Can You Trust Your Google Analytics?

howdy howdy welcome back it's another workshop wednesday this week's edition is a strategy session and we're going to talk today about answering that age-old question can you trust your google analytics all right before we get too far into this welcome this is your first workshop wednesday my name is chris mercer uh everybody calls me mercer you should as well i am the co-founder of a company called measurementmarketing.io and with you found us through some of the podcasts and talks that we give maybe through some of the content that we've shared with other platforms like cxl institute or social media examiner maybe even digital marketer or messersummit which by the way is coming up in september so get ready to party on with measuresummit and then of course maybe already a member of measurementmarketing.io however you found us we are happy that you're here it's our job to help people just like you learn how to use these tools and in today's workshop it's more of a strategy session so it's about thinking about using the tools now we do have our flagship product which is the measurement marketing academy for those of you who really want to dive into this the reason we created the academy really was to help you learn the measurement marketing framework now you don't need the academy to learn this i'm going to make that up front you don't have to buy the academy you get this so that's why we're going to go through the framework now so you can review it three simple steps you plan out your measurement you build out your measurement and then you act upon your measurement implementation right you use what you built so when you start off in marketing we typically are marketing the blind maybe that's you doing it maybe it's your team or your boss but they are probably marketing the blind what they want what you want what we all want is a marketing system that predictably grows revenue and results so how do we do that well first you start with a plan and you ask which questions you actually list down i should say which questions you're trying to get answers to then you figure out what information you need to collect in order to get those answers then you think about the actions you're going to take based upon the answers you get that is a proper plan if you haven't gone through all three of those steps your plan needs work go back and work on your plan and once you've got your plan in place then you go into the build that's where you're working with tools like google analytics to help identify the traffic then you have to make sure you're tying it to results that you're measuring for the results you're measuring for your traffic coming in you're measuring for the results from that traffic and you do it in a way that structures it in a story that's the idea now once you have that done and you've properly used tools like tag manager and google analytics and data studio to build that out then you just use it you act on it that is where you read the reports to get your benchmarks you then forecast your near future based upon your previous past and then ultimately you start to optimize because you're going to measure against your forecasts that's what will tell you what's working and what's not and you'll know exactly where to focus your own team's resources in order to improve your results and ultimately get to the point where you have a predictable system that is the measurement marketing framework in a nutshell all right now with this training we're gonna go into a strategy session about how to think about stuff so uh we're just gonna go one step at a time but remember we're gonna cover a lot of different aspects so if you've heard something that's maybe slightly different or you kind of go like huh i should try that or think about it this way practice that one thing practice that skill then come back re-watch this workshop and you will pick up another new one thing that's why we make them publicly available all right let's go ahead and get started shall we strategy session can you trust your google analytics now this is a question that is often asked that we've been asked a lot uh by different clients that are coming out or students that are coming in i know students have been asked that question maybe you've even asked that question of your own google analytics i know i certainly have so let's go ahead and dive right in and we'll tackle about how to think about this and we're going to start with the short answer the short answer is yes come on what am i going to say we train google analytics of course you can trust google analytics the real answer it depends maybe maybe you can trust it it depends i don't know for a fact i just know that yes you will eventually be able to trust it if things are done right but maybe and this is really the best answer and this is one of our key what we call isms in measurement marketing when we go to teach it at nationalmarketing.io and one of our isms is trust but verify that is how you think about google analytics yes of course you're going to trust it but you need to back and verify so let's talk about that and what this actually looks like so let's go into here's why uh here's how to think about here's why we we are talking about this trust but verify concept so i'm going to start first with lucidchart our little handy-dandy tool here and we're gonna go into a venn diagram so i'm gonna pull and this is something we call triangulating the truth right easy tongue twister for me to say triangulating the truth so here's what we mean by that let's pretend this circle is all of your facebook traffic i'm gonna minimize that just a little bit let's pretend uh this is what facebook's telling you is happening let's pretend oh let's go with green and say this is what your cart is saying is happening when it comes to traffic and results and then uh let's say that let's use orange well it's not quite this is close enough to an orange let's say this is google analytics and google analytics is telling you this is what's happening with the traffic right we're just using this as an example right now so we've got three