Book Marketing Mentors
Jam-packed with smart, easy and simple ideas, this weekly podcast features experts who share proven techniques to add power and zest to supercharge your book marketing plan. Hosted by Susan Friedmann, CSP, international bestselling author, and founder of Aviva Publishing, this new and exciting podcast aims to rev up your marketing efforts with fewer struggles, and more success. Start listening today and discover how to get noticed in a crowded marketplace.
Book Marketing Mentors
How to Use Website Analytics to Sell More Books and Attract the Right Readers - BM507
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Are you guessing what works on your author website, or do you actually know?
In this episode, you’ll hear expertise from Philippa Gamse, a veteran digital marketing strategist and author of Website Wealth. She shows you how to use website analytics to make smarter marketing decisions. And how to spot new opportunities already hiding on your site.
If numbers make your eyes glaze over or you’ve never opened your site stats, this conversation will change how you see analytics. Philippa breaks it down into clear, practical steps any author can use, without any tech overwhelm.
What you'll discover:
- What web analytics really tell you about reader behavior and why they matter
- Simple, free tools that show not just what visitors do, but why
- Where calls to action actually belong and why one at the bottom isn’t enough
- How site search data can spark new content ideas, book topics, and markets
- The biggest analytics mistakes authors make and how to focus on metrics that matter
Your website is already collecting valuable information. This episode shows you how to use it to attract readers, improve conversions, and make your book marketing work harder.
Download Philippa's "Hidden Gems" ebook
Here's how to connect with Philippa:
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Susan Friedmann [00:00:00]:
Welcome to Book Marketing Mentors, the weekly podcast where you learn proven strategies, tools, ideas, and tips from the masters. Every week, I introduce you to a marketing master who will share their expertise to help you market and sell more books. Today, my special guest is Philippa Games. Philippa has clocked over 25 years in digital marketing strategy and analytics, consulted with nearly 500 clients, and and worked with websites that have generated hundreds of millions of dollars. She helps clients to translate the numbers into transformational ideas that move the business forward, reveal opportunities for new markets, products, and services, and maximize return on investment. Philippa, it's an absolute pleasure to welcome you to the show, and thank you for being this week's guest, expert and mentor.
Philippa Gamse [00:00:57]:
Hey, thank you, Susan. I was actually reflecting that we have known each other for many of those years.
Susan Friedmann [00:01:03]:
Absolutely. I mean, you can hear listeners that we sort of have the same kind of accent. Interestingly enough, we are actually from the very same area in London. And even though I didn't know Philippa at the time, she went to school down the road from where I was. It's, like, so coincidental. And we know a lot of the same people. It's one of those fun things. So we met over here.
Susan Friedmann [00:01:33]:
We met through the National Speakers Association. Was that correct?
Philippa Gamse [00:01:36]:
Yep. We grew up in the same place in London, but we live on different sides of the US Now.
Susan Friedmann [00:01:41]:
So, yes, yes. She wanted to remove herself from me. There you go, listeners.
Philippa Gamse [00:01:47]:
She really wasn't the west coast.
Susan Friedmann [00:01:48]:
I'm on the east coast. But still, we can connect. It's beautiful. Well, Philippa, you have an incredible background. I'm so impressed with what you've done and what you continue to do. But I want to help our listeners understand a little bit more about web analytics and how they can apply to an author and their book marketing. Because I'm sure listeners are like, okay, she's got a stunning background, but what's she going to help us with? So let's start at the very beginning. As they say, what exactly are web analytics and why should an author care about them?
