John Jantsch (00:00): Today's episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by blissful prospecting, hosted by Jason bay and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network host Jason bay dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. Recently, they did a show on the four day work week. I'm a huge fan. I think everybody should be looking towards trying to create that, Hey, we get most of our work done in like two hours every day. Anyway, so let's try out the four day work week. All right, listen to blissful, prospecting, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello, welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and I'm gonna do another solo show today. I'm gonna talk about the terribly sexy topic of analytics tracking results, either for your own business or for clients that you may work with. And I know that that's not everybody's favorite topic, but I wanted to give you my point of view on it at least. And who knows, maybe this will be a shorter show today because for me tracking and analytics in some ways less is more, I mean, figuring out the right things to track is far more important than say just tracking everything that you can or worse yet, building a dashboard that just brings you a bunch of irrelevant information or information. That's not organized in a way that's gonna allow you to take action on it. That's really the point of tracking anything is to know what's working.

What's not working, what you could do better at where you should invest your time and energy. So the dashboards that we build for clients, instead of just tracking everything and just throwing it at them, we like to build it in some ways, in an order of relevance, I do think tracking and using dashboards, we use a tool called agency analytics for what it's worth. There are many tools out there now that allow you to bring in and integrate a lot of the things that are worth tracking, various ads, your social media, your email response reviews, things like that. But the way we like to organize it is traditionally people today are talking about marketing in terms of funnel still again, you know, I talk about it in a lot different way, the hourglass, but it is helpful from a marketing to the point of conversion.

There's certainly lots of reasons to then also be tracking things like your repeat sales or your average customer, your customer, lifetime value, amount of referrals. You know, things that happen after somebody becomes a customer. But when thinking about customers per se, or creating customers, per se, we like to break the funnel into three parts as not rocket science. People are doing this now, you know, talking about top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel, just with the idea that P as people move along, different metrics matter. I mean, there is some value in tracking, like where are we getting our traffic from our website? But ultimately the reason for tracking that is to then say, okay, of the channels, for example, of our traffic, what of that traffic is ultimately converting to a customer. So there is a, there is kind of a linear order to this.

So in top of the funnel, we like to tra my, one of my favorites really is to track in analytics. Our are trafficked by channel. I wanna know how much traffic's coming from organic search from just direct that we're sending people there paid search. Obviously that's a big component if you're running paid, and then social to a degree is a component as well. So top of the funnel, we just want to, we wanna measure, you know, are we growing? There is our organic search becoming a bigger percentage, say of our overall bucket, things like that. That's the reason for tracking the metrics a again, yay. We got 2,330 sessions from organic traffic. Doesn't really matter. but it's the growth. It's the maybe time, average time that we're tracking. It's the goal completions that we've set up in analytics. That is what we are really trying to understand at that level.

I wanna track newsletter opt-ins is that list growing, for example, that might be one, again, these are vanity metrics, but likes and followers say on Instagram and Facebook, they can give us some top level. Are we moving in the right direction, kind of data, but you know, the fact that our Instagram followers are up by 2% is not really that relevant. It's certainly not. You know, we're talking to clients, you know, we're not saying you gained 25, Instagram followers did, you know, look what we did for you. It's irrelevant. but we're trying to track trends. And so that goes in top of the funnel. I also wanna know, and quite often I will stick in there, the popular page, one indication of that we're doing things right in some ways is, you know, is, are we getting growth at the contact us page? What, you know, we start actually recognizing, are there certain blog posts that maybe have taken off at the top of the funnel?

All we're looking for is trends. We're looking for useful information, things that, you know, if we created a new page on a website and we've been driving a lot of traffic to it, we wanna see that's become a popular page. We wanna get a little more granular at this level. With our popular traffic sources, who's sending us traffic is, you know, this is where I might put our Google business profile listing. Obviously I want to track various, uh, social networks. If I'm on five different social networks, now I'm gonna get a little more granular, which one of them's actually starting to send us some traffic. And then finally keyword ranking. I will bring Google search console ranking or, or some other tool like we use Semrush all the time. And I can put that into agency analytics. And all I'm looking for there is, Hey, there are 27 keyword phrases we're tracking.

Did, did we make any progress? Did we lose any ground? We might put bang in here as well as Google, but there, we're just trying to keep tabs. And now let's hear from a sponsor, running a small business means doing it all. You deserve an online marketing platform that does the same. Semrush is an all in one platform that will lighten the load handle SEO, social media, and advertising all in one place, attract new customers, save time and money on marketing and get ahead of the competition. If you need it online marketing, no problem. Some rush will get you started. If you're ready to grow online, try some rush free @ Semrush.com/now that's Semrush.com/now. So you see all of those things I just went through are what I would call top of the funnel. They're all high level. They're all trend based.

They're all things that are meant to show us, okay. Are we making some progress? Be obviously progress in, in the, you know, the real world is till we get a clients. And none of that is really giving us that data. So now we start now we move to what I call middle of the funnel. And now we're gonna start tracking the things that we believe are people more engaged? that? Yes, they came to the website, but what did they do? They clicked on an ad, but what did they do? So middle of the funnel, we are definitely gonna start tracking ad conversions. We're gonna look at ad conversions by if you're running multiple ad groups, we wanna see which one of those ad groups are, are converting at a high level. And we might do, obviously the tools give you the, you know, we'll look at 30 days, but then we'll look at 'em comparison to the last 30 days that quite often can give you a little more data as well, the goal completion.

