Episode 128 – Philippa Gamse
What Your Website Data Isn’t Telling You with Philippa Gamse
Featuring Philippa Gamse, Founder of Websites That Win International and author of Website Wealth
Your website is collecting data every day.
Visitors. Sessions. Clicks. Engagement. Traffic sources. Conversions. Scroll depth. Search behavior.
But having more data doesn’t necessarily mean you understand what’s happening.
In fact, the sheer volume of information available to business owners can sometimes make it harder to identify what actually matters.
In this episode of The Covert Code Podcast, Anna Covert sits down with website analytics expert Philippa Gamse, founder of Websites That Win International and author of Website Wealth: A Business Leader’s Guide to Driving Real Value from Your Analytics.
Their conversation explores what website data can tell us, what it can’t tell us, and how business leaders can use analytics to make smarter decisions without becoming professional data analysts.
Your Website Analytics Don’t Have to Be Perfect
One of the first issues Anna and Philippa discuss is something that frustrates business owners and marketers constantly:
Why don’t all of the numbers match?
Your Google Ads account may report one number.
GA4 may show another.
Your CRM may report something different again.
Consent requirements, cookies, attribution models, tracking methodologies, browsers, and other technical factors can all contribute to differences between platforms.
Philippa’s advice is simple: stop expecting every platform to produce identical numbers.
Website analytics shouldn’t necessarily be treated as an auditable financial record.
Your CRM or backend sales system should ultimately tell you what actually became a lead or sale.
Analytics has another important job.
It helps you identify patterns, trends, behavior, and opportunities.
GA4 Changed the Conversation From Bounces to Engagement
Anna and Philippa also discuss the transition from Universal Analytics to GA4.
While GA4 is more complicated, its event-driven model creates opportunities to understand specific actions visitors take on a website.
Instead of simply asking who left, businesses can focus more deeply on engagement.
What did visitors do?
What did they watch?
What did they click?
How far did they progress?
Did they interact with the content that should move them closer to becoming a customer?
The problem is that many businesses install analytics and simply accept the default configuration.
But the most valuable analytics strategy begins with a different question:
What do we actually need to know?
Sometimes Your Advertising Isn’t the Problem
One of Philippa’s stories illustrates why businesses need to examine the entire customer journey rather than analyzing marketing channels in isolation.
A B2B company was spending heavily on Google Ads to generate free trials.
The ads generated clicks.
But almost nobody signed up.
The immediate assumption was that the advertising specialist was doing something wrong.
When Philippa examined the website analytics, however, she found that virtually no marketing channel was producing signups.
The advertising wasn’t the real problem.
The form was.
The company was asking people interested in a free trial to complete a massive form containing far more information than they were ready to provide.
Visitors were interested enough to click.
Then the website created unnecessary friction.
It’s an important distinction for anyone investing in digital marketing: traffic generation and website conversion cannot be evaluated independently.
Your Website Is Part of the Sales Process
A website’s job isn’t simply to exist.
It should help move someone from awareness toward action.
That means understanding what information a visitor needs at each stage of the journey without demanding too much too soon.
Anna shares one solution her team often uses: a multi-step form.
The initial step can collect the basic information necessary to establish a lead.
Additional questions can follow afterward.
This gives the business an opportunity to continue the conversation without forcing a new prospect to complete an intimidating questionnaire before they’re ready.
Marketing doesn’t have to collect every piece of information sales will eventually need.
Sometimes the website simply needs to create the next logical step.
Microsoft Clarity Can Show You What Visitors Are Actually Doing
One of Philippa’s favorite tools for understanding website behavior is Microsoft Clarity.
Tools like Clarity provide heatmaps and session recordings that can help businesses see how real visitors interact with their pages.
One particularly interesting metric is the dead click.
A dead click happens when someone clicks something they expect to be interactive, but nothing happens.
Maybe visitors repeatedly click an image expecting more information.
Maybe a heading looks like a link.
Maybe an interface element simply isn’t behaving the way visitors expect.
Those clicks are incredibly valuable signals.
They’re essentially visitors saying:
I’m interested. Tell me more.
If nothing happens, you’ve created friction at the exact moment someone is demonstrating intent.
The Content at the Bottom of Your Page May Barely Be Seen
Another behavior Philippa consistently sees is surprisingly simple:
People often don’t scroll very far.
Modern websites can contain extremely long pages, particularly when viewed on mobile devices.
If your most important message or primary call to action only appears near the bottom, a significant percentage of visitors may never see it.
This is where scroll-depth analytics and heatmaps become particularly useful.
Instead of assuming visitors consume an entire page, you can examine how far they actually travel.
Anna points out that this reinforces the importance of concise, scannable website content.
