Social Media Measurement & Metrics Master Class Hello and welcome to Creating Fame Classroom: Social Media Measurement & Metrics Master Class. I'm Laura Roeder and here is what you're about to learn today: Why social media is easier to track than traditional media! The must-watch metrics in Google Analytics. We're going to have some how-to on Google Analytics and going more in depth on that. How to use Google goals and advanced segmenting to understand your numbers. Those are things that exist in Analytics. The "numbers method" and "performance review method" for tracking reputation and fame. So this webinar will be about an hour. I'll be taking questions at the end and you can ask your questions using the questions feature in GoToWebinar. So without further ado, let's get started. Why Social Media is Easy to Measure I want to start by talking about why social media is actually easy to measure. A lot of people say that social media is hard to measure; they don't know if it's working; but when you buy traditional advertising or publicity, you can't track it at all. If you're covered on a magazine or even if you have an ad on TV, you have no idea of the people that saw the ad, how many went and bought your products, or what they did afterwards or if they talked about it. I heard Gary Vaynerchuk speak once and he was saying how did offline advertising get away with their "metrics" for so long? He was ranting about Nielsen ratings and how Nielsen ratings, which say how many people have watched the TV shows, is basically a made-up number. They have a few samples. They have a few people around the US selfreporting the TV shows they watch, which is hugely inaccurate, yet that is sought as a standard that everyone goes by. Social media and anything on the web is actually way more accurate and way easier to track like that than something like the Nielsen ratings because on the web you can see what source traffic came from, how long they stayed, what pages they viewed and more. So instead of having someone see your commercial and that same person may or may not have ever bought anything or engaged with you in any way, you can actually see, "Oh, this person came from Facebook and then they viewed my About page and then they viewed my Services page and then they signed up for my newsletter." That is great tracking. That's very measurable.
Now, I know there are some other things that you do in social media that are more relationship and reputation based and we're also going to track those factors as well. That will be at the end of the webinar. Core Tool: Google Analytics So the first tool we're going to go in depth on today, and actually the only tool we're exploring today, is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is the gold standard for web tracking and measuring, and it's free. So small sites use it; huge sites use it as well. If you have not yet signed up for an account, you can do so at google.com/analytics. Now, this isn't an Analytics how-to training so we're not going to go super in depth on how to set it up. I'm not going to explain what every single thing means because honestly, there's a lot to learn in Google Analytics. So instead today, I'm just going to show you some of the most important steps, and we're going to talk about some ways that you can use Analytics to look at your social media activity specifically. So let's start by going into Analytics so you can see exactly what I'm talking about here. So you should see Analytics on my screen right now and you are seeing real stats right now for lauraroeder.com. I just want to talk about some of the most important stats that you want to look at in my opinion. Let's start with average time on site. That's a huge stat for tracking engagement. A lot of people look at the number of visits; they look at the number of page views; and I was actually recently at an SEO conference where they were talking about how the number of visits and the number of page views isn't necessarily the most important metric because it's actually kind of the least accurate. It's hard to track who a unique visitor is especially more and more these days when we use so many different devices to access the web. You might have a computer at your office and then you have a laptop, and then you have your BlackBerry or iphone and it's all the same person, but those wouldn't be counted as three different unique visits since you are viewing it from different computers or different devices. So visits isn't always super accurate as far as the numbers. Something like average time on site shows you how engaged someone; and again, this isn't always perfectly accurate but it will certainly give you an idea. Nothing on Google Analytics is necessarily perfectly accurate, but it gives you something to compare to as long as you have past data to compare it to. That's really all that matters. So average time on site. If people are only spending 10 seconds on your website, then you know that you need to do something to get them to stay longer. They're not finding content that's interesting enough or unique enough or engaging enough. They are getting to your site so you've done something effective maybe in social media to get them but they are not staying. So average time on site is definitely something you want to pay attention to, and Google has that big and bold here at the top.
