Website Analytics Demystified with Tools and Tips for All Users

Dave Jackson [00:00:00]:
When you're driving to a new location, the first thing you do with whatever app you're using to get you from point a to point b is it has to figure out what the heck is point a. And from there, you can make adjustments to get to point b. Well, today, we're gonna talk about tools you can use to figure out what's going on with your website so that you can figure out what to do to get them from what they're doing now to what you want them to be doing on your website.

Dave Jackson [00:01:01]:
Hey. I'm Dave Jackson from the school of Podcast. And one of my little bumper sticker sayings is you are gonna pay with 1 of 2 currencies, and that is either your time or your money. And people go, which one should I use? And I go, the one you have the most of. And so today, we're gonna talk about getting insights from your website. We're gonna talk about a couple different things. We're gonna talk about Google Analytics. We're gonna talk about Fathom Stats.

Dave Jackson [00:01:32]:
We're gonna talk about Monster Insights, Mouse Flow and Hotjar, which sounds like a weird sitcom from, like, 1982. This Thursday, mouse flow and hot jar. Tackle crime. But the first one we're gonna talk about is Google Analytics. Here's the good news about Google Analytics. It will tell you what your audience had for lunch last Tuesday when the moon was full. I mean, it's an insane amount of information. So that's the good news.

Dave Jackson [00:02:05]:
Some people like that. Other people get really worried about having Google track your audience. And the other thing is sometimes I just wanna know what are my top podpage. Like, what are people viewing when they go to my website? Can you get that from Google Analytics? Yes. You can. Is it easy? Once you go through the learning curve. And there is a learning curve because they collect data on everything. So if you're a supermarketer, you're an agency, you really want to fine tune, you can get that information from Google Analytics, but you're gonna take some time to get through it.

Dave Jackson [00:02:42]:
You can if you're using WordPress. Google has an official plugins called Website Kit, and I'll put a link out in the show notes where you can click on that and install it. That's the way to do it. There's also a Google Analytics Academy, and that is free. And as you might imagine, that Google Analytics Academy shows you how to tie it into the Google search console and how to use Google Ad Manager and Google this and there a Google they're a Google, everywhere, a Google, oogle. And, again, if you've got no budget, you can actually use this and get some insane information. It's just for me, I don't need that kind of information. I'm not really needing to dig in that deep.

Dave Jackson [00:03:30]:
Now your mileage may vary, and you may need that information, and that may be a way that you go. But for me, I've just the other thing that's driving me nuts is they recently upgraded Google Analytics to g 4. And when I log in, I will literally get a message that says, your property needs to upgrade to g 4, which I swear I've done at least twice. And I will say, okay. Take me to the update tool. And it will say, here are 3 out of 4 things that you've done. You need to do the 4th one. So I will, again, go through the 4th one and go, yep.

Dave Jackson [00:04:06]:
I clicked on that, did this, okay, and go. And it'll say, congratulations. You're done. And I'm like, great. And I can test it and make sure it's on my website. Awesome. And then I will log in tomorrow, and it will say, you need to update. Yeah.

Dave Jackson [00:04:22]:
It's kind of annoying, and I have decided I'm not going to not pay them anymore. That's the fun part when you have no kind of leverage on somebody by saying, you will lose me as a customer because Google's like, what are you gonna do? Just not not pay me anymore? Yeah. So it's not a horrible product. It's just for many people that I just wanna see where my traffic's coming from. I wanna see what's getting the most views, things like that. Yes. You can do that with Google Analytics once you move all the other 18,000,000 things that it's tracking out of the way. Now one of the ways you can better understand the information coming out of Google Analytics is to get a tool called Monster Insights.

Dave Jackson [00:05:10]:
Now this is made if you're using WordPress. So if you're using something like Podpage or Wix or Squarespace, you're kinda out of luck with this product. But it's $249 a year. Now here's the thing. Every time I go to their website, they're having some sort of sale. So I know right now, you can buy their smallest plan for $99 for the year, and it does a good job of doing exactly what I said. Here's just the basic stats you need, and then you can click and dive deeper if you wanna go deeper, but it does do that. But that's where I kinda go, isn't it kinda sad that I need to buy another tool to help me understand the free one.

Dave Jackson [00:05:54]:
So here's the one I'm currently using. It's called Fathom and, again, links to all these out in the episode description. You can pay monthly. It's $17 a month. I did the 1.15 a year, And what I love about it is, a, it takes maybe 3 seconds to install. They do have a WordPress plugins. So if you're using WordPress, you can actually see your stats right there inside your website. If you're not using WordPress, if you're using something like PodPage, they make it super simple.

Dave Jackson [00:06:25]:
You set up your website. They give you a bit of code, and you can go into PodPage and go under the design settings, and you'll see an option there where it says custom code. And you just paste that into the custom head tag code area, and you are up and running. It takes all of 5 minutes. And the cool thing about Fathom, where some of these other ones kinda limit you, we'll talk about those in a minute, this you can use on 50 website. And you can track ecommerce. So if you wanna track conversions where somebody bought your book or whatever it is, especially being an entrepreneur, that's built into it. And it easy integrates with a lot of CMS and frameworks.