traffic sources three different ways of measuring our data so we're keeping it simple and they're all telling us you know in this case roughly the same thing we're just using the size of the circle i want you to sort of visualize like okay they're basically telling you the same thing like 100 people 100 people 100 people roughly let's just say now what you really do is you don't look at facebook and says oh well facebook says i made let's pretend it was sales facebook says i made 100 sales so therefore i'm going to trust facebook you know you don't go to google analytics and say well google analytics says i'm 100 sales so i'm just going to blindly trust google analytics you definitely don't do that because both of these platforms facebook and google analytics in this case they're not really the one that's doing the action they're not recording that behavior they're being told what happened so they're being actually dictated to by in this example our cart right green for the money so there's our cart so the cart system is what points and dictates to what's going to happen and what this thing gets told and uh that didn't quite work so it gets uh dictating what this happens here and it also dictates the story what this platform gets right so the cart is where you actually can more than likely trust the data and in our case i'll tell you i don't even trust my cart i trust the merchant processor when i pull my credit card settlement statements because that is the thing where the bank is saying yes it worked and here's you know the credit card happen cause sometimes cards have errors too but roughly you get the idea of what i'm saying right you want to go to the source that is most likely to be closest to the actual action you're wanting everything that's farther away from it in the case of facebook it gets told when a conversion happens in the case of google analytics it gets told when an e-commerce sale happens so of course they might be told the wrong thing sometimes right so that can happen it depends on your implementation but that can happen now the real way that we use this and this is kind of more of a real world scenario especially when it comes to facebook is typically you'll see things like oh facebook's saying i made you know 200 sales and my cart says oh hey you made 50 sales make sure to do this by the shape here and then google analytics says yeah well really it was like 150 sales and it kind of looks like this right the data's sort of all over the place and one says one thing one says something completely different and we're kind of like all right i don't know what i can trust so this is where from a strategy perspective this will happen right things like this happen remember it's because this could have just been told the wrong thing because this could have been told the wrong thing this is the one more likely you're going to trust because the cart in this case is the cart system is closest to the action it's closest to the behavior that you're looking for so that's the one that's probably going to be more trustworthy so when you when you uh have this issue and you will that you absolutely will this is this stuff is going to happen because tech changes and platforms change and this stuff starts happening so when something like this happens what do you do yes you go through and you try to fix it again remember if you're the strategist maybe you're not the one in the platforms so you work with your implementation team and make sure they know how to fix it right or work toward fixing it but in reality what we use is a handy little ism it's another ism which is called truth i'm just going to say technically it's the truth and those of you who've been running on trains for a while already know what i'm about to do the truth is in the trend can type this out and the power is in the pattern that's what we're looking for trends and patterns this is how you manage your numbers whenever you're looking at data you remember this phrase the number does not matter what really matters is truth is in the trend power is in the pattern because when you know trends and patterns you will be able to find the truth into what it is that you're looking for so what we're going to do using truthers and the trend powers in the pattern is we would look at this and say okay so so far this is like our snapshot and then what i would look for is a trend this is like a snapshots pretend we pulled this for a week's worth of data and then i would look the next week now if the next week facebook says or the next day whatever the time period you're looking for if facebook says oh actually now we only did let's say you know 50 sales right so it's chunked down a little bit and if the cart stays the same and google analytics stays the same meaning they didn't change week over week they're saying the same things now i probably have an implementation issue because this thing did not it shrunk down but these other ones didn't what i would expect to happen is that this would say yeah that's about right you lost about half for sales and jio said yeah it's about right we made about half the sales and everything sort of shrinks down right so now what's happened is proportionately they're kind of the same thing right i know i'm using shapes right here but that's that's the idea is just to think about those truths and the trend powers and the pattern so um just to zoom out a little bit here and give another head-to-head example so if these all get a little bigger they should grow in proportion like that patterns and trends are all the same so if one's going up everything should go up if they're all going down they should all go down proportionately something like that right so that one's they're all the same proportions that's what you're looking for truth is in the trend powers and the pattern so what that's telling you is oh if facebook's saying hey things went down by 50 your cart should say things went down by 50 google analytics would say something like things went down by 50 and you've got a truth you've got something you can use you have something you can trust you can always trust in trends