Content overview is important as well as looking more in depth on what pages people are viewing. You want to know what parts of your site are most interesting to people and what parts they're skipping over. This is really important for going into your site and optimizing what people are looking at most to making it more effective and more valuable content. Another really important stat is keywords. Now, keywords is just what Google calls search terms. So under your keywords, you're going to see exactly what people are searching for in order to get to your website; really good stuff. Your traffic sources show all the different sites that people come from, and your referring sites show the specific websites people are clicking over from. So your traffic source includes things like direct traffic and Google Search. Referring sites shows the sites people are clicking from, which for me is social media. Number one is Twitter; number two is Facebook; number three is HootSuite, which really means more people coming from Twitter. So those are some of the most important stats that you want to look at. Google Analytics Goals Now, I want to walk through using Google Analytics goals. So many people have Analytics installed on their site, but they don't use goals, and goals make Analytics infinitely more useful. Goals allow you to track conversions. A conversion is the percentage of visitors that perform a certain action. So you might have heard people say like, "What's that converting at?" or "What's the conversion rate?" It's often used for things like opt-ins. So if you're trying to get people on your newsletter, people will say, "What's the conversion rate for that page?" or "What's the conversion rate for that website?" What they mean is out of all the people that visited the site, how many people actually took that action of signing up for the newsletter? How many people "converted?" And I'm always amazed by how many people use Analytics without having any idea what these percentages are. And I would be less concerned about trying to get to some ideal percentage. I'm more concerned about competing with yourself in this area. A lot of times, people get really caught up in being upset that their conversion rate is too low or they want to know what's normal; and the truth is there is nothing really normal. It really depends on the context and the scenario. It depends on what you're asking people to do. It depends on where they're coming from, their existing relationship with you. So instead of worrying about what's "normal," I would just view this as an area where you're always trying to outdo yourself and you're always trying to improve. So if your conversions for a certain action start at 2%, try to get it up to 2.5% and then 3%. This is an area where you want to compete with yourself.
And there's a few must-track goals that you want to set up. I'm about to show you how to set up a goal right now. This is something that's specific to your business that you are going to have to decide what makes sense for you. But a few things that a lot of businesses want to track are their newsletter signups, their purchases, and views of certain key pages. So a goal doesn't have to be something like a newsletter signup. You could say, "I want to know how many people are viewing my Services page or my Shop page" because those are probably people that are interested in buying. So you can set up a goal of how many people hit your Shop page at some point in their visit, and then you'll know, "Okay, 10% of my overall visitors or 5% of my overall visitors are hitting that Shop page," and it helps you understand how people are using your site. And goals is a way that you don't have to do math manually. It's just going to automatically real time deliver you those percentages and those numbers. So let's look at how to set up a goal because it's really hidden. One last thing I want to add before I get into that tutorial is that you can get creative in setting up pages for certain events because I know if you don't have any commerce business, it can be hard to track who is buying. But let's say that you have a consulting business. You could set up a page that people get to after they sign a contract with you. So you can tell them in your sales process, "This is the page you get to to get all my contact information." When I was doing web design I had a page like this that had my cell phone number, my email, my hours, how they could find out the progress of their project, basically like an info overview quick hit kind of thing, and you can tell them to go there after you receive their deposits. So maybe they send a check or maybe they pay you with PayPal and you say, "Okay. The next step is to go to this quick info page and bookmark it." You could have that page be a goal so that's going to tell you out of all the people who visit how many are buying; or you could do something like on your Services page, you could say, "Submit your name and email here to get more info or to get a free quote," and then send them to a thank-you page after they submit their name and email so you can track that page of people who requested a quote. Now you know what percentage of people visiting your site actually requested a quote and then you can dig in and see where they came from, again taking it back to social media. Now you have a metric to see out of all the people that are actually submitting their name and email address or the people that are actually working with me. Did any of them come from Twitter? Did any of them come from Facebook or blogs or forums? You can reverse-engineer your goals and see where people are coming from. So let's look at how to set up a goal. So when you're in your Google Analytics screen here, you want to go to Analytics Settings in the top-left corner. Again, that's Analytics Settings. It's not in your normal report screen here.
