If you have Google Analytics in your business, this is an episode you are going to want to listen to. I have a Google Analytics expert with me today, Carrie Saunders, and she is going to help us and help you. How to switch over your universal analytics to the new GA four and why it's important. So listen in.
I'm Jen Argue, I have been leading masterminds for the past five years for six and seven-figure entrepreneurs, and I would love to help you start your own mastermind as well so that you can create a really big impact with those around you and work a lot less and make a lot more at the same time.
Hi, Carrie, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm so excited to have you here. Thanks for having me, Jen. [laughs] I appreciate it. So Carrie and her husband have a business where they focus on the tech and the backend of a website to make sure that your website is working harder so the business owner doesn't have to. So, Carrie, how is it that you know all about Google Analytics?
Well, it's actually been for me for, I would say probably almost 20 years, actually, kind of before Google Analytics even existed. If it's called Urchin, don't even, we won't even go there. [laugh] Yeah. It was called The Urchin was behind it. Yeah, originally. Oh my gosh. And yeah, so I've always been very interested in how it can help a business owner really drive more traffic and understand their traffic and kind of really pull out what people really like about their website and what might need to be improved. So it's really kind of a great tool to see how well your website's working for you.
That's incredible to think about that. We have this amazing tool at our fingertips to help us understand the performance of our website. Mm-hmm. How many people do you think are actually using Google Analytics to actually help them understand that more? Um, I would say it's probably a lot lower than we would like. There's a lot of people who have Google Analytics installed on their website, but then they never go look at it and they never utilize it at all.
And they. They probably get really overwhelmed cuz there's lots of things you could look at in Google Analytics and you might not know where to look. And you probably get confused. Yes. I'm going to admit right now that is me. You nailed it. Exactly. Yeah. Like I haven't set up and then I go there and I'm like, oh, these buttons, I don't even know what I'm looking at.
And yeah, I might look at the bounce rate and think like, oh, that's interesting. But yeah, other than that, tell us right now, like what is happening with Google Analytics because something big is going down. Yes, well, the recent old standard Universal Analytics goes away July 1st, 2023, so it's really coming up super fast.
Now. The new Google Analytics score has been around for longer than most people think. It's been around for about two, two and a half years. I've kind of lost track, and so they're really forcing people now to switch over and Universal Analytics will stop collecting data as of July. Hmm. So if somebody doesn't have the GA Force set up and they're still just in the Universal analytics, once they're cut off, what does that mean?
Yeah, they won't see any more data on their website. They won't see in the universal analytics hit rates or, um, conversion rates or any of the data that's in Universal Analytics. It will just stop recording. It'll be so we'll be blank after J July one. There won't be any data after July one in it. It'll be like someone just turned off the lights and walked out of the room.
Yeah. You can see what happened prior, but you can't see what's happening now. Oh, interesting. Okay. So who does this really apply to? Um, this pretty much applies to anybody who has a website. It doesn't really matter what your website's about. Um, most people want to have their website function and do what they want it to do, which, whether it's selling products or services or serving their community via blogs or recipes or, you know, any of those things.
So if they don't have Google Analytics, then they're just goimg to be kind of clueless as to where people are coming from and what pages they go to the most. And. All the things. Interesting. So right now I am on Cajabi, and Cajabi has in the backend one spot where you put your Google analytic code and then it works for the whole website.
Are all websites like that or is like WordPress or Squarespace, are they different? Do you have to put that code in multiple places? Um, most applications like Squarespace, WordPress, and Kajabi will have one place that you put it in and then it propagates it to all the pages. So they, they make it a lot more convenient.
Pretty much everything out there anymore, you put it in one place and then it's everywhere. Unless it's super old website, it's super old. Okay. I have another question about websites. So I have one website that I focus on the most, and. That I really pay attention to, keep it up to date, but I, I might have a couple other websites that I don't really pay attention to, but I know that eventually I will.
Mm-hmm. And I want to know the data. If I had just like, let's say just set up a new website. If I go into Google Analytics, do I need to come up with a new code or does that same code go on all my websites? I would recommend a new code per website so you can separate the traffic so you can understand what's happening to each website.
And Google allows you to put multiple codes underneath one account. Oh. So you can connect multiple domain names in your Google Analytics. Okay. And or you can switch to which one over one you want to look at and find the data for. Okay. And it, it's probably an obvious answer, but if I were to run ads for all these different businesses that are attached to these different websites, I would be using the different codes then Different Right accounts, right?
