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Success With Jewelry
138 - Laryssa and Liz Share Tips For Making Smarter Marketing Decisions With Google Analytics
00:25:00
Welcome to the Success With Jewelry podcast, hosted by Laryssa Wirstiuk and Liz Kantner, two experts passionate about helping independent jewelry artists thrive. In Episode #138, we're diving into a powerful (but sometimes intimidating!) marketing...
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the Success With Jewelry podcast. Your go to source for real conversations about business marketing and what it actually takes to succeed as a jewelry brand.
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B
Today I'm Larissa, the strategist, the systems queen, and the one who finds joy in turning big marketing challenges into step by step plans that actually work. Email marketing and generating revenue through it is the specialty of my agency, joyjoya.
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A
And I'm Liz, your creative compass and advocate for designers doing things differently. I live for brilliant brand storytelling, beautiful visuals, and helping designers confidently show up and shine. I founded the Stay Gold Collective to create community and support for independent jewelry brands.
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B
Together, we bring you nearly two decades of jewelry marketing experience. And on this podcast we're pulling back the curtain on everything we've learned. Whether you're just starting out or scaling to your next big milestone, you you'll get honest insights, helpful tips, and maybe a few laughs along the way.
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A
This is episode 138 and we're diving into Google Analytics and reporting how to use it, what metrics matter most, and how you can start making smarter marketing decisions based on data. And if you're an insider, we're taking this conversation even further with a bonus episode where we walk through examples of how jewelry brands can use their analytics to troubleshoot sales slowdowns, identify what's actually working in their marketing, and build momentum with real insights. Hey, Larissa, let's get into it.
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B
All right, let's get into it. What does everyone think about our new intro?
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A
Yeah, let us know. We stumbled through that one a few times.
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B
Definitely. So this topic, Liz, I think you told me you got some requests for it.
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A
Yeah, I got some requests. I am no Google Analytics expert and you know what? I'm actually like five months behind on my own reporting. For the past few years, I've been like doing it every single month and I need to circle back. But you know, sometimes you miss a month and then you just like keep missing months and then it's overwhelming to go back and that's where I'm at right now. But it does provide powerful insight.
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B
I think a lot of people can probably relate to that. I mean, reporting is not, I would say it's not the most fun thing to do. I don't even necessarily like doing it.
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A
But it is part of my job, so I have to.
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B
Yes.
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And for my clients, I do stay mostly consistent with it because I know it's really important to help determine where we're going by looking at something. We can't just go off of a feeling. We need Something to, to actually look.
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B
At and to drive the strategy.
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A
But I guess like so obviously depending on the platform that you have there are different, there's insights involved or like analytics that you can look at and reports you can pull. But what is Google Analytics and what does it do?
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B
Yes, so Google Analytics is a Google product if you couldn't guess. And I think the reason it kind of came to be originally was because Google wanted to be like, I mean it is the go to search engine platform and search is such an important part of marketing. Getting your website, your e commerce site, your other website shown in Google search results is a really important part of like digital marketing. And I believe that Google launched that product to kind of help support businesses that were trying to sell online and, and give them metrics and ultimately to support Google in the sale of like their other products like ads and things like that. So it's kind of this add on metric. But at some point in time it really became like the gold standard for metrics because it can be so in depth, it can be so adaptable and you can really pull in data about your website traffic for all different platforms like what's coming from social, what's coming from email, what's coming from ads and have it in one centralized place. And I would say for a free tool it is absolutely like the most comprehensive kind of reporting dashboard that you can have. And that being said, it is kind of complex. There are things that you can see in there that are a little bit easy, like kind of just quick snapshots of, of traffic or insights. But it can scale to be a very complex marketing tool also that even like enterprise businesses use. So there's flexibility and adaptability there with the platform.
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A
I think that one of the tricky things is for designers to actually set it up on their website. I don't know, we can't obviously walk everyone through how to set it up on their website but and there's, I just have to say to everyone, like if you are struggling, there are a lot of YouTube tutorials.
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B
YouTube would be like the best place to go for that. If you have a Shopify site it is, I wouldn't say it's like the easiest thing in the world, but they do have this kind of shortcut setting in the Shopify backend where you just put in like a, whatever your code number that they give you and there's a YouTube video, I'm sure that could walk you through that. And I'd say just don't like let yourself get overwhelmed by it. Because when you are on Google Analytics, I think what scares people is it looks a little bit more like, techy or like there's a lot happening, but if you follow the instructions, it should be okay.