Visitors frequently want to skim first and dive deeper when something captures their attention.
Short sections, meaningful headlines, bolded information, visual hierarchy, and clear navigation make that easier.
Every Page Should Give Visitors Somewhere to Go
Philippa also emphasizes the importance of calls to action.
Ask yourself:
What is the purpose of this page?
What should someone do after reading it?
Download something?
Request information?
Read another resource?
Schedule a consultation?
View a product?
Watch a video?
If the answer is nothing, there may be a strategic problem with the page.
And one call to action isn’t always enough.
If someone never reaches the bottom of a long page, a CTA located exclusively at the bottom doesn’t exist from that visitor’s perspective.
Anna recommends persistent navigation and clear CTA buttons that remain easy to find throughout the experience.
Don’t Say “Read More” When You Can Tell People What They’ll Get
The wording of a call to action matters too.
Generic language such as “Read More” gives visitors very little information.
A stronger CTA tells someone what they’re going to receive.
Download the specifications.
Get the guide.
Register for the webinar.
Schedule a consultation.
View the case study.
The right CTA depends on the visitor’s mindset, their intent, and what the business is offering at that particular moment.
This same principle applies to advertising.
If an advertisement creates a specific expectation, the landing page should immediately continue that conversation.
Your Website Data Can Reveal New Business Opportunities
Analytics isn’t only useful for identifying what’s broken.
It can also reveal opportunities.
Philippa explains that website behavior can show businesses what customers are looking for, including topics, services, products, and information the company may not currently emphasize.
Internal site searches can be particularly revealing.
What are visitors searching for?
Where are they spending time?
What content generates deeper engagement?
Sometimes those patterns reveal demand for a new product, service, content strategy, or target market.
The opportunity may already be sitting inside the data.
Stop Measuring Everything
One of the biggest analytics mistakes is assuming more metrics automatically produce more insight.
They don’t.
Philippa shares the example of a marketing professional whose management wanted reports containing approximately 30 metrics every week.
The problem isn’t collecting the information.
The problem is deciding what anyone is supposed to do with it.
If you’re measuring dozens of things simultaneously, you can quickly lose sight of the business questions you’re trying to answer.
Instead, begin with the question.
What are we trying to understand today?
Which marketing channels are actually moving customers forward?
Which content is generating meaningful engagement?
Where are prospects dropping out of the journey?
Which pages contribute to conversion?
Then identify the metrics necessary to answer those questions.
Don’t Forget the Middle of the Customer Journey
Businesses naturally pay attention to acquisition.
How much traffic did we generate?
What did we spend?
Where did the visitors come from?
They also pay attention to conversion.
How many leads did we receive?
How many sales did we close?
How much revenue did we generate?
But Philippa points out that companies frequently overlook everything happening between those two points.
That’s the consideration stage.
Customers often need to establish trust before they’re ready to convert.
They want evidence that you understand their problem, have relevant expertise, can deliver what you promise, and are worth contacting.
Your website content plays a major role in answering those questions.
Segmentation Makes Your Data More Useful
Not every website visitor is the same.
A new visitor may behave differently from someone who has visited five times.
A customer may behave differently from a prospect.
Visitors from different markets may have entirely different needs.
That’s why Philippa recommends segmenting analytics whenever it makes strategic sense.
Instead of treating every visitor as part of one enormous audience, examine meaningful groups separately.
Location.
Customer status.
New versus returning visitors.
Traffic source.
Behavior.
Those distinctions can reveal patterns that disappear when everything is averaged together.
Stop Obsessing Over Someone Else’s Benchmark
What’s a good conversion rate?
What’s the average for my industry?
How much traffic should my website receive?
Philippa isn’t a fan of these questions without context.
Comparing your business to an industry average can be misleading because you don’t know everything happening behind another company’s numbers.
Their product is different.
Their audience may be different.
Their advertising strategy may be different.
Their sales process may be different.
Their pricing may be different.
A more useful benchmark is often your own performance.
Establish where you are now.
Set meaningful goals.
Make deliberate changes.
Then measure whether you’re improving.
Always Put the Numbers Into Context
Data without context can lead to terrible decisions.
Philippa gives students a simple scenario:
Imagine you’re managing an ecommerce website and discover that sales are down 40% compared with the previous month.
That sounds disastrous.
Unless the current month is January and the previous month was December.
Suddenly the number has context.
The same principle applies throughout business.
Weather events, seasonality, competitors, economic conditions, promotions, consumer behavior, product changes, and countless other factors can affect performance.
The number tells you what happened.
Understanding the environment helps explain why.
Be Careful Before Replacing a Website That’s Already Working
One of the most expensive website mistakes can happen during a redesign.
A company decides it wants something newer and better.