Yeah. And then you, because if you didn't, you would have no idea how well your ads were doing. I. So it's super important to do that. Yeah, that would, I know that was a basic question, but I had to ask it. Oh, no. Big deal. So what role does knowing Google Analytics play in a business's success? Well, I feel like if you don't have something like Google Analytics and there are some other analytics, um, software out there, but Google Analytics is free cuz they like to reap all the data and, and figure out things about people.
But without Google Analytics or something like that, then you're kind of flying blind. You just kind of don't know what's happening to your website. You don't know if there's problems with your website, possibly you don't know, uh, which landing pages are working well or not working well. So Google Analytics can help you see your conversions and which pages really bring in, um, most of your traffic and your, um, referrals and sales, et cetera.
Hmm. Interesting. So if something on the website wasn't working well, how would you know that from the Google Analytics? One of the ways you might know it is from a bounce rate, you might have a really high bounce rate on a specific page, and so you know that either the traffic going there is not the right target traffic, or there might be something wrong with that webpage or, or maybe the sales copy or the written copy is uninteresting.
And so people are like, they just leave right afterwards. So you could use it for something like that, for example. Wow. That's such objective data, isn't it? It's, yes. It's not like, I feel this page doesn't work. It's like, here's the data. It doesn't work. Right. Yeah. Okay. Let's say that somebody who is like what you were describing in the beginning and is sort of me, where we have it set up.
I actually, I told you this before that I. Switched it over, but it took me like four hours to do because I am so not good with tech. Mm-hmm. Um, But I tried to follow all the steps, tried to read everything, and it was really overwhelming, to be honest, but doable. Mm-hmm. And I did it. But then when I saw in a Facebook group that you were offering this really easy guide to help people switch over to GA four if they haven't yet, I thought, oh, I wish I had that.
And so I definitely will be linking that to this podcast. So anybody who's listening. Or watching this, please grab that in the show notes because I don't want anyone to have to have it take as long as it did for me. So thank you for offering your expertise to everybody in that way. I think that is fabulous.
But one of my questions is if somebody were to, you know, finally tackle that, they got all up to date with their Google Analytics, now they're like, you know, now that I got in here, I realize it's not so bad. And I can see how useful it is. What do you think would be a good. Next step for them to take in order to start using Google Analytics better for their business.
Well, um, actually the last video in that free course on how to set it up, actually I walk you through Google Analytics four because I find that I. It's so much different than universal analytics as far as the words you're looking at in their menu and things like that. So I even walk you through Google Analytics for and how to use it.
So I feel like you want to get some sort of tutorial because even as a techie person, me trying to read those Google Docs on how to use it, it's awful. I mean, it's awful. Really awful. And I have a master's in electrical engineering and it's awful. That sounds. That's why I created the free course, cuz I'm like, this is really terrible.
How are all of my customers and clients going to set up Google Analytics for like, yes, it just was awful. And then to learn how to use it. So I would definitely recommend either getting our free course, cuz at the end you're going to get a little walkthrough, which is going to give you the basics. Or also like you could search on YouTube and things like that.
I would probably watch somebody else's videos and try to go through Google's documents because it's very. Techy and hard to read. Oh my goodness. Yeah. It's like, why do they do that? We just want to, yeah, we want to use it. Right. Oh, speaking of that, you had brought up earlier that Google Analytics is just like one software out there that helps analyze a website's performance.
What are some of Google Analytics main competitors? Um, well, there're, you could really get into some search engine optimization software like moz.org, I believe it is. Um, and, uh, there's ahf too. There's kind of like Mary pretty well with Google Analytics, so they kind of, they go hand in hand. Mm-hmm. Um, I'm trying to think of, there's a client I have that uses them.
He doesn't trust Google, so I'm trying, I can't quite remember what he uses, but I'd have to look that one up. I'm not so sure. Aw. I want to ask you about dashboards. Do you create dashboards within Google Analytics to kind of like visually summarize the traffic and what's happening? Yeah, I think that would be a really good idea for, especially those who don't want to really dig into Google Analytics a lot.
So if you had somebody set up some dashboards for you that's right on. The main screen so that you're looking at what's most important for your business, because not everything in there is going to be important to everybody. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, I think setting up the dashboards makes a lot of sense. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. So does Google Analytics change that much or is it pretty reliably consistent over time? Yes, actually Google Analytics four has changed quite a bit this past year. So I released in June of 2022, my first, uh, version of the Google Analytics for Crash course to help people get converted to Google A four.