Philippa Gamse [00:02:28]:
If you have a website, then analytics are tracking tools that can tell you all sorts of things about how many visitors came to your site and what they did at the site. Which pages did they go to? What did they click on, what did they look at, how long did they spend? And what that does is to give you all sorts of really helpful feedback about how your site is doing in engaging those visitors and giving them things that they value, content and so on, which in turn will hopefully lead them to give you the things that you want, the outcomes that you want them to do, like signing up for your newsletter, buying your book, buying other items from you courses, or whatever else it is that you're selling. The thing that's interesting about this is if you think about this historically, before the Internet, we had newspapers and magazines or books, for example. And you could get figures that told you how many people had purchased a magazine or purchased a newspaper or a book or whatever, or sort of watched a TV show, but that didn't really tell you about how much of it they consumed, which pages they saw, which pages they didn't see. And of course, multiple people could have looked at the same newspaper. This is much more detailed information about what's going on and what you're doing that's interesting to people and where that all falls apart.
Susan Friedmann [00:03:48]:
This is fascinating. And I know that there are many tools out there that do this. So what are some of those basic tools that somebody should have on their website?
Philippa Gamse [00:04:00]:
There are a lot of tools, a lot of people have heard about. Things like HubSpot, I tend to use. Everybody I think has heard of Google Analytics, which is free. I also these days use that in conjunction with a tool from Microsoft called Clarity, which is a wonderful. It records actual screen recordings. So it literally records people. Obviously they don't know who you are. It will say, you know, a visitor from, I don't know, New York State or something, but it will actually record their mouse movements as they're scrolling down the screen so you can see exactly where their attention went, what they clicked on, things that they tried to click on, but those things weren't clickable.
Philippa Gamse [00:04:39]:
Which is very interesting because it's. You know, one of the things that gets in a visitor's way is getting frustrated because they try to do something that doesn't work and that can actually be really detrimental to you getting, as I said, the outcomes that you want. The numbers that say so many people saw this page that you're getting from the analytics don't tell you so much about. Yeah, but where did it all fall apart for them? Putting those two tools together, I find incredibly valuable.
Susan Friedmann [00:05:07]:
Now, these aren't things that they would necessarily have to do. Correct. I mean, that scares me, even thinking about how would I even put these on? How would I do that? Talk to us more about how that would really happen. Who would do this?
Philippa Gamse [00:05:24]:
We were talking actually before we started recording, and I was saying, you know, I certainly don't expect many business owners to want to do this for themselves. And it's for me, it's a bit like my accountant. I hate doing accounting, I hate doing tax returns and I'm not expert enough to do that properly. So I go to my accountant and occasionally he says to me, would you like me to explain what I just did? And I usually say, no, just tell me what the bottom line is. The good news is that just to install these tools is very, very simple. If many people these days have, for example, a WordPress site, there's a plugin on WordPress that you can do. You do it once and you can have the tools running. And of course that means that you can easily get somebody else to do that for you who knows how to do it.
Philippa Gamse [00:06:06]:
It's not like you have to have massive amounts of work done. This really shouldn't be an expensive thing. And both of those tools that I mentioned are free to use. Just getting the tool installed shouldn't really.
Susan Friedmann [00:06:18]:
Be a big hassle, from what I understand. They also allow you to see where they spend more time, let's say on a page, or if they just clicked on one thing or just looked at one area and then skipped the rest. Is that correct?
Philippa Gamse [00:06:35]:
Yeah. And that's where, as I said, particularly I find the screen recordings are useful. Because just looking at how long do people spend on a page isn't really helpful because you actually don't know. It's just like the newspaper analogy that I gave a couple of minutes ago. You don't know if that person was actively reading content and looking at the page or whether they're on the page, but they've actually gone away to make a cup of tea. The screen recording does tell you that. And one of the things that I'm noticing a lot these days, especially with a lot of people accessing websites on their mobile phones, is that the pages are getting longer. Because we know that people don't like necessarily to have to press a lot of clicks to go to a different page.