Dave Jackson [00:07:05]:
And if you wanna get your nerd on and you need API access, yes, they have that. And, you can change your tier anytime and cancel anytime. And I love it because I can go in, and it'll say, hey. Here's how many, you know, people have been to your website. Here's the top pages that people are viewing. And then I can go in and see, like, I was amazed how much traffic I'm getting from my newsletter. So if you're not using a newsletter, you might wanna look into this. And it's just super simple.

Dave Jackson [00:07:40]:
And then if you've never played with, UTMs, which is Universal Tag Manager. I think it is. It's a Google thing, but it's kinda universal. Like, if I I'm going into my website right now, and I can see that the source is, I've basically and this is another cool thing. At the bottom, I can turn on percentages. So 11% of my traffic came from my email on Substack, and then 6% came from my other email on SendFox. And so I can see my refers, where people are coming from. And I don't know for instance, this is one of the things that's kind of cool about having stats on your website.

Dave Jackson [00:08:20]:
I've never heard of podcastx-ray.com, but 1% of my traffic in the last 2 weeks came from podcastx-ray.com. So I can go look at that. And sometimes you'll find out that somebody is linking to your show, and a bunch of traffic is coming from that. And so this is super simple. And then they have a a great way. If I just want to look at traffic, I can see where I've got, the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the Philippines. Well, if I just click on the United States, I've now got stats just on those types of visitors. And I can see that 54% of my visitors are on a desktop, 44% are on a phone, and 3% are on a tablet.

Dave Jackson [00:09:06]:
They do have a, I believe, 15 day trial, and I love it just because now granted, again, Google Analytics is free, and, yes, I'm paying for this. But the headache of not having to dig through 13 pages to get to the content I want is worth the money spent. Now if you listen to episode 3 with Greg Marilese from Design 1 Studio, and you can get to that by your podcast website/ 3. Links will be in the show notes. He mentioned Hotjar. And Hotjar is a tool that actually records your visitor, not so much like a camera, but it's recording their mouse clicks. It's recording their mouse movements. So you're no longer guessing what is happening when people come to your site.

Dave Jackson [00:10:05]:
And so I looked at it, and it's $32 a month. They do have a free program that allows you to have up to 35 recordings a day, but I was like, well, this is something I'm really kind of interested in. So you could, again, if you just wanna get a sample of this, you could use their free program. And then I saw $32 a month for 3,000 recordings. Well, then I found mouse flow. And mouse flow, number 1, does the same thing. So it's basically monitoring people on your website, but you can go in. And if you wanna track how many times somebody clicked on a button or how far they scrolled, and those are called heat maps.

Dave Jackson [00:10:46]:
Hot Hotjar does that as well. In fact, pretty much mouse flow and hotjar have very similar features. You can make a feedback form. We'll be talking about that in the future. What kind of questions would you ask for feedback on your website? And in the end, you can get for $31 a month, you can get 5,000 recordings on the paid version of MouseFlow. Now they do have a 0 forever version, and I believe you get 500 visitors for that, which is actually a little less than the free version of Hotjar. But I started using mouse flow And just things like if you have a form on your website, you can see how far people make it through your form. It really if you wanna know what's going on your website, and they do this being GDPR compliant, so that's that whole UK law thing, it's a really interesting thing.

Dave Jackson [00:11:40]:
And I saw on their website where mouse flow was like, you can get installed in minutes. And I literally it's wild because, like, I just saw the one on feedback. And I watched a quick 2 minute video, and it's like click here, do this, do that. I go to my website. I click here. I do this. I do that, and there's my survey. It's pretty amazing.

Dave Jackson [00:11:59]:
So if you really wanna know what's going on, and it it'll give you visitors and things like that, but you actually get to watch a video of what your your visitor is doing. And there are times when I saw this one guy was scrolling from the top of the school of podcasting and he's scrolling and he's scrolling. He makes all of the way to the bottom, and he scrolled back up. It's kind of frustrating because you're like, what do you want? What are you looking for? Tell me. You know? But you can't because there's no audio, obviously, and it's just a video recording of their mouse. So if you really wanna get into what's going on on your website, and this is where one of the things I always say, one of the most important pages on your website is the about page. How do I know that? Because I've used tools like these in the past. I wish I would have known about mouse SEO before, but it's you can actually see people go to your website, kind of scroll up, scroll down, and then they go to the about page.