and patterns right you can trust in trends and patterns the trick is finding them but they're really not that hard if you think about it you just want to do that so that's sort of the first thing i wanted to to discuss when we're thinking about this you have to sort of truth is in the trend powers in the pattern you do that now what about this triangulation of data so uh we talked about this before triangulating the truth the way that this basically works is you set up your measurement system let's zoom into facebook here we set up a measurement system for our little facebook and we get that running we make sure that the card is doing its thing and hopefully it's got something close to a reasonable truth and then we make sure google analytics has the same sort of truth and again you're working with the implementation teams if that's not you uh to make sure that this is getting a useful truth right something that's that's reasonably useful for you to use it notice i do not say accurate there is no such thing we call it the a word here so it's not about accuracy but it is about usefulness so what the way to think about this is this is facebook's version of the truth this is your cart's version of the truth this is ga's version of the truth and what happens is the truth is somewhere in the middle it's between all three right it's in the middle here so that's what a venn diagram is kind of a good way to think about it because you're not going to use one traffic source to get everything one traffic source is not enough it's not right you should never use just one i'm saying traffic source but it should be data source one reporting platform you can never use just one you want to use at least two or three to be able to triangulate technically three would be the proper term there to triangulate the truth so you can say okay well here's what facebook's saying here's what my card says here's what ga says well here's what facebook says here's what google ad says here's what gs says so try to get different versions of the truth different viewpoints of that truth and you'll see that roughly the truth is in the middle somewhere right that's what you're really looking for when you look for your trends and your patterns that's where they are they're going to be in here and remember of course the patterns right and so if one says that things doubled and the other says that things doubled and the other says that things doubled then probably things doubled right the truth is good but if one says that things shrunk and the other ones don't move there's probably an issue here right this is an implementation issue so you really can't trust that data now the reason that i bring this up is because before we jump into google analytics i wanted you to think about and have an understanding of why you might go into google analytics so i know i'm picking on poor facebook here uh but let's pretend it was google analytics i said hey things doubled right e-commerce you sold a million dollars this week congratulations and nothing else said that you sold a million dollars well then obviously in this case i would say you definitely cannot trust your google analytics you have an implementation issue because the other platforms didn't bump up in sales so why did this one that means somebody probably set something up and it's over reporting same thing if ga goes way down right you can say all your traffic dropped off to practically nothing but facebook's not saying anything and the cart doesn't seem to show sales that have dropped well ga's probably got an implementation issue right and so you want to focus on that because you really can't trust what it's telling you because it's not coordinating with the other measurement platforms that you've got which is why it's so important to use multiple measurement platforms so you can triangulate the truth as we say all right so enough about kind of the overall general idea of this the thinking through it let's talk about google analytics and go into google analytics now this is the universal edition of google analytics there is of course google analytics 4 which is the new kit on the block but right now as of uh july 2021 right toward the end of july 2021 when we're recording this um this is the one that's not really being used by everybody yet it certainly will be over the next six months so we're gonna focus on universal because that's the one everyone's probably still using for 2021. remember just a public service message 2022 is going to be the year of ga4 so please if you haven't already get your team and get yourself uh some skills on google analytics four we can help you with some training on that as well we've got courses available and we're actually redoing the google analytics four course live training uh for our members in august uh so coming up in just a couple weeks we'll be doing that okay so let's go back into universal analytics and let's talk about how do we actually debug stuff as we're coming through so the first thing that i would do if it's an e-commerce thing when you come through a new check first thing we do is come into conversions go to e-commerce and go to product performance now different this would be a different uh report it'll still say product list though if you're using enhanced analytics sorry excuse me the enhanced e-commerce it's called um so you'll see product list but that's the idea get your product list report first thing you do and remember you don't have to be an expert at google analytics to do what i'm going to do i'm assuming you're more of a strategist since this is a strategy session so we're going to just keep it very high level but what you do is you click on the secondary dimension and you type in source medium this gives you an additional with it called dimension and it just breaks it down by traffic source so you can see what the product was and you can see what the traffic source was that sent that product in right that's how this whole thing works here so when you see something like this that's actually coming through what you're looking for again even as a strategist you can do this is number one are the