SPEAKER_02
Hi, I'm your host Larissa Worstiek. Through this podcast, I aim to empower and inspire jewelry entrepreneurs and innovators so they can thrive by doing what they love. I'm passionate about digital marketing for jewelry brands and I'm excited to share my passion with you.
This is episode 125 and today I'm going to walk you through some of my favorite metrics in Google Analytics. The ones that I personally review on a regular basis for my clients. If you're only listening to the audio of this episode, I highly recommend you check out my YouTube channel, Joy Joya TV, where I'll be sharing an actual screen share video of me walking through a Google Analytics demo account so you can not only hear me talk about all of these different metrics that I like to look at, but also see me use them in Google Analytics and how to find them all.
My goal with this episode is to show you two things. One, that Google Analytics is extremely important and two, that it actually doesn't really have to be complicated and scary and you don't need a ton of extra training to be able to use it, especially if you kind of just stick with what I show you or explain to you in this episode. I'm also really excited to make an announcement.
So my course, Jewelry Marketing 101, which has been in development now for about a year, is now live and ready for students just like you to enroll. So Jewelry Marketing 101 is a self-paced foundational video course with seven chapters and 50 lessons in total. By taking this course, you'll understand the foundations of jewelry marketing so you can begin implementing sound marketing practices for your jewelry business at a fraction of the cost of working with me one-on-one.
If you like listening to me on this podcast or you follow me on YouTube or you like my content in general, I think that you'll really like this course. Also I try to make it approachable and friendly. I speak to you like you're my friend and I give advice that I would even follow myself.
So for a limited time now through the end of May, May 31st, you can get $50 off the course by entering code podcast at checkout. To sign up, you just need to go to JewelryMarketingSchool.com. I'm so excited to share this course with you and I really think that you'll benefit from it greatly. But before we get to today's episode, I want to share some marketing related news and insights from the past week that caught my attention.
So a new article from JCK said that Christie's Jewels partnered with the bridal jewelry designer at Layla Rose, I'm sorry, the bridal designer Layla Rose for a promotional video to show how the jewelry pieces from Christie's might be styled in a bridal context. So the videos were really amazing. The jewels complemented the bridal wear and really elevated the style and it shows that jewelry pieces can be worn even after a wedding in various ways.
So that jewelry does not have to be limited to that special day. I love how this partnership or collab really takes advantage of reaching new customers. They're not being afraid to venture out into new territories and test new audiences.
So I'm a huge proponent of collaborations and cross promotion and I think this is a great example of that. Another article that I saw in Jing Daily was all about the future of luxury marketing, especially digital marketing for luxury brands. They say that social media may not be as foolproof as it once seemed and luxury brands today are struggling to find the correct balance in their marketing to attract both traditional customers and new ones.
And to be successful, they really need to look to diversifying the marketing mix. And this is a much must if they want to reach new younger customers. Consumers today, luxury consumers today want to see more creative approaches rather than seeing things like celebrities and influencers post in new collections and in extravagant settings.
And really great quote from the article, the future of luxury marketing is in a wide range of special projects that can generate long tail online discussion and multiple revenue streams and quote. Finally an article from ad week was all about the email marketing trends to watch for in 2021. So more than 4.
4 billion people worldwide are expected to be using email by 2024. I'm like, okay, isn't everyone on email, but I guess not. I think it is growing and expanding.
Your email marketing strategy must keep up with evolving times. So what are some of the trends to look out for video email marketing is super popular. It's great for explaining text heavy information.
Of course, long paragraphs can overwhelm customers and they're harder to read. Another trend. Well, I don't even consider this a trend.
I consider this a must have is responsive design. So that means an email design that's just as effective and impactful on a desktop browser as it is on a mobile phone. And not only that, but taking into consideration all the different email clients that people use, whether they're web based or software or something else, 46% of all email opens all email opens come from mobile devices.