And then once you're in Settings, if you have more than one website, or even if you have one website you'll see this as well just with the one listed. You'll want to hit Edit next to that site. So I'm going to edit lauraroeder.com. You click the edit button and then right here you're going to see your goals. So this is where you can add a goal or you can edit goals; and so you can see some of them that are inactive because this is something that in my company we're refreshing and reorganizing all this right now, but I have goals for people buying, my programs and goals for someone becoming a subscriber to The Dash of course. I could add even more but the way you add a goal is you go here. Again, you found this by clicking Settings and then Edit next to the URL, and then you click Add Goal and it's going to ask you for a goal name. So it's important to name really clearly something that you'll remember. So don't just call it "opt in." Call it "sign up for a newsletter" because you might have more than one thing called "opt in." So right now we're just going to name it Test. I'm going to turn this goal on. Goal position, that doesn't really matter. It's just a way to help you organize your goals. So you can keep it at whatever comes up as the top for you. And then the type of goals, we are talking about our URL destination. Now, you can see you can also set a goal for spending a certain amount of time on the site because as I said, that's a great way to measure how engaged people are or the pages that they visited. So you can set up a goal for everyone who visited more than four pages or everybody who spent more than 5 minutes on your website. The type we're talking about today is really the URL destination goals and the URL destination is just a fancy way to say they got to a certain website. Match types. You're probably going to want to use exact match. You can read Google Analytics Help on this for an explanation of all of them. Again, this isn't an in-depth Google Analytics training so I'm not going to go in depth on every single thing. Basically, head match and regular expression match are for sites like e-commerce sites where custom URLs are being generated depending on where people are coming and going. If you have sort of the basic website, you're probably going to want to use exact match and then you want to enter the page that they are going to. So this is important. They explained it right here. For the goal page mysite.com/thankyou.html you just enter / thankyou.html. So they already know that we're talking about lauraroeder.com. You just want to enter everything after lauraroeder.com. So in this instance, thankyou.html, we'll just copy that one. And then you can give your goal a value. This is if you want to get fancy pants for saying this has more value than that or assign some numeric tracking to it. You can just keep it at zero or you can just keep it 1.
A goal funnel is something more advanced where you can track not only getting to one page but people who go through an entire sequence. So the funnel may include steps in your checkout process that lead to a thank-you page. So again, I'm not going to get into that. It's something you can go explore, but you don't really need it. Having a regular goal URL should be good enough for most basic goals. And then you just hit Save Goal and there you have it. This is confirming that I'm receiving data on this site, all that good stuff. Analytics for Social Media Tracking So now, let's talk about how to dig deeper into social media in particular when you're looking through your Analytics data, and my favorite way to do that is to use advanced segments. This is something that I just started playing with recently, and I think it makes looking at your numbers really easy and it's a really cool, easy-to-set-up feature. So let's talk about how to set up an advanced segment to see your traffic from just one source. So again, I'm back at that Google Analytics interface. I have the correct URL chosen. I'm going to click on Advanced Segments over here on the left, and let's just see how you create a new custom segment then we're going to look through some of my real social media data. So I'll click "Create a new custom segment." Okay. This thing looks a little complicated and confusing. It's actually kind of cool once you understand it. Basically, what you're doing when you're creating segments is they have this drag-anddrop interface where you can do "and" or "or" statements. So we're just going to keep it really simple and just do one statement, but this allows you to get really, really fancy with the type of segments you're creating; but let's just talk about how to see traffic from one social media source. This is a screen you're going to see when you first create your advanced segment. You go over to Traffic Sources and we want Source so we're just going to drag Source over. So source matches exactly and this is what we want for traffic source; and then it will actually give you a dropdown of all of your most common traffic sources or you can type one in. So actually, let's go ahead and hit YouTube right here and create a new one for YouTube. Now, I'm going to name this YouTube Traffic. I can already tell you this is going to be low because I actually use a different URL. I usually use getthedash.com than YouTube although I sometimes use this one. So if you wanted to make this more complicated -- so again, we did that by going to Traffic Sources/Source and dragged that over. You want your condition to be matches exactly, and then you just want to choose to site. So again, it could be a social media site
like YouTube or maybe it could be a forum that you're active on. You want to see how the traffic from that forum behaves. And then you can add an "or" statement here. So you could say, "I want people from either YouTube or Vimeo," a different video site; and then down here you can say, "And I also want them to " -- you can see they have all the choices here -- "And I also want them to be people that have stayed on the site for two minutes or that have reached this goal." Again, you can make this really complicated. You can play around with it. I'm not going to get into all that. The easiest one is Source matches exactly and then the site. So we'll go ahead and hit "Create Segment." I want to X that out. It's giving me this little error message "Dimension or metric not selected" so I'll just close that one, and then "Create Segment" and now I have my YouTube traffic. So let's actually go ahead and let's explore it together here. Let's go ahead and look at that one and see what it's like. So now that I have my segments, when I click on one, this is going to show me just traffic from YouTube. Since it's only 37 visitors let's expand the dates a little here. Let's go from April until the end of July. Okay. So again, once I've clicked my segment, it's showing me just people who have visited from YouTube. So this is a really easy way to dig in to the behavior of people coming from different places because I get all of my same data; I get my same dashboard but just for YouTube. So I can see okay, on YouTube, they are spending about 2.5 minute average time on site. There's a very low bounce rate. That's kind of interesting, right? So if people come to my site from YouTube, they are clearly interested. So that tells me that YouTube is kind of a good lead source. They come; they know what they are in for; and they stay. They have a pretty good average time on site. I'm getting a lot of new traffic, which is great. You always want to look for new visitors. And I can see what they are interested in here. So people from YouTube have been looking at my blog. They look at my services. They look at The Dash. They look at my About page. I can see what kind of goal conversions I have. So from YouTube, I believe this is conversions for The Dash opt-in rate. For YouTube, I'm getting a 2.73 goal conversation rate. That's pretty good. And so I can get even more in depth here looking at my content. I can see what pages on my site are popular for YouTube viewers. Well, let's go ahead and look at another segment so we can compare. So again, this one had 7% bounce rate, 2.5 minutes on the site, and 58% new visits. So let's compare that to something else. So I'm going to go back to my advanced segments and now let's look at Facebook traffic. So I'll click on Facebook. So Facebook has a higher bounce rate and a little bit lower time
on the site and less new visitors. So this is really interesting, right? So the time on site is pretty similar. It was 2.5 minutes from YouTube. It's 2 minutes here. That's pretty much the same. The bounce rate is higher, not significantly so. The new visits is interesting to me because I believe from YouTube it was about 50%; from here it's about 30%. So that actually might be a negative thing because I want to bring in new people to my website. So it might be more valuable for me to spend my time on YouTube instead of on Facebook and I would have never known that had I not looked at these segments and examined these data. Because you can see I overall get a lot more visits from Facebook to YouTube, and a lot of people make the mistake of just looking at that raw visitors' number and they think, "Oh, clearly Facebook is way better because I'm getting so much traffic." Traffic is important; don't get me wrong; but it's not necessarily the only metric. Here it looks like the pages that are being visited are pretty similar but that's something else I might want to look at. Maybe one would have more people going to my Shop page than the other. That's an important metric for me. My goal conversion is about the same. I think it's a little lower from Facebook than it was on YouTube. And another cool advanced segment you can set up is I actually have all my Dash subscribers because you can set the condition that they've met a certain goal. So when I look at my Dash subscriber segment, all these people were subscribers. So this is my best traffic basically. This is the traffic that I'm most interested in. So now, I can see what other pages they went to. I can see the keywords that they used. I can see the sites that referred them. For example, this is interesting, thirdtribemarketing.com. A site called The Third Tribe that's a membership site is sending me a lot of really good traffic because people that come from there -- it's in the top five and Copyblogger as well. People that come from are signing up. They are converting. So it's showing up at 100% conversion rate, 100.7 for some reason, because again, I'm only searching for the people that have actually converted in this segment. So again, the referring sites are really interesting here because this is telling me some very high-value sites for conversions. So that is advanced segments and how to use it. How to Track the Untrackable Now, let's move on to how to track the untrackable and then we'll have some time for questions. So, social media is extremely valuable for building relationships, reputation and fame. I always tell people this is how I teach social media. I feel like this is kind of my unique slant
on it. Some people teach social media for traffic or for sales, and those are all outcomes, right? Traffic and sales are a natural outcome. But to me, the most effective main focus of using social media is using it for reputation building and for relationship building; but I know those things can feel difficult to track. How do you know which channels are paying off? Especially because social media can be so time consuming so people will tell me, "I spend a lot of time on forums" or "I spend a lot of time on Facebook" but I don't really know if it's valuable, which again why the measurements and metrics are so important. There's no reason why you shouldn't know if Facebook or a forum is valuable for getting newsletter subscribers for example or is valuable for sales. Those things are in your Google Analytics metrics. You just have to start tracking them. However, I know there are some other valuable goals that aren't going to show up in Google Analytics. Maybe you're a consultant getting clients from one place or maybe there's a forum where you chat with someone who sends you a bunch of referrals. So those are sales but they're not going to show up in Google Analytics, right? Or maybe you met three people that all asked you to do interviews on Facebook. That's not going to show up in Google Analytics and those things are very, very important for the success of your business. Start With a List So how do you track them? The first step is to start with a list, and this is very similar to Google Analytics goal tracking. We're going to make a list of "trackable" events related to relationships and reputation. So just like a Google goal is someone hitting a certain page, we want an event to happen. In a goal, the event is hitting a certain page or being on a page for 2 minutes. In this case, the event is I've given you some examples here: write a guest post, receive a request to write a guest post for someone else, receive an invitation to join a mastermind group, receive an interview request, receive a quote request, receive a fan email, receive a blog comment, get retweeted, receive a comment on your fan page wall, receive a speaking request. So these are just some examples to get your mind going. I want you to make a really long list of all the measurable events that happen as your business grows in reputation. And this is something that will evolve. There might be things that when you're starting out you think are going to happen that don't happen or don't turn out to be important, and there are things that you can expect. Maybe it never occurred to you that you would be interviewed on a radio show or maybe one of the most valuable events is that you've got a weekly column or a weekly or a monthly speaking gig for your local chamber of commerce or something like that. Those are all events that are really important to spreading your referrals, spreading your reputation, your word of mouth, all that good stuff; and they are trackable and that you can make a list of them and you can say did this happen or not.
So the first step is just to really get your brain going and make a list that's as long as you can and as specific as you can so that you can say yes or no, so that when you get an email in, you can say, "Okay. This was a fan email so I'm putting one tick mark in that box. This month I got one fan email and then they also asked me if they could quote my blog in their blog." So I'm going to make a new line item for that. "My blog is quoted in a different blog" or "Someone wrote a blog post about me" is another great line item, and you just want to add those all to your big master list. The "Numbers" Way And then there's two different ways to use this list. The first is the "numbers" way. I can already tell you this is not my favorite way, but I think it just depends on your personal preferences, what motivates you, and sort of how your mind works. So one thing you can do is assign a point value to each event or just make them all one point and literally just check off every time they happen. So you could say, "Okay. A speaking gig is going to be a 10 and a fan email is going to be a 1." Or maybe you feel the opposite. Again, there's no right or wrong way to do this. This is just where you measure against yourself. I know questions that often come up are like, "Well, what's good? How many speaking events should I have?" And that's not what you want to be thinking about because really, every business is different and everybody's marketing and publicity and exposure plans are different. This is a metric that you're using to judge yourself. You're saying, "Okay. This month I got one speaking event and next month I want to get two." So you can either assign a point value to every event or you can just track how many times each event happens. A way that I sort of do this is I have a list of the guest posts that I publish. I just write it on my white board and every time I have a new guest post published where I write a post on someone else's blog, I just add it to the list. So that helps me track and it helps motivate me as I can see the list grow, and I just number them one, two, three, four, five. So I can say, "Okay. Since I started this list, I've done 10 and now I want to get it up to 20." And that's kind of a simple tracking thing that's easy and right in front of me. So you can do something similar. You want to keep this simple and you want to track what's valuable for you to evaluate. I think this all this stuff can be like quicksand where you have a lot of fun. If you're the type of person that loves making numbers and systems and stuff, you're going to have a lot of fun assigning point values and then you're going to put together this really complicated chart where everything adds up perfectly and you're going to hem and haw about how many points everything should be worth. And you can spend a lot of time doing that and not really see any better results than for example just having a long list of guest posts.
So you want to make sure that you're tracking what are valuable, things that you can actually look at and say, "Okay. I can see that this is giving me movement," instead of just tracking for the sake of having metrics without much meaning so you can brag to people like, "Oh, I tracked 60 different metrics every single month in my business, and then I spend 6 hours every month charting them all out and then I paste them all over my office." If that's valuable for you, that's great! Again, you're doing this for yourself. You're not doing this to win a price or to compete with other people. If that's genuinely a good use of your time and it propels you forward in your business, that's great. Most people honestly, it's a waste of time especially having a system that's really complicated where you're spending all this time tracking and adding it up and graphing it. So this is one option. Again, maybe you can just take a piece of it like I did with the guest posts where I have one thing that I track in more of a numbers way where I make a long list. The "Performance Review" Way Or you can use that second way I'm about to tell which is doing a performance review. This is what I prefer. I want you to start a document where you keep notes on these events as they happen. This can be really informal. It can be a little notebook you keep on your desk. It can be a word document. If you want to use something, a little web app to do this. Again, this is for you. Do it in a way that's fun for you and that works for you. I just want you to start making a list and don't worry if it's "right" and if it's "worthy" of being on the list. So maybe you get a nice message on Facebook and you're like, "You know what? I'm just going to add that to the list." And so you literally write in your little notebook, "August: Nice message on Facebook. Someone wrote a comment on my wall." Again, this is what's right for you. If you're getting 10 comments on your wall every day, you're probably not going to want to write them down; but if you're getting one a week, then it might be worth tracking. That's something that's ramping up for you that you're not really seeing yet. So just start making a list, and then at the end of the month, write up a summary. So again, this is just for you. There is no right or wrong way to do this. It's just a time for you to reflect and evaluate on how your month went, and you want to use that list as a reference because even with just a month, it's so easy to forget what happened two weeks ago because we have so much going on in our businesses. So set aside a little time to reflect and say, "Okay. July was a really good month. I got two interview requests, and on this one interview it went live on someone's blog and I got a lot of really good comments on it. I saw more comments on my blog than ever but I was hoping to get speaking engagements and that didn't really work out. I didn't get any requests for speaking or none of the speaking proposals I submitted went through." You're just basically doing a performance review on yourself and you are creating fame efforts, and you need to schedule a time each month to do this and more importantly to
review the previous month's summaries. It is very difficult to be objective looking back at your own business. Most people are way too negative when they look at their business. Most of my clients, they're like, "Oh, it's been six months and I feel like I haven't gotten anything done." And I say, "Are you kidding me? You did this and you did that, and now you're only working three days and you're hiring someone." And they're like, "Oh, wow! When you put it that way, it really sounds like I've done a lot." We tend to underestimate what we do. We tend to not see the progress that we're making just the same way that you don't see your own kids growing. You see your little niece that you see once a year and it's like, "Whoa! They turned into a different person." But if it's somebody that you see every day, your own child looks kind of the same to you day to day; and then one day you look up and realize that 5 years have passed. It's the same in your business. It's such a slow change that you sort of take it for granted and you don't see it. So it's really, really important to review your month's summaries both for the good and the bad. One of the most important things in business that I think people spend much too little time on is looking at what worked and what didn't because people waste a lot of time spinning their wheels starting from scratch every time. Like when you're doing an email promotion, see what email promotion went well before and copy it or use it again. When you want to write a blog post that's going to do well, copy a blog post you've already done. Copy it in format or write about a similar topic. There's no reason to start from scratch every time. But we tend to not really know what did well and what didn't; and of course there's a negative side as well. If something is a huge flop, you don't want to use the same marketing campaign again, and you might be doing it without even realizing it because you sort of forgot about the one that was a flop three months ago. So do these little reviews for yourself. We're talking about the context of creating fame and social media right here, but of course, this is something that you can take much bigger in your business and just do kind of an overall performance review on the state of your business every month. Always know where clients and prospective clients came from, always, always, always. When I had my web design business, I would just make sure that I made a note every time I sign a contract how that person had heard of me. So I might say they were referred by this person or I met them at a networking event or they found my website. I just started a list. Again, don't overthink this. Don't try to make it too fancy or too complicated. I just started a list with all my clients' names and then where they came from. As I started doing that, I realized what sources were working for me and what weren't. I had one person that was
referring all my referral clients. I saw that for me at that time, networking events is where I got a lot of clients. People that I met just called at networking events, but I had no idea until I looked at that list as a whole. It's weird because it seems like you would know. It seems like you would sort of have an idea I get most of clients from this place, but you don't know until you look at the data. I recently pulled up the data of all my product sales from the last two months and I was really surprised to see that we have one product that's just barely selling; and since we've had sales coming in, I'm thinking, "Okay," because things are selling, things are going well, and it was really easy for me to overlook this one product. I had no idea until I pulled up this report and now I'm like, "Okay, let's see what we can do. How do we need to change this? How can we improve this situation?" You just don't see those big picture things when you're in the day to day of your business. So you always need to know how money comes in to your business. The people that are your customers and clients, those are the most important. So if you do sales online, this is tracking again using Analytics where all your sales come from. You need to set up that sale as a goal and see where people are coming from and what they are doing on your site before they make a purchase. If you're in more of a consulting type business, you need to just start making a list next to every person's name. Even if you're in a bigger business and this is a little bit harder to do, this is the top I think important metric to track, where are the people that are paying coming from and the perspectives as in the people who -- when you're doing consulting, sometimes there are people that you have an entry session with but just doesn't work out. People that get close to buying I think are also very important to track. In Summary So in summary, social media tracking is the art of combining hard numbers with "fuzzy" relationship happenings. For example, knowing that you gained two clients from Facebook and the traffic from Facebook stayed on your site for 8 minutes is more powerful than either metric alone. So you want to look at the performance review that we talked about combined with the numbers from your website. Of course, performance review time is a great time to examine the numbers from your last month and then see how those compare to the month before. You have to schedule time for yourself or it will not happen, I promise you that. Go ahead and put it in your calendar right now. Put a time on it. Make it a serious appointment even if it's just you that does it. If you have a team, do it with your team. You can even do it with a friend of yours who is an entrepreneur. You're like, "We really need to get on track. I want to make sure that we hold each other accountable. So let's meet for lunch once a month and let's bring all our numbers, and then we can help each other
examine the data and interpret and make sure that this is getting done every single month." Again, you want to combine the hard numbers of how people are spending their time on your website, what they are doing with keeping track of the guest posts that you're writing, the interview requests that you're getting, the fan letters that you're getting, all that great creating fame stuff that's so important for your business's success. So now, it's time for questions. You're going to hear me be quiet for a few minutes while I let questions roll in so you'll hear a little break on the audio. You can ask your questions using the GoToWebinar questions feature. Type them in. You can ask me about anything that has to do with tracking or measurement or performance reviews. This is also your time in Creating Fame Classroom to just ask me whatever you like. So anything about running your business, marketing online, social media, it's all fair game. We don't have many people live on this call today so it's actually a great chance for you to steal a little time for me. I'll hang around as long as the questions roll in. So don't be shy; ask me anything. Okay, our first question is from Gray. She says, "I let down my newsletter fans. I know it's a no-no. I've not written anything since March. Lots of excuses! I have a list of 70 people. Any good advice that I am starting over again?" This is great question. You're not the only that's had this experience so let that reassure you that this is something that happens. People start a newsletter and they start a blog and they don't keep up with it. What I would say is that this is much less of a big deal in the minds of your customers than it is to you. For better or for worse, most people have probably not even noticed that you haven't been mailing out. I know that sounds bad but it's good for you to be honest. It's not like they signed up and then every single day they thought, "Where is that email? Where is that email?" They probably signed up and forgot about it. That's the truth. So a lot of people make too big a deal out of "Oh, my God, I'm so sorry. I haven't written to you." This is a big mistake I see with blogging. I see so many blogs that every single blog post starts with "I'm so sorry. It's been two months since I've written. I've been really busy." That's not good content. You know what I mean? Like no one is interested in the fact that you haven't blogged for two months. They just want to hear what you have to blog about. They don't care that you haven't emailed in three months. They just want a good email from you. So you can write like one sentence that says, "I just wanted to get in touch with you again. I know it's been a while." That's it though. Don't make a big deal out of it. They haven't noticed that it's been long as you have in all likelihood. So yeah, you can put a little note in
the beginning that says, "I've been out of touch in a while and I just wanted to reconnect." I would leave it at that. Again, don't let this scare you from starting again. This is something that can become a vicious cycle. People think, "Oh, it's so long that I can't talk to them again," and then it just keeps getting pushed off more and more because just to jump back in, they probably have not noticed as much as you have. Danielle says, "Can I get your opinion on pages like this?" And then she gave me a website that I'll pull up for everybody in a minute where she obviously has a lot of online projects going on but she is just using her main site to list them all. "Do you think it's effective if you're someone with various projects? Do you think it's distracting?" So let's pull up that site. I guess the answer is it depends. I think this is a great website first of all. I know Chelsea so shout out to her. She is fantastic. And this is a good way to handle it. It looks very professional. It's very well-organized. However, most people separate things out too much. So someone like Chelsea really does have a lot of different businesses like this Best Day Foundation and Cultivating Relationships for Real Business Results and a marketing agency. It sounds like those are probably three distinct things; and so yeah, if you have three distinct things, it's really good to give people one home page where they can find everything. But a lot of people make the mistake of creating too many website and they have to keep them all up and it becomes kind of a nightmare to be honest with you because it's like every maintenance that you have to do on one site, now you have to do it on five sites instead. When you blog, you don't know which site to post it to. So you wouldn't want to have a ton of businesses that just you are running. I know for Chelsea like she has her hand in a lot of different businesses so it's not like Chelsea alone is responsible for maintaining all these sites. Obviously, LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter she doesn't maintain. Those are just her links to find her there. So I think this is really well-done. I think it's a great format. But I would caution against creating any more sites than you need. Most people need to combine instead of separate. All right. Do we have any more questions? I'm going to give you a little time to write them in and you're totally allowed to ask more than one. I would love you to ask as many as you like. Okay. We have "I've put my blog on my first page. Is that good or bad? No info on the first page." This is another really good question. So what she is referring to is how some sites -- let me go to my site real quick. My site does not have a blog on the home page. It has this big opt-in for The Dash and it has some media things, recent posts, testimonials. And then we can look at a site like -- let's
look at Marie's that does have the blog on the home page. So if you go marieforleo.com, she has this picture of us for our latest video promo. This was a hilarious video. If you go to her site, she has her blog right on her home page. I think there are pros and cons to both ways, and I don't think this is one where there is a clear right or wrong. I think they can both be a good approach. The reason that I don't have a blog is because I want to direct everyone's attention to The Dash. That's the most important thing for someone visiting my site. I want to make sure that they sign up for The Dash, and not having the blog allows me to put that really big. Those things aren't mutually exclusive though. I could have this huge on my site and then I can have the blog underneath it. Marie also has a pretty prominent opt-in box over here on the right side that could be serving the same purpose. I don't think this opt-in box on the right is going to be as prominent as one filling the whole space, but there are benefits to having a blog on the home page because it gives people content to jump into right away, which is always sort of a nice gift to give. So that's why I don't put the blog. I want to make sure to drive opt-ins as much as possible. And if they want to find the blog, it's easy to get to. I also have the recent posts on the home page. I feel like it's a nice compromise for giving content. That's why I choose not to have a blog, but I think having the blog on the home page can also work really well if you're smart and you have a big email opt-in like Marie does right here. All right. Well, it looks like we don't have any more questions for today. Thank you for being here and learning all about metrics and measuring; and I hope to see your reports of doing your own performance reviews very soon. They are very powerful. It's a great habit to start. Again, this is Laura Roeder and this has been Creating Fame Classroom.