Brilliant Ideas

#28: A Beginner’s Guide to Website Analytics That Help Your Business Grow with Philippa Gamse

• Alyssa Bellisario • Season 1 • Episode 28

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Navigating website analytics often feels like decoding a foreign language, full of charts, graphs, and numbers that seem important but leave most small business owners scratching their heads. 

What does all this data mean for your bottom line?

Philippa, a digital marketing veteran with 25 years of experience transforming raw data into revenue growth, cuts through the confusion with remarkable clarity. She explains that the true challenge isn't collecting data (tools like Google Analytics do that for free), but interpreting it in ways that create meaningful value for your specific business goals. Before diving into any analytics dashboard, she urges entrepreneurs to first clarify exactly what they want visitors to do on their website—beyond just making purchases or completing lead forms. Are they watching your videos? Signing up for newsletters? Following you on social media? These secondary objectives matter tremendously for your business pipeline.

The conversation shifts from theoretical to tactical as Philippa shares real-world examples from her client work, including a manufacturing company that discovered why their conversion rates were plummeting despite steady traffic. By analyzing site search data, they uncovered customers searching for obsolete part numbers and leaving when no results appeared, even though the products still existed under updated numbers. This simple insight led to an easy fix that recovered significant revenue. She challenges common assumptions about analytics benchmarks, arguing that comparing yourself against vague industry standards misses the point entirely. Instead, track your performance over time against metrics that specifically matter to your business model.

Connect with Philippa Gamse:

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Alyssa:

But I think where small business owners really struggle is interpreting the data in order for it to mean something of value to their business. Welcome to Brilliant Ideas, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of some of the most inspiring digital products created by solopreneurs just like you. I'm your host, alyssa, a digital product strategist who helps subject matter experts grow their business with online courses, memberships, coaching programs and eBooks. If you're a solopreneur with dreams of packaging your expertise into a profitable digital product, then this is the podcast for you. Expect honest conversations of how they started, the obstacles they overcame, lessons learned the hard way and who faced the same fears, doubts and challenges you're experiencing, from unexpected surprises to breakthrough moments and everything in between. Tune in, get inspired and let's spark your next big, brilliant idea. Website analytics the one thing that either makes you super curious or overwhelmed by what it all means. Welcome back to the Brilliant Ideas Podcast.

Alyssa:

Today, I'm excited to introduce Philippa, a digital marketing veteran who spent the last 25 years turning data into growth. She spots these hidden gems that boost revenue and cut wasted spending. She's helped generate hundreds of millions of dollars, so she knows exactly how to turn numbers into opportunities. Get ready to dive into her world of website analytics. Let's get started. Welcome to the show, philippa. Thanks for being here.

Philippa:

Hey, alyssa, great to hear from you.

Alyssa:

So website analytics, I find that there's two types of business owners that I've come across. There are some businesses who would rather outsource someone to handle the analytics than have to learn and interpret the data themselves, but then there are other business owners who want to learn how to interpret their own analytics so that they can make better informed decisions around their business. Now, for the majority of businesses, most people don't seek out a degree or go through an entire certification on Google Analytics, so it does make sense at some degree that there is going to be a bit of confusion as to what they should be tracking. So if they're visiting their analytics for their website with so many graphs, charts, stats and numbers, where should they start?

Philippa:

Yeah, it's a great question and I think I should say immediately that if you would prefer to outsource it to somebody who knows what they're doing, as the business owner or decision maker, I don't think that's terrible, as long as you choose the right person. Because I have no idea how to do my taxes, I outsource that to a good accountant, right? But this piece about where do you start? So yes, when you log into an analytics tool, you usually see a ton of charts and graphs and stuff. And what do you do with it? Because it can be really overwhelming.

