Website Analytics Demystified with Tools and Tips for All Users

When you're driving to a new location, the first thing you do

with whatever app you're using to get you from point a to point b is

it has to figure out what the heck is point a. And from there,

you can make adjustments to get to point b. Well, today, we're

gonna talk about tools you can use to figure out what's going

on with your website so that you can figure out what to do to

get them from what they're doing now to what you want them to be

doing on your website.

Hey. I'm Dave Jackson from the school of Podcast.

And one of my little bumper sticker sayings is

you are gonna pay with 1 of 2 currencies, and that is either

your time or your money. And people go, which one should

I use? And I go, the one you have the most of.

And so today, we're gonna talk about getting insights from your

website. We're gonna talk about a couple different things. We're gonna talk about Google

Analytics. We're gonna talk about Fathom Stats. We're gonna talk about

Monster Insights, Mouse Flow and

Hotjar, which sounds like a weird sitcom

from, like, 1982. This Thursday, mouse

flow and hot jar. Tackle crime. But the first

one we're gonna talk about is Google Analytics.

Here's the good news about Google Analytics. It will tell you what

your audience had for lunch last Tuesday when

the moon was full. I mean, it's an insane amount

of information. So that's the good news. Some people like that. Other people get

really worried about having Google track your audience.

And the other thing is sometimes I just wanna know what are my top

podpage. Like, what are people viewing when they go to my website?

Can you get that from Google Analytics? Yes. You can.

Is it easy? Once you go through the learning curve.

And there is a learning curve because they collect data

on everything. So if you're a supermarketer, you're an agency, you really

want to fine tune, you can get that information from

Google Analytics, but you're gonna take some time to

get through it. You can if you're using WordPress.

Google has an official plugins called Website Kit, and I'll put

a link out in the show notes where you can click on

that and install it. That's the way to do it. There's also

a Google Analytics Academy, and that is

free. And as you might imagine, that Google Analytics

Academy shows you how to tie it into the Google search

console and how to use Google Ad Manager and

Google this and there a Google they're a Google, everywhere, a

Google, oogle. And, again, if you've got no

budget, you can actually use this and get some insane

information. It's just for me, I don't need that

kind of information. I'm not really needing to dig in

that deep. Now your mileage may vary, and you may

need that information, and that may be a way that you go. But for

me, I've just the other thing that's driving me nuts is they recently

upgraded Google Analytics to g 4. And when I

log in, I will literally get a message that says,

your property needs to upgrade to g 4, which I swear I've

done at least twice. And I will say, okay. Take me

to the update tool. And it will say, here are 3 out of 4

things that you've done. You need to do the 4th one. So I will,

again, go through the 4th one and go, yep. I clicked

on that, did this, okay, and go. And it'll say, congratulations.

You're done. And I'm like, great. And I can test it and

make sure it's on my website. Awesome. And then I will log in

tomorrow, and it will say, you need to update. Yeah. It's

kind of annoying, and I have decided I'm not going to not pay

them anymore. That's the fun part when you have

no kind of leverage on somebody by

saying, you will lose me as a customer because Google's like, what are you gonna

do? Just not not pay me anymore? Yeah. So

it's not a horrible product. It's just for many people

that I just wanna see where my traffic's coming from. I wanna see

what's getting the most views, things like that. Yes. You can do that

with Google Analytics once you move all the

other 18,000,000 things that it's tracking out of the way.

Now one of the ways you can better understand the

information coming out of Google Analytics is to get a tool

called Monster Insights. Now this is made if

you're using WordPress. So if you're using something like Podpage or

Wix or Squarespace, you're kinda out of luck with this

product. But it's $249 a year. Now here's the

thing. Every time I go to their website, they're having some sort

of sale. So I know right now, you can buy their

smallest plan for $99 for the year, and it does a good

job of doing exactly what I said. Here's just the basic stats you

need, and then you can click and dive deeper if you wanna go

deeper, but it does do that. But that's where I kinda go,

isn't it kinda sad that I need to buy another tool to help

me understand the free one.

So here's the one I'm currently using. It's called

Fathom and, again, links to all these out in the episode description.

You can pay monthly. It's $17 a month. I did the 1.15

a year, And what I love about it is,

a, it takes maybe 3 seconds to

install. They do have a WordPress plugins. So if you're using

WordPress, you can actually see your stats right there inside your website. If

you're not using WordPress, if you're using something like PodPage, they make it

super simple. You set up your website. They give you a bit of code,

and you can go into PodPage and go under the

design settings, and you'll see an option there where it

says custom code. And you just paste that into the custom

head tag code area, and you are up and running. It takes all

of 5 minutes. And the cool thing about Fathom, where some of these

other ones kinda limit you, we'll talk about those in a minute, this

you can use on 50 website. And you can track

ecommerce. So if you wanna track conversions where

somebody bought your book or whatever it is, especially being an entrepreneur,

that's built into it. And it easy integrates with a lot of

CMS and frameworks. And if you wanna get your nerd on and you

need API access, yes, they have that. And,

you can change your tier anytime and cancel anytime.