So email has to be basically designed with mobile in mind. And another trend, but I consider it a must have is add an unsubscribe button that's easily visible. So if customers don't, so that your customers don't report spam if they keep seeing your emails, it's, you know, you think you may be sneaky by like hiding that unsubscribe button, but actually that's going to bite you in the butt.
If someone can't easily unsubscribe and why do you want that person on your list anyway, they don't want to be receiving your emails. Good riddance. If you want to get the links to the articles I share in this segment of the podcast, you can sign up for my email newsletter by visiting joy joya.
com slash sign up and you'll get a digest with the links whenever a new episode drops. So I really want to show you guys some of my favorite metrics to track in Google Analytics. I find that a lot of my clients are afraid of Google Analytics and hey, I get it.
I've been using Google Analytics for more than a decade and I feel like I have not even scratched the surface of what's possible with it. It is a super powerful tool and it's amazing to me that it's free because it really serves as one of the most powerful tools in any marketing strategy that I'm working on with the jewelry brand. There's so much information here.
If you don't already have Google Analytics connected to your website, then you are missing out on just a goldmine of data. So before you listen any further, go make sure Google Analytics is connected. Once it's connected, come listen to this episode.
So what I have here on my screen, if you're watching the video of this, if you're listening to the audio, I'm going to do my best to just explain everything. So Google actually has a demo store that if you want to kind of play around an experiment, you can look at the Google merchandise store and check it out so that you can see all the different tools in there. The first thing I usually like to do when I'm in Google Analytics, it's it when you're logged in in the top right hand corner of your dashboard, there's a way to adjust the date.
So depending on the type of data I'm trying to get, whether it's more a long term view or a short term view, I always make sure that it is adjusted to show me what I'm looking at. If I'm kind of diving into a jewelry brand's data for the first time, then I usually want to look at maybe a year's worth of data. So I'm just going to adjust that here for the sake of this example, we're going to look at data back from April 2020 to April 2021.
And that really kind of gives you a long overview of what's been happening with your website or e-commerce store so that you can really get a sense. You can also compare data. One thing I sometimes like to do if I want to show growth or percentage change, I will choose a date range and then click you have the option to compare it to a previous period.
So if I want to, for example, see how the past year compared to the year before it, I can do that. And it will show me, at least in the example here, that there was a little bit of growth. Hopefully for your jewelry brand, there was a lot of growth, but that's something that you can within seconds see on Google Analytics rather than guessing about whether or not your jewelry brand is growing, at least in terms of your web presence, digital presence, you can very easily see that in Google Analytics.
So when you are on the master dashboard of your Google Analytics, the first thing that will pop up is audience overview. If you're not watching this video, it's on the left hand side, there's a menu, you expand the audience section, and then you can get an overview, which again, depending on the date range that you chose, it'll show any number of months on the main screen. So the top kind of shows you fluctuation.
I guess this is a line graph. I don't remember from statistics, my graph names, I know what a pie chart is, what a bar graph is, I guess this is a line chart shows how ignorant I am about statistics. But I do know what I'm talking about in Google Analytics.
You can see things like total number of users, new users, sessions, number of sessions per user, per user page view, pages per session, average session duration and bounce rate. I'm going to quickly explain what all of those things mean because they are all really important, especially when you're trying to get an overview of your website traffic. So users is kind of self-explanatory, that refers to the number of people, I'm assuming it's people, it might be dogs or cats if they can use a computer, but people who visited your website over whatever given period you're looking at, whether that's a week, a month, a year or more.
New users is simply how many of those people who visited your website are coming for the first time. That's a really important metric to look at if you're interested in customer acquisition, if you want to make sure that your brand is getting in front of new customers rather than people who already know you. So that's something that you would pay attention to if that's a concern of yours.
Sessions does not refer to unique people, but rather how many times in total was your site visited, so that could be by the same person multiple times than it usually is. And that's why the sessions number is typically much higher than the users number. Number of sessions per user means how many times on average did each person come to your site.
If you're really interested in, you know, having people be return visitors to your website, making sure that your website and your brand is interesting enough for people to come back, then that's a metric that you'll definitely want to track. Page views means in total, how many pages are people looking at when they come to your site. Google Analytics here is saying that repeated views of a single page are also counted.
And then pages per session is an important number if you want to make sure that your website, that your products are engaging. So the obviously the more pages someone is visiting when they come to your website, the more interested they are in exploring other things. If this is a really low number, it probably means that they're just coming and going without really exploring or spending time on the site.
And average session duration kind of works together with that to give you an idea of how engaging your website and your products are the higher the time that someone's spending on your site, the more that that's a sign that you have something to offer, at least to the people who are ending up on your website. So getting that number higher is always good. Bounce rate is something that really confuses people that I work with.
So Google defines bounce rate as a percentage of single page sessions in which there was no interaction with the page. So basically someone goes to your website, they're on a page for less than a second. They don't click anywhere.
They don't interact with the page. They kind of immediately leave or bounce as they say, get ready to bounce. So the higher that number is, the worse off you're going to be.
You'll typically see if you're advertising on Facebook, Instagram, Google ads, that at least for the traffic that's coming from ads, that bounce rate is going to be higher, probably in the 70% or above, because it's hard to even with the best targeting really qualify that traffic. People coming from ads, it's a little bit of a gamble. You don't know if they're qualified traffic.
Some of it will be, some of it won't be bounce rate. Apart from ads, typically what I see is around 30 to 50%. I would say that's pretty normal.
And then again, with the ads, it can get up to 70 or even 80%. It's just a normal thing. It's something I see all the time.
So just to give you some benchmarks to look at. So this audience overview is typically the first thing I use just to get a feel for what's going on, a feel for the traffic. Another thing that I like to look at under that same audience menu item on the left hand side is demographics.
Now this is something that you actually have to enable when you implement Google Analytics and one really common mistake that I see is a jewelry brand will have Google Analytics for years, but they never went and enabled the demographics report. And the reason it needs to be enabled is I think for data privacy concerns, so you have to take that extra step to just agree to how that data is being used. But once you unlock that report, and I suggest if you are not sure if you've done this to go check right now, because it won't show you historic data.
So if you enable this today, for example, it's not going to show you the demographic information from like a year ago. So the sooner that you get this going, the sooner you can benefit from this data. Demographics overview shows you general age ranges of the people visiting your site, which is going to be super helpful in developing customer personas, for example.
So in this example store, the bar chart says that the biggest segment of customers are between the ages of 25 and 34. And then it will also show you in a pie chart the breakdown between male and female visitors. And you can also look at things like where the where the visitors are located in the world.
So even if they're in the US, you can narrow it down to see what state these people are in, what city or metro area they're in. All this information is super helpful in understanding who your customers are, or at the very least who are the people visiting your website, and are they matching who you think your customers are or who your customers should be. After that, I really like to go in the left hand menu to a menu item called acquisition.
And acquisition to the overview acquisition just refers to how are you acquiring the traffic. So what method are people using to get to your site? The options are direct, which means someone is typing your URL into their browser and going directly to the site. Why is that important? Because it shows that those people already know you, so they're likely return users, or maybe they met you in person or somewhere else and now they're going to your website.
Organic search means that they got to your site through a search engine like Google. Referral means that somebody got to your site by clicking from another website. So for example, if you had pressed somewhere and there was a link to your site, if they clicked to your site, that's a referral.
Display and paid search refer to any sort of advertising that you're doing, people coming to your site through ads. And then social is very, very common with jewelry brands. So what I like to do, especially because social is such a big form of customer acquisition for jewelry brands, when I'm on this page, I actually like to click on social.
And then it will show you a breakdown of all the different social platforms and which ones are the most popular. This is a view in Google Analytics or a metric that I noticed almost all my clients never kind of break down. Like maybe they see the overview of acquisition, but then they don't look to see which are the social media platforms that are actually making up that overview.