And I've actually had to rerecord those videos three times in one year because they've changed so much and we just recently found another change in it as well. Um, so yeah, they've changed quite a bit and actually, They had to listen to their users because in universal analytics there's something called a bounce rate, and when they first released Google Analytics four, there was no bounce rate and people were complaining, so they brought it back.
So there's now bounce rate in Google Analytics four as a few of months ago, but it wasn't there for a while and people were missing their, their bounce rate because it's kind of a, it's actually pretty important. So we actually even had to write a blog post about it to let people know about the bounce rate coming back and, and how they could use it and where to look for it in the new Google Lenox four, because it was, it was just not even there.
Amazing. Amazing. I'll be sure and get me your blog link and I'll, I'll link it in the show notes as well. So, for people going forward now that they've, you know, done, they've updated everything. What is next for them and how are you part of that? How can you help people going forward? Well, what I'd recommend next is they just really need to spend the time is because it's very important, even though it might be a boring task, they really need to spend the time to get to know Google Analytics for, because it will help them just get better return on investment on their website.
Um, and if anybody ever does need help, they can always contact us. We're happy to help. We, we'd love. Breaking down the tech into bite size pieces. And we have a variety of, um, customers as far as tech technical abilities go. So some of them are absolutely not technical at all, and we will hold their hand all day and help them out.
Some people just want us to give them some directions and some instructions on how to do things, and we're happy to provide that as well. So we do work with clients in many different ways, depending upon their technical level and how much they really want us to be in there with them. So, Hmm, that's amazing.
So with the business that you have helping people's websites and technical things to work harder and better, so it frees up the entrepreneur to do other things and makes them more successful. Mm-hmm. What are the biggest or most things you do most often for your clients to help in that area? What we really like to do is, uh, spend the time to get to know them and what their business goals are so that we can create tools and processes and automations that will help them be a lot more hands off on their business.
I always like to say that we like to. Help them invest in a project and do it the right way rather than the fast way, so that in the long run they get a much better return on their investment and they can have, for example, if they're an e-commerce system, have their orders automatically process and ship or have other automations going on, or product importing so that they get, you know, product feeds from their suppliers and it automatically goes into their website and they don't have to touch their products and everything just happens for them.
So we'd love to do those hard things. Behind the scenes that makes their lives easier so that they can run their business because that's what they're good at. And we want to fill in the gap on the tech side so they can do their, what they're good at, which is running their own business. Amazing. That sounds like such a great way to help people to really set up that area that probably they're not good at.
You know, we want to hire out those things. And I love that you and your husband love to do that and you've built a whole company around it, so that's fantastic. So I have another question. A lot of people I know. Who really relied on the way that all these different software things talked to each other, especially with the IOS and running Facebook ads.
When we lost that connection, they relied more heavily on Google Analytics to help them understand how their ads were performing, their Facebook ads. Yes, actually that's part of what Google Analytics four helps solve and do a better job of is tracking the person across multiple devices. So even from your computer to your phone to tablet and, and especially with the iPhone updates, it helps track all of that much better than Universal Analytics does.
So that's one of the reasons that they're forcing the switch to Google Analytics for is it does a much better job of tracking all that. Oh, interesting. If you are listening to this and you are like, I definitely have something that I need to work better on my website, definitely give her business a call because you guys sound like you can really help them out a lot and that you love to do it.
Yeah, we do love to do it. We love to do the hard things. I mean, we've turned shopping carts upside down and turned them into. Just crazy stuff. It's just so much fun. We just, we love doing all that. Oh my gosh. That's amazing. Carrie, thank you so much for being on the show today. I will definitely put all of the ways to contact you on in the show notes if somebody wanted to connect with you.
Where's, do you have a preferred social platform or do you prefer people to reach out on your website? How do you like people to get ahold of you? I'm probably reaching out on the website would be the best because I get a lot of direct messages and I wouldn't want it to get lost. So yeah, definitely checking us out on our website would be, would be best so that we can, and you can always say, Hey! this is a note to carry and my staff will make sure I see it.
Too because we do have a staff behind us, so. Nice, nice. That makes so much sense that you would want somebody to come to your website since that's where you shine, so, right. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much again, and thank you for making our worlds, um, and our lives a little bit easier by helping us with this transition that is so important in our business.
Switching over to the new Google Analytics and helping us not to have the lights shut off on our analytics side of our business. So thank you. Well, thank you for having me, Jan. I appreciate it.
Thank you so much for listening today. I hope that if you found value in this that you would subscribe to my podcast and share it with a friend and leave a review.
Thank you so much!