number of sales roughly correct right now there will be a time where something won't record because somebody's got cookies that are disabled or something like that like that happens and it's gonna happen more with time uh but if your cart says hey i've got six sales and it says four uh close enough right um remember if your cart says 12 this should say eight right basically that they both doubled so you're always looking at trends and patterns and that's what you're looking for so that you have that trend and pattern intact and it's consistent but if it's roughly close enough i go okay this is close enough so first thing i'm doing is checking the number second thing i'm doing is checking the individual numbers to make sure this data makes sense now this is where you would have to understand the operation of your store or your product whatever it is that you're selling and reporting to google analytics in our case you can't buy multiple products so if i ever saw something that said three quantity and one unique i know something's off because we will never have more than one here that's just not what we do they're all digital products you don't buy more than one you just buy the one account so i know it should always be a one to one ratio for me for other things it might not be so as an example i'm going to flip into our google analytics demo accounts so give me a second to pull that up here and this is the google analytics oops account google analytics merchandise store i'm going to go to the universal analytics version that they have and we're going to take a look at the enhanced e-commerce so i can show you essentially the same thing but this is the enhanced one so if you have like a shopify store so it's probably the one you're using we're gonna go into pr product uh where is it here product performance there you go and under product performance we're going to see a list of the products right same basic idea and same thing i'm just going to do source medium and what i'm looking for again is first things first i'm looking for the number of products i would go to the cart system if i was working for team google and i would say okay did we sell roughly about 2000 different transactions yes we did okay great then i would look at this right and see does this make sense here's my uniques but i sold more than that well in this case this is physical goods so of course people will buy more than one occasionally i'm just making sure that it generally makes sense and so far this does right no big deal now this one's a little interesting the google campus bike mini backpack there's 46 based on seven so possible it's possible that somebody bought a bunch of these things because they wanted to give them away like maybe it could be something like that these little mini backpacks but right now seven purchases accounted for 46 sales so i would dig into that but again you could easily do that with your team and they might say yeah we had one guy buy four of them great right perfect um so you have that um but if this was a consistent pattern where i noticed this over and over again that's sort of like seven to you know whatever one to uh three ratio whatever that ends up being a one to four ratio i guess the the idea here is if that happens uh over and over again then i know i have an implementation issue right in this case i probably don't it's probably just somebody bought a lot so that's great now the next thing you check so again we checked about the numbers we checked just the ratio to make sure it makes sense for whatever your business model is then you check this the source medium report i'm going to go back to mine for a second it's a little easier because we sadly have less transactions than google but hey that's okay um the source medium you can see there's different ones that's all i really care about is that there's different ones what this tells me is that different traffic sources this is somebody this is one of you watching the youtube coming in and purchasing the academy thank you for that um this is one of the uh best things about google analytics is that it can t which traffic source caused a result to happen in this case the result being a product sale so what i look for is variety right i'm not i'm not trying to figure out and answer the questions about which traffic source is the best one to use that's not what i'm doing right now we're trying to see if we can trust rga data so here i can see okay well there's different traffic sources being attributed to different sales coming in some people came direct some people came through google after doing organic search others came in through watching the youtube videos that you're watching now so that sort of stuff it's like okay this is great so we have we have all of that coming through and i've got variety which probably means my traffic is is my implementation is set up correctly now this is all direct none and this would initially kind of scare me a little bit with the exception if you look down here i'm only looking at 10 of 303 so what i'm going to do is i'm going to expand this out and again i'm just kind of auditing i'm debugging our google analytics right and i'm gonna do is i'm just gonna come down here and i'm just scrolling down to see if everything is direct none right now this one's not all i need is a variety so i go okay maybe that traffic is okay but i come through and there's some other variety there's more partner affiliate here more partner affiliate here more partner affiliate here so i have a little bit different traffic sources uh that are coming through but that's really it now if if this would be this is hypothetical but if i was running google ads and spending a bunch of money on google ads which if i was google i would do because you know i own it if i'm google but i don't see google ads getting credit for anything so there might be a problem with an implementation there and i would work on my implementation team with this idea of trust but verify which means trust is set up correctly but be really skeptical and verify that it is set up correctly in fact the way you really do it is you