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A
I think that's the overwhelming thing about all reporting dashboards, like, even the ones, you know, the Shopify one or I have wix. So the WIX dashboard and things like that is. And Google Analytics specifically is. I always forget the pathway to get to the numbers that I'm looking for. It just is a lot and to click through. And I think that also, sometimes designers don't necessarily know the terms or what the terms mean. And I do have a reporting template, which I'm glad to share with everyone that you can tweak to make work for you. But having a starting place I do find helpful.
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B
But some of the terms that are.
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A
Important are like, users. So that's the individuals. So that's a unique number of people coming to your site. Sessions is not a unique number. That is how many people, like, so the same person could come to your site 5 times.
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B
Bounce Rate is always, like, a tricky one for me.
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It's. I think. Larissa, correct me if I'm wrong. If somebody, like, clicks to a website.
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B
And, like, leaves immediately, they leave, like, in one second. And actually. So one thing I want to mention before I go more into that metric is into 2024. What can I say? A year. Last year, Google Analytics, like, sunsetted a previous version that they called Universal analytics and rolled out this thing called GA4. And that confused a lot of people because the dashboard and the way it's set up is a little bit different, and even some of the terminology is different. And I don't think bounce rate is a default in, like, everyone's dynamic dashboard. Now you can, like, add it in as a metric. I think the reason they did that is because they want to be more positive. And bounce rate is kind of like a negative term. So now they call it, like, engagement rate, and it's actually like, the opposite. So what percentage of your traffic is engaged for, like, more than. I believe it's like one second or two seconds.
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A
Got it. Okay, that's confusing.
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B
It is. I've always looked at bounce rate. Yeah, it. So it may. If you go into Google Ads, you may see it, you may not. There's, like, different columns you can adjust in your dashboard to get certain metrics. When Liz pitched me this topic. Sidebar. When Liz pitched me this topic, I was a little scared because I feel like there's no easy Way to talk about Google Analytics. So if I start getting in the weeds, just. Just caught me off.
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A
I just opened my GA4.
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B
Yeah, maybe it might be in yours, Liz, but I know because I have access to like a lot of my clients dashboards and bounce rate isn't always like a default metric in there.
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A
And the, the like main home has active users, which I understand. Event count, which I would guess is sessions.
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B
Yes, it is sessions. So one other like thing I want to say about this. When they changed to GA4, the reason they did that was because they wanted to think more broadly beyond website use. So some people use Google Analytics to track data on like an app or something else that's not necessarily a traditional website. And so that's why some of the terminology also changed. Like event is like a little more broad and can be defined in different ways, like depending on what you want to see happening on your website, on your app, on whatever platform you're tracking data on. That's why they have these like weird terms. So you kind of have to relearn it.
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A
But anyway, some other key terms to know and you know is traffic sources. So that's a good thing. That's kind of like where your traffic's coming from. So you're looking at direct organic search. Organic social referral is referral when somebody clicks, say from an email.
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B
Referral is when someone clicks from another website. So like if you're linked, say on like jck's website or something and someone clicked over, that's considered a referral. Got it.
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An engagement rate would be people who are viewing your website and moving through it.
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That. Yeah, that's the percentage of people that are spending. I'm trying to remember what the exact metric is. It's like more than two seconds or something on your website. So percentage of sessions that are spending more than like two seconds on your site, they're calling that engaged. Got it.
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A
And we know what conversions are. That's when somebody buys something.
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B
Yeah. When you're looking at like your traffic sources, Liz, like you just said, like organic search, organic social. One thing that sometimes happens. Google Analytics is an imperfect tool. There's a lot of reasons why it may not exactly count the traffic coming to your site and why you may see discrepancies between like your Shopify analytics. We cannot perfectly track everyone on the Internet. There's like cookies and privacy stuff and that data gets obscured and like one person could be looking on their phone versus desktop. There's like a lot of factors that come into play. So it will always be an imperfect tool. And something that I see a lot is, especially with email marketing, that depending on the email platform you use, what kind of tracking links it has, how you're like, tagging your links, Google Analytics might not register all your email traffic as email traffic, so it's just a little bit tricky. I'm just saying this in case you go into your Google Analytics and you're like, that doesn't make sense to me. I don't know why I'm only getting like 10 visits from my email or whatever, from this or that. It's not a perfect tool, and you want to kind of take it all with a grain of salt.