And I love it because I can go in, and it'll say,

hey. Here's how many, you know, people have been to your

website. Here's the top pages that people are viewing.

And then I can go in and see, like, I was amazed

how much traffic I'm getting from my newsletter. So if you're not using a

newsletter, you might wanna look into this. And it's

just super simple. And then if you've never played

with, UTMs, which is Universal Tag

Manager. I think it is. It's a Google thing, but it's kinda universal.

Like, if I I'm going into my website right now, and I can see that

the source is, I've basically and this is another cool thing.

At the bottom, I can turn on percentages. So 11% of my

traffic came from my email on Substack, and then 6%

came from my other email on SendFox. And so

I can see my refers, where people are coming from.

And I don't know for instance, this is one of the things that's kind of

cool about having stats on your website.

I've never heard of podcastx-ray.com, but

1% of my traffic in the last 2 weeks

came from podcastx-ray.com. So I can go look at that.

And sometimes you'll find out that somebody is linking

to your show, and a bunch of traffic is coming from that. And so

this is super simple. And then they have a a great way. If I just

want to look at traffic, I can see where I've got, the United

States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the

Philippines. Well, if I just click on the United States, I've

now got stats just on those types of

visitors. And I can see that 54% of my visitors are on a

desktop, 44% are on a phone, and 3%

are on a tablet. They do have a, I believe,

15 day trial, and I love it just because

now granted, again, Google Analytics is free, and,

yes, I'm paying for this. But the headache of

not having to dig through 13 pages to get to the content

I want is worth the money spent.

Now if you listen to episode 3 with Greg Marilese

from Design 1 Studio, and you can get to that by

your podcast website/ 3.

Links will be in the show notes. He mentioned Hotjar.

And Hotjar is a tool that actually

records your visitor, not so much like a camera, but it's

recording their mouse clicks. It's recording their mouse movements.

So you're no longer guessing what is happening when people come

to your site. And so I looked at it, and it's

$32 a month. They do have a free program

that allows you to have up to 35 recordings a day,

but I was like, well, this is something I'm really kind of interested

in. So you could, again, if you just wanna get a sample of this, you

could use their free program. And then I saw $32 a

month for 3,000 recordings. Well, then I found mouse

flow. And mouse flow, number 1, does the

same thing. So it's basically monitoring people on your website,

but you can go in. And if you wanna track how many times

somebody clicked on a button or how far they scrolled, and those are called heat

maps. Hot Hotjar does that as well. In fact, pretty much

mouse flow and hotjar have very similar features. You can make

a feedback form. We'll be talking about that in the future. What kind of

questions would you ask for feedback on your website?

And in the end, you can get for $31

a month, you can get 5,000 recordings on the paid version

of MouseFlow. Now they do have a 0 forever

version, and I believe you get 500 visitors

for that, which is actually a little less than the free version of

Hotjar. But I started using mouse flow

And just things like if you have a form on your website, you can see

how far people make it through your form. It really if you wanna

know what's going on your website, and they do this being GDPR

compliant, so that's that whole UK law thing, it's

a really interesting thing. And I saw on their website

where mouse flow was like, you can get installed in minutes.

And I literally it's wild because, like, I just saw the one on

feedback. And I watched a quick 2 minute video, and it's like

click here, do this, do that. I go to my website. I click here. I

do this. I do that, and there's my survey. It's pretty amazing.

So if you really wanna know what's going on,

and it it'll give you visitors and things like that, but you actually get to

watch a video of what your your visitor is doing.

And there are times when I saw this one guy was

scrolling from the top of the school of podcasting and he's

scrolling and he's scrolling. He makes all of the way to the bottom, and he

scrolled back up. It's kind of frustrating because you're like, what do you want? What

are you looking for? Tell me. You know? But you can't

because there's no audio, obviously, and it's just a video recording

of their mouse. So if you really wanna get into what's going on on your

website, and this is where one of the things I always say, one of

the most important pages on your website is the

about page. How do I know that? Because I've used

tools like these in the past. I wish I would have known about mouse SEO

before, but it's you can actually see people go to your

website, kind of scroll up, scroll down, and then they go to the about page.

And that's kind of a red blog, and that's what's one of the advantage of

these types of tools is you can SEO, okay,

they're going to the about page because when they land on the page, apparently,

they don't know what's going on. And so there's a a great book,

StoryBrand. We talked about that in episode 3 as well, that you want

your website to be obvious, and using something like mouse

flow is a great tool to go in

and see exactly what's going on on your website.