So this is making the assumption that you actually set up goals in your Google analytics, which everyone should do so that you know that if you know, whether it's a phone call or it's a fill out a form or is download some free report that you're tracking those events that are happening as well. Because then what that's actually able to do is now you can start breaking down, okay? Here are the goal completions, but here are the goal completions by channel. And it turns out that gosh, that paid search that we thought was so expensive is actually producing 70% of the goals. So it's working, or at least we feel it's working because we're seeing that people are picking up the phone. People are filling out forms. Now we don't know yet. If they become customers, this is a place where we might also break down campaigns, ad campaigns.

So we're just looking at, has our average cost changed? Are we getting clicks or what's our conversion rate looking like how many conversions what's our cost? I mean, it's all the basic stuff, but this is not just how many ads are we running, right? This is how much money are we spending to create X amount of conversions. So we're getting more granular. Now we use call tracking for just about everything and actually form submission tracking as well. Meaning that, that we are tracking where our phone calls are coming from by channel. We're tracking where our form submissions are coming from by channel. Now these are big buying signal actions. I mean, you have to have everything else generated awareness, middle of the funnel, we're generating leads. So we're looking at, you know, things that are much more engaged folks. I, I like to throw over reviews in the middle of the funnel as well.

They, they probably don't officially go in there, but we love to track those. And it's showing that we have happy customers. It will ultimately be engagement, you know, in, in say Facebook a review in Facebook. Although I must admit it's become very spammy. Facebook doesn't seem to have any desire to do anything about it. That's just a little side note , but it, it shows more engagement. So we're gonna look now at not only the reach say in our social platforms, but the likes, the comments that's the shares. I mean, those are engagements that, that, that might have a tendency to demonstrate that maybe people are paying attention to what we're putting out there and it's causing them to do something that, uh, that we see as a positive, not necessarily buying signal, but a bit of the buying process. Now, all of those things are where a lot of marketers stop because ultimately we generated the lead.

We generated the phone call. We generated the, uh, the form fill, but let's face it. The bottom of the funnel is what we're really after understanding quite often in our case, that means that we have to get from a customer, which one of these phone calls, which ones of these forms filled out, actually turned into a customer. And obviously if you're looking at this in your own business, that's the link you've gotta be able to make. And that's why I love call tracking so much. I mean, we rerecord many of the calls. You're able to actually listen to a phone call and go, yeah, that was a sale . So, so you can actually say this lead generated from this source turned into a client, and that's really the, that's the holy grail. I mean, that's what we're after, because then we can literally say that, you know, that's what, that, that's what it cost to generate that client.

It's nice to know what generated that lead, but I wanna know what generated that client. So now we're tracking at the bottom of the funnel. How many depend upon your business? How many scheduled consultations were there? How many of those consultations or sales calls, you know, turned into, you know, were converted, we're turned into clients. We can back that then into the cost of client acquisition. And then we wanna start measuring things like what's the average revenue per customer. Obviously every business is gonna have different things that are going to make sense, but average revenue per customer in many cases is a great metric because you can, I, you can influence that if you know what it costs you to get a customer and you know what the revenue average revenue per customer is, you can start going to work on CRE increasing average revenue per customer.

Heck raise your prices. that might actually increase your average revenue per cost per customer, and maybe even decrease your cost to generate a customer. So if you think about the whole point of today's recording is to start thinking about your metrics and your tracking as a way to turn somebody who visited your website into a customer. That's ultimately what we're trying to do with marketing. So let's start thinking about our metrics, what metrics would be seen as top of the funnel, what metrics for you would be middle of the funnel that would be truly lead tracking. And then finally, what metrics would be bottom of the funnel that you could have access to that would show really the customer metrics. That's understanding that journey. At least that part of the journey is how you really can better understand where you can invest your marketing dollars, where you can cut out investing your marketing dollars and where you can really double down on what it is that's actually working instead of just throwing a bunch of stuff out there.

You know, even if your revenue's growing, even if you're happy with sales, if you're not doing this level of tracking, you're not maximizing, you're not optimizing what your business could be doing. So whether or not you are a small business owner who needs to track this for their own marketing or a marketer out there who needs to get better at tracking in your position, or you're a consultant who has many clients that, uh, that, that you should start getting on this way of thinking when it comes to analytics. So that's all I have for today. However, I'll throw out one thing. If you are a consultant, if you are thinking about starting a consulting practice, we just launched a new free assessment. Go find out. Can I analyze where you are in your consulting journey @ consultantassessment.com. It's free ask you about 15 questions. It'll give you a free report to give you some ideas on where you might to take your business to the next level, whether you're just getting started or you're an existing consultant who is trying to find better ways to do things, or you're a senior consultant who now is actually struggling with scale more than just getting clients or just serving clients.

You're adding team, you're adding process, you're adding systems. So go find out where you are on that kind of continuum of consulting at consultant, assessment.com. That's it for now. Hopefully we'll run into you all one of these days out there on the road,