Mastering GA4 with John Reinesch of Exponential Growth

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Web analytics has become an essential component of business success in today's digital landscape. In a recent interview with Exponential Growth founder and analytics expert John Reinesch, we explored the importance of understanding and utilizing web analytics effectively to drive growth and make better business decisions. In this blog post, we'll highlight key takeaways from the discussion, providing actionable insights for business owners and marketers alike.

The Importance of a Measurement Plan

A solid measurement plan is crucial for businesses looking to make the most of their web analytics. John emphasizes the need to start with clearly defined business goals and objectives. This helps to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) and the right metrics to track, ensuring your analytics efforts align with your overall strategy.

Navigating the Learning Curve

Web analytics tools can be daunting for beginners. However, John reassures that the learning curve isn't too steep, especially once you get started. Familiarizing yourself with the basics, even if you have an analytics team, helps you communicate more effectively and ask the right questions when it comes to data analysis.

Improving Communication Between Business Owners and Analytics Teams

One challenge businesses often face is bridging the gap between business objectives and web analytics. John suggests having an analytics team member help translate business goals into website KPIs. This fosters better communication and ensures both parties are aligned in their objectives.

Identifying the Right Metrics to Track

Not all website metrics are created equal. It's essential to focus on those that genuinely contribute to your business goals. John advises using your measurement plan as a guide and prioritizing metrics that directly impact your desired outcomes.

Leveraging Web Analytics for Business Growth

Ultimately, the goal of web analytics is to drive business growth through data-driven decisions. By understanding the data, communicating effectively with your analytics team, and focusing on the right metrics, you can unlock the true potential of web analytics and propel your business forward.

Web analytics play a vital role in the success of modern businesses. By mastering the art of web analytics and applying the insights shared by John Smith in our interview, you can make better, data-driven decisions that lead to increased growth and success for your company. Keep learning, stay curious, and always be ready to adapt to the ever-evolving digital landscape.

Interview Transcript

Want the transcript of the interview? We got you. Read below:

00:00:06:23 - 00:00:07:17

Andy

Hi. I'm Andy.

00:00:08:07 - 00:00:17:18

Lindsey

And I'm Lindsey. Welcome to E-commerce Marketing with the Pitbulls where we try to cut through the noise and simplify digital marketing for authentic brands looking to make more sales online.

00:00:19:00 - 00:00:33:06

Andy

Today we're joined by John Reinesch. John is the founder of Exponential Growth. It's an analytics company that works with other agencies to make sure that they have their analytics, reporting and tracking all set up properly. Welcome, John.

00:00:33:24 - 00:00:35:11

John

Awesome. Great to be here.

00:00:36:05 - 00:00:42:12

Andy

So why don't we start just tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and kind of what you're working on these days.

00:00:43:06 - 00:01:11:12

John

Yes, I've been working in kind of the agency space for probably the last ten years or so. So various agencies over the years I got started doing mostly SEO, then kind of move to Google ads and getting into analytics. And now what we're doing is we just got the company exponential growth started last year around August and we're really focused on kind of white label services for agencies to essentially give them an analytics team that they can leverage to get set up at year four or even client reporting as well.

00:01:12:24 - 00:01:42:05

Andy

Awesome. Yeah, I feel like that's such a such a gap, such a need. So great. Great to be there. Awesome. So today we're going to be talking a lot about analytics around e-commerce specifically. That's kind of what we what we deal with the most here. But I'd be remiss if we didn't kind of start with J. Can you give me a little bit of, I guess, kind of an intro for the audience, anybody who hasn't heard of J for yet, but kind of what are what are you all seeing with the with the upgrade?

00:01:42:24 - 00:02:01:19

John

Yeah, we're seeing a lot of people still have not set up their accounts yet. So it's coming up in July. There's that deadline where your universal analytics is going to stop tracking what some people don't know as well is they're not official date. But in 2024, it looks like Google is actually going to delete your data for universal analytics as well.

00:02:02:07 - 00:02:15:13

John

So not only is it going to start tracking this year, but by the time next year rolls around, you're not going to have your data unless you back it up in a tool like big query. But so it's a good time to set up G for now. So you have a little bit of data before that deadline rolls around.

00:02:16:07 - 00:02:33:16

John

One thing we're seeing is Google is pushing out as auto migration. So a lot of people might start to see those emails come in or when they log in, it's like the first thing you'll see. There's a lot of issues using that because Google is going to try to map different metrics over and a lot of things tend to break when you go with that automated set up.