Philippa Gamse [00:07:16]:
So pages are getting longer. But the problem there is that a lot of people don't scroll that far. Your content has to be quite interesting for them to scroll down, down a long page. And again, what these tools can tell us is, on average, for example, how far down a page do people scroll? Because what that means is that if you have really important content at the bottom of the page, and a lot of people make what is honestly a mistake of only giving their major call to action right at the bottom of the page at the end of the content, now, a lot of times will say yes, but Only maybe less than 25% of people have actually ever even seen that. If this is your big call to action, this is the thing that you really want people to do. It doesn't work if only quarter of the people who could see it are actually seeing it in the first place before they even decide whether they want to do it. Things like how long people spend on a page or how many visitors you get is what we kind of call vanity metrics. Right? It's basic stuff that can make you feel good.
Philippa Gamse [00:08:18]:
Oh, look, we got all these visitors last week or last month. But the question is really deeper than that. It's what did they do?
Susan Friedmann [00:08:25]:
Where did they go?
Philippa Gamse [00:08:26]:
Did they find what you have interesting? And again, the whole point of your website from your perspective, is to get the results that you're looking for. Did the visitors, even if there were more of them, go towards creating the results that you wanted them to do? Whether that's again, buy the book or sign up for the newsletter or take a course or whatever it is, or did they not go very far and leave? Or did they try to click on something that didn't work for them so they got annoyed and left. This is really what we're trying to do. It's what is the visitor experience and how is that helping me to grow my business?
Susan Friedmann [00:09:00]:
From what I understand, you put a call to action actually right up front on that. What do they call above the fold on a website? What somebody can see in their screen at any one time. Putting that button if you want them to download a report or sign up for a newsletter or, or yes, I mean, I offer a 20 minute book marketing strategy session. That button is right at the top because if they don't go any further, I just want them to be able to press that button. Would that be a good strategy?
Philippa Gamse [00:09:36]:
Yes, but actually my philosophy is multiple calls to action in the page. Because again, you're absolutely right. And that's why Amazon, for example, have this buy now in one click button right at the top of the item listing. But once they start scrolling again, they're going to lose sight of that. Actually what I like to sort of think about is especially when you have these screen recordings and you can see where people's attention is really being held wherever somebody's likely to be saying, hey, that's interesting, tell me more. You can put a call to action right there. There's nothing wrong with having multiple different calls to action on the same page. And maybe that will allow you to test what kind of wording or what Kind of visual creates the best likelihood that somebody will actually do what you want.
Philippa Gamse [00:10:23]:
You can have a different wording on a button or a different type of click that leads them to the same outcome. But it can be interesting to see which one of those works better.
Susan Friedmann [00:10:32]:
Oh, okay, so that's interesting. So it doesn't actually have to be one specific thing because actually on my site I have a few buttons that say link up for a strategy session. And I think right at the very bottom, if they get that far, there is a free 50 lazy ways to help with your book marketing or something like that. That's sort of a free resource Right at the very bottom. But I don't mention it anywhere else.
Philippa Gamse [00:11:05]:
Right. What I would be doing if I was looking at your sites is to say which are your key calls to action? Which are the ones you really care about? Not the call to action, but the actual outcome. Right. Do you care how many people download that ebook or not? If you do, how well is it working? Where are the current directions to get it? And A, are people seeing that? B, are they clicking on it? And C, if it's not working too well, or even if it is, can we duplicate that somewhere else where it might do better?
Susan Friedmann [00:11:34]:
Fascinating. If there were only a couple of numbers that authors should focus on, what might those two numbers be that would be of most value to them?
Philippa Gamse [00:11:46]:
That's a great question. And honestly the answer is classic consultant response, right? It depends. Depends, because I don't think you should just be measuring a standard set of numbers just because you said that you get some numbers from your VA every week and I don't know if you do anything with them. But the question that you and everybody else should really be asking yourself is, what's the most important things that I want to come out of my website in terms of my goals, the results that I want, and what is making those happen? As I've been saying, and based on that, your most important metrics are going to change because you're going to be focused. You should be focused not just on generic numbers like how many visitors or which pages or whatever. But it's why what was happening? What can I do better? What's not working? You don't want to test everything at once because you'll never focus actually identifying at any one time. You know, what are my 2, 3 top priorities for this site that I can figure out if they're working or not, and if they're not, try to find ways to make them work better or try to diagnose what the problem is. And again, it might be something really simple like people simply aren't seeing that content because they're not scrolling that far.
