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The Amazing Authorities Podcast
Unlocking Hidden Revenue — Philippa Gamse on Turning Website Data Into Profit, Strategy, and Growth
00:28:07
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- [00:02]
A
Welcome to the Amazing Authorities podcast, where game changers, visionaries, and category leaders share how they built their brands, platforms, and global influence. Your host is Mitch Carson, international speaker, media strategist, and creator of the Instant Authority system. If you're ready to learn from those who've done it and want to become the go to expert in your space, you're in the right place.
- [00:31]
B
Philippa Games is in the house. She's an amazing authority, and before we started this interview today, we had to do a little bit of memory lane together, where I saw her speak. She captivated and intrigued the audience. I didn't even get to share this with her because I remember her so well. She was on point, and this was in Los Angeles probably 24 years ago is what I'm doing.
- [00:59]
C
You're dating me. That's. That's.
- [01:01]
B
Oh, sorry, sorry. Let's just say a little while back. A little while back. And Philippa, welcome to the show.
- [01:10]
C
Thank you. Thank you, Mitch. It's great to be here. Yes.
- [01:13]
B
And you're in the US and you've.
- [01:16]
C
Where.
- [01:16]
B
Where are you based?
- [01:18]
C
Santa Cruz, California.
- [01:19]
B
All right, so you're in California. Oh, beautiful. It's probably got the most gorgeous university. UC Santa Cruz. I've seen redwoods on the ocean. Oh, my. What a terrible place to study.
- [01:31]
C
Yeah, right.
- [01:32]
B
And known for that. So you are known as the metrics master. I'm going to give you a newly anointed title because you are known. You've written so much that you're the expert, you've written the book on it. So would you mind showing us your book?
- [01:55]
C
So hopefully we can. We can see this.
- [01:57]
B
Yeah. So it's website wealth.
- [01:59]
C
All right.
- [02:00]
B
And the subtitle, yeah, it's a little bit blurry, but it's Philippa Games at the bottom. And then there's the subtitle, and I'll let you read that to the group.
- [02:07]
C
So the subtitle is a business leader's guide to driving real value from your analytics. All right, so can I just tell you a little bit? So this book, shall I put it down now or shall I keep you.
- [02:19]
B
Put it down now.
- [02:20]
C
That's fine. All right, so, you know, honestly, thank you for remembering my talk about analytics, but the truth is that for many people, when you say analytics, to them, they just go, oh, no. And glaze over immediately because it's overwhelming, it's confusing. It's. It's not sexy. Right. For many, many people. And yet in my book, if you have a website that plays any kind of a role in your business. And you're not looking at your analytics. You have no idea what's going on. You're flying completely blind with all of the investment of time and money that you're putting into it. Just looking at your website doesn't tell you anything. And you can say, yes, but I get plenty of business, I get sales. But you really don't know what else you're missing out on. And so what I try to do in writing this book, it's all in English, lots of stories. There is not one chart in the entire book. No, no graphs, nothing. Right. Because it's designed for business owners who, who are going to glaze over. And I understand that. But to try and tell you in English and in business oriented terms, why you, why analytics are really worth important to have what you can know, what you should know, how to think about it, how to talk to somebody like me.
- [03:36]
B
I remember your workshop at NSA some years ago. As we mentioned, you made a dry topic interesting. You pulled us in because of your British accent. That certainly helps. Oh, it's a great allure. Americans are attracted to it. You know, we think Mary Poppins and, or James Bond based on the gender. But you had a clever way of intriguing people without all the graphs and charts and, and you gave stories which made us relate exactly to ourselves because the first person we tune in is always to ourselves. How does this apply to me? And you gave those examples through stories of clients that you had helped. And I would imagine you've got something a little more current than what you told me some years ago.
- [04:26]
C
20 years ago. Yeah. Although I have to say what's interesting is that some things, okay, how we do it technologically might change, but the concepts don't change. I mean, we're still trying to have human relationships. We're still trying to have great customer service. We're still trying to convince people that our products are great and that they should trust us and all of that. It's just how do we do it kind of changes a bit.
- [04:50]
B
And I'm going to ask a dirty question. How about AI? Can AI do what Philippa does?