That may be completely justified.
But a redesign can also accidentally remove things that are quietly producing value.
A page may rank extremely well in search.
A piece of content may consistently attract qualified visitors.
A particular path through the site may contribute to conversions.
Remove it without understanding its value and the new website may look better while performing worse.
Before making major website changes, examine the existing data.
Understand what’s already working.
Preserve the valuable pieces.
Then improve from there.
Website Analytics Should Lead to Action
The larger message behind Philippa’s approach is straightforward.
Analytics isn’t valuable because you have it.
Analytics becomes valuable when it changes what you do.
Find the dead click and make the image clickable.
Discover that nobody reaches the bottom of the page and move the CTA higher.
Find the form everyone abandons and simplify it.
Identify a piece of content people repeatedly search for and make it easier to find.
Discover an audience segment behaving differently and build an experience for them.
Find an old page driving valuable organic traffic and protect it during your redesign.
The goal isn’t more dashboards.
It’s better decisions.
About Philippa Gamse
Philippa Gamse is the founder of Websites That Win International, a digital marketing and analytics strategist, speaker, educator, and author.
Her latest book, Website Wealth: A Business Leader’s Guide to Driving Real Value from Your Analytics, helps business leaders understand how to use website data to make better strategic decisions without getting buried in technical analytics terminology.
You can also connect with Philippa on LinkedIn.
Watch the Full Episode
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What Your Website Data Isn't Telling You
The Covert Code Podcast
Host: Anna Covert
Guest: Philippa Gamse
Founder: Websites That Win International
Book: Website Wealth: A Business Leader's Guide to Driving Real Value from Your Analytics
Anna Covert [00:00:03]:
Aloha. My name is Anna Covert, and I'm coming to you from my battleship here on the beautiful island of Oahu.
This week on The Covert Code, the topic is something that is near and dear to my heart: What's your website data not telling you?
My very special guest is Philippa Gamse, founder of Websites That Win International. She's also a sought-after public speaker, professor, lecturer, and advisory committee member for digital marketing courses and curriculum being taught and created in London, as well as even Qatar.
She's also the author of the bestselling book Website Wealth: A Business Leader's Guide to Driving Real Value from Your Analytics.
Thank you so much for being here today.
Philippa Gamse [00:00:50]:
Hi, Anna. Good morning.
Anna Covert [00:00:51]:
Good morning.
So let's just jump in and get our geek on, as I like to tell my listeners when I get really nerdy, which I love to do.
Let's start off with—you are just a very fascinating woman. Tell us a little bit about the CliffsNotes version of your story, and then we'll jump into what we're seeing today online.
Philippa Gamse [00:01:12]:
Well, okay, the CliffsNotes.
I've been working in websites for a long time and analytics for a long time.
In fact, when analytics first came out and started being really available, I got quite excited. This was early on, before anybody really knew how powerful analytics were.
I just looked at it and said, this is going to be huge, because now we can tell all sorts of stuff that we didn't know before in the real world.
You can sell newspapers, you can sell books, you can get TV ratings, but that doesn't give you anything like the kind of granular information that we can get about website visitors.
How many people opened a newspaper doesn't tell you which pages they went to. It doesn't tell you how much of the page they actually looked at.
Now we can really get into not only whether they saw the page with your video on it, but how much of that video they actually watched. How much of this podcast are they going to listen to?
I think quite early on I saw the potential in that.
It's also fun because this is a very male-oriented sector. There are far fewer women in this area than there are men.
I find it fun to be a woman trying to make a mark because I think we do process and talk a little differently some of the time. I don't want to get all gender-specific, but I think that's an interesting angle as well.
Anna Covert [00:02:45]:
Yeah, I agree with you.
I think the way that we perceive data, or more like the customer journey, is deeper than a man might be just looking at, okay, what is the conversion? They're not necessarily looking at the full story at the same level as I think women do.
That must have been such the Wild West back then.
I got into digital advertising later. I went to Bentley University in Boston, graduated early in 2005, and was here in Hawaii working in traditional advertising.
Back then, even websites were just like a digital brochure. They didn't really do much more.
Then I started building my own WordPress websites around 2010 and started my advertising agency. It's been self-taught from there.
I'm really interested in your insights on GA4.
Even today when I take control of a client website, it's interesting to see that some don't have GA4 set up correctly. Some didn't realize Universal Analytics had been retired.
There's a lot of information that we lost in this transfer.
What are your overall thoughts on the switch?
Philippa Gamse [00:04:22]:
I don't think I should get into a political discussion on why they did it.
It is a different model. It's what they call event-driven rather than session-driven.
It's very much based on specific actions that users take as opposed to simply how many users came.