Philippa Gamse [00:13:01]:
But for everybody, it should be, what's the key thing that I want to happen? How do I figure out if that's happening as well as it should, and what I need to do about it? And that's where your important metrics will fall.
Susan Friedmann [00:13:13]:
Interesting. One of the questions that I often get, Philippa, is should I have a speaker website or a book website? If somebody came to you with that question, how would you answer it?
Philippa Gamse [00:13:29]:
Are you saying, should I make two different websites?
Susan Friedmann [00:13:33]:
What's the choice between the two?
Philippa Gamse [00:13:35]:
The problem with two different websites is that then you have to market them both, and they may well end up competing with each other. Because you're still Susan, right? You're still that person to some extent. I feel like, unless your book is about something completely different from what you speak about. I don't know, you've written a children's book, but you speak about leadership or something. I don't know. If it's all part of who you are as a thought leader, then to me, it all goes together. You have a page about your speaking, and you have a page about the book. But the whole point of the website is I'm a key authority on whatever my topic is that people should know about.
Philippa Gamse [00:14:14]:
And here are all of my different credibility pieces. I mean, that's my approach. And again, part of it is because that means that everything is presented to people together and they can see how it all hangs together. And if you're a speaker, you know, the fact that you have a highly regarded book is really going to help your promotion and your credibility. And again, as I say, it's also because the more websites you have, the more that, in a sense, they're competing with each other to get the right attention. Because your thought leadership content is probably going to be on all of them. And so what's the point of that? To some extent, yes.
Susan Friedmann [00:14:46]:
And I totally agree with that, because you're right. Authors are really not selling books. That's not the business that they're in. The business is in how they can create transformation. And that's going to either come through speaking, training, coaching, consulting. So the book gives them credibility in this marketplace. But I don't see that they're in the business of selling books. And if they are, that's a tough business to be in because very rarely do people get rich on books.
Susan Friedmann [00:15:17]:
Unless, of course, you're a celebrity.
Philippa Gamse [00:15:19]:
I Just came back from London. As you know, one of my good friends over there is quite a well known historical fiction author. I was actually quite stunned when she told me. And she sold books in the hundreds of thousands. But even in that kind of genre, not business books, book sales are declining as well, I guess, because I don't know why, but. And I'm sure you know more about that than I do, I was quite surprised.
Susan Friedmann [00:15:44]:
And people are listening to books too, more. I mean, audiobooks are sort of the number one format that people are looking at now, but doesn't necessarily mean that they wouldn't buy a printed version as well or an ebook version.
Philippa Gamse [00:16:00]:
Right.
Susan Friedmann [00:16:00]:
I often do sometimes the ebook and the printed and the audio, it just depends on the subject matter. Now, if it's fiction, that's a different kettle of fish, so to speak.
Philippa Gamse [00:16:13]:
Yeah.
Susan Friedmann [00:16:15]:
What else should authors know about this environment? What kind of mistakes should they avoid? Or are there myths out there that they should be aware of?
Philippa Gamse [00:16:27]:
As I said, the common mistakes are assuming that you know what's going on because you really don't. Sometimes I get pushed back when I say everybody should have analytics going because if you don't, you really have no clue what's happening with your website, you know, and people will say, yeah, but I'm getting sales, I'm getting leads, so I know it's working. And my pushback on that is normally, yes, okay, but wouldn't you rather get more sales and more leads? I mean, how do you know if you get 10 sales a week but you've had 10,000 visitors, is that actually particularly good? It seems like you can still improve things, you can still improve the experience, you can hopefully still improve outcomes. And the real point as well, that we've talked about mistakes that people make and places where you can lose visitors and things can fall apart. But one of the other things that I find very exciting about analytics is the ability to discover opportunities for new products or services or target markets. And I've worked with, obviously being in the business myself, a number of authors and consultants around this. And so, for example, if you have a lot of content on your site and if you're a thought leader, presumably you should, then you should have a search engine on your site so that this isn't Google, this is a search on your site so that you can help people around specific areas of your content. And that search engine can be absolute goldmine of market research information.