- [05:00]
C
So there is a piece in AI about, about AI in the book. I, you know, the answer is I hope not. No AI actually now if you, if you open up Google Analytics or something like that, you'll see AI stuff because it will say, oh look, you had a peak of traffic on such and such a day. If I say to AI, please make me a lovely pie chart of this data, it will. And I don't have to mess with designing it. That's great. So it's really good at the low level. You know, the stuff that I could get the intern to do. Right. What I don't think it can do, and hopefully I'm right because otherwise I would be out of a job, is the so what? Because the so what differs based on your specific business, your specific market circumstances, etc. Right? So you know, oh, look, our traffic's gone down or our sales have gone down. But then the question is why? Actually the question is, do we care? Because it was unqualified traffic. You don't care anyway. And B, if we do care, what are we going to do about it? And that question is going to depend on a whole load of factors. Right? I mean, maybe your sales literally went down because you sell a seasonal product and you're out of season now. You know, AI may not or may or may not be able to just come up with that. Right. You have a new competitor in the market. I mean, there's all sorts of reasons about what's going on. And you know, how are we going to redesign things if it's a question of design so that things perform better. But that's where I think AI is. You know, a human person is still hopefully needed is the higher level. Okay, so what's the strategy that's going to come out of the data?
- [06:43]
B
Well, I would say this about AI and I get this question. I help people write their books is one of my areas because I was trained as a journalist and writing is pretty easy for me. And writing copy is something I learned, which is a different skill set. And I learned that from, from various copywriters. AI has been a fear component for a lot of poverty stricken copywriters because they think, oh, it's going to replace me. No, it's not. It is a tool and you still need the human element to go in and look at the data, analyze it from a human perspective. And that's where you come in with value that overlays what a robot can come up with.
- [07:24]
C
Right. Although, you know, I mean, I have heard that people like Paul McCartney and Elton John are upset because I can write songs as if by Elton John. I don't know how good they are. Wow. You know, yeah. So I don't know where we're going, but for now. Yeah.
- [07:41]
B
Well, give me an example. What's one of the most outstanding clients you worked with? Where you came in, they were getting X clients and dollars and then after using your services, they had Y output.
- [07:56]
C
Well, one of my favorite things about talking about analytics in terms of you're going to get insights that you couldn't see or ideas that you couldn't have otherwise, right. So I worked with an industrial wax manufacturer up in Wisconsin and they sold industrial level wax, right. In big quantities. And their website was lots of pictures of how clean their factory is and stuff like that. But they had done, they were doing really, really well in search. I mean they were well known. And it became very obvious from looking at the analytics that, and also obviously from the inquiries that they were getting that consumers, a lot of consumers were coming to the site because they wanted to buy beeswax or duck wax or something to make candles, but obviously in very small quantities because they were just consumers and my client didn't do business with consumers. So they were turning all these people away and it was taking, if they got inquiries and so on, you know, it was taking a level of salesperson time. And but what we did, you know, I said let's look at, let's try and look at the numbers, potential numbers of these people. And they really were quite a lot of them. So they decided to take a risk and it was great. They created a little side business. So they created a whole different website that sold small quantities of beeswax or duck wax or whatever. And so as soon as you got to the site it said if you're a consumer or you know, you just want a little bit, click here.
- [09:25]
B
Split, huh?
- [09:25]
C
Split. Yeah. Leave the main industrial site, come here, buy a bits and pieces. They allocated maybe one or two star people. I mean it really didn't take a lot of fulfillment. It was, and, but they, but all of that traffic, that original, that before they had just been turning away, now they were able to say, great, we've got something for you. They could make, you know, a few thousand dollars every month extra on the side without a huge amount of effort. And it was just a really nice use of. Because every website has visitors that aren't immediately qualified for that business. I mean I just see it again and again, right. But sometimes you can say, well maybe I do have something that I can offer them and turn them into qualified visitors. Not always, but sometimes.
- [10:13]
B
And so that came so above and beyond. They didn't change their SEO, no paid advertising, it was just traffic that was existing, diverted into a retail operation versus wholesale and retail. They were able to make with very little resources, a few thousand dollars extra a month or something to those. Okay, well that's a no brainer. I'm sure. That was above and beyond the cost of the allocated employer employees.
- [10:43]
C
Oh, sure. No, obviously. Otherwise they wouldn't have done it. Yeah, yeah.
- [10:46]
B
Well, that's great. And that's an industrial. How about for authors? How so? You're an author. So this is close to most authors, because I work with a lot of authors, fail to monetize their sites, their book sites and. Or their books. I mean, that could be a whole topic that we could talk about specifically, you know, Amazon and their own book website.
- [11:14]
C
Right.
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B
What can they do? Have you had any examples in that arena?
- [11:18]
C
Absolutely. So, you know, let's go back in the old NSA years. I actually was. I had a very good friend out here and who was also a member of NSA and had a book, and she was an employment lawyer.
- [11:32]
B
Okay.