Philippa:

The answer is you've got to start with your business, I mean, which you do know about because you're a business owner. So the whole point is to figure out what is it your business is really trying to do with your website. What are the outcomes that you're looking for? Where do you want people to go? What do you want them to see? How do you want them to interact with you? And to get really clear about that and most people focus on the obvious, which is, if you're selling anything or you've got a lead generation site, you want them to either buy or fill in the lead form. Right, that's the ultimate major goal, but it's important to remember that you've probably got other things going on. So, for example, you might have videos or podcasts, like this one, that you want them to listen to or watch. Are they doing that? You might want them to be signing up for your newsletter. Are they doing that? You might want them to be connecting with you on social media. Are they doing that? So, thinking about not only the major goal of the site, but all the other goals, everything that people can and should do on your website. Now, when you've got that clear, then you can start saying well, is that happening? So, where are those points of interaction? And you know. So the metrics that you should look for can really go beyond how many visitors did we get this week? Because that's not necessarily a helpful metric. I mean, obviously, if you've got no visitors, that's a helpful metric, because, yeah, that's not good. But once you're getting some traffic, you know, just saying we got more visitors this week than we did last week is only the beginning of the story, because then you want to be asking well, so what? Were they the right kind of visitors? Did they do the kinds of things that we want them to do? Because tons and tons of visitors who come to your website and sort of take one look or walk away are also not used to you, right? So, really thinking very specifically about things that you want to know about, there's no point measuring for the sake of it. So you want to be measuring stuff that you're going to be doing something about.

Philippa:

So if you have a lead generation form, for example, and nobody's filling it in, why are they not filling it in? That's where you want to go. So is that because they don't see the form? So if your lead generation form is right at the bottom of a very long page, one of the things that analytics will tell you is how far down the page do they scroll? If they never actually scroll, so people aren't engaged by your content on a very long page, they're going to leave it right. So anything that's below where they typically scroll is not going to get seen. So maybe it's that simple. Your form just isn't being seen. If it is being seen and people start filling it in and then they stop another big clue that, and again, you can track that with a proper analytics package.

Philippa:

You know, did they start filling in a form but not complete it? Well, maybe your form's too long. People hate filling in long forms, right? The longer the form, the less likely they are to complete it. So if you can see a lot of instances where people start filling in a form and stop, what's going on there? Is there a particular question that they all stop at? Maybe you shouldn't be asking that question right now, right? Is it just that it's clearly too long? Yeah, what's going on? Is it a question that I have to think so hard about that I can't be bothered, so I don't, right. So so, thinking about the things that you're trying to make happen and then following through with well, are they happening? And then trying to tease into well, if they're not, why not?

Alyssa:

You know, that's what we're trying to do here. Okay, I like that approach. That was a very long answer too. No, that makes sense. But I like what you said about points of interaction and I think it is very unique to every business, depending on what you offer, what services you have, if you have a podcast, if you don't. Getting clear about the outcomes first. So that does make sense.

Alyssa:

And then looking at all the other little goals that I haven't really thought of that also matter in getting closer to your end goal, which is obviously lead generating or whatever it is for your business. And then looking at the traffic, but even more than that, looking at the specifics of, like your sales page and how many people like what is the time spent on that website or on that sales page and does it go to the next checkout or do they take the next step? And if they don't, why Start asking those questions? Now, do you track this on like a spreadsheet or do you have like, do you fill it out first of what you want to track, and then you go kind of like daily, weekly, monthly. So like what metrics do you think?

Philippa:

are most important, that we should be tracking on the daily, weekly or monthly. So when I work with a client, I mean, yes, I well, the first thing I do is sit down with the business owner and talk about their business, just like we've just talked about, I mean, without ever looking at the analytics. Right, what's going on? What do you want to happen? Who are your audience? That kind of stuff right, what are you doing to track to get traffic, et cetera, et cetera? Right, then we can put together a plan based on that. And, yes, that, and yes, I do sort of make a spreadsheet of what am I tracking and why, just because I think it's good documentation. But what should you track? As I said, I really think this depends on what the answers to those questions that we just asked are. And one thing that people do that really doesn't make sense is to track absolutely everything they possibly can. So people will make laundry lists of metrics and go after all of them, and the point is so what you know? If you can't say so, what? Then there's no point doing it, because you've got to be doing it for a reason Like what am I going to do with this information? Now I have it. If it's just a nice to know, okay, fine, but so what? Right? So, and if you find something so you know we just talked about a couple of examples is is the form that they want to fill in? We want them to fill in on the call to action that we want to click on way down the page and nobody's getting that far. So you can track, like I think I said, how far down the page people go. Um, so you know, we come up with a theory that people aren't clicking on it. Right, so it must be. Maybe it's too far down the page people go. So you know, we come up with a theory that people aren't clicking on it. Right, so it must be. Maybe it's too far down the page and people aren't getting there. And we can see that people aren't getting there because we can see how far they're scrolling. Okay, now we have a theory.

Philippa:

So what we want to do now is test whether that theory is right by moving the call to action, or rather maybe even duplicating it. There's absolutely no reason, no problem with having more than one on the same page, right? So maybe we add that thing. We want them to click on a bit further up the page. Maybe we keep it at the bottom of the page, but we add another one within the area that we know people are scrolling. Now do we get more clicks? Right, that's how you know we've got.

Philippa:

We know that there's a problem, we've identified a potential solution or a way to approach it. Then we have to test it. We have to try and see if it's working. Now, if we're measuring 50,000 different things at once and we're trying to solve for all of them at the same time, obviously it's a mess. I said 50,000, I should have done that. It's obviously a ridiculous exaggeration. But even 20 or 30 things at once right, because you want to know. We moved this and it seems to have made a difference. If you've moved 10 other things at the same time, it's much harder to know which one of those is working and which aren't. Okay, so, very focused tracking. That's going to allow you to make specific changes and test them. And once you know that you've got that right, move on to the next thing. Okay, it's a slower burn, but it's a much more effective approach.

Alyssa:

I like that. I like what you said about a slower burn, because it is, it is true. I mean, I think this whole idea of trial and error like we're trying to somehow avoid this trial and error because it takes too much time, it's too time consuming, everybody's looking for those quick wins and I feel like the analytics part, you can't rush because it's all a numbers game and it's also you have to figure out what works, because for someone else's checkout page, whoever lands on their page might be different than yours, and so I think this is where it comes. There's unique. We need to have a plan that's very unique to our business.

Alyssa:

And it's one thing to have all these numbers recorded and logged and it's great to have all this data, but I think where small business owners really struggle is interpreting the data in order for it to mean something of value to their business.

Alyssa:

Like, for an example, recording how long people spend visiting your website and then comparing that to the standard of what it should be and then knowing how to fix it. So, similar to what you just said about you know having that theory, then testing it and then reviewing it, analyzing and see if it moves the needle. So then before, at the part where they're trying to interpret, to see, like, what does the data mean against the standard. I think there's a gap there as to like how do you? How do you like? Theories are just theories, like we don't even know if that's correct or if we're interpreting the data correctly. So can you give just some I guess just some advice as to like, for someone who is new to this, how do you come up with a conclusion that this might be the problem, or is it all just really based on guessing?

Philippa:

Well, I mean, obviously it's a mixture. Look, if you've got a broken link, you've got a broken link right, easy to fix. Beyond that, you know, sometimes things can be obvious. I mean, I'm actually hopefully bringing a book out in the next couple of months that's aimed at business owners and decision makers in exactly this kind of manner. So not talking about the technology, but talking about how you think about your business in this context and, for example, the story in there is about using your site search engine, where you have a lot of content. It's got a lot of stories in it and examples from my own client experience.

Philippa:

So, for example, I know this isn't your audience, but just as an example, I had a manufacturing client who sold a lot of parts different component parts for equipment and over time the part numbers would change and so their sales were declining and they couldn't understand why, because they were getting visitors but their conversion rates were going down quite a lot. And we analyzed the site search traffic so you can tell what people put into the search engine. So this is a search engine that's on your site, not Google, and we noticed that a lot of people you know they thought they knew the part number that they wanted. So they were putting it in, but it was an obsolete part number and so the search engine was coming back and saying sorry, we haven't got that. And of course that basically says go away, we can't help you. There was nothing else, it wasn't doing anything else, right, it was just saying sorry, we haven't got that. So they were leaving.

Philippa:

End of sales opportunity. And of course the part number has changed, but the part still exists. So you know, then I mean the fixes. Then becomes obvious right, ie, you need to build a table that translates the old part numbers onto the new part numbers and then says to the visitor hey, you know, the part number has changed. Here it is would you like to buy it? Okay, so it's not rocket science. Once you've identified the problem, but without having done that study of the search engine and got that insight, we wouldn't have realized why people were leaving.