So, again, we went from no money per

month to 17 a month for something like Fathom.

MonsterInsights, again, is 2.49 a year. So you're looking it's what?

$12 a month or $20 a month, if you wanna do that.

But, again, I I just find that odd, and it just helps make my point

that Google Analytics, it's not just me.

They track so much information that MonsterInsights

can help you decipher that. And I'm like, well, for that, I'd just

rather instead of spending $20 for MonsterInsights,

I'll just spend $20 for Fathom. And you can use Fathom

on WordPress or if you're not using WordPress. So that's the

advantage of Fathom over Monster Insights. And then if you really wanna see

what's going on on your website, you can use a tool like

mouse flow. And I'll have links to all of these out in the

website. And, also, I've mentioned already, I'm

looking into you might know how to do a survey

about your podcast. But if the goal of the

podcast is to drive people to your website, you might

wanna do a survey about how is the

website doing. When you landed here, is this are you able

to find what you're looking for? What what brought you here? Things like that.

So that'll be in a future episode of your

podcast website as we start to talk about, well, what should I ask

my visitors when it comes to my website?

Here's just a quick tip that can boost your SEO,

and this came about in the school of podcasting. We have group

coaching and somebody brought this up and I'm like, oh, I'm gonna use that for

your podcast website. And that is depending on who

your media host is. So Libsyn, Buzzsprout, Captivate, Blueberry,

etcetera, etcetera. And some of

them, but not all of them, there are these things

called headings. And so to explain these,

when you look at an episode title on your website,

the episode title is always bigger. It's number 1,

and that's exactly what it is. It is heading number 1. If you look at

the code of the website, that's that. Now this website,

this podcast is very much we're not really into looking

at the code, but I just want to explain this a little bit. And then

when you start to type something in the description

of your episode for your website, that

typically known as a subheading, you would mark that

as heading number 2. So it's bigger

font. It's typically bold, but it's not as big as the

title font because that's the big kahuna. And then as

you might imagine, you have heading number 3, which is not as big as

heading number 2. And the bigger the number so,

like, heading 3 in the eyes of Google

is not as important as heading 1. So as you might

imagine, this is why the title of your episode

is so important on the website because it's

heading 1 and that is telling Google this is really what

this blog post or in our case, this podcast episode

is about. And so Google gives it more

authority, your title of your episode. Now what I've seen

people do is they will go in and instead of making

kind of a subheading, they will just highlight the text.

They'll click on the bold button and make it larger,

which totally makes sense. My tip is you

should, if it's in whatever, you know, if you're ranking Podpage,

for example, you can go in and choose larger text

or smaller text. And that's just Podpage being PodPage

and making things easier. But behind the scenes, what they're doing

is they're adding those tags to that subheading

to boost your SEO. So if you choose larger

header, that's an h 2 behind the scenes. And if you

choose smaller header, that is an h 3. And, again,

this just makes it bold. It makes it easy to set out. But what you

don't want to do is just make it bold and bigger.

You're missing out just on a little bit of SEO juice. Now if you're

like, I'm not really sure. I'm using Wix

or Squarespace or things like that. There is often a

button that have, like, a left pointing arrow and a right pointing arrow

on the same button. And if you put your mouse over it, it'll say view

source. Now I'm not going to try to walk you through in an audio

podcast how to look at number 1, we don't like code. That's the whole point

of this show. But out at your podcast website,

I'll have a quick video that shows you how can I test to see

if I'm using the right headings?

And today, we just looked at a few tools. There are many, many, many

tools, and I'll have links to those again out at your podcast

website. If you have a tool that

you're using to track analytics on your website, you know, like, oh, Dave, you missed

it. There's one so much better. Well, you can go out to your podcast

website and leave me a message.

If you want to, be sure to mention your website. I'll give you a

plug on the show. Always appreciate feedback from

you. Also, while you're out there or

if you're listening to this on your phone, there'll be a link for a

survey. These are really quick. They're, like, 3 questions about the

episode. As this is a new show, I'm building this show for you.

And so just take a couple seconds. Click on that. Let me know what you

thought of this episode. If You have any ideas for future episodes. Like I said,

we're gonna talk about surveys in the future and some other things that

we got lined up. It's all there at your podcastwebsite.com.

If you go to your podcastwebsite.com/follow,

you'll never miss an episode. And while we're at it, something else

you can do out at your Podcast website is click the

share button and share it with a friend. Or if you're listening to this on

your phone, there's a share button there somewhere in the app. I would deeply

appreciate it if you know somebody else who is going, I'm not really sure

what I should be doing with my website. You could say, oh, man. Do I

have the podcast for you? And share with them, and you're

gonna look like a superhero. Thanks so much for listening.

I'm Dave Jackson from the school of podcasting.com. I

help podcasters. It's what I do.