it's going out to people's inboxes that's not seo doesn't matter there that's not getting rank because it's going into your inbox is not being published on a web site but I find blogging and then that same post is going up the email or I've got content on my website then that will get indexed and ranked by google and it will rank according to how well it scores you know on google's you know ceo ranking tests and nobody knows exactly all of the secrets to that but the basics have always been true which we talked about our copyrighting lesson write a really good headline that is descriptive of what you're going to talk about if you have an article about sea kayaking, you better mention the key term sea kayaking in that title that accounts for something like seventy percent of the articles relevance so when google is ranking ah page on your website in its you know where it's going to fit you know on the search index it's it's really looking at that title and then some other things it's looking at is how many people are linking to that page how much that key word is mentioned throughout the body of the article especially how much it's mentioned within the first hundred words this again goes back to copyright that's why you want to mention what you're talking about in the first paragraph in that lead just like you would write a newsletter you would apply this to writing articles and blogged post so what we talked about in that session really applies to writing search engine optimize content for search engines so how that applies and why that would be relevant to you and my takeaways for you would be right great content people are going to find values that they share it and linked to it have smart titles remember to have them attractive, interesting and descriptive on and leverage those articles that air ranking well so you can see through google analytics what pages people are visiting and if you if you're measuring that and you see why a lot of people are going to this page, I could probably throw a call. The action at the bottom of this article to get people on my email list and so that's how I would connect. Teo teo, email marketing. You don't want to just have a bunch of traffic. You want to convert that trafficked email subscribers so that you can continue to deliver that content to people.