Alyssa:

Okay, so just start with looking at what you think might be wrong.

Philippa:

You know you're looking for clues. I mean, you know you've got a problem and in this case your problem is that, although your traffic isn't going down, your conversion rates are, so some things are right. So what's going on? And then you've got to yeah, there is a certain amount of theorizing in there, obviously because you've got to look at, well, what could it be.

Philippa:

But the site said if you have a lot of content on your site, you really should have a search engine, because what you can get out of that is absolute gold in terms of what people look for, how they describe what they look for which can give you a lot of insights into the words that your customers use, as opposed to the words that you use, because often in industries with a lot of geek speak, the question that's really important is does your market speak the same geek speak that you do? Do they understand your technical terminology Right? Because if they don't, they're often not able to find stuff that they should be able to find because they don't know the right word that you're using for it. That's a great insight. It's also the search engine is fantastic. It's also a wonderful source of ideas for new products and services, and your audience makes digital products like eBooks.

Philippa:

I've got a story in my book about creating eBooks based on clear demand for content based on searches in the search engine. Creating eBooks based on clear demand for content based on searches in the search engine Right? So people are looking for content which is within your area of expertise, that they're getting a good idea of, because they're seeing what the content is that you've got. But they asked something that you haven't yet got anything about and boom, there's a market research idea that you could turn into another product, and I mean, I again have stories of literally doing that. So the thing I love about analytics is that it can help you to not only find out what's going wrong, but also to give you ideas for moving forward and growing, as I said, with opportunities for new product services and new markets, as I said, with opportunities for new product services and new markets Makes sense, and this is a little bit left center, but do you use ChatGPT to help you do any comparisons with data analytics?

Alyssa:

Or I've seen some people, some creators, do this, where they put in their data in ChatGPT and then it'll give out suggestions.

Philippa:

Do you use ChatGPT with your own clients or in your business at all? Actually, I don't particularly like ChatGPT, but as a specific tool I actually prefer I mean, my favorite, actually, ai tool is Claude. But I think that AI can be really great in doing some number crunching, especially if you've got big data sets right so it can look for trends and patterns. And you know tools like Google Analytics have already got AI built in to do that. And it's wonderful because it can, you know you can say can you take this and show it as a graph, and so it can do visualization and save me tons of money doing that kind of stuff.

Philippa:

But I do have my doubts about chat, gdp or AI when you get to that piece that I'm saying is the so what? Because then you've got to take into account the specifics of the business, that specific business right, the things that they're trying to do, their markets and so on, any constraints that there might be at this time. You know AI is learning from what it finds. So I think that I'm not sure that I'm yet ready to say AI can replace me.

Alyssa:

No, that makes sense. I mean there are certain things, obviously. I mean it depends on the prompts and what you give it and all those things. But I also think that, as someone who is a web server data analyst who specializes in it, no, you cannot be replaced, because you're the one that's really going to, you know, because you have really unique expertise, and I feel like AI can only go so far.

Philippa:

Yeah, like I said, it's really good all the basic stuff and I can stop having to worry about doing that and sort of saying what's the trend here and again. You know you have to be careful about the way you ask your questions so you don't introduce bias into the answer. So, yeah, and actually can I just push back on one other thing that you said yeah, which is the average in your? A lot of people like benchmarks, right, what's the average in my industry? So I actually got asked the other day by a business owner you know what's the average engagement time for a piece of content like this? And I hate that question. I mean, I hate the question but I think it's not a helpful question for a specific business, for an individual business, because you don't know what you're actually comparing with Sometimes.

Philippa:

I mean, engagement time on a page is very difficult to measure. In analytics you can also get along with the analytics usage recordings. So you know, for example, there's a HubSpot or Microsoft Clarity. You know they will actually do screen recordings of how people move around a page, which can be really helpful. Because one thing you don't know about the engagement time is you know, did I get a phone call while I was on this page and I stopped for five minutes to talk to somebody on the phone and then I came back to the page and it's recorded that five minutes. So you think, oh, wow, this person is really interested in this page. But I'm actually not, because you don't know was I proactively consuming that content or not.

Philippa:

And sometimes, you know, long time spent on a website can be because somebody can't find what they're looking for and they're kind of searching for it.

Philippa:

Sometimes a very short time spent on a website can be because somebody found exactly what they were looking for, really quickly, fulfilled a call to action, gave you know, did what the business owner wanted and left, which is a highly successful visit that didn't take long at all.

Philippa:

So you know I, and the same for marketing. You know people say, well, what's what's, what's the average amount of traffic or something like that. Right, and again, you don't know, when you see those benchmarks, how well other sites are marketing themselves. You know what their budget is, maybe for advertising et cetera. So I mean, industry benchmarks may be interesting up to a point, maybe it gives you some sort of idea, but I do think that it's much more useful to benchmark yourself. Ie when you start really taking a serious interest in a given metric, like engagement or traffic from specific sources and so on, to take a benchmark, at that point, take a measure, you know, say this is what we're getting now, and then let's see what we're doing a month from now and three months from now and so on, and see if we're doing better.

Alyssa:

I do agree with that. Lots of clients have also asked me like what's this industry standard? And it is hard to compare because there are like millions in your industry and it's really hard because it's not very unique, very generic standard conversion rates or things like that. And yeah, I agree with that, Like compare against your own data. But the first step is to start tracking some of that data.

Philippa:

So what would you say? And again, you know we go back to the so what? So what are you going to do with that information? Anyway, the industry standard you're doing better than the industry standard. What does that mean? Right, Should you just relax and stop worrying about everything. You're doing worse than the industry standard. What does that mean? Maybe you're brand new and you need to get some search engine traction. I mean, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're actually either very businesses or newer businesses, or we don't know what level they are, how many years they've been in business for.

Alyssa:

So that doesn't really give us a snapshot either. So what would you say? We've kind of come to our next, to take the first step in their business.

Philippa:

So what would you say is one tip, strategy, mantra or advice that you can share with my listeners of what their next step should be, of what their next step should be Well, honestly, I would say, if you have a website, either if you don't have analytics at all or if you're not seriously looking at your analytics, it's time to start Because, honestly, if you have a website that plays any kind of role in your business, if you're not doing this, you're shooting in the dark. With everything you're doing, you don't know for sure how many people are coming to your doing. You don't know for sure how many people are coming to your site. You don't know what they're doing. Even if you're getting a few leads, you could be getting potentially a whole lot more.

Philippa:

So it doesn't make sense to me to put time and money into creating a website and then not figuring out whether or not it's doing what you wanted it to do. So make a start. Google Analytics, for example, is free, um. Put it on your site and it's. Again, it's not that difficult and again, you can. You can even if you don't want to hire somebody like me on a long-term basis. You can get somebody to help you with that. If you don't know how to do it, it's not really that difficult, um, and then just start looking at some basic things that will help you, again, allied with what you're trying to do with your site. That will get you on the road to starting to have some ideas about what's working and what's not working, and where you may be spending a load of money on social media ads or something like that that, honestly, isn't paying off for you.

Philippa:

Makes sense, amazing. And where can people connect with you after? Yeah, like, where can people connect with you online and on their website? There is this free ebook which has it's called Five Hidden Gems and it has five stories from my experience where we've made a significant difference to the business or to the website, based on insights from analytics that we couldn't have otherwise known. This whole ebook is in English. There's no charts or graphs in the whole thing, but it's designed to give you maybe some inspiration to say maybe that's happening for us and we should check it out. So that's a free e-book. Please feel free to go and get it.

Alyssa:

That's great. Well, thank you so much, philippa, for joining me today. Thank you, it's been a pleasure, great and for everyone tuning in. Thank you for so much for listening today and hanging out with us. I really hope you found this episode as helpful as I did. I took a ton of notes and all of them are going to be in the show notes, so make sure to check that out and make sure to connect with Philippa as well. Thanks so much, everyone, and I'll catch you next time on another brilliant idea. Thanks for tuning into this episode of Brilliant Ideas. If you love the show, be sure to leave a review and follow me on Instagram for even more insider tips and inspiration. Ready to bring your next big, brilliant idea to life? Visit alissavelsercom for resources, guidance and everything you need to start creating something amazing.