00:02:34:14 - 00:02:41:11

John

It's better than nothing, but it's ideal if you actually take a look at it and really start dialing it in and make sure your tracking is ready to go once July hits.

00:02:42:16 - 00:03:00:17

Andy

Yeah, it's funny, we've done a few G-4 upgrades ourselves and it's funny what we're seeing. It even on accounts where we've already done the G-4 upgrade, it's like, so we'll have the the G for all set up and configured the way we want and then obviously get this email like, hey, we're about to create a new, new property out of your old universal analytics property.

00:03:00:17 - 00:03:08:02

John

So yeah, you actually have to opt out of that still, even if you have it set up in most cases, which gets thrown everybody off.

00:03:08:12 - 00:03:28:10

Andy

Yeah, but no, definitely a great I think for anybody if you haven't done that upgrade yet, it's definitely really, really important, especially now on the eCommerce side, Shopify just launched that they are supporting it kind of out of the box. So on the Shopify side, probably a little bit easier. Obviously just put in your your tracking ID and it pops out.

00:03:28:10 - 00:03:38:22

Andy

But but yeah, I know we work with a couple more custom set ups here and there too, and it can get a little bit hairy, making sure that you're tracking all your events properly. So definitely want to do that. Custom.

00:03:40:03 - 00:04:02:16

John

Yeah, yeah. We see that a lot and it's nice that the integrations are starting to roll out because we're kind of waiting to see when all that would happen with obviously Shopify being one of the biggest ones. And yeah, without the e-commerce data in G4, it's you're really just getting your traffic data or some maybe forms of missions that you set up so that one doesn't usually the first thing we'll look at for e-commerce sites, definitely.

00:04:03:24 - 00:04:21:18

Andy

Awesome. So outside of G4, what would you say? You know, as we're kind of turning towards ecommerce and thinking about analytics, what's maybe the one thing that you see e-commerce companies not doing or what's the, you know, kind of the first thing that that ecommerce brands really should focus on in terms of analytics?

00:04:22:14 - 00:04:39:00

John

Yeah, the way I like to think about it is sometimes even before you get into the tools like G4 or really any other analytics platforms is doing what used to be pretty popular. Still is a measurement plan where you're starting to look at kind of what are your business goals and objectives, and then what are the actual goals, goals for the website.

00:04:39:09 - 00:04:55:01

John

So like which of these business goals will map into the website? And then you could start selecting kind of KPIs based on those different website goals. So that could be a really good way to start thinking about like how you're going to approach your tracking and your setup just to really make sure like you're going to be tracking the metrics that you really care about.

00:04:55:01 - 00:05:13:01

John

They're going to ultimately help with the business objectives. So doing that exercise first can really help you start thinking and understanding like the metric you really want to make sure you're tracking. And then you can go and look at which of those metrics are currently being tracked, like out of the box by Q4 and which ones you need to set up custom.

00:05:13:08 - 00:05:19:14

John

So you really kind of have that full game plan of exactly how you should approach your tracking.

00:05:19:14 - 00:05:35:03

Andy

Yeah, I think that's really, really helpful. We, we, we find that a lot of times where, you know, it's easy to say, okay, well, I'm going to throw in my, my ID, my G4 ID or even my universal analytics idea and start getting some, some data coming over. But at the end of the day, it's like, well, what question are you trying to answer here?

00:05:35:04 - 00:05:51:08

Andy

Like you can go in and it's like you're kind of in like a swamp of data. But yeah, is it are you more product focused or are you more user focused? You looking at location stuff like it's all you know, it's kind of different for every every company. So it's, it's important to kind of understand where you're going first.

00:05:52:08 - 00:06:15:10

John

Yeah. And more data isn't always better too. Like sometimes we try to track every single thing, but then if it's not usable, it's not actionable or it even gets overwhelming. We're now people don't want to look at it or log in and actually see what's happening. There's kind of that point where it becomes more detrimental to actually over track things and really want to make sure it's it's ultimately leading to whatever your goals are that you have the answers for that definitely.

00:06:16:04 - 00:06:33:07

Andy

And I think that's probably a really good Segway. I know you do a lot of work around Dashboard as well with all of this. So like thinking through trying to avoid that overwhelm getting into, okay, well what, what do we really need to be looking at or what are we going to show on a dashboard, something like that.