Philippa Gamse [00:17:47]:
When people start using it to say, oh, have you got some content around, you know, X, it tells you what they expect you to be providing. It tells you what they expect your expertise to look like and it tells you what words they use to describe what they think you should be offering. And that's really important because if you're especially. You warned me right ahead of this recording, you said, right, if you use any jargon, I'm going to tell you off. So hopefully I haven't used any jargon.
Susan Friedmann [00:18:17]:
I'm going to ask you to explain it. I wasn't going to tell you off. You never tell, I guess.
Philippa Gamse [00:18:23]:
Right.
Susan Friedmann [00:18:24]:
But you're too precious for that.
Philippa Gamse [00:18:27]:
There are many industries that have jargon and they have their own buzzwords and everything. So what people put into this search engine can be really helpful in showing you whether the people coming to your site understand your jargon or not. And if they're using their words instead of your words to get to what they want. I love this example. It's not an author example, but back in the days when I used to do search engine optimization, which I don't anymore, I got hired by this association of plastic surgeons and they had a member database that people could look up a surgeon in their area. And they said, we want to be number one in Google for the search term rhinoplasty. And I said, well, I'm sure I can probably do that for you pretty easily. And this was a long time ago.
Philippa Gamse [00:19:13]:
Right. Because there isn't going to be a lot of competition for that search term because the average consumer isn't going to put rhinoplasty into Google. Right. They don't know the word because the word they use is nose job. Right. And the association was really upset. Well, because they said, hey, we're professional surgeons. We don't do nose job.
Philippa Gamse [00:19:34]:
We do. And I said, right, but that's not the word that people think of. You can educate them once they get to your site and once they're reading your stuff, but you can't start there. That's what I'm saying about the search engine on your site is that it can tell you what words people are using to describe what they want from you. And that in turn can give you great ideas about new products or services that you can develop, new content that you can develop. I've had clients who've developed courses, ebooks, thought about different sort of target market audiences, people who wanted different things based on this kind of input from their search engine. The analytics is a telling you what's currently happening on your site and where you can improve things. And then potentially it's telling you what else you can do to further develop your business.
Philippa Gamse [00:20:24]:
That part of it I find really quite exciting.
Susan Friedmann [00:20:27]:
Well, that whole idea is very exciting. And then the first thing that comes to mind is how on earth do you go about doing that? Is that like, in these terms, a bot that would do that for you or help you with that, or what they call an agent in AI? I don't know. Where would you begin with this?
Philippa Gamse [00:20:47]:
Oh, you're talking about the.
Susan Friedmann [00:20:49]:
The site searching. Yeah, yeah.
Philippa Gamse [00:20:51]:
No, I mean, these days that should be something that. Presumably you've got a web designer putting together your website.
Susan Friedmann [00:20:57]:
Yeah.
Philippa Gamse [00:20:57]:
When you first put it together. And there's all sorts of technologies now that can do that. Again, a lot of people are using platforms like WordPress that will offer this kind of thing as plugin and so on. So I'm not a designer, so this isn't my area of expertise. But if you're a speaker or a consultant or an author who wants to look good, obviously you want to start out with a decently designed site. Even if you maintain it once it's there, that's something that I would definitely go to the designer to get them.
Susan Friedmann [00:21:26]:
To do and to know. Yes. The kind of questions that people ask or would want to know more about. Because you're right, they use very simple language. So I think your example was brilliant because you're like, oh, well, this is the real term that people should be using. But that's not the term that people necessarily use. It's like ISBN numbers. You know, I know what that is, and people know, well, what is that? I need a number.
