Using Your Website Data To Find The Actions That Will Move The Needle With JJ Reynolds

Andy Splichal 0:45

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal. We're happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is Using Your Website Data to Find Actions that Will Move the Needle. This week's guest here from Mediauthentic, he first started working in the field of marketing as a videographer who would create marketing videos and other assets. However, he quickly learned there was a problem. Organizations didn't really know what to do with these marketing assets once they were created. Today, he focuses on assisting businesses and measuring and acting on their marketing data. A big hello to JJ Reynolds. Hi, JJ.

JJ Reynolds 1:25

Andy, thank you so much for having me today.

Andy Splichal 1:27

We're excited to talk action here. So to start, what are the keys to identify what is and what isn't working, when it comes to your website numbers.

JJ Reynolds 1:39

The biggest thing that I would say for anybody, regardless of what numbers you're looking at, right, like, everybody has numbers, and every platform will give you a different number. But let's talk about a website, for example, is, if you're asking for a number, whatever number that may be, is before you get the number, decide what you're going to do about it. So for example, if you wanted to know how many people are going from our product page to our cart page, and in my head, it's going to be alright, if it's above 3%, we're good. We're selling let's keep driving traffic, what's below 3%? Maybe let's take a look at our product page and see if we're meeting people's expectations there. So it's probably the biggest the biggest overall theme I'm going to keep talking about is define what your action is, before you even ask for a number from anyone.

Andy Splichal 2:32

How do you define what that action is? I mean, you just threw out 3% With the I mean, do you have a list of what would be industry specific? Or where did you come up with that? 3%?

JJ Reynolds 2:45

Yeah, every every industry is going to be slightly different. And everyone always asked like, what's the best conversion rate? And the answer to that is better than it was yesterday, right? Like, in reality, that's the best conversion rate if you're always improving, but usually, for example, cold traffic, 1 to 3% is what you'd see for like an offer. That's just like off the back of my head. That's kind of where I'd expect things to be.

Andy Splichal 3:12

Okay, now, are you using then past data to kind of pry it, you know, kind of put your perspective? And then you're looking at that? Or what do you mean by setting the bar? I guess, before you looked at the numbers?

JJ Reynolds 3:27

Yeah, I'd say like, Well, don't even use. So if you have a if you have a gauge for what you think is normal, right? Then that's what you're going to use it. So say, for example, say, you always know, it's 3%, just for pulling a number out of the air for whatever we're talking about. If it's 5%, like, let's see what we did that made it better. If it's less 3%, maybe we should go adjust something, but you have to have a benchmark to start off with that I would suggest not using not googling it like being like, hey, like, Let's google it. What I'd suggest is kind of figure it out. If you have been collecting that information, figure it out what it's been for the past month, if you haven't set it up, and then let it run for a week or two and then see what that average is.

Andy Splichal 4:14

So what are you using to track the data? Are you using Google Analytics? Or are you using something else?

JJ Reynolds 4:21

Yeah, I'm, I'm a huge fan of Google Analytics to collect that store that information for you.

Andy Splichal 4:28

And how do you make sure that your analytics is properly installed?

JJ Reynolds 4:35

Yeah, making sure is one of those things that's a bigger question in and of itself. And I could speak for hours on that. But what I would suggest is that you go into whatever goes into your Google is the count, and you break it down by how many people are coming into a website and the source of traffic so it's called a source media. report in Google Analytics, and it's called a the acquisition report inside of Google and looks for and that's where I'd suggest starting seeing just off the bat, like, does that look right to you? And then diving into it from there. And that's kind of the first, the first domino sort of say it should kind of start knocking down.

Andy Splichal 5:19

When you have clients that come to you, how often do you find that their analytics is not set up properly?

JJ Reynolds 5:28

A 100% of the time. 100% of time is, is there something that could be improved, right. And the definition of properly like, almost give you a real world example, is if you're measuring pageviews, which is a default metric for Google Analytics, you can actually collect extra information. So for example, so you wanted to know how many people have stayed on a page for at least 30 seconds, you could collect that information and store that. And now you have another level of engagement to kind of say, Okay, we have people who saw this page or offer page, we have people who stuck around for 30 seconds, which is, say, 50% of people, and then the other people who clicked Add to cart, or whatever the offer is, and now even an extra optimization point in there. So that is where we really specialize in is kind of customizing things, above and beyond just saying, hey, how many people hit our website? And how many products that we sell?

Andy Splichal 6:25

And are you using Universal Analytics - UA? Or have you started transitioning to the new Google Google Analytics for?

JJ Reynolds 6:35

Yeah, it's a bit of a, you're kind of one, one foot on both sides of the fence at the moment. So we're just just for everybody's to have a little bit of action is using Google Tag Manager to deploy and trigger Google Analytics, we currently would advise everybody to be used both Universal Analytics and GA for just because you can probably find your answers faster and Universal Analytics right now, just because been around for a long time. You can google how do I do X, Y, and Z. And usually there's an article about it. But at the same time, you have to start familiarizing yourself with GA 4, because they're going to stop Universal Analytics in July 2023. So you, there's a ticking clock as far as when it's going to stop, but you should start getting from yourself familiar with GA 4

Andy Splichal 7:20

Now, I've read that you believe that a company can grow in a predictable manner by measuring the numbers in their metrics on an ongoing basis. And when I read that, I guess, is this really true? Have you found this to be the case? And exactly which numbers and metrics should you be measuring?

JJ Reynolds 7:37

Yeah, I think it's one like I said it. So I believe it's 100% True. The reason why is because if you can measure and you can, you can store all that information, right? Everything that you believe is important, you can then predict what will happen next week, next month. And if you can predict next week, the second that you start deviating from what you think is going to happen, you can hop in and take an action. Whereas most people, most businesses, from 100,000 to 100 million, don't realize they're not on track until the end of the month or the quarter. So that's like, I believe that's 100% true, the numbers that you look at the numbers that you watch are the ones you can change. The same thing goes for people who if you weigh yourself every morning, like there's your chances of losing weight are much higher, because it's the number you're watching every single day. As far as the numbers that matter, right, that's what we need to make each click count, right, is I would highly advise breaking down however you define a journey on an individual page. So for example, if someone sees a page, if the page loads, that's now an impression, they saw that your brand even exists, they might save 10 seconds on the page. And they're now aware that you have an offer right there. 10 seconds on page is usually enough for someone to at least understand like it's just for me, you're not viewing the offer, they might be introduced. If there's like a pricing box or something like that, I'd say like they're introduced to your offer. And then initiate is to take action like click the click the Pay Now button or whatever it is that's on your page. And those four are like the basics of like you've you have those four metrics being collected and stored. And you have 100% of people's are introduced, like you kind of have a fall off. funnel for lack of a better term, you're able to much move much quicker next week when things aren't going your way. If you launch a new offer or if you launch a new thing. You're much bigger, you're in a much better spot.

Andy Splichal 9:42

So what are some quick ways that you could use Google Analytics historical data to take an action? Take an action or two that would increase your sales?

JJ Reynolds 9:52

Yeah. It just depends on if you are tracking like let's just say assume that everybody has trends factions inside of their globalist account. So like you have some measure of saying was this good or bad, right. So assuming you have either leads or transactions or whatever your your main performance indicator is is being stored, what you want to do is I would highly suggest and if you're listening is paused, go to your computer, pull it up, go to your Google Analytics universal. In your acquisition report in the left hand side, you open that, and then you'll see source medium, buy traffic sources. And in that report, you can then see every single traffic source, it's sending you people. And the first column, you'll see number of users number of sessions. And on the last column, on the far right, you'll see the goal or transactions that have occurred. And so you can see a conversion rate for each of your traffic sources, for example, Facebook, traffic source, Facebook Ads, traffic source, maybe other affiliates, or referrals, or any of those types of things. You can see all those broken down for us right there. And that'll give you a good like, what's the most inputs that we're doing, because only you know, like, hey, maybe we're running ads $100,000 a day, right? Like, you're just up there. Whereas the other thing you're doing is much less, whatever you're putting effort in, you want to see outcomes, right. And that's, that's what you need to do. And at the end of the day, that's all that matters is you want to tie effort to outcome so you can put more effort where the outcomes are better.

So you take a look, and you see the different traffic sources that are driving conversions or goals. What action would you take based on that knowledge?

Yeah, so that's what I would like to see if you have that. And just say that you have one traffic source that you're really, really doing well on, you're like, Oh, my goodness, this is just the best traffic source. Either see if you can do more of that. So for example, say a reward example, we had a client who featured a magazine, online magazine. And just traffic's like a traffic source it didn't intend on right, it was like webs magazine.com/affiliate, or referral, just started them and tons of traffic, they got like 10,000 people to their site, and of those, like 5% bought their things. Well, you either get to look at that and say, Hey, that was cool, awesome. Or you take an action on it, and you call it that magazine and say, Hey, can we get it featured again next month, like we'll pay you money? Or we will just like, what do you need from us, we'll give you the best article written and you get your own public relations person to try to get you featured in more of these types of magazines. And so that's what I'd suggest is like, see what your traffic sources are? And can you do more of it? Reasonably, or maybe if it's something that you're doing a lot of like, you're spending a lot of effort on something, but they're not very much outcome. Maybe you want to scale back on that.

Now, if you had a crystal ball, how would you see the industry changing in the next year to 18 months?

Oh, we're in for a doozy of a year to 18 months, I would expect that everyone, the companies that are going to succeed are the ones that can get really comfortable with the relative mess metrics. And what I mean by that is the percentages. Because accuracy is has never been a thing that nothing's ever been accurate. If you want accuracy, go to your bank account, I'll tell you how much money you have. But on the measurement side, it's gonna get a lot less accurate. But if you know your percentages of hate 10% of people do X 30% of people do y and you can measure those percentages, you're gonna be a much better spot. And if the more you can ignore the actual hard numbers of like, hey, my my cart says 100, but my Google Analytics says 90, that doesn't matter. What matters is the percentages of people who saw your offer to purchase the offer to continue the offer, etc.

Sure. And I think the the reason for that is because of the different privacy issues, is that correct?

Yeah, the different privacy issues. Like it's it's a kind of a multifaceted, we've got privacy on one side, you got tech giants that own devices on the other side, and browsers that are owned by a third party. So we're just getting really messy as far as who owns what and what we do. But that's going to be the main privacy as well as just who owns what

And according to what I read, I mean, that's the whole reason that Universal Analytics is going away, as well. Correct?

Yeah, it's one of the reasons Universal Analytics has been around for a long, long time. And so I think that GA 4 has a lot of awesome features that are that is built for the future of the Internet. That is going to be if you learn it and you learn it well you can make it thing to do what you want it to do.

Now you started it said in the bio is a videographer. Do you still do that? Or are you purely an analytics guy now?

I like to think of myself as a creative. We make lots of dashboards, and I'm the person who builds all the dashboards that we produce for our clients. I run a YouTube channel that is just myself chatting about all these nerdy things. So I get to do some video things here and there. But at the end of the day, I get much more enjoyment. Instead of pushing publish on like a video or something to do to a client of like helping a client take an action that at the end of the day makes them more money. And I think that's, that's really where I found a lot of passion.

Now, personally, have there been any business books out there that you could attribute to your journey as an entrepreneur?

I am the biggest fan of the, oh, it's blinking. Blinking me right now is two books. I am big fan of the The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. I know that's like a cliche in of itself. But it's, I read it a long time ago, when it kind of first came out. And I really thought it was a very, like understandable book as far as that. And then the other book is a company of one by Paul Jarvis and Paul Jarvis. He runs Fathom Analytics, which is another analytics company. But his ideas around keeping a team nimble keeping a team concise, and building a profitable business. I really, really enjoy.

Now with your agency, what problems are you solving for your clients? And and how does your agency stand apart from the competition?

Yeah, it's kind of measuring those things like the our main core positioning for everyone we talked to is we measure beyond just pageviews. So we're not just taking the default things you hit pull up publishing your Google Analytics account, or we work with lots of different data sources like Facebook, and Bing and Google ads and all those pieces. It's measuring not just the page view, and the transaction, it's measuring for the entire journey in between that, so that you have a number to say, we need to increase this, we need to improve our number of people who interact with our carousel or do something online, which just makes everything more actionable. Want to like I always wanted to always tell clients, the action should jump off the report as you it should be highlighted red, bold, and saying, Okay, we need to fix this. As opposed to looking at a report. We're like, well, that's cool. I'm gonna go back to doing what I was doing.

Do you have a favorite success story you'd be willing to share of a client that came in and you were able to identify something that they really changed the direction of their company?

Yeah, like, what's the most of our clients? That's the case? Yeah, so we have the pleasure of working with clients on a long term retainer. So most clients that we have, I think, like the average, stay with us for at least two years, like that's like kind of the minimum. And so over the course of that time, we can start from being like, we know nothing to then having us be part of their actual company, like, we're like we are their data company, part of our data department, and then we can go from there. But the one that really sticks out with me, is we had a, like a coach that was a high, kind of High Ticket Sales offer type of thing. And they were doing millions of users a month to their website. And their offer was just getting such a small number of people who were signing up. And what we did is we showed them like we built out all the things that just knock them out of like impression, what does awareness on a page engaging 50% all those pieces, and you could see this funnel that like just screamed, we need to improve the video on a video sales page. It just screams that. And what they did is they, their team improved that. And they were able to almost double the percentage of people who filled out the applications.

Now let's talk about what services you offer. When somebody comes to you, and I guess, are they pretty much they just want to help with their analytics. I mean, how does that whole process work?

Yeah, well, we start with a question that they're asking, like usually most, most people have come to come to us and I talk with every single person, all the discovery calls, that's me. And the number one thing is either they have a problem that they've identified, they're like this, this is not working. We know no one's we don't know what to do with this. We have no idea with our Google Analytics, or what our ads are doing or all these pieces and we just want insights and actions. And that's usually I'd say about 80% of people that's that's the case that talk I talk with 20% are like I know I should be doing doing better. I just don't know what. And so as far as services, we offer kind of the entire, like range of Google Analytics. But data collection is a more broad term, we'll use more than just Google index. So data collection, data manipulation. So we'll like clean things up rearrange information, so that it's stored more appropriately. We update

Here, you're talking about the tags. They're not not actual elements on the page, right?

Yeah. Correct. Like collecting the like, like hits on users and all those types of things.

Okay.

So yeah, we have basically like, the kind of journey is data collection. So whatever that is, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics doesn't matter. Your own CRM collecting information, then we have to manipulate that to make sure it's actually some like some way that makes sense, right. And that could be lower casing things as simple as that. Within a store that information somewhere, so Google Analytics, by default, you can store information in there, you can store things in BigQuery, Google Sheets, there's a lot of different options to store your information. And then lastly, we need to visualize it. So because rows and columns only work for a small subset of people. So we need to make things that look pretty and then also actionable.

Now, who is the perfect client for your agency, if they're listening right now, this is the person who should try to reach out to you.

Now the perfect client. For us, the perfect person is, if you have a small team of people who are either in marketing, or you're just doing everything, and you don't know what to do as far as using data and using your marketing information to provide feedback on what your actions are. And so if you're in that, like kind of cycle of saying like, Hey, we've been doing promotions, not 100% sure how to improve next promotion or next month. That's kind of it and most most people are between two, at least doing $1 million a year.

I was gonna ask, is there kind of a minimum that they should be to be able to financially, you know, make it feasible to afford your rate?

Yeah, I'd say 1 million is the absolute, like the bottom, I'd say most people are comfortable between the 10 to 20 million is where it's like, almost a no brainer at that point. Because if we can increase help you increase by like even a percentage point you're we've we've paid for ourselves multiple times over.

And how can an interested listener perfect or not learn more about working with you?

Yeah, if you head over to mediauthentic.com, that's me, di AU, th e n t ic.com. You can poke around there. I've also got a like a visualization Data Studio site that I've run on the side called datastudio.vip. And either one of those spots, you can find me, get in contact if you'd like.

I see a spelled out the name. Do you have people that misspell authentic a lot?

Yeah, the problem is, is is that when I was creating this company, I don't know eight years now 10 years ago, is I actually spelled it not the way most people would spell it. So media and authentic but there's only one a in the middle. So it's media, media authentic. And so if you type in media and authentic, it'll show up as well in Google search, but I really messed up on the naming of this whole situation back when I went back when I created the S corporation.

Yeah, got it. You know, I asked because my my agency is True Online Presence. And people are always spelling presents, like it's a gift under the tree instead of presence. So just toss it. Yeah, of ironic. Hey, I'll before we go. I have one more question. What is for somebody who's listening that says this all sounds great. But I'm nowhere close to a million dollars. What is one piece of actionable advice they could take today? They could help them find some meaningful changes based on their website data.

Tie your effort to an outcome. So whatever you're doing, if you're trying to promote something, tie it to the outcome using your data in some capacity. And so that is the number one thing if you can tie your effort to outcome, you can put more high quality effort in the high quality outcomes and tie them together.

Well, that's great. Well, that has been fantastic. Is there anything else you would like to add before we wrap it up today?

No, I think that that's been it's been it's been a pleasure and awesome chatting.

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