That's important because that's what we want to know: What do the users actually do?
Where do they engage?
What do they like?
What do they watch?
What do they look for?
And, obviously, at the end of the day, do they convert to do whatever it is that the website is trying to get them to do?
It is a more complicated model than Universal Analytics, without question.
I know a lot of people hate it.
It was also attempting to deal with some of the privacy issues around Universal Analytics.
Unfortunately, even now I've come across people collecting personally identifiable information in their analytics because of what they're doing, which contravenes the terms and conditions of using analytics as well as general privacy rules.
It is more complicated.
I like it in the sense that it's much more powerful if you know how to program it correctly so that you can really dig into what it is specifically that you're trying to do.
I think it is really strong, especially in conjunction with something like Google Tag Manager.
Anna Covert [00:05:55]:
Yes.
Philippa Gamse [00:06:04]:
Google Tag Manager is really powerful because it allows an analyst to play with really digging into what's going on with the site without having to impact the site in any way.
You don't want me messing with your site code for sure. I'm not a designer. I know very little about design.
That's actually a really important feature.
But I think people who take GA4 out of the box—and we should say GA4 because a lot of sites use it, but of course there are other alternatives, some of which are also really good—don't always customize it.
A lot of people don't think: What do I want to do? What do I want to know? What are my key questions today?
Using it out of the box is not necessarily as useful as it could be.
Anna Covert [00:06:55]:
Yeah, I agree with all that.
I think one of the big distinctions that's easy for people to understand is that before, with Universal, we were talking about bounce rate.
Bounce rate was one of those primary metrics, and what that really meant was: Who didn't stay?
Then we had to do all this math to figure out who did stay.
The whole model has shifted toward focusing on engagement.
What are the people who did stay doing?
That's more valuable inherently.
People care about whether their website is working. Is it making us money? How do we make more?
From there, what tools or website sources and referral traffic are contributing to this customer's experience in a positive way?
One of my problems with GA4—and it's been a problem with Universal as well and all analytics—is that the data just doesn't always match.
Especially with Google Analytics and Google Ads.
You'd think they're from the same partner, along with Google Tag Manager, so this is the Google family.
You look inside your Google Ads account and you're paying for clicks, especially if you're blocking bots, and I feel you should see a pretty reasonable correlation between the number of clicks and the sessions and users.
But I've found recently that's not always the case.
Are you doing any Google Ads as well?
Philippa Gamse [00:08:35]:
No, I don't.
To be really clear, I don't do implementation of campaigns. I'm strictly a strategist.
I use analytics data to create strategy, but I don't actually run any of this stuff myself.
I used to, but honestly, I get bored very quickly doing that, so I'm really not the right person to be doing it.
But what I will say is, yes, this has been a problem forever.
Business owners tear their hair out over, "This number doesn't match this number. This number doesn't match this number."
It's the same if you look at ecommerce systems, the shopping cart piece, and compare what's in the CRM with what's in Google Analytics, for example.
They won't necessarily match.
That's partly because of consent issues, cookie issues, sometimes because they measure sessions or collect data at different times, and attribution issues.
How do you assign credit for a click to a particular marketing channel?
Anna Covert [00:10:07]:
Absolutely.
Philippa Gamse [00:10:07]:
Can I just go back and say one more thing?
I can't tell you the number of people who come to me tearing their hair out because the numbers don't match.
I always say, for heaven's sake, stop.
Stop this immediately.
Don't pay your people thousands of dollars to figure this out because they probably never will match, and it shouldn't matter.
Your analytics should not be your tool of record.
Your CRM system is your tool of record. Your backend, where you record your actual sales, obviously has to be 100% accurate.
What you're using analytics for, because we have Safari blocking cookies and consent issues and all of these other factors, is patterns.
Patterns of behavior. Trends.
You're absolutely not looking for auditable numbers, and you shouldn't be.
It's really important to understand that, otherwise you will go nuts.
Anna Covert [00:11:06]:
Yeah.
I will say, though, if you're spending money—listeners out there, if you're giving money to a digital partner and they're telling you they're spending your money, and you're buying clicks and impressions—you must see a correlation of paid traffic to sales.
If you don't see that, yes, the numbers may not match exactly, but no matter what you're spending online, you should have a result.
If you don't, push pause and don't be fearful to say, we've got to stop right away and decide what is going on here.
Is it the partner? It could be.
Is it the website? Most often it is your website.
Your mobile experience might be poor. It might be too slow.
I've seen buttons that someone needs to buy covered so they can't see it and can't buy.
Philippa Gamse [00:11:54]:
Can I tell you a story?
Anna Covert [00:11:55]:
Yes, I love your stories.
Philippa Gamse [00:12:02]:
I had a client last year in the supply chain and logistics business.