verify that it's set up incorrectly you look for what's wrong not for what's right and that way you're more likely to see the errors that are staring at the face and this could be one of them it's good that we have some different traffic sources coming through even though there's there are far and few in between like this partner affiliate traffic here but it's bad that there's not a lot and again if i'm doing a lot of google ads hmm maybe something's going on there and we gotta get the implementation team on it um but that's how i would know if i could trust my numbers when it comes to google analytics specifically with e-commerce again i would obviously check revenue as well it's a dead giveaway if the cart says you sold 300 000 and google analytics says you sold 38 000 that's probably pretty off now the popular question is well how close should these numbers be in a perfect world within 10 percent right used to be much closer now it's within 10 percent as the world grows in data which it will i would very much expect that number to grow as well meaning things will be off by more than 10 probably in the future i would imagine over the next year you'll start to see that sort of pattern why because you have platforms like brave out there tech browsers i don't like that you've got the way text changing like with apple and ios is coming out it's harder to measure there are people that just use ad blockers there are people who don't want to be measured for privacy purposes there are laws that are out there that are coming out more and more around privacy so there's going to be a bigger discrepancy between the data but remember when i say that i mean between what your cart says and what google analytics is able to record right but remember this is the most important lesson of all of this the truth is in the trend the power is in the pattern that is what you're looking for so even if let's see let's pretend these are all fairly equal and then with time this starts happening google starts getting told less facebook starts getting told last because they just can't record because of the way the laws are going or whatever so this happens let's pretend it happens and this becomes the new normal right this is this is what you're looking for you're looking for this sort of pattern uh in terms of truthers and the trend powers in the pattern so as your sales go up so should the rest of them they should work in lockstep as your sales go down so should the rest of them they would work in lockstep that's what it should look like so even though they will be off it would they should still be the pattern should be the same the trend should be the same between them that's what you're looking for and remember that's the focus of this um as you're going through okay so enough about e-commerce let's talk about one other thing uh that is a dead giveaway when you're going into pages and we're staying in the google store for a moment i'm going to go to actually i'm going to go here we're going to go to ours because ours is just set up a lot better than google analytics is uh or so i shouldn't say google analytics it's better than google's for sure so we're going to come into behavior we're going to go to site content and we're going to go to all pages now this is another dead giveaway for a very quick can i trust the number of users i'm being told can i trust the number of pageviews i'm being told that sort of thing because we don't want to make the assumption that i have 2 000 different page views or in this case a thousand unique ones roughly 1400 unique ones and then go well great that's what my traffic is so now i should expect x amount of sales coming from that traffic source yada yada yada i don't want to make those decisions if i don't know that this is a useful truth and we want a useful truth remember erase the word accuracy from your brain it does not exist in the world of data it does not exist i don't care doesn't exist but there is a useful truth and that's what we're looking for right you want that useful truth something you can actually take action on and improve your marketing from and which google analytics gives you plenty so in this case i've got a useful truth that i think is 1400 right roughly 1400. i want to tbv that i want to trust but verify we always call it tbd so we're going to tbd right trust but verify that this number is giving me a useful truth how do i do that well one thing i will do is i will look at the number of page views and compare it to the number of uniques right again ratio is what i'm looking here roughly two to one so it's like the home page is being viewed twice for every one unique visit it's kind of what's kind of happening here now that might be okay it's a home page people are going back and forth and exploring the site so maybe that's okay but if i see a pattern of two to one right for every one for every two pages i get one unique or something like that i have an implementation issue because it's the site's not designed to do that let's see if this continues well here's the academy page the offer page roughly one to one right some people will see it a couple times so that's fine most people are going to see it once that's about what's happening here i see the certified measurement marketers page now that one is getting a lot of traffic by the same people checking it over and over again possible because the certification program is a little unique then we have this 33-29 this is the um another version of the marketing page now this is an important point if i you see this is it says i can tell in the url it's the measurement marketing academy but you see here is a parameter it says ref equals nav this tells us because we set our site up to do this this tells us that they came in from the navigation link that's what brought them to the page this tells us that they didn't come in from the navigation link right there was no they showed up from some other way so we split these up so if i made the assumption that okay 40 people saw the academy page that is not true it's actually 41 plus 29 plus however many else came through and i have seen really