Susan Friedmann [00:21:57]:
I need a number for my book. How do I get that number? So that's the kind of thing that they might ask or might want to know more about. Yes. Even though that is an ISBN number or a Library of Congress number, which is an lccn, again, that's jargon in this industry, but the average person doesn't know what that all is. Yeah. This is brilliant. Okay. This is a great time, Philippa, for you to tell our listeners how they can find out more about you, your services, and I believe you have some goodies for them as well.
Susan Friedmann [00:22:39]:
So take it away.
Philippa Gamse [00:22:41]:
Thank you. So, yes, I actually am an author myself. My second book is called Website Wealth. It just came out earlier this year. Website Wealth, A business leader's guide to driving real value through your analytics. So if you've enjoyed this chat that I've had with Susan, the book is designed to help you as a business owner, understand analytics, understand much more in Depth about what you can get out of it, the kinds of things you can learn. It's entirely in English. There is no technical jargon in it.
Philippa Gamse [00:23:06]:
It's got lots and lots of stories and examples from my experience that are designed to inspire you to think if that can happen, maybe that's happening for me, or maybe I can take that idea and use it. So again, website wealth, you can get that at any bookstore. I do have an ebook which gives a few ideas that's a free download that Susan will put on the show Notes. And if anybody's interested, without looking at your analytics, because I kind of have been doing this for so long, one of the other things that I'm offering now is a free 15 minute. I call it an outside in leak check, which is where I'll take a quick look at your site with you on a zoom call and show you some of the areas where, based on what I know, if you're not already looking at your tracking or even if you are, these are the places that I would be looking at for things that might give you really good clues about what's happening with your site as a sort of starting point for thinking about how can we do better, what other ideas can we get. And I'm happy to do that for you as a free service.
Susan Friedmann [00:24:07]:
That's beautiful. I'm going to take advantage of that. So know that, because I don't have a clue. So listeners, I'm in exactly the same boat as you. I and that's one of the main reasons that I wanted Philippa on here because she's got this incredible wealth of information and it's in language that I believe we all understand. The accent may be different, I understand that. But the fact is this is in everyday language and that's so wonderful. And you did that beautifully, Philippa.
Susan Friedmann [00:24:40]:
As you know, we always have our guests leave our listeners with a golden nugget. What's yours?
Philippa Gamse [00:24:49]:
Well, you can probably predict it at this point. I mean, honestly, my entire ethos is if you're not looking at this kind of data, then you really have no idea what's going on with your website. And if your website plays any kind of a role in your business and you put money into it, you put some level of investment into it, then you're honestly flying blind because there are so many things that you can't tell just based on any results that you get or by looking at it from the outside in. If you're not using analytics at all, then please hopefully get some inspiration from this. Interview. It's not that difficult. Get some help, read my book, Talk to anybody who knows how to do it. But stop flying blind.
Susan Friedmann [00:25:29]:
Yes. Yeah. Stop flying blind. Wow. Feeling very guilty at the moment. Well, I know from what people have said. For instance, you know, one of the things that I offer is book marketing, and yet it plays such a small part on my website. And that's something.
Susan Friedmann [00:25:50]:
As I'm going to be redoing, my website is more focused on showing people the book marketing that we do here at Aviva Publishing. I know that that's on the cards. Thank you. This has been amazing. I appreciate you sharing your wisdom and listeners. If your book isn't selling the way you want it or expected to, let's you and I jump on a quick call together to brainstorm ways to ramp up those sales. Because you've invested a whole lot of time, money, and energy, and it's time you got the return you were hoping for. So go to bookmarketingbrainstorm.com to schedule your free call.
Susan Friedmann [00:26:33]:
And in the meantime, I hope this powerful interview sparks some ideas you can use to sell more books. Until next week, here's wishing you much book and author marketing success.
Download Philippa's "Hidden Gems" ebook
Here's how to connect with Philippa:
