Google Analytics Q&A with Phil Frost of Main Street ROI

This interview with is part of our Convirza Webinar Series, where we interview marketing experts from across North America. But, if you only want to read a transcript of the Q&A, we’ve included it below. 

McKay Allen: Awesome. Phil, thanks for the presentation. It was really good and we have a ton of questions. I’m excited to go through these. We’ve got about 12 minutes to get through questions, so we’ll get through as many as we can, everyone. Okay, let’s start. First of all, we have a lot of questions asking if the webinar has been recorded and if they’ll have access to that recording. Yes, and you’ll also have access to the slides. I’ll have Phil send those to me directly after this webinar. We’ll post them on Slide Share, and we’ll send out links as well. If that works with you, Phil.

Phil Frost: Sure, no problem.

McKay Allen: Okay. Here we go. So Richard is asking about Google Tag Manager. He says, “I thought Tag Manager will help implement the code on the site without pasting the code on every page. Is that true? How does Tag Manager work?”

Phil Frost: So Tag Manager, that is a great tool. And for anyone that’s not familiar with that, it basically gives you one place to put all of your different code or codes. For example, a Google Analytics code. You might be advertising Google AdWords, you want to have conversion code, and then you might advertise at Facebook and now you have some Facebook tracking code that you need to install. It gets a little hectic to have all this code flying around on your site. And it gets annoying to have to send that over to a developer every time. So Google Tag Manager makes it fairly easy for anyone like you and me to actually go in there without any coding experience and add code to your site.

Basically, the answer is yes, you can certainly use Google Tag Manager but you would still need to add Google Tag Manager to every page of your site first and then you would add the Google Analytics code to Google Tag Manager.

McKay Allen: Okay.

Phil Frost: Hopefully that made sense.

McKay Allen: Yeah, Richard asked. . . We asked to follow up if that doesn’t make sense, but yeah, I think it made sense, Phil.

Phil Frost: Okay.

McKay Allen: Myra [SP] asks, she said, “If it’s running Facebook ad would build this URL in the Google URL Builder and paste that URL into the Facebook ad.” So I think she’s specifically asking about Google URL Builder and where to post the URL.

Phil Frost: Right.

McKay Allen: Which is in the ad itself.

Phil Frost: Yup, she’s absolutely correct. So if you’re running a Facebook ad campaign, I highly recommend you go to the URL Builder, make the source Facebook. And then make the medium, I generally use CPC, and that’s cost per click. There are some other different mediums that you can use. And then the other mandatory field is campaign. So maybe it’s a 50% off sale, then you just write “50% off sale,” something like that.

McKay Allen: Wonderful. Okay. Glen, asks…not sure what he’s referring to. He says, “Can this be set up by product or business line? We sell travel insurance [inaudible 00:49:29], autoblast [SP] memberships, etc.” I assume he’s talking about goals or funnels within Google Analytics. I’m not sure. Maybe he’s talking about specific landing pages. Glen, if you could clarify that question, that would be great. We have several people asking how Google Analytics tracks phone calls from a website. I can answer that or you can take that, Phil, if you want to talk about how that displays within Google Analytics with the call tracking tool like ours.

Phil Frost: I’ll definitely let you take that one.

McKay Allen: So basically, what our system does, is we sort of fool Google Analytics into counting a phone call as a page view. So you would basically associate a certain page of your site with all of the phone calls that come through your system. And so our system can analyze which precise pages are generating calls and have those show up in Google Analytics, or it can basically spoof a phone call and basically fool Google Analytics into thinking it’s a web visit. So you would have a certain source that you’d specifically label as phone calls. That would show up within Google Analytics as a web visit but would actually be a phone call coming from our system.

So they’ve made it not terribly easy with phone calls, but we’ve figured out a way to sort of fool them into tracking phone calls. So you need to have a Google Analytics account. You also need to have an account with us, and the integration is already pre-built. So just the data flows in there really easily and there are set up instructions as you go through it. And there’s a lot of our clients that do that. They just want the data in one place. So you don’t get a lot of advanced metrics within Google Analytics about phone calls, you essentially only get whether or not one happened and how long it was. But you don’t get data lead score that our system extracts, or missed opportunities, things like that.

Sabias [SP], she says, “I see very low bounce rates for our site across all channels, less than 2%. I know there’s an issue there. Is it because of all the events we’re tracking on the load of every page?” I’m not sure I understand that question. Do you understand that question, Phil?

Phil Frost: I’m not…

McKay Allen: I think she’s concerned her bounce rates are too low, and wondering if there’s an issue with the back end of some sort. I’m not sure. I think that may be where she’s getting that.

Phil Frost: Yeah, usually if you do have a super low bounce rate, that is a little concerning that something wrong is happening. It would indicate to me that you could be automatically sending people to another page. Because a bounce, if somebody comes and leaves that same page, but if you somehow force people to another page or force the Google Analytics code to look like you went to another page, then that would artificially drag down your bounce rate to nearly zero. And it sounds like that’s what’s happening, and it sounds like she has some advanced code on there that’s probably tricking Google into thinking, “Hey, this person went to another page,” in which case, there wouldn’t be a bounce anymore.

McKay Allen: Interesting. That makes sense. We have a lot of people asking about benchmarks. I mean, what do you think is a good bounce rate? What is a bad bounce rate? How do you judge this? Obviously, it depends on the type of site, the industry, as well as precisely what you’re offering. But what are good bounce rates, as well as traffic source is probably more important? But what are good and bad bounce rates in your mind, Phil?

Phil Frost: Yeah, you touched on the key issues with that question. There are so many variables but I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you’re advertising and sending people to your landing page that is offering something for free. You can generally get, let’s say, a 20%, 30, even upwards of 40% conversion rate, and that would basically mean that, let’s say, 60, 70, 80% are just bouncing. Or a little bit less because they might be clicking around to other pages. But let’s say you’re driving people to a page that now is offering a paid product, now you can get much more of those folks actually bouncing. It’s very hard to say on average or industry standard bounce rate. I would focus on the conversion rate. In terms of average there, I just mentioned something free could be 20 to even upwards of 40% when you start getting into paid conversion rates. Now you’re looking at maybe one, two, three percent conversion rate.

McKay Allen: Right. In my mind, it really depends. There’s a lot of variables, Phil, as you know. But I agree, I think it mostly depends on the traffic source. Because if you’re doing paid search, your bounce rate is going to be very high. But if people are just coming to your home page and they’re organic searchers, I mean, your bounce rate could be very low. Like for example, on our new site, our bounce rate is 20, 30%. Our old site was a little bit higher than that. So it really depends on… In my mind, the traffic source is probably the largest variable.

Phil Frost: Right. Yeah, actually in that slide where I was showing the different channels, the Referral Traffic, generally Referral Traffic has low conversion rates. I think it was about 25% in that slide. I’d have to go back. But that, again, is based on the source of traffic. And a referral is similar to a recommendation. Somebody’s clicking over because they got recommended over to this other site. They’re less likely to bounce versus like McKay said, Paid Search traffic. They’re more likely to bounce because they’re in that shopper mindset and they want to take a look at all the different options.

McKay Allen: So we have two more questions that I want to address. The first one is from Mike. He says, “We’re a small company looking for more leads in an area of about 125,000 population. In your professional opinion . . . ” That’s pretty authoritative. They’re looking for you for professional opinion, so I’m impressed. He says, “Which has worked best for you to drive traffic to your website for obtaining leads: TV, radio, PPC, Paid Search? What do you recommend for a small company looking for leads in a certain geographic area?” And that really depends on the industry and there’s a lot of variables there, but see if you can take a stab at that, Phil.

Phil Frost: Yeah, again, it would depend on the industry. Another key variable, especially when you’re considering advertising, is your value per sale or your price point for your product or service. A lot of times when you run the numbers, it’s just going to be impossible to make it profitable if you have a very low value per customer versus your competition. And that should make sense because if they have a really high value, they can pay more to acquire those customers, and they’re going to naturally drive up the cost per clicks and the cost to advertise in any ad platform.

So basically, the name of the game, if you’re looking to advertise, is to drive up your value per sale or your value per customer. And that allows you to actually compete and buy the media that you need profitably. So if you look at your numbers in that sense, if advertising does not make sense, then your options get limited and you need to look at possibly SEO, look at partnerships to drive traffic. And it may not work, Paid Search-wise, but you may want to look at Facebook and see if the numbers make more sense on their platform.

McKay Allen: Yeah, I agree. And he clarified too a little bit with the industry, retail window. And retail, on average, ticket price is about $9,000. So that’s a big item, Mike. So here’s my suggestion too to piggyback on what Phil said. Keep in mind, too, especially in retail window, that most people in those scenarios don’t necessarily want to fill out a web form. They want to call you and they want to talk to you. Because when they’re talking about spending that kind of money, they really want to have a conversation. I guess my two cents is make sure you’re looking at the right metrics. Things like bounce rates, things like that probably don’t matter as much in your industry as producing a high number of good quality phone calls. So just keep that in mind, Mike, as you go forward with your marketing, what channels are going to produce phone calls for you, not necessarily which ones are going to generate form fills. So just my two cents.

All right. Phil, I think we’re out of time, man. Any final words of wisdom for us here today?

Phil Frost: I’ll give you a plug. This is totally unprompted but it just is super important to track your phone calls in your marketing campaign. We didn’t touch a ton on phone call tracking with Google Analytics but that is the other side of tracking your marketing campaign. So you need to see what’s going on on your site, if people are filling out forms. But as McKay just said, if your business relies on phone calls, you really need to know where your phone call is coming from. And it’s a similar analysis that we walked through, you need to get that high level view of total number of calls per marketing channel and then dive a little bit deeper into that call quality. So it’s a very similar process and just wanted to bring that point up since we didn’t really touch on it. No matter what tool you’re using, you do need to keep an eye on your phone calls.

McKay Allen: Yeah, thanks for the plug, Phil. Appreciate it. And everybody, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to join us. We really, really do appreciate it. Next week we have two fantastic webinars as well. The first one is with a guy named Greg Hickman, with an agency that specializes in mobile marketing, just talking about how to mobilize a loyalty program with your clients with text messaging, which should be a really interesting topic. And then we’re also going to have a webinar on Thursday, where we actually talk a little bit about why we changed our name from LogMyCalls to Convirza, and some of the hurdles we had to overcome to do that, some of the surprises, things we learned. So it’s an interesting process. I think you’ll find it instructive.

So anyway, with that, thanks again. Watch for an email from us with the recording and the slides. And as always, thanks to Phil with Main Street ROI. Those guys do a great job, and I highly recommend you talking to them if you have any type of marketing question