smart people make this unfortunate error where they just go oh well i've had 41 people and they make assumptions based off that but that's not what's actually happening so i'm going to give you another little tip when you're strategizing your google analytics to get a useful truth is you put the page that you're looking for in here so for us i'm just going to do marketing dash academy and i'm going to find every page that sort of has this little marketing academy in it and it should just be our marketing academies but let's find out so here's all the different versions of the message marketing academy i've got some coming in from the toolbox some that are coming in from the bottom navigation links some that are coming in from the home page link others that are coming in from the courses it looks like our course catalog that are coming in others that are coming in from the member announcement uh that we've got so and there's a lot right that are coming through here so we see all of these and now i have a better understanding of the actual traffic that i'm getting right in this case there's 164 unique views to a version of the measure marketing accounting page we have different ones as well but that's that's good for me now i understand instead of 40 that i thought i had i actually have 164. right again it's can i trust what's there so what i look for is pattern it's like oh these are basically one to one that's about this particular page it is meant to be viewed essentially just once during a visit and that's kind of what's happening here roughly speaking that's what's happened right 189 total views 164 uniques that means most people are seeing it once each visit as opposed to multiple times in the same visit and that's okay that makes sense to me i also see that they're spending some time on there i see that they're not bouncing as much as other pages might be that's good right i see that it's you know got a little page value which means making some sales which is good too so i can start to see okay this is great now for me i can i know that i've got a useful truth now because i'm not seeing any weird obvious errors however it is easier and this is where you go to your team and you say set this up for me because this guy on this workshop showed me this thing and i want rs to do this too there are two things that i've done to customize ours first is i put the entire domain in there because it makes it much easier to read so what i mean by that is if i go into google's and we'll go to google's demo account we go to site content and all pages look at how different this looks like so as i come through you see slash home basket store but you can't really see the entire domain so that is something called the host name i'm just going to show you what that is secondary dimension hostname cool little pro tip here to pull this up and you can see that they're all the shop dot except this one's not this one is google merchandise store now watch what happens here here's my home if i assume in my head right this is where it goes to people say oh i can't trust what this is telling me if i assume this is the home page and i have a picture of what the home page is i have eleven thousand and nine thousand unique and i think about all the traffic but watch what happens when i do the host name and then i'm just going to come up here and i'm going to look for slash home so i'm just using my little box here and i'm just going to look for the home page now and you can actually see there are shop dot google merchandise store and there are www dot google merchandise store right these two they're actually split up so i have seven thousand that are coming on the shop.home page i have another two thousand uniques that are on the dub dub dub dot google merchandise store homepage two different home pages that google analytics does not tell them right because they haven't set it up properly in order to set up properly you should have your domains in there you got to have what they call the host name technically and that's what shows this entire thing so you can very very clearly see what domain it is um and please do this a lot of people say well i don't really need to know that we literally had a very very large popular client that i promise you already know about um this client because they're that big and they uh had their say their site scraped and then they s the person who scraped their site this company script or whatever it was that scraped their site it put up another site under a different domain so they were duplicating their content trying to do some seo stuff or whatever who knows it was definitely black hat and what happened was um they instantly saw other site.com and then their urls right blog or whatever else so if you imagine here it would be like they they would see store policies frequently asked questions but somebody scraped it if somebody scraped it they couldn't tell because they wouldn't be seeing the domain up front but imagine this saying some other site.com right if that host name was different and you don't have it displayed here you can't tell the difference without digging into it so they would have just thought oh we're getting a bunch of extra traffic yay us but they weren't somebody was stealing their stuff so they immediately saw it because the urls were different right it was the same ending part what they call the page path this part is the page path but the host name was completely different it means it was a different domain so they were able to do a seasoned assistant get that site taken down but they would not have known that if they did not set this up in their google analytics so very important little pro tip there when it comes to that the other pro tip that i want to give you is to create a parameters view so i'm going to go back and talk about what i mean by that this is a this is technically our parameters view because it shows all these little parameters here little ref equals or f equals uh all that sort of stuff and you've probably this is default this is what google analytics does by default right shows you all these different uh versions of essentially the same page sometimes right so if i uh just look at uh let's just do uh membership slash measurement and we're going to pull up all the different versions of this page so there's the academy with the the parameter there's an academy without the parameter academy with a different parameter you had another parameter you had another parameter you had another parameter you had another parameter you get the idea there's a lot of different ones so how do you how do you handle that you create a no parameters view which i'm going to do here all i'm doing is i'm flipping the views and i'm going to look at a much simpler version of what's happening it's the exact same stuff it's the exact same thing except it's been combined so i can very quickly see oh i had 179 to this page 130 of them unique i had 10 to this page eight of them unique bam done right we know we know a good useful very quick truth and i know i can trust my analytics because this makes sense based upon all the ways that we're measuring it um so we have that right we're doing we're doing our own triangulation of the truth in other ways so i know i've got a useful truth but but doing the the no parameters views uh will immensely help you to get through instead of looking at a million different versions of the same url and getting caught up in that um because people forget that they're looking at a bunch right they forget to look at this little number down here and you don't have to do that as much if you have the no parameters view all right so with that we're getting a little long here so i want to make sure that you know at least your one thing focus on what your one thing was was it the idea of triangulating the truth and making sure that they are all sort of coordinated the truth is somewhere in the middle the idea that truth is on trend power is in the pattern and that they should grow or shrink together and keep the same trend and pattern and if that's happening you know you have a useful truth and maybe the idea of trust but verify hopefully that's it where you trust that something is set up correctly but you go skeptical in your mindset you become skeptical and you basically try to prove to yourself that it is incorrect you prove to yourself that it's wrong and if you can find it because you're looking for the error you are more likely to see errors and and improve things that ways that's the whole trust but mindset trust but verify tbv mindset all right with that next week we are doing yeah of course another workshop wednesday it is the first workshop of the month uh since it would be for august so we will go back through the month of july and we will look at all of the changes and updates that have occurred in july 2021 to google analytics tag manager and data studio so if you want that just make sure you subscribe to the channel you get notified and we love to see you there otherwise you have other options if you want a free version of our membership there are some people who is just not time to invest in something like the measurement academy i get that but we do have a free version it's called the measurement marketing toolbox and you get these weekly workshops you see the most current workshop is going to be there the traffic tracking toolkit you've got dashboard toolkits there's a split test optimization pipeline there's a power planner for forecasting and results there's a lot of stuff back there it's like 40 different tools that we offer you for free and along with this training so you can get that just go to measure.tip www if you want to go ahead and open up a free account but if you're ready for the measurement marketing academy i would definitely encourage you to do that remember we built the academy to help you learn this to go through the framework to learn all the tools to learn how to structure the thing to learn how to get traffic actually in a useful way into google analytics how to actually measure results what results should even be measured not just how to set a goal but what should a goal even be and what do you do with it all that sort of stuff is back in the academy and we have instructors standing by there as well i'm going to give you a very very quick tour when it comes to the academy itself so you can take a look at it this is the dashboard so when you come in you actually have access to these six blocks here that you would have access to this is all of our courses we have the on-demand workshops and we've got the toolbox that's kind of the majority of the content training part of the academy so when courses look something like this so you see when google optimizes there we also we have them organized by date because a lot of members will maybe take off a month and then come back in and they want to see and get caught up on the latest and greatest so we always update them so this is google optimized was just updated in july actually this month server side was one of our new ones that came out last month uh tag manager beyond basics a little more advanced tag manager stuff was a month before that it was an update but you can see all the stuff we've had also grouped by topic so if you're wanting to learn google analytics things like google analytics for basics this is the one that's going to get redone in august actually so we're a couple of weeks away and that'll get updated that was last updated in october and that was the second time we updated in the year so this will be the third time in a year that we have updated this platform uh this particular course but ga4 is a rapidly growing platform it just goes to show you uh how often we do it and then there's tag manager of course you've got data studio if you're learning data studios and reporting and how to build funnels or work with sheets whatever it is and then you've got measurement strategy which i think is the secret sauce because when you understand how to think about this stuff the tool part of it gets a lot easier so the strategy is the hard part and we can help you out with that so that's the win courses you also have uh that's there the on-demand workshops that looks kind of like this we have the workshop wednesday right that's coming in uh you've got the different topics that are there for our students they're edited down for academy members this is what you would have access to so you can always reference them whenever you want and it is searchable so you can type in you know goal or whatever the thing is you're looking for and find what you need so on your own time you can do this so whether it's two in the morning you can hopefully get unstuck and moving forward fast for the way that you need it so that is the on-demand workshops the toolbox is right in here so there's our toolbox remember i talked about all these tools these are tools we've created for our members they are all proprietary and custom and they are for you um so you can have access to all of those back here you actually get this with a toolbox membership too if you want that but to get it done guys is the additional bonus item that comes with the academy so this is our first one the eyes on the journey there are more to come as we produce about once every you know probably four months or so we get another one in there um but these help you to do uh kind of like craft kits to build specific things with the skills that you now have so like the eyes on the journey report one of our famous ones then that's our toolbox you have support how do you get answers when you've got questions because we know you're going to you need to talk this stuff out with people you just do measurement's not something you can really do on your own you want to talk it out talk out the strategy talk out the tactics talk out the implementation talk out the results and how you interpret stuff that's winner circle there's a lot of people in winner circle where you've got updates that are coming through and members helping members with their own special skills um this is also going through a pretty nice little update this should be ready in a couple of weeks so i'm looking forward to that gonna work a little bit more like slack does uh but it's gonna be really cool so the idea is that you can help other people back here because you understand marketing they'll understand marketing or they can help you when they're just starting out so you'll be able to access that and that's peers helping peers right students helping students however that's not the only support there's also ask an instructor so ask an instructor is where you need help from us we have measurement marketing instructors that are standing by we do this stuff every single day we are on the cutting edge of this stuff right all the time with multiple platforms multiple business models we've seen a ton and we'll continue to see more than you ever will more than likely um and and so when you need help you want to work with somebody who can give you that help this is no extra cost to the academy it's included with your accounting membership you come in here go the ask instructor support put in your question put in your description or whatever the details are send us over screenshots send us over videos of you walking through the issue and then we will send you back screenshots and videos too so matt it's like literally as close as you can get to calling somebody like me over to your workstation and saying hey can you look at this and give me your opinion that's exactly what people do and they do it all the time so our members really love asking instructor support um and then these are the hours so monday through friday 9 a.m to 6 p.m eastern eastern u.s is what the hours are for the instructors standing by and most of the time you get an answer within 24 business hours that's the idea to keep it up and going so that's ask and instructor support now this entire thing again courses the asset structure the on-demand workshop winner circle courses you get every access to everything there are no limits so it's unlimited courses it's unlimited updates if we do a new course you're going to get it if we do an update you're going to get it right as long as you're an active member you get access to everything the access instructor support very simple there is no limits to that at all you can ask 12 questions a day for all we care the more questions you ask the better it is actually because it shows you are using stuff and we know you're gonna have questions so uh please use that the on-demand workshop library there's now over like 230 at least 240 live videos that are back there well over 200 um so that you have access to everything there's nothing that's hidden back there from you gotta get it all and of course the winner circle community unlimited access to that as well it's a total of 8 500 in training and support that you have access to as an academy member so i wanted to make sure that you knew that this was an option it is substantially less than 8 500 per month but if you take a look at the options you just go to measure.tips get academy again measure.tips slash git academy and you will see we have both monthly and annual options available i would recommend the annual option it is the one that's going to be the best long-term fit because this does take time you want to learn this stuff the going through the framework people have asked us how long does it normally take for about 90 days to get through it once and really practice some skills and build some muscle but then you're going to go through it again and again and again and we will be in your corner at every step of the way so with that we will go ahead and officially bring this one to a close you have watched strategy session can you trust your google analytics thanks again for watching this workshop and we'll see you on the next one take care

Channel: MeasurementMarketing,io

Views: 237

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: measurementmarketing.io, strategy session, measurement marketing, mercer analytics, workshop wednesday, digital measurement, trust ga, trust google analytics, can i, can you, audit ga, google analytics, debug, debug ga, debug google analytics, google analytics strategy

Id: Xhgm334oT1g

Length: 38min 56sec (2336 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 29 2021