In the case of this example store or Google Analytics account, YouTube is the top refer Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, whatever, whatever. Instagram is not even on here. The typical breakdown that I see with jewelry brands is Facebook, Instagram, Instagram stories and Pinterest are typically in those top four.
And then depending if it's a brick and mortar or e-commerce, sometimes I'll see Yelp on there, sometimes I'll see YouTube on there. It really depends on the, on the brand itself. But this can help you really understand where the traffic is coming from in terms of social, where you need to kind of be investing more time and effort and where maybe you can pull back a little bit.
Like if a social media platform really isn't working for you, you're not seeing any success or growth from it. Maybe it's time to kind of like step back from it. So not only do I want to see where users are coming from, but I also want to look at the bounce rate and the pages per session and the e-commerce conversion rate for all of those social media platforms.
Because yeah, let's say Facebook is driving the most traffic from you, but if it has a super high bounce rate, which means the people coming from Facebook are all like leaving immediately, that's kind of adding another dimension to the picture. So you could be like, wow, Facebook is really working for me. But at the same time, it's not working for you because everyone coming from Facebook is bouncing, they're leaving right away.
So it's important to kind of look beyond just the users and also kind of see these different facets of the data. Are people going to your site from Instagram and visiting multiple pages? Are they spending a lot of time on the site? Are they making purchases? What's the e-commerce conversion rate like from any given social media platform? So you really have to take in this data holistically instead of just focusing on like one part of it or one specific number. Another thing I like to look at in Google Analytics, in the left hand menu, there's something called behavior.
And that refers to the actions or the paths that users take when they're on your site. So in the behavior overview, you'll see a list of pages and those show you the top pages, page views. So which pages are viewed the most often on your site? That's what you'll get in the overview.
99% of the time, that top page is going to be your home page. That's typically going to be the one that people view the most. If you go to behavior and then click site content and then click landing pages, that's another metric I really like to look at.
Landing page refers to the page that people find themselves on when they enter your site. So you may be wondering, why would it be different from my home page? Well if someone finds you through Google search, a different page on your website like maybe a product page or a blog post maybe ranking, so they enter your site through there. And this is a good way to also see what is working for you in Google search.
If you have a blog post that's ranking really high as a landing page, that means you should probably write more blog posts like that because it's helping you get ranked in Google search results and it's really bringing a lot of people to your site probably for the first time. So it's good to see the landing page for SEO purposes and just for your own knowledge so you know what content to create in the future and what to optimize. And then finally, I like to look at the conversions section of the menu.
This requires a little bit of extra setting up for Shopify for example where you have to just make sure that I believe it's called enhanced e-commerce tracking is enabled. But once you set it up and you can do a Google search for the instructions to do that, it allows you to see in e-commerce overview your customers path to purchase. So you can see their shopping behavior, their checkout behavior.
These are all so important to optimizing your e-commerce site. So it'll kind of break it down for you. How many total sessions do you have? Then how many sessions are people looking at products from there? How many people are adding products to cart from there? How many people are actually checking out and finishing the transaction? So where are people falling off in the process? Are they abandoning carts? How many people are new customers versus returning customers? These are all such valuable insights that you can gain from Google analytics.
So that's really all I have to share with you. As you can see, I didn't spend hours on this. These are the touch points that I typically show my clients and that I am looking at to get a broad overview, maybe once a month checking in to seeing how things are changing.
But again, what you look at really depends on your goals and what you want to try to understand about your website. So it'll be slightly different based on that. But if you want a starting point, this is it.
So what did you think? You can always email me, Larissa, that's L-A-R-Y-S-S-A at JoyJoya.com. As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, you can get $50 off my course jewelry marketing 101 for a very limited time until May 31, 2020. And you can take advantage of that by visiting jewelrymarketingschool.
com and entering promo code podcast when you check out for the course. As a reminder, my book Jewelry Marketing Joy is also available and you can learn about that by visiting joyjoya.com slash book.