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A
Mm. Okay, so let's talk about the metrics that really matter. One would be website traffic and where it's coming from. Because obviously you want to drive traffic to your website, and knowing what is actually driving traffic to your website is helpful. And with this, like, you were just talking about, it's hard to fully say. You can think about it, like, say you just did a craft show and you met some people there, maybe they didn't buy, and you're seeing an increase in traffic to your website. It could be coming from that craft show, but unless they're clicking, you know, specific links, you can't necessarily fully track it. And even if they are clicking links to get to your website, there's no way to 100% tell where somebody is coming from or how many people are coming from that place. Right?
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B
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, you can use, like, tracking links, but that's a whole other thing. So for, like, the normal business owner who doesn't isn't aware of how to use those things, it's not a hundred percent certain all the time what happens too. So let's think about Instagram, for example, and let's say someone is like, on Instagram, and they come across your post and they're like, oh, my God, I want that ring. Let me go find it on their website. Instagram is not a platform that makes it easy to click off. As we all know, sometimes it's annoying to, like, try to click through to a product or a website from Instagram. So what ends up happening a lot is that traffic ends up coming in as, like, organic search. Because what are people doing? They're opening a browser and searching, like, Aquama, Aquamarine, statement ring, whatever, Liz's jewelry brand, to try to find it more easily. It's just, like, easier to do that on mobile. So a lot of times things that are actually technically Instagram traffic Don't get attributed properly just because Instagram is so hard to leave as a platform. Right.
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A
And you never know, it's hard, so hard to draw a line.
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And I remember when I, in the.
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Early days of me working in digital marketing, we would use bitly links all the time.
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B
Well, that's an example of a tracking link.
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Yeah, but that's just kind of chaos. You get kind of a sloppy link and sloppy links.
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B
I like that.
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Sloppy links. It doesn't look nice. Okay, so another metric that's important is your top viewed pages. Yes, I, I always know my top view pages is top viewed page. It's probably going to be your homepage. But for me, because a lot of times I link to the Stay Gold Collective page on my website. That's usually my top feed page. But that's something good to know and.
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B
Yeah, understand. And you can find that in your pages and screens report, which actually can be like in a few different places depending on how your dashboard is set up. But generally it's under the engagement heading in Google Analytics. So pages and screens shows you what are your top viewed pages. And like Liz said, yes, homepage will typically be the first one. And understanding what comes after that can help you merchandise can help you make product production decisions, things like that, what to promote, what not to promote. So it's good to pay attention to that. Yeah. If there's like some sort of, some product that is getting a lot of.
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A
Views for whatever reason, maybe you don't know why, maybe you haven't even been talking about it on Instagram, but that could be a good one to move to your homepage or that could be a good one to share on social.
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B
Media or in an email. Yeah. Just to be, just to have curiosity about that, to be aware of what the numbers are telling you, have a curiosity about it and then potentially making decisions based on that.
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A
So other things that are important is conversions, obviously. So that could be email signups or it could be purchases. There are a lot of things that could be considered a conversion and then also time on site and engagement rate. So the reason why bounce rate, which we were talking about earlier is important is I see that oftentimes bounce rates are higher if you are not aligning your content. So if somebody's discovering you on Instagram or at a craft show or in an email or where you're saying one thing and then they get to your website and it's not showing that collection or it's old content or it's not the same products that often Leads to a high bounce rate.
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B
Yes, exactly. Like, for example, I just pulled up a random Google Analytics account up here. Like, if you see, okay, homepage is my top viewed page, but on average, over the past 30 days, people are only spending 20 seconds there. Well, I mean, that can mean a few things. It can mean that your homepage is so well merchandised that people leave it quickly to go into it and check out other products. And then you'd have to kind of look at that in the context of how the other pages are doing. Or it could mean people are just going there and leaving the site. So you also have to kind of take it all in as. As a whole, rather than looking at, like, bits and pieces of it.
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A
I was just looking at.
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Sorry, I got distracted because I was.
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Looking at my engagement rate and.
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Which is 25 seconds on your top page. On your.
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Yeah, it's my. In my engagement overview.
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I see. Oh, in your engagement overview, it could be worth exploring how to get people to stay on there longer.
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A
Right. Okay, I lost my outline.
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Here we go.
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So with this. With these analytics, there are vanity metrics, just like there are for social media. But page views can be misleading.
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B
Wait, let's define vanity metrics, because I don't know if everyone knows what that is.
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A
So they are metrics that make us feel good or not good, but don't actually matter. So followers on Instagram, which I know is a tough one for everyone to swallow because I understand that you want a larger reach, and it seems like more followers means larger reach. That's not necessarily true. Another one would be likes. Likes don't actually matter because you. Once you like something, it just.
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B
Yeah, it disappears.
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Like, saves are more important because somebody can come back to it. Likes just are there. It's a vanity metric. They don't matter.
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B
Definitely. Yeah. Even email subscribers, for, in some cases could be a vanity metric, because if your engagement sucks and you're just focused on building your list. Whoa. Not really helping anything.
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A
Great. So, like, page views, that's another one. It's. It. It can be misleading. Like, it doesn't necessarily say that anybody's doing anything except for maybe they're browsing.
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B
That's so true. When it comes to ad ads as well. This. I mean, I'm saying this because this is a question that comes up a lot. Maybe for brands that are, like, boosting posts or they do have an ad strategy. Like, you will see an increase in traffic. I mean, 100%. But is that traffic qualified? Are they taking action? Are they browsing Your site, are they actually converting? Just getting traffic is not a big accomplishment. Anyone can pay some money to get more traffic. Right.
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A
You need to make sure they're doing the things you want them to do once they get to your site. Okay, so let's talk through making some decisions based on this data. So if you see any drop offs or slowdowns in traffic or conversions, this could mean that you aren't talking about, and I see this a lot with designers. You aren't necessarily like, maybe you're doing the social media posts or you're doing the emails, but you're not necessarily driving people to your site. You're not necessarily saying click here to shop or hey, this is available, you can buy it.
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B
Yes, that's very true. Also like the mobile experience. So, oh, here's something about Google Analytics. In Google Analytics you can see what percentage of users are coming from or visiting your site on like desktop versus mobile. And that is in the tech overview, which is typically like in the very bottom left corner of the menu. And it will tell you, um, what kind of device they're using, what kind of browser they're using, and that way you can test your website on these different devices and browsers and that could be a reason why someone might be leaving. If your site is not rendering like easy to use on whatever device people are using the most.
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A
Yeah, that's a good thing to look at because for the most part people are viewing websites on mobile, whether it be an iPad or tablet or a phone. So that's something really important to think about when you're making tweaks to your website. Making sure that you are also looking at that view on mobile.
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B
Yes, definitely.
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A
So also something important to do is identify your most effective channels. I know that this can feel tricky, but where is most of your traffic coming from? What is your biggest traffic driver? I feel like mine is probably Instagram and but like just knowing what that is because you need to make sure that you're not only putting energy to putting content out there, but also making sure that you are saying that you have a website and your product is available there and give people reasons to click through.
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B
Absolutely. It is important to be aware of that. One thing I do find is like a lot of people don't realize that their top source is organic search, like kind of accidentally. But they haven't done a lot to optimize for search. And, and it gives them a clue and almost a green light to like start paying attention to the content on their site. How can they make it more search friendly. Maybe they want to write some blog posts or like beef up their product description. So lean into those things that are already doing well for you.
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A
And I think people a lot of times don't know where to start with SEO or leaning into search where we have an upcoming episode. So yeah, we'll be talking about that more. But also our episode with Sohail was a good one. And then I think we talked about it a little bit with Cami too.
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B
Yeah.
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A
But anyway, so we have some, some resources you don't necessarily need to hire out. You just, you know, need to know about your keywords and stuff like that. Anyway, if you see something working, keep leaning into that and adjust based on behavior. So if you're seeing like, for example, a high bounce rate, look to see that your content's aligned with what you're putting out on your other channels.
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B
Yes.
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A
All right, so we're going to chat a little bit more with insiders about this and dig deeper. But we encourage all of you to check out your analytics, to log into Google Analytics or set that up if you don't have it already. Or at the very least, just check out the dashboard on your website and start thinking about reporting regularly and look at the data and think about what.
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B
It means if you don't have Google Analytics. By the way, it doesn't track historically. So if this motivates you to set it up asap, it will only track from the day that you set it up moving forward. So every day that you don't have it, you're losing. You're missing the data from the days that you didn't have Google Analytics.
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A
Yeah, our call to action really should be go set up Google Analytics.
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B
Go set it up. If you don't have it, this is okay. One other thing, even if you think you have Google Analytics and you haven't checked it in a while, you should confirm that you actually have Google Analytics because that's a really common error that I see that it actually is not correct. Connected correctly. Go check. Go check.
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A
Let us know.
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B
All right.
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A
Do you look at your analytics? Let us know. Visit successwithjori.com and if you love the podcast, we'd love to hear from you. Send us a message or leave us a our view. Thanks for being a part of our community.