They were trying to get people to sign up for a free trial of their mobile app that managed fleet management and so on.
They were very upset with their ads guy.
They had an in-house guy running Google Ads and honestly were starting to feel like he didn't know what he was doing.
The ads were reporting tons of click-through to the signup page for this app trial, and yet there were almost no signups.
They said, "Has he got the tracking right? Are the tracking and conversions set up correctly?"
Yes.
I tested it. It was all fine.
They said, "We can't possibly have this number of clicks for no business. It doesn't make any sense."
But they hadn't looked at the actual website analytics.
This is a problem I see very frequently: siloing.
People who do one part don't look at how that correlates with any of the other parts.
That's not helpful.
When I looked at the analytics, there were almost no signups for this free trial from any marketing channel.
Then you ask why.
When we looked at the form, the form was controlled by the sales department, not the marketing people.
The form was massively long and asked just about every question you could possibly think of about that person's business.
It was absolutely clear that someone might say, "I'm interested in a free trial, but I don't want to tell you all this stuff right now. I'm not ready to marry you."
I said to them, the ads are not the problem and your ad guy is not the problem. He's doing a fine job.
This form is the problem.
Then their salespeople came back and said, "We're not willing to let you change that form, which we control, because we need all that information."
The obvious answer is you get that information after somebody signs up.
When they sign up, you have a salesperson go back and say, "How are you enjoying the trial? And by the way, can I find out a bit more?"
I think it's a really interesting tale because the sales department didn't care that the ads people were spending in the five figures on ads every month for absolutely no reason because the form killed it.
Anna Covert [00:14:43]:
So the poor guy was getting the blame for what's going wrong, which was completely unfair.
One thing I like to do for some of my clients is a two-part form.
The first is like a little squeeze form. Hardly any information: their name, phone number, email.
Then we get them into the CRM and it goes to the next part of the form.
If they don't answer those other questions, at least we can start a marketing campaign to them.
So we can say, okay, salespeople, we're going to keep your questions, but we're going to put them into a two-step form.
There are these silos, especially today.
Then you have to think about privacy too.
Should you even be collecting the questions that you're asking?
Thinking about what the intent is, what the salesperson's job is, and what marketing's job is.
The website's job is to accelerate the process of awareness to action.
They're aware, they're considering you, they have intent, and they're submitting.
Then it's up to the rest of the team to take over from there and make them happy.
What other analytics solutions do you enjoy looking at besides Google?
Philippa Gamse [00:16:51]:
My other absolute favorite tool is Microsoft Clarity.
I use it for screen recordings and heatmaps.
One of the things that I love in Clarity is that you can record dead clicks, which I find really interesting.
A dead click is when somebody clicks on something on the page that they think should be a link, and it isn't.
Maybe you've got a heading and then a picture and they're constantly clicking on the picture because they think that's how they're going to get to more details.
If you consistently see dead clicks on a given element, it's a great hint to make that a click.
Why not?
When somebody is clicking, they're saying, "Hey, tell me more. I'm interested."
Right there, you've got their attention.
If they click on something and it doesn't work, you're asking them to figure out how to do that differently.
If they're not motivated to do that, they won't. They'll go away.
You've lost that interest point.
I love looking at things like dead clicks.
Anna Covert [00:18:08]:
That's really interesting.
I've used Clarity before for other clients, but I hadn't thought about that in a while.
That's something I'm going to go look at next.
It's also another thing that's pretty safe from bots. Bots don't click on things just erratically, at least right now.
Philippa Gamse [00:18:38]:
Another thing that I have discovered consistently using Clarity is that people don't scroll down the page.
So many web pages now are quite long, especially if you're looking at them on a mobile.
One of the things Clarity will give you is a heatmap.
You can do this in analytics too. It will give you scroll depth.
If you're going to do this in Google Analytics, you want to do some customization because the default in analytics is to tell you when somebody has gone 90% of the page.
If it's a long page, 90% is a heck of a long way.
You can set up other measurements along the way—tell me when they've done 25%, 50%, etc.
But in Clarity you can actually see it graphically.
The number of people who don't go beyond the fold, the first screen they can see, is frighteningly huge.
Which means anything further down the page, if less than 50% of your audience is seeing it, you've already lost 50% of your possibility to convert that traffic.
The heatmap will also show where attention is, where people are moving their mouse, and where their eyes are going.
The scrolling is a big one that I see again and again.
Anna Covert [00:20:21]:
That's fascinating.
One thing I see clients getting stuck on is too much copy.
No one wants to read it.
Depending on what you're selling—I do a lot of work in solar—we see people want to skim first and then dive.
Make it pretty. Make it easy to consume.
