Utilizing Data and Analytics to Enhance Business Longevity and Decision-Making

GA4 was a big update, and it's easy to get lost in all the changes.

Let's face it; Google Analytics provides a lot of information. The information is excellent, but most important is what YOU do with it to improve your business.

Today we dive into how you can use the information to save money, time, and sanity.

Want to dive deeper? Check out our GA4 migration blog post.

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Collab with Kiva.

See you next time!

Podcast transcript:

Kiva Slade: [00:00:01]

Hello, and welcome to Collab With Kiva. I'm your host, Kiva Slade. From the marbled halls of the US Congress to my racing-themed office chair, I've learned that there is no perfect path to the life of your dreams. My journey over the past 20 years has included being a legislative director for a member of Congress, policy director for a nonprofit, stay at home mom, homeschooling mom, jewelry business owner, and now the owner of a service-based business. Whether your journey has been a straight line or full of zigs and zags, join me and my guest as we share insights, hope, and lessons learned from our female entrepreneurship journeys. May the collaborative sharing of our stories be the tide that lifts your boat. Let's dive in.

[00:00:55]

Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to another episode of Collab With Kiva. I am your host Kiva Slade. And today we are quickly approaching the middle of June. Seriously, where is time going? But let's back up some to July 1st of this year. Do you know what that day was? I'll give you a hint. It wasn't my birthday. That's next month. Hint, hint. But July 1st of this year marked one year until Google starts to sunset universal analytics and direct and report all traffic data only to Google Analytics 4. What does this mean? Because I know some of you are probably wondering, okay Kiva, and what? It means that you have now less than a year in order to make the move to Google Analytics 4.

[00:02:01]

Don't fret if you go to my website the516collaborative dot com, I've put together a ten-page guide to help you help yourself move and migrate over there to GA4. Because I want you to have at least a year of historical data in your Google Analytics 4 account before July 1st, 2023, when Google stopped sending information to your universal analytics account. So, that is my free gift to you because I really do want you to have that. And you might be saying, "Why Kiva? Every single time I turn around, you're talking about data, data, data, data, data" Guess what people, as women (and most of my listeners are women) there's no shortage of us starting businesses in the United States. I cannot speak to other countries because I haven't done the research yet.

[00:03:07]

But in the US of A, we start business businesses at very high rates. However, we also suffer from some of the same problems and some slightly different problems when it comes to business longevity, when it comes to staying in business, when it comes to having a profitable business, when it comes to running a business that does not lead you to burnout, when it comes to being the CEO of a business that you are like, "Hey, I'm still excited, I'm still pumped, and guess what? If I decide to sell this business one day, I have data to show a prospective buyer what it is that they're buying and the value that's in it."

[00:04:02]

So. Yes, I can talk to you about systems. I can talk to you about operations because those are super important as well when it comes to possibly selling a business or just running one that does not burn you all the way out, but today we're going to talk about the data that comes from the Web, the Internet, the interwebs. And before I start though, just a quick story. When I talk to you guys about data, to borrow from a hip hop song, "I'm not new to this. I'm true to this." I've been doing this for years, people, years. I can take you back to grad school and using geographical information system mapping in order to put together census data on levels that you would not want to probably see, to see that level of my inner nerd come out.

[00:05:07]

But in addition to that, that continued, I was a budget management analyst for county government, and literally budgets that my smallest agency had a $5 million budget. My largest, well over 50. So, having to do the work in those businesses, in those agencies, in order to make sure that county taxpayer money, as well as state funds and other things were all allocated, and things were being used, and regression analysis, and so much that was taking place. That continued even when I was on Capitol Hill. In order to put forth legislation, we had to do numbers, we had to do research, we had to look at data and what it was telling us.

[00:06:09]

When I was with the nonprofit as their policy manager, same exact thing. All the time in life we are dealing with numbers, and numbers are our friends. One of my favorite movies with my kids was Finding Nemo. And you remember Bruce, "We don't eat fish. Fish are our friends." But honestly, numbers are our friends. But I'm going to digress a bit from Bruce here, I think we need to eat our numbers. I'll just say it. We need to eat them in. And too many of us are not eating our numbers. We don't know what our numbers are. So, when I'm talking about your web analytics or social media analytics, what exactly am I talking about?

[00:06:56]

So, there'll be questions. Maybe you have some of these questions. Where's my web traffic coming from? Where do my leads come from? What are people searching to find me and or my website? When they come to my website? What is their typical customer journey? What path are they taking when they're on my site? Are they coming to your home page and leaving? Are they coming to your home page intrigued enough to go to your about page? Are they intrigued enough there to go to your services page? Are they intrigued enough there to go to your book a call page for those that are service providers? What does that look like? What page is the last page that people are seeing on your site before they are like, I'm out of here? What's your email list click-through rate? Those are just some of the questions that you have access to and you may have asked yourself, but you may not actually know where to find that information.

[00:08:06]

And it does exist, except for the email click-through rate, in your Google Analytics. But if it's not being examined, if it's not being utilized, then you're not going to have this information. But all of this information helps set you and your business apart from others. It helps you know what you need to do more of and what you might need to do less of. It lets you know when you combine it with things like UTM links, "Hey, this content did amazing. This content fell flat. Was it the timing of when I released the content? Let's try it again." Because so much of this is experimentation. Let's be real.

[00:09:02]

But when you do that and you have the data ... So, your piece of flat content, you've now recirculated it three times, every single time it's been flat. You're amazing content, you've recirculated it three times and it has done well three out of the four times. I think you can draw a conclusion from there, "Hey self, this content is better than this and I need to produce more of this and less of this." Let's just go there with a very simplistic example. And one of the things that I find so interesting is that we are not utilizing this data. And I think that ... I don't think, I know, data is what's going to separate businesses that have longevity from those that do not. I'ma say it again. Businesses that utilize data will last longer than those that do not.

[00:10:11]

There's just no other way. Data is the currency in our economy. The time that we live in, it is currency. And the sooner we start to tap into it, the sooner we start to utilize it, the sooner we understand and accept and realize that it is there to help us, the better off we will be. So, let's talk about some other things. If you have a website, what are some things that you might want to measure? We talked about traffic sources. What about your page load time? Let's think about that one for a minute. Have you ever gone to a website and you were like, oh, my goodness, refresh, refresh, and it still wasn't coming up, and you just said, forget it? Yeah, I know. I'm not the only one.

[00:11:08]

But page load time is important. Why is it important? Because just as you were having that frustrating experience with a website, you don't want people to have that experience with your site to the point where they're like, "Oh my gosh, I was there and nothing happened and I bailed." Maybe you have multiple pages on your site. Maybe you have blogs and different things. Do you know? Because let's be honest, who has time to check every single link on their website? Would it be helpful for you to have a report that lets you know, Hey, this particular page and this one are generating a 404 error and people are bouncing off your site because they went somewhere that doesn't exist anymore?

[00:12:01]

What are the top pages on your site? Maybe you're running ads or maybe you have a free download like that Google Analytics 4 migration checklist I told you about at the beginning. So, maybe you have some of those things. Is it coming up as a top page for you? What else might be coming up for you where obviously your homepage should be coming up? But if you're directing people, say, via email and social to a particular blog post, then you would want to see that blog post is one of your top pages to know that, hey, folks are actually doing it, they're clicking on it, they're going there. Maybe you have a lead magnet. How about how many views are coming to your lead magnet landing page? Because that's important. Because you could be jumping for joy. Over 20 people who have signed up for your lead magnet. Would you still jump for joy if there had been 250 people who actually went to the landing page for it? You might. You might not.

[00:13:13]

You could look at how many leads you actually acquired from that or your conversion rate for your lead magnet. Maybe you sell services. How many people go to your services page How many people actually go and visit your book call, your scheduler, whatever you call your call? How many actually visit it, and go to that particular page? But then how many actually schedule a call? Because those numbers aren't the same. I know you might be thinking they're the same, but they're not. If you have a funnel, maybe you have an order bump, you know what those are. You go to buy A, and the next thing they know, they're like, Hey, do you also want B? And then the next thing you know, you have A and B in your cart. So, you want to know how many people took that order bump?

[00:14:19]

How many people are like, yeah, you know what, I'm good ... Because, underneath that, it that says, No, thanks, just take me to the checkout? So, you know that you could do that as well. You might, though, sell the products. How many people visit your sales page and your product description, and or your check checkout page? What's the abandoned art rate? Maybe you're running ads and you have a lot of traffic coming to your site, but no one's buying yet. What products are they looking at? Do you know? Do you know in addition to that, how many people are starting checkout, but then they're like, "I don't know, do I really want to buy or just those? I am not sure."

[00:15:11]

So, you can look at your number of those who initiated checkout and then those who also completed transactions, and then obviously those who abandon the cart. And also, your average transaction value because that's really important. So, there are so many things that you could definitely track and be aware of in your business that could help guide you to once again making decisions that are not rooted in what you think is happening, but more so rooted in, Hey, this is actually what's taking place, so, therefore, you can move forward with not only confidence, but I think move forward with a true level of assurance that you are doing things and making decisions in your business that are just that rooted in fact.

[00:16:15]

And I get it, tech numbers can sometimes feel overwhelming because, let's be honest, we're all wearing 50-11 hats in our business. I get that. But I don't want you to let that be the reason why you just don't do anything at all. Because not doing anything at all is not the option. Putting your head in the sand like an ostrich is not going to make Google decide "Hey, you know what? We're actually going to delay that date and you can keep using X, Y, and Z. You can keep using universal analytics. You can keep not tracking anything." No, that's not what's going to happen. You are just going to be left behind. That's just what's going to happen. And no one wants that for you. I don't want that for you.

[00:17:06]

So, again, go check it out. Get the guide. Move yourself over there. And I even tell you how to filter out your own IP address. Because I know, because I've spoken to many, people don't know that they can do that. You can filter out yours, filter out your teams. Because quite honestly, I know some ya'll ... ya'll check out that website daily, multiple times a day, and you're making your own numbers be skewed. So, I'm going to need you to filter that out, all right? For some of you, I'd also recommend creating a new view that includes that filtered-out data so that you're not confusing that with other old information.

[00:18:00]

So, what are you going to do? Yes, you're right, you are going to go download the guide and you're going to get GA4 on your websites because you want you to have almost a year's worth of historical data before you're forced to move to G4 because Google no longer reports to your universal analytics AKA GA3. So, with that being the case, if you have any questions, definitely feel free to reach out to me. Grab the guide. The link will be in the show notes. And remember numbers are our friend. So, in the words of Dorie, I want you to just keep swimming and I will talk to you next week. Bye.

[00:18:57]

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Collab With Kiva. Each of us has a different path and I hope that this episode gave you some takeaway that has left you inspired and motivated to keep pressing forward on your unique path. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on any future episodes. And of course, your reviews on Apple are greatly appreciated. If you're a small business owner, ready to start making data-driven decisions in your business, and you know that without the data, you're really just guessing, make sure to visit my website, the516collaborative.com, and let's schedule a time to talk to make sure that you can harness the power of data in your business. I'll see you next time. Bye.

Meet Kiva Slade - the Founder and CEO of The 516 Collaborative. With a unique background in high-power politics on Capitol Hill and sixteen years as a homeschooling mama, Kiva found her calling in the online business world as a trusted guide for entrepreneurs looking to build the business of their dreams.

Kiva's work began behind the scenes, orchestrating the back end of businesses and managing teams. But her inner data diva couldn't help but notice that small businesses needed help harnessing the power of data for growth. So she and her team set out to uncover and tidy up the data required to enable clients to grow their businesses confidently and easily.