Maven Marketing with Brandon Welch

How Strong Is Your Business? (3 Google Analytics Clues)

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Most businesses think branding is vague, expensive, and impossible to measure.
It’s not.

In this Maven Monday episode, Brandon and Caleb break down what brand strength actually looks like in the real world, and how to see it clearly inside your own data. 

They walk through the three Google Analytics metrics that reveal whether your business is becoming the one people think of first… or just another option in the pile.

You’ll learn why being easy to remember makes every other marketing dollar work harder, how direct traffic and conversion rates quietly signal trust, and why long-term growth shows up in trends…not spikes.

If you’ve ever wondered whether your marketing is building real momentum or just buying attention, this episode gives you the framework to tell the difference.

Our Website: https://frankandmaven.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frankandmavenmarketing/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@frankandmaven
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/frank-and-maven/

Host: Caleb Host
Executive Producer: Carter Breaux
Audio/Video Producer: Nate the Camera Guy

Do you have a marketing problem you'd like us to help solve? Send it to MavenMonday@FrankandMaven.com!

Get a copy of our Best-Selling Book, The Maven Marketer Here: https://a.co/d/1clpm8a

Do you have a marketing problem you'd like us to help solve? Send it to MavenMonday@FrankandMaven.com!

Get a copy of our Best-Selling Book, The Maven Marketer Here: https://a.co/d/1clpm8a

Brandon Welch:

The super not so secret thing we do here at Frank and Maven. The number one thing we do is we make our clients the one that people think of first. We make them the household name in their market. And when that happens, man, everything else gets ridiculously profitable in marketing. Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. I'm your host, Brandon Welch, and I'm here with Caleb. How are you getting strong this year, AG?

Caleb Agee:

Hey, uh, you know, I was doing five days a week on workouts. I'm going three. Boom. Actually. You're getting all swole. I'm getting and then protein.

Brandon Welch:

Protein.

Caleb Agee:

Protein intake. I was low on that. You know? You get in the moment. Were you actually serious about how am I getting strong physically? Okay. I was sometimes I don't know what the prompt is. Um strength of mind, strength of being. Yes. Um, but physically that's what I'm doing. Yes. Just a three-day show, and you're looking good. Three-day workout and soccer. Yeah. I do play some recreational adult men's soccer.

Brandon Welch:

And if Caleb's gone for 12 to 18 weeks, you'll know he blew out his ACL. So speaking speaking of, I don't want to speak that over. Happens to the best of us. Yeah, well, you know what? Patty Mahomes. So I'm on the same level. Speaking of strength, we are talking about brand strength today. Uh, the concept of branding, um, and even that word gets thrown around as just like that's a lot of hot air. And uh, as you know, we are the anti, we're the antithesis of hot air. We are here to help you eliminate waste in marketing, get clarity so you can grow your business and achieve that big dream that we're all after. And so when when this concept of branding, I think a lot of us have already become skeptical of it. Um, just because we've had so many people say that to us and then things didn't happen, they said, you know, spend this money, it's just for your brand. And so we're really kind of against that uh that category of of speak, if you will.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

Brandon Welch:

However, um, there is very uh there is very real uh value tied to how strong um your brand is, your brand name, your company.

Caleb Agee:

Yeah, and yes, most of the time branding is is given this ambiguous approach. And if you want to see some of our episodes on tomorrow marketing, you can go watch some of our previous episodes if this is your first time or you haven't seen very much of us. Um, but you can measure your brand strength with Google Analytics.

Brandon Welch:

Yes.

Caleb Agee:

And that's at least in part.

Brandon Welch:

Yeah. So so for for all for anybody who's been like, oh, what is brand? And I just I just need to put money in and get money out of marketing. Well, what you need to know is that the strength of your brand um or the memorability or the feel-good factor of who you are, what we call uh is have you earned the tomorrow customer. Um there are some actual data points that you can look at and go, okay, how is that in relation to either my market uh or who I used to be and is that improving? Because when that happens, when you are easy to think of and people feel good about you, uh you become easier to buy from. And the the soup, the super not so secret thing we do here at Frank and Maven, the number one thing we do is we make our clients the one that people think of first. We make them the household name in their market. And when that happens, um, man, everything else gets ridiculously profitable in marketing. That's these are our 10, 20, 50 million dollar companies that have had just explosive growth doing it that way.

Caleb Agee:

So yeah, and these are lagging measures. So I do want to say if you start uh I'll use the bad word, branding today, or if you start tar tomorrow marketing today, you won't be able to log into analytics tomorrow and see these things change. These happen uh real change happens over years, not even months most of the time.

Brandon Welch:

So but that yeah. If you have a if you have a decent website and you have Google Analytics installed, there are three things I want you to look at. This will give you an idea of where you are, okay? So um the first one is direct traffic. Uh, one of the biggest markers of it are people thinking of your brand when it comes time to buy what you do is how many people are coming to you directly. Um this shows up in the um acquisition tab of Google Analytics 4, GA4, which is the modern uh current day version of Google Analytics. Yeah. And uh it'll it'll sort out not just what is your website traffic, but how much are you getting from direct, which means somebody entered your your URL. They went straight to you.

Caleb Agee:

They went to frankandmaven.com. Right.

Brandon Welch:

Um they either saw your ad and print or they remembered your URL because you've done such a great job of helping them remember that with a good, consistent call to action, or maybe a jingle, or maybe just really high visibility, or maybe just a really simple and good URL. Um, the higher percentage that direct traffic is of your overall traffic is a really good sign of brand strength.

Caleb Agee:

Yeah, and watching that trend go up over time will show you that your brand strength has has continued to grow up. Uh, great quote by Marty Newmeyer. He said, the best brands don't have to introduce themselves. And that's the the problem. Most of the time we think about, I think Google called it the zero moment of truth. And they tried to distill this down to one moment of decision. We know that it's a hundred, two hundred moments of little micro moments that come down to a zero moment of truth. And um, that zero moment of truth is when they whip out their phone or they hit a new tab in their browser. What are they gonna do? Are they going to search for your category or are they gonna type in your name? And this is this is where we're talking about. When they type in your name, when they type in your URL, you know your strength of your brand is winning.

Brandon Welch:

Yeah. So you're gonna look at direct traffic, and what you want to see is a pretty significant um portion of your overall traffic um coming from people who just remember you directly. We have some clients that have as much as half of their traffic from direct. Um, and uh a little caveat here, you if if you're in any sort of modern advertising, you are probably paying for some sort of traffic. If you were doing any amount of uh Google ads or search engine marketing or Facebook ads where you're you're directing people to your website to make a decision, um the obviously the more you spend there, the more that's going to be a percentage of your traffic. But I pulled uh just one case study. This is actually pretty common amongst all of our clients, but um, this client spends a little over$100,000 a year on paid traffic in a very competitive home improvement category. And they are getting, because of the strength of how they've built um likeness and memorability of their name and their company, they are getting more uh or sorry, the same amount of direct traffic, free traffic, traffic didn't cost them a penny as they are paying$100,000 for. So they're doubling their fun.

Caleb Agee:

Yeah.

Brandon Welch:

Uh just by being a remarkable company.

Caleb Agee:

Yeah. And I we're gonna talk about this in a second, but think about what that traffic does. The people who typed in your website.com, think about what that traffic does after they open your website versus the ones that came from organic or paid search.

Brandon Welch:

So all the ways you get traffic to your website are constantly changing. Search traffic is constantly changing, it's always getting more expensive. Social traffic is constantly changing, it's always getting more expensive. And your competitors, a bigger competitor, can disrupt you instantly. But if you are earning the traffic long before they ever have to go to the search engine, you win. You won before you had to buy the click, you won before you had to track conversion rate or ROI. You won because you were remarkable. And the companies that are remarkable enough to have their name and their website remembered long before anybody enters the search engine are the ones that grow the fastest because they have to put the least amount of money into marketing to get a bigger result. So uh that's what we want you guys to have happen. And so basically, baseline is like, is it happening for you already? And I would want you to have at least 15 to 20 percent uh direct traffic before I would before I would let up on the idea of like you're you're not well branded enough, right? Yeah. So um uh it's there's there's a little bit of sort of relative math. Um, but we're gonna talk about this next one that'll be another indicator of what that traffic is worth to you.

Caleb Agee:

Yeah. So point number two uh is what is your conversion rate? And so in analytics, uh you can build in if you don't already, this can sometimes take a little bit of an extra step depending on your website. Um, but analytics can measure key events or conversions, and that could be like a form fill or a phone call on your website. Um, sometimes it could be engagement or a purchase, also if you have an e-commerce site.

Brandon Welch:

So a lot of times it's not just did somebody get to your site, it's do they trust you or feel good enough to take the next step. Um, most business owners are really surprised uh when I tell them, hey, 90 plus percent of your traffic didn't do a single thing. They didn't they look they didn't take an action. And that sounds really, really bad, but the average is actually like only 3% of people uh take action on a service-based website. 3% of visits, I should say. Yeah. So a 3% conversion rate is kind of average. Um, a really like a baseline for us to even feel halfway good about um do people trust this client and are we saying the right things on the site is a 5% uh floor. Yeah. Meaning at least five out of a hundred people that came to your site took the next action by either filling a form or giving you a call. Now, if you don't even know what that number is, if you haven't had a marketing person read that back to you, you want to find yourself a nerd and you want to say, hey, set up my conversion tracking. And you just want to track the rate at which form fills and phone calls happen on your website. That's the that's the metric we're talking about. It's a ratio, it's a percentage. What percentage of the time when somebody visited did they take the next step? You could also track things like downloads, like if you have a guide or a pricing sheet or something like that, uh, but you want to track those goals independently. And when we're talking about conversion right now, it's the rate at which they took the next step to do business with you.

Caleb Agee:

Yeah. And what you want to do is start from a high level, all the traffic on my site, which of them, you know, if a hundred people visited my my site from any source, how many of them are gonna convert? Yeah. Uh, and then what you can do to you can get real nerdy about this, but you can go down to traffic sources is usually a pretty strong indicator. So if you have a traffic campaign on um meta ads, Facebook and Instagram, you're gonna want to see how that's performing. Are they converting into leads? Yes. If you are running Google search ads or any sort of paid search, you want to see are those people converting. If you're running, well, if you are getting direct traffic, which we just talked about in the first set, those people should be converting at the highest rate. Yeah. The highest rate. If they're not, something's going on. Um, if you have organic traffic, a lot of those could be branded terms, but then also industry-based, service-based terms, yeah, you want those to be converting well too. And so we're looking at uh we want to build your direct traffic because if somebody typed in your name in the URL bar, they will or should convert at a very, very high rate because they already know you and they should be trusting you because they know you. Yeah. Um, if that's low, you probably haven't given them a good opportunity to convert.

Brandon Welch:

Yeah. Or they just they're still shopping. Uh somebody who says no, said who does who doesn't convert, who becomes part of that 97% that leaves, that person is saying, I'm not ready. And so if your brand and everything about you, your values, your service, your clarity clarify uh that you are the right provider long before they get to your website and you get a higher rate of them than the average competitor saying, Yep, I'm ready to go, that conversion rate is the ultimate leverage on your marketing. A website with a 10% conversion rate is twice as profitable as a website with a 5% conversion rate without spending a single dollar on advertising. And that is what we want to do. By the way, it is not uncommon for our clients to have a well above 10% conversion rate. Yeah. And you think about it, when they came in the door here, they had a that three, sometimes two, three percent conversion rate. Yeah. And just after a year or so of making them really well known and making people like them with these relational campaigns that we talk to you guys about every week on this podcast, uh, that tomorrow customer, just by earning that tomorrow customer, they are getting the business at two, three, four, sometimes ten times the rate of their competitors. And it's no wonder that they can scale up that their advertising dollar goes multiple times farther, and they can afford to steal market share at a rate that nobody else can really compete with just because they did a few things right.

Caleb Agee:

Yeah.

Brandon Welch:

So um, that conversion rate is one of the strongest indicators of your brand. And if you do not have a 5% or better conversion rate, you have work to do, not in the website department, not in the advertising department, but in the brand department. And you need to make people know you, like you, and trust you better.

Caleb Agee:

Yeah. One last thing before we move to point three, um, just in case we didn't say it clearly, to find this, you go to reports, engagement, and then there's one called conversions. Or if you want to look at it by traffic source, you can go to reports acquisition, traffic acquisition, that'll show you direct, social, all those. And then you add a column for session conversion rate. Yeah. Um, and so you should be able to see that in two different ways. Um, but I just want to make sure you're able to find that when you get in your analytics.

Brandon Welch:

To all my advertising people out there, my my salespeople, my consultants, that is the place you should start with your clients. You should help them find their conversion rate. And if it's low, it's like we have work to do in making you more memorable, more likable, more trustable.

Caleb Agee:

Yes. Yeah, and and that website is the finish line of all of that. If it doesn't connect, if it doesn't connect to the brand you're building, that can also be a detriment because you're splitting your votes there.

Brandon Welch:

Yep. So the conversion rate tells you I believe you, I understand what you do, you're not risky, and I'm ready to give you a shot. So, all right, last thing. Uh, Google Analytics. Um if your website traffic goes up 20% year over year, you are probably on a trajectory for your business revenue to go up year over year. So long as you're minding your sales process, so long as you are minding a customer service process, so long as you have the good stuff inside your four walls, if more people are coming to your website, that probably means more people are coming to your business. And so we talk about this one. If you want to forecast your growth, look at your year-over-year trends. This happens ever so slowly. You don't you don't see it overnight. But what's been happening the last 12, 18, 24 months is that there's been a trend of people who arrive at you as a possible solution and that is captured and represented by the traffic on your website. And so if you're watching that slowly go up, that's really good.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

Brandon Welch:

Obviously. Um I I looked at a client the other day. This is a totally another case case study for tomorrow marketing, but we started a really, really strong um tomorrow marketing campaign in the city of Atlanta, the one of the biggest media cities in the country. Top five. A year and a half ago, their traffic, their legit traffic is up a hundred and ninety percent. And guess what their business did? It's on the track to do about that type of growth this year. That's crazy. It definitely did it at about 90% last year.

Caleb Agee:

Yeah.

Brandon Welch:

And so, um, and I'm talking multiple millions of dollars in increased sales. So this is real, real stuff. But um, if you want a forecast of like, am I going the right direction, if you were to go and look at year over year traffic, especially in organic and direct, paid traffic can be up or down based on budget and some other like competitive factors, but in organic and direct traffic year over year, if that's going down, that is not a good thing for you. That you should be concerned about that. And before you say, Okay, well, I gotta go find a marketer and get it to go up overnight, that is a slow-moving thing.

Caleb Agee:

It is.

Brandon Welch:

And so consistency, re repetition, repa, repetition. I got it. Yeah, uh, consistency, repetition, uh, a consistent set of values, your um, your core message, what you believe in, how you talk about what you do, the clarity you provide, the feel-good you provide, the emotions you provide in all of your brand interactions, from the ad they see on TV, radio, or Facebook to how you answer the phone, to what your trucks look like, to uh how you're represented in the community, to what the word is on the street about you via your reputation on online and what the people at church say about you, all of those things equate to a leverage point that if you have that, it it'll start showing up in this year-over-year growth. So if you have it, I'm happy for you. Two thumbs up, keep listening to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Uh, we're gonna help you keep doing that. If you don't, uh start listening to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Yeah, we're gonna start listening, uh, you know, start start acting on some of the stuff we're talking about. Because, guys, this is um the stuff we're teaching is remarkably simple. But when you enter um emotional decision making and all of the distractions that exist in marketing, it does not necessarily become easy. It is simple, not easy. But we want to teach you the simple things that if you just do a few things over and over well, you will have this year-over-year growth, you will have this increased conversion rate, you will have this increased amount of people that when the when they suddenly need what you do, they go, ah, that's your company. They didn't go looking for a bunch of your competitors on the same page, they went to you. And that is the magic behind tomorrow marketing, and now you know how to find if that is working well for you.

Caleb Agee:

Yeah, I want to emphasize this is the same report, which is under reports acquisition, traffic acquisition. Um, the other thing I'd I'd point out, if your big numbers are going up and your budget has gone up on anything paid search or paid social or whatever, paid traffic of any kind, if that's climbing, you do need to filter that out because if uh if you want to see true, you know, growth year over year, um, you can include those and say, yes, that's going up because I'm paying for more. But you can also see the trends of the other sources that were unpaid and see that those are going up as well. We've said this several times, but you will see this growth in year over year, not month over month. Seasonal trends will cause this month over month thing to be risky, scary. You'll have a cold January and you'll it'll make you freak out and you'll make an emotional decision. That's not the reality. We need to be looking at the long term. If you've got years and years and years, you can compare data over all of that time.

Brandon Welch:

A year over year trend is really the only one I trust. Uh, so look at those, look at those things. Take a take uh some time with your website nerd and say, hey, help me with these three metrics conversion rate, direct traffic, your and year over year growth. And uh you'll have a pretty good idea for how well you are earning market share or hopefully not losing it. Um and if you need help with that, we would love to help you in the Maven Marketing Mastermind. Just go to Mavenmethodtraining.com, sign up for that. You get live advice from Caleb and I and the rest of the team here. We will workshop your business with you and other really smart people, really smart business owners. Uh, or continue to listen to the Maven Marketing Podcast. We will be back here every single Monday answering real life marketing questions because marketers who cannot teach you why are just fancy lies. Have a great week.