With the attention problem we're having now, are you seeing that pattern with scrolling? If there's too much copy, do people just stop reading?
Philippa Gamse [00:20:55]:
It's helpful to bold things.
If there are certain words you want to stand out and you want people to get, bold them. Make them stand out.
Shorter copy in short chunks can be very helpful.
But one of the other things I've been preaching for ages is multiple calls to action.
What's the point of a webpage?
It's to get somebody to do something.
As the business owner, as the owner of the site, you should understand your individual pages as well as the overall site.
On any page, I should be able to figure out: What am I supposed to do here?
What am I supposed to do as a result of seeing this page?
The answer probably isn't nothing.
Anna Covert [00:21:48]:
No. If there's nothing, then you go back to the drawing board.
Philippa Gamse [00:21:53]:
So many sites don't think about this.
You have to drive people to action because people won't stop and figure out what you actually want them to do.
Maybe there's a call to action at the top of the page and people are scrolling down, so it's disappeared.
Or maybe the call to action is at the bottom of the page and they don't get that far, so they don't see it.
How do you solve that?
Have a call to action at every point.
There's nothing wrong with having multiple different types of calls to action.
You can test whether they respond better to this wording or that wording.
At every point where somebody might be saying, "Tell me more," have something there for them to do that takes them toward what you're looking for.
Anna Covert [00:22:51]:
One easy solution for people listening is to make sure you have a sticky menu, meaning when people scroll, your menu follows them no matter what.
Have a very clear call-to-action button in the top-right corner: Join Now, Get Started, something like that.
That way they're not going to get lost and have to go back up to the top.
Are you looking for correlations based on the type of website traffic source and what their call to action is?
Is there deeper data where you're saying, who is this person, why did they come, and are they more attracted to one call to action over another based on other metrics?
Philippa Gamse [00:23:47]:
I think that's worth looking at because each site is different.
I mainly work with B2B sites.
Download specifications, for example.
A call to action should be really clear about what you're going to get.
"Read More" is not particularly exciting.
Anna Covert [00:24:06]:
Or download a white paper, sign up for a seminar or an event.
What are some of your go-tos that get high engagement?
Philippa Gamse [00:24:19]:
I think it honestly depends on the individual website.
It's got to be specific to what you know about the mindset and intent of the visitor at that point and what you're offering, and putting those together.
It relates back to ads because ads essentially are trying to do the same thing.
If you have an ad that sets up a certain mindset or expectation in the visitor, and they get to the site and it's not there or they can't immediately find it, you're dead.
Anna Covert [00:24:51]:
Absolutely.
One of the fastest ways you can save on your AdWords budget is making sure your location settings are actually targeting the people you intend to target.
Google can include people who are physically located in an area or people who have shown interest in that location.
That's not always what you want.
Here in Hawaii, for example, people have a lot of interest in Hawaii because they want to vacation here.
But they could actually be in Texas looking for a plumber.
If a Hawaii plumber ad appears because they've shown interest in Hawaii, they click it and immediately realize it's irrelevant.
That's a perfect example of making sure the ad and landing-page experience correlate.
You wrote a book about creating real value.
Why did you decide to write this book?
Philippa Gamse [00:26:19]:
Actually, firstly, this is my second book.
My first book was part of a series called 42 Rules.
It was about ten or twelve years ago and was called 42 Rules for a Web Presence That Wins.
I'm very proud to say it was endorsed by Guy Kawasaki.
Anna Covert [00:26:34]:
Wow. He's from Hawaii.
Philippa Gamse [00:26:39]:
And now he lives in Santa Cruz, where I live.
But this book that came out last year isn't about analytics in the sense of being a how-to.
It's not full of technical terms.
It's written for business leaders who own a website or a business that has a website.
It's designed to help them understand the power of analytics.
A lot of people don't.
As you said earlier, you can open up a page of analytics and it looks completely overwhelming if you don't know what you're looking at.
It's graphs and charts and tons and tons of numbers, and you're supposed to figure out what that means for your website.
It's impossible.
A lot of people then default to the dashboard kind of thing: Tell me we've got more of this than we did last week, whatever this is.
Vanity metrics.
They go, "Great," because they really don't want to get to grips with it because it's overwhelming.
You can't blame them because it is.
But if you're not looking at it, or getting somebody to look at it in an intelligent way, then you're missing out on really important insights.
Not only about where you're potentially wasting money, like the advertising story we told earlier.
Two seconds of me looking at the analytics page for that form told me there was a problem.
There were basically zero conversions for any kind of marketing channel.
That made no sense.
There are also a lot of stories in the book about working with clients and looking at the data and finding insights into new products and services we can develop based on what we see visitors looking for.
Where do they go?