- [11:33]
C
And. But she didn't do litigation, so she lived here in Santa Cruz. And what she did was training programs for the big Silicon Valley companies to help them stay out of court by avoiding employee lawsuits. Right. Over stuff like sexual harassment and stuff like that.
- [11:53]
B
Insurance, essentially.
- [11:54]
C
Yeah. And so she had a website, and this was back in the early days, like you were talking, you know, but it still is such a great story because it could still be today, it could still work. She had a website, and in order to establish her credibility, she had a huge amount of information and content on the site about employment law, the latest news, how it's applied, etc. And again, using the analytics and looking at what people were searching for. So what people search for in your site when you have a ton of content is an absolute goldmine of market research, because it tells you what people expect from you. It also tells you how they describe what you're offering, which. And if those words are different from the words that you're using, that's important to think about. Right. But we realized again that we had tons of people who were coming in who were employees. So again, they're not the people who are going to hire her to run a corporate workshop. Ah. And they're all over the country, but they're coming in and they're saying, here's what's going on. I think I'm being sexually harassed, or I think I'm. Or I'm being accused of harassment or whatever it is, or I've been fired. And I'm wondering if that, if it was legal, I. I think I should be getting overtime. And I'm not. All of these kinds of questions that she was dealing with from the employer side, but now she's getting from the employee side and what we did was we created a series of ebooks. And an ebook is basically a PDF, right? You put it behind a payment thing.
- [13:20]
B
Paywall.
- [13:21]
C
Yeah, yeah. And boom. And you don't even have to have anybody allocated because the whole thing becomes automatic. And of course, it was covered in legal disclaimers, you know, that, you know, you need.
- [13:32]
B
Because it varies state by state in some cases.
- [13:34]
C
Right, but, but there's, you know, there's, there's overall general information that you can give. And the selling point of it was, look, it can cost you hundreds of dollars to consult a lawyer before you do that. A lot of what people think of as sexual harassment, for example, isn't so illegally. Right? So read this checklist, see where you are, and get an idea of whether it's worth going to a lawyer. And then we expanded it into manuals for employers because again, she had a local market. But, you know, so you know how to avoid or you know, the proper way to terminate somebody or overtime, whatever. Right, Same thing. These things just sold themselves because again, we had all the traffic coming to the site because it was doing great in search. They were the ebooks, so they're self fulfillment. You don't need anybody at the other end. And I remember going to NSA at some point and somebody said to me, I hear you're, you're making Rita money while she sleeps. Can you do that for me?
- [14:35]
B
Bravo. Bravo. Isn't that wonderful?
- [14:40]
C
Anybody who is basically selling expertise, you know, can, can do that kind of thing. And if you want content ideas, that internal search engine is, if you've got that is such a great source of ideas.
- [14:55]
B
So with website traffic, you can determine who's coming and do a demographic display of them. Is that, is that what you're suggesting or. There are other ways.
- [15:08]
C
What I'm talking about is in the search or, you know, we, we figured all this stuff out by the things that were put into search.
- [15:14]
B
Okay.
- [15:15]
C
Because obviously, what questions are people asking? Obviously also by, you know, which pages, which content gets the most engagement, that kind of stuff. I mean, to answer your question, for example, Google Analytics will offer demographic information. I mean, I wouldn't rely on it as scientific truth. It's, you know, it's an indication. Right. It. But it. Because you can't, it's illegal according to terms of service and because of privacy. Right. You can't, you can't literally say, oh, Mitch came to my site today at 4:06pm because I can't identify you. Right. So, so everything is kind of an estimate in terms of the demographics.
- [15:59]
B
I love the idea of turning on trackable traffic into trackable and then turn it into cash. And you came up with a very. A basic monetization model of a PDF. You can follow up with a whole host of information from employees who typically aren't the market for the lawyer. She's more employer side versus employee side. Because in order to be a lawyer representing. Well, I know this because I was married to a litigator in my past life. You're licensed by a state in the usa. Very few states offer reciprocity. Even though she's in California, you can't take on a client in New York. You'd have to substitute in. So she can't represent either an employee or an employer in New York because it doesn't apply. So she took national traffic because the laws are specific here, and turned it into cash via information.
- [17:06]
C
Right.
- [17:07]
B
Can you disclose what kind of money that was or is it. Is that confidential time ago?
- [17:13]
C
I honestly don't remember. What I do remember is people said, I just think this is another interesting point. People said. So you know, when we sold it, you just got the PDF and I remember somebody said to her, aren't you worried that somebody will get hold of the PDF and just share it with all their friends? And she said, that's what I call marketing. I thought that was a great reply.