00:06:33:14 - 00:06:42:12

Andy

What's your approach when you're working with a, you know, an agency that's trying to support an eCommerce client? What are one of the things people really need to be looking at?

00:06:43:08 - 00:07:00:23

John

Yeah, I think that's the first thing we like to map out is kind of just long term trends for a few metrics that we really care about. So typically for e-commerce, it's going to be like revenue purchases. If you're running ads, probably return on ad spend for Google, Facebook, whatever you're running and they're trending that out with as long of a time period as you can.

00:07:00:23 - 00:07:17:23

John

So if you have 13 months, that's great because you could see year over year and then actually see what are those main metrics look like. A huge fan sometimes are just focusing on kind of like the scorecard style where it's just the metric, the month versus the last month, because sometimes there could be seasonality or you don't have that long term view.

00:07:18:07 - 00:07:39:17

John

Something may have gone up or down, but you really don't have that extra context to really know are things trending in the right direction overall? So that's usually where we'll start and then you can start digging deeper into specific campaigns or channels and get into more detail on that. But we always like to start with kind of a few metrics and just long term trends and then kind of let the report progress from there.

00:07:41:05 - 00:08:01:05

Lindsey

I like that you mentioned seasonality and I feel like that's kind of a pitfall. A lot of early clients for us, I don't I'm not sure if you see it with agencies where they see something trending downward and think, oh, okay, something's not working anymore when really it's just seasonality at play. I'm wondering if you have other metrics or things to kind of look out for, for agencies or clients when they're looking at their dashboards.

00:08:01:05 - 00:08:06:21

Lindsey

What are some things that maybe people get tripped up on or that can kind of give them false positive hope?

00:08:07:19 - 00:08:26:19

John

Yeah, that's a great example too. Sometimes when you're tuned in to just looking at month to month, you're going to get sometimes the wrong answers. Are you going to be led in the wrong direction? Where we're basically yeah, if there's seasonality or sometimes if you've increase and last month was an all time high, maybe your decreased slightly and it looks like things are going down, but it's still your second best month you've had.

00:08:27:03 - 00:08:49:01

John

So really zooming out is like it's going to give you that, that view that you want. What I see commonly on dashboard is a moat, the most common issue is really putting too much on one slide. So a lot of times we try to jam in as much metrics and charts into one slide, but really that just makes kind of everything a little more confusing and it's hard to really understand what's happening.

00:08:49:11 - 00:09:06:15

John

So really simplifying can have a big impact on your reports. It looks easier, but a lot of times actually harder to pull that off where you have one or two charts that's really clear kind of what's happening and not overdoing it with kind of throwing everything at somebody.

00:09:06:15 - 00:09:23:07

Andy

Yeah, I'm laughing. I feel like that's something that we get into or have have bumped into in the past a lot where it's a, you know, we're really comfortable with the numbers and we're in it every day. So like and understanding how this metric ties to that metric and you know, which ones do you focus on and which ones can you kind of ignore?

00:09:23:07 - 00:09:48:18

Andy

And only look at if you're trying to, you know, deep dove into something else. But yeah, really important to remember that like client probably isn't in it every day. Like you are like just coming up. A lot of times it's more often than not it just creates more confusion or, you know, worse yet creates the wrong information where you're looking at one particular metric that like really is not where your mind needs to be focused on and really tying into that.

00:09:48:18 - 00:10:00:14

Andy

So yeah, I think that's great. The idea of like, okay, let's simplify and find a way to just get as little information as possible but the right information on the, on the dashboard at once.

00:10:01:10 - 00:10:17:12

John

Yeah, I think that's really key. So even if you understand like who is the audience for the report, a lot of times that can give you some some direction on where you should go with it, what level of detail, because there's all these features and look or studio or any dashboard tool where you can make it interactive and people can like drill down into the data.

00:10:17:20 - 00:10:37:14

John

In some cases that may make sense if it's like an an internal team. Like maybe if you make a Google ads report and the one the person running the Google ads campaigns is going to use it, then you could actually add a lot of those filters and like ability to drill down where a client report typically you want to have it kind of set to be kind of show the story of what's happening and the direction you're going to go in.

00:10:38:20 - 00:11:05:17

Andy

Definitely. All right. So we talked a little bit about kind of some of those high level metrics. You know, the you want to make sure that, you know, you've got your revenue coming in. You want to make sure that you kind of understand if you're running ads, you're ROAS, all of that. But what I'm really interested in is, you know, as we think about if I'm a brand owner and I've got this dashboard, I'm trying to focus on, like, how do I know that my website is performing well?

00:11:06:04 - 00:11:23:01

Andy

What are some of those like? Kind of I think of them almost as like interior metrics or, you know, the things that I should be worried about that maybe will show up some problems or show up some areas for improvement, you know, even prior to seeing those top line, you know, revenue metrics and things changing.

00:11:24:00 - 00:11:42:12

John

Yeah, I think in G-4 in particular, there's like an engagement metrics now like engaged sessions which shows and they have the definition when you hover over, it's essentially like sessions that aren't immediately bouncing or only spending a couple of seconds on the page. I believe the other factor is if they click on to another page as well that Google factors into that.

00:11:42:18 - 00:12:00:19

John

So you could see engagement rate as well, which is kind of interesting to see like by channel or maybe by landing page. A lot of ways to break that down, but just to get an overall sense of like are the right people going to your website? And that can be that can be interesting to look at over time, especially by channel as well.

00:12:00:19 - 00:12:15:15

John

Sometimes opt for channels, a lower engagement rate might be fine if it's really a landing page and you're really just trying to get them to submit a form and they're not going to go anywhere else but other times you might want to see that depending on the campaign or channel, you're running b higher. So I do like that one.

00:12:15:15 - 00:12:20:18

John

It's a newer metric, but it can kind of quickly give you a way to see if you're reaching the right people.

00:12:21:22 - 00:12:39:24

Andy

Yeah, I like that too. Kind of summarizes a lot of things together, right? So you're not just looking at bounce rate, you're not just looking at, you know, click through on a given page or something like that. I like that. It's kind of rolls it up to give you a metric that's a little bit more understandable. Like this is actually who's engaging with the page.

00:12:39:24 - 00:13:01:19

John

Yeah. And I think one other one I really like now is in the Explorer tab of JS four. So that's a newer feature where you could build some more kind of interactive reports. There's the old behavior flow report is called Path Exploration Now, and that's a really interesting one to see how people are navigating throughout the website. So you could see like as they enter the home page where they navigating to next.

00:13:01:22 - 00:13:16:14

John

So ultimately you'd want to see like are these pages you really want people to be like progressing to you and you can make some adjustments and then you can even do it. The reverse order where you start with a form submission and then start to see the steps somebody is taking right before submitting the form or purchasing for e-commerce.

00:13:16:14 - 00:13:31:14

John

So that could be interesting to see. Like what are the pages that are really leading people to purchase? Maybe you see a blog post on there that you want to drive more people to, or maybe certain product category pages. So really interactive and a nice way to be able to kind of sift through how people are using the website.

00:13:33:04 - 00:13:50:03

Andy

Yeah, I love that. I love that. It's really it's very behavioral at that point. I think a lot of what we've talked about in terms of four has been like, hey, why did they force me to upgrade to this new system? And like, how do I get that report that I used to have an EUA now in for?

00:13:50:03 - 00:14:05:05

Andy

Like, how do I answer the same questions? But it is kind of cool once you start getting into some of those, you know, explore reports of like, hey, now here's where the actual power is and like the, the new things that I'm sure there is a way to do that in universal analytics, but we weren't doing that in universal analytics.

00:14:05:05 - 00:14:23:00

Andy

So like now pretty easily all of a sudden if you've got a question like that, like, hey, what are the few pages somebody got to before they submitted this form? You can actually answer that now, which you probably wouldn't be able to do without some, you know, pretty intensive reporting shenanigans in the old days.

00:14:23:16 - 00:14:44:02

John

And I think that was the biggest criticism of GFR, too, is like you're used to all the old records where everything is now Google out of the box didn't give you as much. There's more customization options, which is one of the benefits where you could actually tailor all the reports exactly towards your business so you can get rid of any reports that aren't relevant for you where it used to be.

00:14:44:02 - 00:15:03:08

John

Whatever reports Google had in the navigation was that was locked in. Now everything can be customized. So there's some pros and cons to that. The nice thing is once you get going with and you do tailor the reports, you can make it so it only has exactly what you're looking for and what you need versus all the reports that used to be in there, which maybe there was only a few of them that you really checked.

00:15:04:10 - 00:15:09:02

John

So that's one thing to look out for when you're doing a set up.

00:15:09:02 - 00:15:29:05

Lindsey

I'm curious to now that you I feel like you kind of touched on something that maybe is the whole reason exponential growth is here, that there's probably this space in the market between agencies who were reluctant to go ahead and jump on four or whatever and end up to begin with. Can you touch on that, what you've seen with your agency clients, like where was the resistance there?

00:15:29:05 - 00:15:30:17

Lindsey

Why are people scared of data?

00:15:31:11 - 00:15:47:04

John

Yeah, that's a great point. That's exactly one of the reasons we kind of dove into this is really two things. One of them, it's hard for most agencies to have full time analytics people on their team. You really have to start hitting a certain scale, a certain size for that to make sense. And it takes quite a while to get there.

00:15:47:10 - 00:16:05:22

John

So for most agencies, they're typically hiring contractors or maybe companies to help just to bridge the gap, because you might have someone in your team that knows a little bit about or maybe they're trying to research it and then learn it for for your team. But being able to plug in a team that does this every day is one of the reasons we really, really dove into it.

00:16:06:18 - 00:16:27:03

John

I was resistant like everybody else when it first came out, because you're used to the way things were, that you get used to the analytics. You're in there so often that eager to find stuff. So that's that's another thing. Do most agencies that are still in that phase? There's almost no at this point their clients are asking or they want to go to clients and be able to say, like, we have a solution for it.

00:16:27:03 - 00:16:32:12

John

And I think that's kind of as the deadline keeps getting closer, there's more of that popping up pretty rapidly.

00:16:33:15 - 00:16:48:00

Lindsey

Yeah, I've been really surprised to see how much everyone has procrastinating jumping onto it. And I'm just I've been kind of pulling everybody and curious as to like, why are you not doing this? And everybody's just sort of like in just I'd rather not talk about it. It is.

00:16:48:09 - 00:16:49:04

John

Yeah, yeah.

00:16:49:13 - 00:16:51:01

Andy

Bury the head in the sand. Why not?

00:16:51:03 - 00:16:53:00

Lindsey

Yeah, it's surprising.

00:16:54:24 - 00:17:15:07

Andy

I'm curious kind of getting back to some of the those special reports or what I would call like a specialty report, like a funnel report or something or a past bath exploration report. I know we're really focused on data box. We set up data box dashboards for all of our clients. From what I gather, you're more like our studio, right?

00:17:15:07 - 00:17:21:14

John

Yeah. We've used data box as well though, so I'm definitely deeply familiar with it. I think there's some advantages to it for sure.

00:17:22:11 - 00:17:46:04

Andy

I'm curious. Like, so I know that we found some limitations with data box just really in general with GA for integration, there's, there's the basic stuff you can do. And we found a way to like kind of get our basic metrics that we really like to report out on there. But certainly things like path exploration and funnel reports that you may want to use, we don't really have a good way to integrate that in data box.

00:17:46:09 - 00:17:50:22

Andy

I'm curious if there's anything better in Looker studio or if that's still kind of a gap there.

00:17:51:09 - 00:18:24:18

John

Still a gap with universal analytics. There was a separate API at one point that lets you connect to like multichannel funnel reports and some different stuff. I'm not sure if that's going to be the case you aim for at some point, but a lot of those features still, yeah, you have to be engaged for even some metrics aren't available through the API still yet like landing page, you can't really get into a lot of reports and other issues we see we're connecting to G-4 is the the limitations where your charts will actually break in looker studio if basically too many people are using the report.

00:18:25:05 - 00:18:44:11

John

So that's where big query comes in, starting to connect directly to big query and use big query to connect to Looker studio. It's much faster and you don't run into any of those limitations. So that's kind of the work around. We've been doing quite a bit now with Gia for actually having some issues like connecting to Dashboard Tools.

00:18:45:15 - 00:19:13:06

Andy

Yeah, yeah. I think what I'm what I'm hearing from a obviously a lot of that will get better as Gia for, you know, gets a little bit more, you know, out of beta and all of that and kind of more integrations are available. But yeah, I think with all of this, our perspective as an agency has always been that like everybody has got to have analytics, you know, as far as for us, Lindsey and I were both really focused on like understanding, you know, the numbers on the dashboard.

00:19:13:06 - 00:19:33:18

Andy

Like you can't really get away from it, but you have more and more and more as we start to look at like the complexity growing, I feel like even from like a brand or a founder perspective, it's like you're going to have to learn at some point, even if it's just so much as like I can log into G4 and find a report that somebody has already created for me, that seems like that's kind of the direction we're going there.

00:19:33:18 - 00:19:37:17

Andy

Like everybody's got to be able to see and understand this stuff.

00:19:38:20 - 00:19:56:17

John

Yeah, I think that's key. Just being able to know enough to navigate, know kind of a basic understanding of what some of the metrics you're looking at are. Because then when you're presented a report or someone showing you a report, you can kind of digest some of the information a little bit better, and then you'll have your own questions and insights as you're looking at that that someone else might not have.

00:19:56:17 - 00:20:10:08

John

So, yeah, if you can once you get in there a little bit and you start navigating the learning curve isn't too bad when you get in there. Definitely takes a little bit upfront, but once you get in there, it's going to be a big benefit.

00:20:10:08 - 00:20:34:11

Andy

Yeah, and I feel like that's one of those things. Even doing it at a basic level will help a lot, even if somebody else is going to be doing everything for you or creating reports or whatever. But to your point of like having a measurement plan upfront, just being able to kind of speak the language a little bit and understand like how some of these reports work and like what they can and can't do helps a lot to like make sure that you're asking the right questions or, you know, communicating with your analytics team in the right way.

00:20:35:10 - 00:20:54:17

John

Yeah, that's where the measurement plan can really help because if you start with business goals and you also have an analytics person that then can help you translate those into website KPIs, then you're really starting to have those conversations more about business results and not just about, yeah, some of the website metrics that may or may not be contributing or maybe may or may not be worth looking at.

00:20:54:17 - 00:20:59:16

John

So that can really kind of push you in the right direction, that using the data in the best way possible.

00:21:01:02 - 00:21:01:14

Andy

Definitely.

00:21:02:01 - 00:21:06:08

Lindsey

Is lookers to your data studio. Yes, they seem to me.

00:21:06:18 - 00:21:16:10

John

Yeah, they rebranded, I believe Looker was a different company. I mean, if they're on the Google acquired and they did rebrand it now to Looker so I'll probably call the data studio for for a long time.

00:21:16:10 - 00:21:22:17

Lindsey

So yeah, I think I was doing that and then I realized so I just wanted to clarify for anybody else confuse like me.

00:21:23:19 - 00:21:25:10

John

Trying to say it correctly. It's tough though.

00:21:25:20 - 00:21:28:17

Lindsey

Yeah. It'll be like AdWords forever.

00:21:28:17 - 00:21:31:21

Andy

So yeah, I still see that everywhere. Everybody calls it AdWords.

00:21:32:07 - 00:21:35:15

John

Yeah. Yeah. That was going to be a tough one for Google to really get the change.

00:21:36:04 - 00:21:56:07

Andy

And that's been years. Like it's not it's not even like that just happened now. So one kind of last area that I wanted to get your perspective on is I think a lot of times people think of this stuff as like, hey, we're going to set up our report that we like or we're going to set up our dashboard or whatever it is, or, hey, we're going to get a four set up and we're going to get it.

00:21:56:07 - 00:22:13:11

Andy

We're going to pay one price. We're going to pay somebody to come in, do it, get it set up. And that's like we now have reporting done where we've answered the question, we're good to go. I'm curious if you can kind of speak to more the long term maintenance piece of this where, you know, it really isn't that simple from my perspective.

00:22:13:11 - 00:22:34:08

Andy

Like, you know, if you can actually look at it where you are answering questions over time and answering new questions, it can really be helpful. But I'm curious kind of what your perspective is around like, you know, is that a one and done solution or is there a kind of like an ongoing maintenance needed?

00:22:35:09 - 00:22:54:22

John

Yeah, thinking about it is ongoing maintenance is a good way because you can only do so much in an initial set up. You get a lot of the basics covered like forms, e-commerce metrics. But really the best way to do it is as new business problems come up or new questions pop up, you can go in and actually make new reports or new dashboards to get the answers you're looking for.

00:22:54:22 - 00:23:17:12

John

So I think you should think about it as something that evolves and you continue to update. There may be reports that maybe weren't as valuable that you thought they would be in the beginning. So maybe those you get rid of and if you're doing like quarterly planning or depending on how you're doing your business planning, you might actually want to adjust metrics and KPIs and have new reports that you're looking at for each quarter or each month when priorities change.

00:23:17:12 - 00:23:31:03

John

So even event tracking, like your website's probably not going to stay the same. So you might have new forms, new content that launches, making sure that track and you have the right data and you're updating it is definitely, I think, the way to get the most value out of it.

00:23:32:20 - 00:23:49:05

Andy

Definitely, yeah. That's I think from like an e-commerce perspective, we always think about that too. It's always a different question, right? It's not just like, how much revenue am I getting? It's, you know, you're breaking that down by different segments or you're really focused on, you know, what kind of users are visiting the site or what kind of products are people purchasing, whatever it is like.

00:23:49:14 - 00:23:59:15

Andy

To your point, you can't answer all those questions on one dashboard. So I think it does make a lot of sense to like wait until they pop up and then figure out how we can answer that question from the analytics data that we have.

00:24:00:21 - 00:24:20:13

John

Yeah, and that's one other thing too that we see is like we try when we do a set up, we'll try to kind of give our own input on what we think should be tracked and then get the client's input on what they know about like what do they really want tracked on the website. And a lot of times you think you have everything mapped out, but there's inevitably going to be things that pop up in the next month or next quarter that you didn't think of in the beginning.

00:24:20:13 - 00:24:30:03

John

But then now, you know, like, okay, that's data I'm going to need going forward. So yeah, it's a great way to do it is just keep updating as you go.

00:24:30:03 - 00:24:53:04

Andy

Definitely. Well, awesome. It's been really, really helpful. I feel like this is to your point, there's definitely a gap in the market here and this is something that everybody kind of kind of likes to put off as long as possible. But it's just so core to everything we do, kind of analytics and understanding the numbers. Yeah, I think it's really just such a big part of of running a profitable ecommerce store.

00:24:53:04 - 00:24:57:01

Andy

So thank you so much for giving us all your guidance in that area today.

00:24:57:22 - 00:25:01:13

John

Awesome. Thanks a lot.

00:25:01:13 - 00:25:15:05

Andy

Awesome. So yeah, let's take a quick moment to give you some space to let our listeners know kind of where they can find you. And yeah, a little bit more about if they want to hear more about analytics and what you're doing.

00:25:16:01 - 00:25:34:02

John

Definitely. So we're pretty active on LinkedIn, so you can definitely find me there. That's usually the best place to reach me. And we just launched a newsletter on Substack where we're giving away free template every month. So different Google sheets tools that we build. Look, pursue your reports. As of this morning, we just launched the one for this month.

00:25:34:02 - 00:25:49:13

John

It's a Google Analytics audit checklist which you can go through all the steps to make sure you're setting up your account right. And just give you some guidance on things that you might not have thought of that you want to make sure are set up properly. So definitely feel free to sign up for that and you can get that right off my LinkedIn.

00:25:49:13 - 00:25:50:09

John

We have the link there.

00:25:51:07 - 00:26:06:04

Andy

Awesome. Yeah, I can definitely vouch for for your LinkedIn. I think that's actually how I found you. You had dropped some sort of a video walking through a very specific J for templating type thing and I found it super, super valuable. So I think that's how we connected.

00:26:06:17 - 00:26:09:06

John

Yeah, I think I think so. I think it was off that that post there.

00:26:09:15 - 00:26:35:10

Andy

Yeah. Well awesome. That's all I have for today. Thank you so much to John for being with us today. Like I said earlier, I think we got a ton of value out of this. Hopefully we've given our founders who are a little bit analytic, avoiding analytics, some reason to jump in there and learn it and get a little bit more involved.

00:26:35:10 - 00:26:39:13

Andy

So thank you so much for your time and thanks for the value you brought today.

00:26:40:02 - 00:26:41:04

John

Awesome. Thanks, everybody.

00:26:42:15 - 00:27:06:23

Lindsey

Thank you, John, for being with this extra valuable information that you share today. And if you're ready to take the next step in your digital marketing journey, go ahead and check us out at PPC for Philstar.com. You can see our digital marketing maturity assessment where you can assess where you are in your journey and see how we can help and if you liked what you saw today and subscribe so you can check out all of our interviews coming up and all of the great helpful information we have for PPC and CPG brands.

00:27:06:23 - 00:27:16:16

Lindsey

So we will see you all next time.