What do they put into the search engine on the site?
It can reveal new business opportunities for products, services, or target markets, but only if you think about it.
The book is really about how to think about your business strategy in conjunction with your analytics so that you can customize your analytics to tell you what you need to know.
Another huge default mistake is to measure everything you can possibly measure.
I once taught a class and had the guy who was in charge of pay-per-click marketing for a very large technology company we've all heard of.
His bosses wanted a report of 30 different metrics every week.
I said, this is crazy. Why?
What are you going to do with that?
There's no point in measuring anything unless you're going to do something about it.
You can't do something about 30 different things at once because you don't know, if you change one thing, what impact that's going to have on everything else.
What are the key questions that you're trying to answer today?
I once taught with Avinash Kaushik, who wrote Web Analytics 2.0 and is very well known in the analytics world.
He created something called the Digital Marketing Measurement Model.
What that says is you should focus on no more than about nine metrics at any one time, and those metrics should be spread across the customer journey.
Most people focus on acquisition: How do we get traffic and what are we paying for it?
Then conversion: What have we sold and how much have we made?
But what they forget is the bit in the middle, the behavior or consideration stage.
Most people don't come to a website, take one look at it, and buy something.
You need to prove who you are.
You need to prove that you can do what you say you do, that you're trustworthy, that you're competent, that you have expertise in whatever you're offering.
That's where your content comes in.
Within each area of the customer journey, think about: What's my key question today?
Maybe it's which of my videos are creating more interest and progress toward conversion.
Maybe it's which of my marketing channels are most successful.
Think about one or two questions in each of those buckets and then what metric you need to measure that.
Because then you can take action.
The other thing you need to do is segment, which most people don't do, especially at the smaller end of the market.
If you have a business where visitors from Hawaii are going to behave differently than visitors from Texas, separate them out when you're looking at what they're doing.
Don't just treat every visit to your website as one huge mess.
They have different things going on and different characteristics.
You can create customer segments according to things like location or behavior.
This is somebody who's bought something before. This is somebody who hasn't. This is somebody who's new to the website. This is somebody who's been several times.
That creates a much more granular understanding of those behaviors.
Get really intelligent about what you need to know and what the most useful type of information is.
That will help you understand what's going on and what you can try differently.
My book is essentially about that.
It's very carefully edited, so there are no technical terms in it. There's no "how to use the analytics."
It's all about business strategy and how you can learn more about your business strategy from your website, with lots and lots of stories.
Anna Covert [00:33:14]:
Nice. Sounds great. I can't wait to read it.
Another thing you just said sparked some light bulbs in my brain.
I think a lot of business owners get stuck trying to compare too much.
They'll say we're going to do this for 30 days and then this for 30 days.
In my opinion, that doesn't work either because too many things in the environment around you are also changing.
If you want to test something, you have to do it at the same time, do it long enough, and understand there's a world happening around you.
Philippa Gamse [00:34:09]:
One of my favorite things to do when I was teaching—I taught at three different business schools—was give MBA students scenarios and ask what they would do.
One of my favorite scenarios was: You're the ecommerce manager for a big ecommerce site.
You've just got your monthly sales figures in and your sales are 40% down on last month.
Your boss wants to see you in an hour.
What are you going to do?
There are a number of different answers.
But one of the answers is, "I think I'll put my feet up, have a cup of coffee and read the paper."
Why?
Because this month is January.
Last month was December.
We had a load of Christmas sales.
Our sales were almost 40% down in January.
Anna Covert [00:35:06]:
Exactly.
Or COVID. Things happen. Hurricanes.
I remember doing a breakout PR event and right when I was supposed to get all this press, a hurricane came on the mainland.
All kinds of things can happen at any time.
Even year over year, people's trends are different and what they're looking for changes.
Philippa Gamse [00:36:03]:
That's right.
Other external factors—a new competitor could have entered the market with a really hot product.
There are all sorts of things that can happen.
It's important that you put all the math into context.
Anna Covert [00:36:14]:
Another thing that was really popular for a while was localization.
You talked about segmentation.
For a while, big companies with big budgets were able to create custom experiences where if I looked at the site from Hawaii, I saw Hawaii imagery and variable content based on my location.
That was popular, and then it started to lose interest on my side.
It's hard to maintain, expensive, and can create a lot of dead pages.
I don't see it as often as I used to, but I think there's a big opportunity.
We're doing it in email marketing and the CRM because we have more capability.
What are your thoughts as a website strategist on localization?
Philippa Gamse [00:37:13]:
Again, I don't do design, but I think it depends on your strategy and your goals.
If it's important to you, maybe you have pages for different locations with different projects and so on.
Most of my work is B2B.
One of the rules in my first book was: One size does not fit all.
You can't just say everybody does it this way, so I'm going to do it this way.
It's not the most helpful thing you can do.
You need to figure out your own situation.
Along with that, there's another thing that I hate, which is when people say, "What's the benchmark in my industry for this? What's the average conversion rate?"
I don't know.
How much does it cost to build a house?
You're going to say, well, what kind?
It's the same thing.
It depends on all sorts of things.
You don't know, if another company has a higher conversion rate than you do, what they're doing in terms of marketing.
If another company has a lower conversion rate, what does that mean?
I think benchmarking should be done against yourself.
You set some goals. You start out with a benchmark of where you're starting from, and then you measure your progress.
Anna Covert [00:38:51]:
I think that's absolutely right.
Because of what I specialize in, the number one thing people always want to know is what it's going to cost. How much do I spend?
We have to let the numbers tell us that.
There are different ways to do a budget, but what I like is objective-task.
What are we trying to achieve?
What are those actual goals?
Then what do we know about our own business?
It's shocking that people don't know their own business.
Of all the leads and opportunities that came from your website, what percentage did you sit with?
What percentage of those did you win?
If you didn't, why?
What was the reason?
What is the average length of time from first inquiry to these different touchpoints?
Then we have a conversion rate along the funnel and we reverse engineer it.
What is your goal and what is it worth to you?
If a new customer is worth $2,500, what's their lifetime value?
What are we willing to spend on it?
Then we have to see if we're in the reality of the universe here.
If you want this goal but only have $20,000, let's readjust our expectations, increase our conversion rate, or improve the sales process.
There has to be something based on your own numbers and your own benchmark of what you want to achieve and what's possible.
What have I not asked you that you think right now is critical for people listening to know about their website and what the data isn't telling them?
Philippa Gamse [00:40:41]:
I think we've covered a lot of ground.
Anna Covert [00:40:45]:
Good.
What's next for you?
Are you still teaching?
Are you going to write another book?
How do people want to engage with you?
Philippa Gamse [00:40:51]:
I'm interested in starting a new service, which I'm currently working on, that's an independent perspective on a business's website.
What I'm trying to help leaders understand is whether they're basing decisions on the right metrics and whether the metrics they're looking at justify the decision they're making.
Sometimes I'll have a CEO come to me and say, "My agency wants me to renew the ad budget. They say that the ads are going great. Is that true? Should I continue to pay at the same rate?"
My goal is not to criticize agencies.
There are good agencies and bad agencies.
There are definitely agencies that try to pull the wool over people's eyes and say, "Look at all these clicks you got. We're doing great."
But it's more like: Let's get a fresh pair of eyes.
Let me see whether I can find any anomalies or things you might not be looking at.
Are you missing opportunities to create more revenue?
Another example is, "We've been told we need to completely replace our website. We need to completely rework it."
When you do that, that's great because you're creating an opportunity to make it look and work a lot better.
But you're also creating the danger that you're going to lose something that's working really well.
I've seen things like having a page that's doing really well in search, and then you take that page away.
Google doesn't know immediately that you've taken it away, so it still comes up in search for maybe a while, and then people get a page not found.
That's not helpful.
It's about taking a look at the big picture.
Let's get beyond all the silos and different departments and have an independent look at your entire site in the context of your business strategy.
Make sure everything is as it should be and that you're making good decisions.
Anna Covert [00:43:21]:
Absolutely.
I think that's really important.
Especially when a new site is going to happen, making sure Search Console is considered because Google has changed the rules several times.
It's outrageous when people just put up a new website and don't think about the great rankings they already had.
People have worked ten or twenty years on a site.
We could just do a facelift of that same site.
There is a lot we can do now with WordPress and other technologies to make it fresh and new without jeopardizing the work you've been committed to for a long period of time.
People need to have those third-party views because things change quickly.
You don't want to make a decision that could be very, very expensive without thinking through all of the consequences.
Your website is not small.
This has been really wonderful.
How can people get ahold of you?
Philippa Gamse [00:44:34]:
As you mentioned earlier, my site is Websites That Win.
I mostly like using LinkedIn. LinkedIn is my favorite tool.
I think I'm the only person on the entire planet with this name because it's a very unusual name.
If you look me up on LinkedIn, you'll find me.
Please do connect, and if you have questions, let me know.
My book is called Website Wealth.
It's available at all good book places and on Kindle and so on.
Anna Covert [00:45:03]:
Great.
Thanks so much for being here.
I'm going to include all of this information on the channel.
For everyone who's listening, thank you so much for joining me once again.
If you have not yet subscribed to the channel, please do so.
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Please continue to share this content with people who you think will find value in it.
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I'll see you then.
Aloha!