- [17:34]
B
Wonderful. Because sometimes those employees will become employers and they'll know who gave that information. And if they happen to fall in the state of California, I mean, the, the opportunity is great. She is licensed in California with 42 million people. So that. Okay, so that was a book that she then was able to. And that was her just. Or her credibility standard because she had written a book on this, but it was geared more for the employer than the employee.
- [18:03]
C
Wait, which her book? Her book? Oh, absolutely, yes, the book. The book was for. For her target market, which was employers.
- [18:10]
B
Yes. And then she found the cash with the employees.
- [18:13]
C
Well, hopefully she, she still did training, bro. I mean, she's moved to Hawaii now, so it's not, it's not still a current business.
- [18:20]
B
But yeah, I'm just saying that was the, the, the benefit that you uncovered for her do.
- [18:25]
C
Right.
- [18:25]
B
Your.
- [18:25]
C
Exactly.
- [18:26]
B
Your analytical expertise.
- [18:29]
C
It's. It's an untapped market that we could tap.
- [18:32]
B
Oh, that's great. That's great. And you tell us more about your book. Have you got other case studies that are worth teasing us with? Because I'm gonna buy it. For sure. I'm gonna buy it and I'm Gonna write a review, Philippe, because you got my attention now.
- [18:45]
C
Thank you very much. Well, you know, and so there are two things going on and really, what about analytics? One is these. These opportunities that if you spot them and you get creative, you can capitalize on. But the other thing is to figure out what's going wrong. I mean, the book is full of the book. The entire book is stories and examples, which is great because it means, you know, AI didn't write it, I wrote him. Because AI can't get yet and get inside my brain and my, my experience. But, you know, there's also the. Where is it going wrong? So again, for example, one of my clients was a parts manufacturer, and they sold. I was manufacturing or electronics or something, loads and loads of parts, right? And their sales were declining and they didn't online and they didn't know why. And we looked at their search engine, where people can look up the part that they want, right? And we realized that over time, you know, these parts, they get redesigned, and as they get redesigned, they get renamed. And they hadn't thought about the fact that a lot of people still know the old part name or number, and now it's been replaced. So they were putting in the old part number. And once we looked at the searches, we could see the number of searches for an obsolete part. And of course, the search engine is coming back and saying, sorry, we haven't got this anymore. But it didn't do anything else. It just said, go away. Basically, right, sorry, we haven't got it. And of course, once you can see that, then the answer is obvious, which is great, let's map the old part name or number onto the new one, and boom, your sales come back up. But until we looked at that sales, the search data again to show that people were looking for the old part numbers again, we didn't know what the problem was and why their sales are going down.
- [20:32]
B
Well, well, until you do this. So how do people work with you when you, when someone says, okay, my analytics, I haven't paid attention to it. I'm so focused on marketing and I've got all this traffic. At least I know that much. What can you do for somebody like that? How does it, how does it play out to work with, with you and your expertise?
- [20:53]
C
Well, I mean, the first question is, great, lovely to hear. You've got traffic. Is it the right traffic? Right. As we've been talking about? I mean, traffic is great, but then what are those people? You know what, Where I start with a business is okay, but what are you trying to do with the site? You know, before I even look at the numbers, what are we doing here? What's the goal? What are the. What are the strategies? Who's the markets? What are you trying to achieve? Where are the important points of call to action and so on? Right, let's map it out and then we can start saying, okay, is what we want to happen happening? So we start there, right? Is what we want to happen happening? And if not, what's going wrong? Obviously, not to get nerdy on you, because I've been trying to keep the technology out of this, but one of the things I would do is audit the implementation of the analytics tool to make sure that you're getting good data. Because obviously garbage in, garbage out, right?
- [21:48]
B
Sure, sure.
- [21:49]
C
So there is that. But then, you know, okay, so what's going on? Is the traffic that we're getting actually doing the things we want them to do? And if not, why not? And how do we fix that? And then we can get into the. And what more can we do? So, you know, again, going, are there in fact missed opportunities that we're losing out on for new products, services, markets, et cetera? So there's a kind of progression from, okay, let's start at the beginning, let's figure out what, make sure we know what we're trying to do. And actually, I mean, honestly, that sounds simple, but it's amazing how many business owners actually can't answer that question initially.
- [22:26]
B
Oh, I'm not shocked. I'm not shocked. I can just speak for myself with my own site. I haven't looked at it in years, and my web designer left in January and I got to go and look at it and go through it, and I have this hesitation. It's like, oh, gosh, I'm so much more focused on marketing and doing things. I have to go and look at this myself and think, geez, I, I haven't done this and I'm not unusual. Hence, people like you are in existence. That's why you earn what you earn, because you help people. And I'm. I would be, I would hazard the guess that the investment is you in you has an roi.