Dave Jackson [00:12:56]:
And that's kind of a red blog, and that's what's one of the advantage of these types of tools is you can SEO, okay, they're going to the about page because when they land on the page, apparently, they don't know what's going on. And so there's a a great book, StoryBrand. We talked about that in episode 3 as well, that you want your website to be obvious, and using something like mouse flow is a great tool to go in and see exactly what's going on on your website. So, again, we went from no money per month to 17 a month for something like Fathom. MonsterInsights, again, is 2.49 a year. So you're looking it's what? $12 a month or $20 a month, if you wanna do that. But, again, I I just find that odd, and it just helps make my point that Google Analytics, it's not just me. They track so much information that MonsterInsights can help you decipher that.

Dave Jackson [00:13:54]:
And I'm like, well, for that, I'd just rather instead of spending $20 for MonsterInsights, I'll just spend $20 for Fathom. And you can use Fathom on WordPress or if you're not using WordPress. So that's the advantage of Fathom over Monster Insights. And then if you really wanna see what's going on on your website, you can use a tool like mouse flow. And I'll have links to all of these out in the website. And, also, I've mentioned already, I'm looking into you might know how to do a survey about your podcast. But if the goal of the podcast is to drive people to your website, you might wanna do a survey about how is the website doing. When you landed here, is this are you able to find what you're looking for? What what brought you here? Things like that.

Dave Jackson [00:14:45]:
So that'll be in a future episode of your podcast website as we start to talk about, well, what should I ask my visitors when it comes to my website? Here's just a quick tip that can boost your SEO, and this came about in the school of podcasting. We have group coaching and somebody brought this up and I'm like, oh, I'm gonna use that for your podcast website. And that is depending on who your media host is. So Libsyn, Buzzsprout, Captivate, Blueberry, etcetera, etcetera. And some of them, but not all of them, there are these things called headings. And so to explain these, when you look at an episode title on your website, the episode title is always bigger. It's number 1, and that's exactly what it is. It is heading number 1.

Dave Jackson [00:15:41]:
If you look at the code of the website, that's that. Now this website, this podcast is very much we're not really into looking at the code, but I just want to explain this a little bit. And then when you start to type something in the description of your episode for your website, that typically known as a subheading, you would mark that as heading number 2. So it's bigger font. It's typically bold, but it's not as big as the title font because that's the big kahuna. And then as you might imagine, you have heading number 3, which is not as big as heading number 2. And the bigger the number so, like, heading 3 in the eyes of Google is not as important as heading 1. So as you might imagine, this is why the title of your episode is so important on the website because it's heading 1 and that is telling Google this is really what this blog post or in our case, this podcast episode is about.

Dave Jackson [00:16:46]:
And so Google gives it more authority, your title of your episode. Now what I've seen people do is they will go in and instead of making kind of a subheading, they will just highlight the text. They'll click on the bold button and make it larger, which totally makes sense. My tip is you should, if it's in whatever, you know, if you're ranking Podpage, for example, you can go in and choose larger text or smaller text. And that's just Podpage being PodPage and making things easier. But behind the scenes, what they're doing is they're adding those tags to that subheading to boost your SEO. So if you choose larger header, that's an h 2 behind the scenes. And if you choose smaller header, that is an h 3.

Dave Jackson [00:17:37]:
And, again, this just makes it bold. It makes it easy to set out. But what you don't want to do is just make it bold and bigger. You're missing out just on a little bit of SEO juice. Now if you're like, I'm not really sure. I'm using Wix or Squarespace or things like that. There is often a button that have, like, a left pointing arrow and a right pointing arrow on the same button. And if you put your mouse over it, it'll say view source.

Dave Jackson [00:18:03]:
Now I'm not going to try to walk you through in an audio podcast how to look at number 1, we don't like code. That's the whole point of this show. But out at your podcast website, I'll have a quick video that shows you how can I test to see if I'm using the right headings? And today, we just looked at a few tools. There are many, many, many tools, and I'll have links to those again out at your podcast website. If you have a tool that you're using to track analytics on your website, you know, like, oh, Dave, you missed it. There's one so much better. Well, you can go out to your podcast website and leave me a message. If you want to, be sure to mention your website.

Dave Jackson [00:18:50]:
I'll give you a plug on the show. Always appreciate feedback from you. Also, while you're out there or if you're listening to this on your phone, there'll be a link for a survey. These are really quick. They're, like, 3 questions about the episode. As this is a new show, I'm building this show for you. And so just take a couple seconds. Click on that.

Dave Jackson [00:19:12]:
Let me know what you thought of this episode. If You have any ideas for future episodes. Like I said, we're gonna talk about surveys in the future and some other things that we got lined up. It's all there at your podcastwebsite.com. If you go to your podcastwebsite.com/follow, you'll never miss an episode. And while we're at it, something else you can do out at your Podcast website is click the share button and share it with a friend. Or if you're listening to this on your phone, there's a share button there somewhere in the app. I would deeply appreciate it if you know somebody else who is going, I'm not really sure what I should be doing with my website.

Dave Jackson [00:19:48]:
You could say, oh, man. Do I have the podcast for you? And share with them, and you're gonna look like a superhero. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Dave Jackson from the school of podcasting.com. I help podcasters. It's what I do.