- [23:09]
C
I would hope so. Now, of course, you know, it's a bit like a doctor, Right. Until I see what you've got going on, I can't promise you anything. I mean, I have no idea what you've got going on. Right. Of course. No idea what the numbers look like. So, you know, I never sort of make promises like, you know, you're Going to, your ROI is going to go up three times or even more or whatever because you just don't know.
- [23:30]
B
Yeah. Now do you work, do you also consult on pay per click after you fix, let's say you fix the engine, do you add a different fuel to make sure that engine runs more smoothly and that.
- [23:44]
C
Yeah. So you know, I'm a marketing strategist. What I like is the, is the holistic strategy. So you know, looking at all the channels, marketing channels that would make sense like SEO, pay per click, social media, email, whatever. What I don't do anymore, I mean I used to, but I really don't do it anymore, is the actual implementation of any of that. So like, you know, if you, if you really want to improve your SEO, I'm not the SEO, I can tell you that you need to improve it, but I'm not the one that's actually going to do that.
- [24:14]
B
Got it.
- [24:15]
C
What I'm looking for is how effective is it? I mean for example, social media advertising is the one that always gets me. So many people think that they need to do social media advertising because they've heard how A, it's a lot cheaper than Google Ads. Right. And B, it's, they think it's effective. But again, if you actually look at the, and what you'll get from the social media end of things is oh, look at all this traffic we're driving you. Therefore your spend on our site, on our platform is really great. But when you look at the analytics, you can segment out, you can separate out the people that come in from each social media platform and very frequently you can see that they spend next to no time on your site and they're gone. So the platform's telling you that they're sending you lots of people, but when you can actually get to the site, you see that they weren't worth it. Yeah.
- [25:07]
B
Maybe they expected somebody dancing, you know, like a tick tock. Yeah.
- [25:11]
C
You know, the thing is a lot of the time social media advertising, when people are on social media, I mean I'm not outside of LinkedIn, which is obviously a much more professional. But you know, if you're on Instagram, you're, or Facebook, I mean you're probably, you know, looking to be entertained, you're looking to mix mess with your friend, you're looking at cat videos. Right. You're not necessarily looking to solve your problems. You'd be in a search problem, a search engine.
- [25:35]
B
I would. If I am looking for a solution to a problem, I go to YouTube.
- [25:40]
C
Right.
- [25:40]
B
I don't go to Facebook, I go to YouTube.
- [25:43]
C
Right. And. And you know YouTube is Google. Right.
- [25:46]
B
So essentially.
- [25:49]
C
So. So, you know, I think that's a really important point because people spend tons of money on social media ads and a lot of the time they're not worth the spend. And again, you can't see that unless you look at the web analytics because the social media site is going to tell you your ads were very successful because they drove traffic.
- [26:08]
B
Yeah, but not conversions. Which is all important number, isn't it?
- [26:12]
C
Right. It's so there's always. The point is there's always a so what. Yeah, and most people don't get to the point where they're asking the so what.
- [26:20]
B
Well, that's, that's great. So where can people find you, Philippa?
- [26:24]
C
I hang out on LinkedIn a lot.
- [26:26]
B
So do I.
- [26:27]
C
Actually, probably the best way to find me. My website is actually called Websites that.
- [26:32]
B
Win Websites with an S. Yeah, it's.
- [26:36]
C
Actually, I mean, there is a site there. I'm having it redesigned as we speak. So if you think it looks old, you're absolutely right.
- [26:43]
B
I, I hear you. I haven't worked on my website in seven years, so. Yeah, it, it's just one of those things. But you've been a great guest. It's so great to connect with you. I was a student listening to you in. In awe of. Wow, she made sense. And this is not boring. The topic. You made it fun and interesting. And this was over two decades ago. I don't mean to age us because I aged as well. Happens to the best of us. But you were great then and you're even greater now. And you've got the book to prove it. And I'm going to buy it, devour it, and probably end up hiring you to help me later. And if people are smart, they'll use you. Yeah, they'll use you as well to do that. And you've been a great guest. Philippa. Thank you for your time and the accent is always appreciated.
- [27:32]
C
Thank you. I'm honored.
- [27:34]
B
Okay, we'll see you again very soon. Thank you.
- [27:38]
A
Thanks for tuning in to the amazing Authorities podcast. If today's episode inspired you, take a moment to subscribe rate and leave a review. It helps more experts like you rise to the top for behind the scenes access and free resources to boost, boost your authority. Head to MitchCarson.com until next time, stay amazing.